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Democratic People's Republic of Korea

2026-09-07T17:45:28Z

The Phantom Bull: I changed the orthographic territory map and its caption, in line with the DPRK's official abandonment of Korean reunification. Check the description of the uploaded SVG file to learn more. Also, feel free to undo this change, if it's incorrect.

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{{Infobox country
| name = Democratic People's Republic of Korea
| native_name = 조선민주주의인민공화국
| image_coat = Emblem of the DPRK.svg
| image_flag = Flag of the DPRK.svg
| symbol_type = Emblem
|national_anthem=애국가 ''Aegukka'' ("The Patriotic Song")| image_map = DPRK No RoK (orthographic projection).svg
| map_caption = Territory currently claimed by the DPRK, after Korean reunification was officially abandoned in January 2024.
| map_width = 220px
| capital = [[Pyongyang]]
| largest_city = capital
|mode_of_production=[[Socialism]]| government_type = Unitary ''[[Juche]]'' [[socialist state]]
| established_event2 = Founding of the DPRK
| established_date2 = 9 September 1948
| established_event1 = Start of partial US occupation
| established_date1 = 8 September 1945
|area_km2=120,540| population_estimate = 25,845,400 (77,048,000 including Koreans under [[neocolonialism|neocolonial]] occupation)
| population_estimate_year = 2020
|unemployment=2.8%<ref name="UNdata">UNData (2021). ''[https://data.un.org/en/iso/kp.html DPRK – UNData]''</ref>|GDP_nominal=$16.3 billion<ref name="UNdata">UNData (2021). ''[https://data.un.org/en/iso/kp.html DPRK – UNData]''</ref>|GDP_nominal_per_capita=$639.6<ref name="UNdata">UNData (2021). ''[https://data.un.org/en/iso/kp.html DPRK – UNData]''</ref>|GDP_nominal_year=2021|export=$1.1 billion<ref name="UNdata">UNData (2021). ''[https://data.un.org/en/iso/kp.html DPRK – UNData]''</ref>|export_year=2020|import=$3.46 billion<ref name="UNdata">UNData (2021). ''[https://data.un.org/en/iso/kp.html DPRK – UNData]''</ref>|import_year=2020|HDI=.785 (High)|currency=Korean People's Won|currency_code=KPW|drives_on=right|calling_code=+850|iso3166code=KP|cctld=.kp| leader_title1 = General Secretary of the Workers' Party
| leader_name1 = [[Kim Jong-un]]
| leader_title2 = President of the Presidium
| leader_name2 = [[Choe Ryong-hae]]
| leader_title3 = First Vice Chairman of the State Affairs Commission
| leader_name3 = Choe Ryong-hae
| leader_title4 = Premier of the Cabinet
| leader_name4 = [[Kim Tok-hun]]
| leader_title5 = Chairman of the Supreme People's Assembly
| leader_name5 = Pak Thae-song
}}
The '''Democratic People's Republic of Korea''' ('''DPRK'''; Korean: 조선민주주의인민공화국, ''Chosŏn Minjujuŭi Inmin Konghwaguk''), sometimes referred to as '''People's Korea''' and incorrectly, but best-known, as '''North Korea''', is a socialist country in [[East Asia]]. [[Korea]] is one nation, but the southern half of Korea is occupied by the [[United States of America|US]]-backed [[Anti-communism|anti-communist]] [[Republic of Korea]], also known as Capitalist Korea. DPRK's capital city is [[Pyongyang]].

The DPRK is led by the [[Workers' Party of Korea]] (WPK) and the [[Democratic Front for the Reunification of Korea]]. According to its constitution, the DPRK is an "independent [[socialist state]]", guided by the ideology of [[Juche]] which is a derivative of [[Marxism–Leninism|Marxism–Leninism]] originally codified by [[Kim Il-sung|Kim Il-Sung]].<ref>Articles 1 and 3 of the [https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Peoples_Republic_of_Korea_1998.pdf?lang=en Constitution of the DPRK]</ref>

While the DPRK distanced itself from [[Union of Soviet Socialist Republics|USSR]]'s ideological leadership in the 1960s, some authors still consider it a [[Marxism–Leninism|Marxist–Leninist]] socialist state.<ref>{{Textcite|author=Thomas Stock|year=2019|title=North Korea’s Marxism-Leninism: fraternal criticisms and the development of North Korean ideology in the 1960s|pdf=|lg=http://libgen.gs/scimag/ads.php?doi=10.1215%2F21581665-7258081&downloadname=|doi=10.1215/21581665-7258081}}</ref>

In 2017, DPRK's Minister of Foreign affairs, Ri Yong Ho, stated at the [[United Nations]] General Assembly that "The U.S. had put [[Economic sanctions|sanctions]] against our country from the very first day of its foundation, and the over 70-year long history of the DPRK can be said in a sense a history of struggle, persevering along the road of self-development under the harshest sanctions in the world." Ri also stated that the essence of the situation of the Korean peninsula is a confrontation between the DPRK and the US, where the DPRK tries to defend its national dignity and sovereignty against the hostile policy and nuclear threats of the US, and points out that it was the US who first introduced [[Nuclear weapon|nuclear weapons]] to the Korean peninsula. Ri stated that "The very reason the DPRK had to possess nuclear weapons is because of the U.S., and it had to strengthen and develop its nuclear force onto the current level to cope with the U.S. [...] Our national nuclear force is, to all intents and purposes, a war deterrent for putting an end to nuclear threat of the U.S. and for preventing its military invasion".<ref name=":0">Ri Yong Ho, DPRK Minister for Foreign Affairs. [https://gadebate.un.org/sites/default/files/gastatements/72/kp_en.pdf "Statement by H.E. Mr. RI YONG HO, Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea at the General Debate of the 72 Session of the United Nations General Assembly."] New York, 23rd September 2017. gadebate.un.org. [https://web.archive.org/web/20220709114619/https://gadebate.un.org/sites/default/files/gastatements/72/kp_en.pdf Archived] 2022-08-28.</ref>

Minister Ri also clarified DPRK's nuclear policy by quoting [[Kim Jong-un]] as saying that international justice can only be achieved when the [[Anti-imperialism|anti-imperialist]] independent countries are strong enough, and that possession of nuclear deterrence by the DPRK is a righteous self-defensive measure taken as an ultimate option, pursuant to this principle, and further clarified that the DPRK "do[es] not have any intention at all to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against the countries that do not join in the U.S. military actions against the DPRK."<ref name=":0" />

DPRK representative Kim Song stated at the 2021 UN General Assembly, "If the U.S. wants to see the Korean war, the most prolonged and long-lasting war in the world, come to an end, and if it is really desirous of peace and reconciliation on the Korean peninsula, it should take the first step towards giving up its hostile policy against the DPRK by stopping permanently the joint military exercises and the deployment of all kinds of strategic weapons which are levelled at the DPRK in and around the Korean peninsula."<ref name=":1">Kim Song. [https://estatements.unmeetings.org/estatements/10.0010/20210927/f9hI1UVcyVQ6/Ina2tpqa5rlW_en.pdf "Statement by Head of the DPRK Delegation H.E. Mr. KIM SONG, Permanent Representative of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the United Nations At the General Debate of the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly."] New York, 27 September 2021. UNmeetings.org. [https://web.archive.org/web/20220828072554/https://estatements.unmeetings.org/estatements/10.0010/20210927/f9hI1UVcyVQ6/Ina2tpqa5rlW_en.pdf Archived] 2022-08-28.</ref>

In 1965 [[Che Guevara]] said that the DPRK "was a model to which revolutionary [[Republic of Cuba|Cuba]] should aspire".<ref>{{Web citation|author=Stephen Gowans|newspaper=What's Left|title=Understanding North Korea|date=2007-03-03|url=https://gowans.blog/2007/03/03/understanding-north-korea/|archive-url=https://archive.is/2esBE|archive-date=2022-08-19|retrieved=2025-08-21}}</ref><ref>{{Textcite|author=Bruce Cumings|year=2005|title=Korea’s place in the sun: a modern history|pdf=|publisher=W.W. Norton & Company; p. 404|lg=}}</ref>

==History==

=== Early history and Japanese occupation ===
{{Main article|Korea}}

===Division of Korea===
Following the defeat of [[Japanese Empire|Japan]] and the end of the [[Second World War]], Japan lost control of its colonies, including what was formerly the [[Korean Empire]]. As a result of negotiations between the Soviet Union and the United States, the [[Korea|Korean Peninsula]] was divided into occupation zones along the 38th Parallel North. Although there was an attempt at establishing the [[People's Republic of Korea]], the nascent state was outlawed by U.S. forces. In the northern zone, the Soviets allowed Koreans to govern themselves, and a system of people's committees developed into a full provisional government.<ref name=":12">{{Citation|author=Stephen Gowans|year=2018|title=Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom|chapter=The Patriot State|page=88–93|pdf=https://ipfs.io/ipfs/bafykbzaced4iiga4ngtxusr2civjxewbili5jne2sbpefbx2s3im2kphattzc?filename=Stephen%20Gowans%20-%20Patriots%2C%20Traitors%20and%20Empires_%20The%20Story%20of%20Korea%E2%80%99s%20Struggle%20for%20Freedom-Baraka%20Books%20%282018%29.pdf|city=Montreal|publisher=Baraka Books|isbn=9781771861427|lg=https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=8435F6FF91279531705764823FDC2A7F}}</ref> Originally, the division of Korea was not intended to be an actual dividing line nor a border to split the country, but simply meant as designated areas where Soviet and U.S. forces would be temporarily assisting Korea as it stabilized after liberation from Japan and formed an independent Korean state. However, the U.S. sought to prolong Korea's division in order to form Korea into a state subordinate to U.S. interests, pushing for separate elections in the south despite opposition from the [[The people|masses]] and despite attempts among the Korean populace to form a unified nation.<ref name=":9" />

Under conditions in which the U.S. imperialists were occupying south Korea and foreign and domestic [[Reactionary|reactionaries]] were gathered together in the occupied zone and opposing the founding of a unified independent Korean state, the policy of constructing a powerful democratic base in the northern half of Korea was adopted. The formation of a broad united front to rally the masses of people in all walks of life was the first question to be solved. Thus, early in 1946, a [[united front]] was formed of different parties and groupings, democratic forces of various social strata.<ref name=":9" />

=== Democratic and economic reforms in the north ===
On the basis of the people's committees, the Provisional People's Committee of North Korea (Korean: 북조선림시인민위원회; Hanja: 北朝鮮臨時人民委員會) was formed on February 8 of 1946.<ref>[https://dprktoday.com/news/43457 "북조선림시인민위원회." ("North Korea Provisional People's Committee.")] 조선의 오늘, 주체109(2020)년 2월 8일. DPRK Today, February 8, Juche 109 (2020). [https://web.archive.org/web/20231004150520/https://dprktoday.com/news/43457 Archived] 2023-10-05.</ref><ref>[https://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Article/E0070131 “북조선임시인민위원회(北朝鮮臨時人民委員會).”] Encyclopedia of Korean Culture. [[Archived]] 2023-10-05.</ref> The leaders of the Korean resistance agreed to make Kim Il-sung the new leader of Korea, and he became president of the provisional government on 8 February 1946.<ref name=":12" />

In March of 1946, the [[20-Point Platform]] (Korean: 20개조정강) for realizing Korea's [[Anti-imperialism|anti-imperialist]], anti-[[Feudalism|feudal]] [[Democracy|democratic]] reforms was announced, including such items as thorough liquidation of all remnants of Japanese imperialist rule, waging an implacable struggle against reactionary and anti-democratic elements, carrying out land reform, [[Nationalization|nationalizing]] important industries, direct and equal suffrage, and the institution of free medical care for the poor, among other points.<ref>Kim Han Gil. [https://archive.org/details/ModernHistoryOfKorea/page/n1/mode/2up "Modern History of Korea."] Foreign Languages Publishing House. Pyongyang, Korea, 1979.</ref><ref>[http://www.jajusibo.com/58698 <nowiki>“[헌법으로 보는 북한-서문] 사회 전 분야의 방향이 제시된 20개조 정강.” ("[North Korea as seen through the Constitution - Preface] A 20-point platform that sets out the direction for all areas of society.")</nowiki>] 자주시보, 2022-02-25. [https://web.archive.org/web/20220707211557/http://www.jajusibo.com/58698 Archived] 2022-07-07.</ref><ref name=":15">[https://www.tongiltimes.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=767 <nowiki>“[북 현대사] 북조선림시인민위원회와 토지개혁 (4).” ("[North Korea Modern History] North Korea Provisional People’s Committee and Land Reform (4)")</nowiki>] 통일시대. April 6, 2022. [https://web.archive.org/web/20231004152620/https://www.tongiltimes.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=767 Archived] 2023-10-04.</ref> On November 3, 1946, the first democratic election in the history of Korea was held in the north, and the People's Committee of North Korea (Korean: 북조선인민위원회; Hanja: 北朝鮮人民委員會), which was no longer provisional, was created in February of 1947, functioning as the organ of the [[dictatorship of the proletariat]].<ref name=":9" />

The new government redistributed land from [[Landlord|landlords]] and Japanese officials to [[Peasantry|peasants]], nationalized large companies, shortened the work day to eight hours (seven for dangerous occupations), banned [[Child labour|child labor]], established social security and paid vacations, and enforced gender equality.<ref name=":12" />

As a result of land reform, feudal landownership, which was the social and economic base of the undemocratic reactionary forces, was done away with in the rural villages of the north. At the time, the matter of land reform was of great concern, due to a large percentage of Korea's population being peasant farmers, many engaged in [[sharecropping]] and being [[Exploitation|exploited]] in feudal relations as well as by Japanese colonialism.<ref name=":15" /> In addition to land reform, the nationalization of key industries was undertaken, wiping out the political and economic bases of imperialists and domestic reactionaries and promoting the general rehabilitation and development of the national economy in the wake of the Japanese colonial period. The Provisional People's Committee implemented the Law on the Nationalization of Important Industries in August 1946. Under it, all large factories, mines, power stations, railway transport, telecommunication facilities, banks and commercial and cultural establishments were made the property of the Korean people. Factories and other enterprises which had been owned by pro-Japanese elements were confiscated without compensation and became the property of the people, to be used for their own benefit rather than for the extraction of Korea's wealth for imperial Japan's benefit. Democratic reforms, beginning with the Labor Law and the Law on the Equality of the Sexes, were enforced, putting an end to unlimited exploitation of the working class and liberating women from feudal subordination.<ref name=":9" />

Author [[Kim Byong Sik]] describes the changes in social, economic, and class relations in the north during this time, noting that as a result of the reforms following liberation, capitalist economic relations were reduced to a small scale in limited areas of the economy, while socialist economic relations became dominant in all areas of the economy:<blockquote>Radical changes were effected in social, economic and class relations in the northern half of the Republic, a people’s democratic system was established and a powerful revolutionary base for an all-Korea victory was founded. In other words, all colonial and semi-feudal components were removed, and socialist economic relations, based on state and cooperative economy, came to occupy a leading position in all areas of the people’s economy, with capitalist relations confined to only small commodity production by private farms and handicraft enterprises in urban areas and to some commerce and small-scale industry. Concerning class relations, landlords, comprador capitalists, pro-Japanese elements and traitors were eliminated and working people became the masters of the country, the leading role of the working class increased and the worker-peasant alliance was consolidated. In this way, the balance of forces developed decisively in favor of the revolution.<ref name=":9" /></blockquote>As the above author later notes, by 1947 state-controlled industry accounted for 80.2% of industrial output, and private industry for only 19.8% of industrial output. In addition, mining was completely state-controlled. Industrial production jumped 70 per cent, and labor productivity 51 per cent, in fiscal 1947 in comparison with the previous year. 1947 was the first year in which an [[Planned economy|economic plan]] was implemented. 1948 also saw a successfully implemented economic plan.

=== Founding of Korean People's Army ===
The Provisional People's Committee trained national cadres and prepared a revolutionary armed force to defend the people's democratic system, establishing the [[Korean People's Army]] on February 8, 1948.

=== Reactionary regime forms in the south ===
Throughout this time, reactionary and imperialist forces in the U.S.-occupied portion of Korea had been seeking ways to prolong Korea's division in order to form a state which was subordinate to U.S. interests and in which anti-communist forces would remain in power. As democratic reforms were taking place in the north and the base of power was being removed from feudal landlords, Japanese collaborators, and other reactionary forces in the north, the reactionaries were moving south, some of them forming right-wing anti-communist paramilitary groups such as the [[Northwest Youth League]] (Korean: 서북청년회), who later committed atrocities against ordinary citizens in the name of the southern regime, and many of whom went on to become police and members of the local government.<ref>Flenniken, Lauren. [https://www.jejuweekly.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=1435 “The Northwest Youth League.”] Jejuweekly.com. 2011-04-10. [https://web.archive.org/web/20231005035904/https://www.jejuweekly.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=1435 Archived] 2023-10-05.</ref> Among the imperialists' plans was the plan to hold a separate election in the south, which was opposed by many of the Korean masses.

In this context, Kim Il Sung submitted the draft Provisional Constitution of Korea for discussion by all the people north and south and he proposed the election of an all-Korea supreme legislative assembly through a general, direct, equal and secret ballot. At the same time he called on the political parties and social organizations of south Korea to hold a south-north joint conference to oppose the separate election and to discuss ways and means of saving the nation. In response to this call, a joint conference was held in Pyongyang on April 20, 1948, with attendants representing a range of political orientations. A resolution was adopted to boycott the separate elections. At the time of the controversial separate election held in May 1948, more than 140 polling stations and a number of police stations were destroyed and burned. The U.S.-backed southern regime resorted to fascist terror to suppress the opposition. After proceeding with the elections, the regime formed as a puppet regime consisting of collaborators, landlords, and subservient capitalists.<ref name=":9" />

===Founding of the DPRK ===
The Democratic People's Republic of Korea was founded on 9 September 1948. The illegitimate government of the occupied portion of Korea (often referred to as South Korea, or [[Republic of Korea]]) had been established earlier the same year, when dictator [[Syngman Rhee]], who was referred to as an "imported expatriate" and "extreme rightist" in a CIA document of the time,<ref>[https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/220065.pdf?v=d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e "March 18, 1948 Central Intelligence Agency, ORE 15/48, 'The Current Situation in Korea'"]. ''Wilson Center Digital Archive''. [https://web.archive.org/web/20220729051304/https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/220065.pdf?v=d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e Archived] from the original.</ref> came to power due to U.S. influence despite many Koreans opposing the holding of separate elections in the south. In DPRK, Kim Il-Sung became the first [[Premier of the DPRK]], a position he would hold until 1972. DPRK soon requested for U.S. and Soviet troops to leave Korea. The Soviets left on 25 September, but the U.S. occupiers refused to leave.<ref name=":1102">{{Citation|author=Stephen Gowans|year=2018|title=Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom|chapter=The Political Partition of Korea|page=114|pdf=https://ipfs.io/ipfs/bafykbzaced4iiga4ngtxusr2civjxewbili5jne2sbpefbx2s3im2kphattzc?filename=Stephen%20Gowans%20-%20Patriots%2C%20Traitors%20and%20Empires_%20The%20Story%20of%20Korea%E2%80%99s%20Struggle%20for%20Freedom-Baraka%20Books%20%282018%29.pdf|city=Montreal|publisher=Baraka Books|isbn=9781771861427|lg=https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=8435F6FF91279531705764823FDC2A7F}}</ref>

The Occupied Korean government was hostile to socialism and to the DPRK. Even though Western media accuses the DPRK of initiating the [[Fatherland Liberation War]] (often referred to as the Korean War), numerous acts of violence were perpetrated by the illegitimate southern government that were tantamount to war—namely the [[Jeju Uprising|massacre on Jeju Island]] that targeted communists. The people of Jeju had been protesting the formation of a separate southern regime and the holding of separate elections in the south, but were eventually violently suppressed by the US-backed southern regime. The death toll was composed of thousands of civilians, many of whom were not affiliated with the [[Workers' Party of South Korea]] or communism at all. In addition, the [[Yeosu-Suncheon rebellion]] of 1948 was a rebellion among soldiers in the south who began guerrilla-style fights against the military, as the rebelling soldiers refused to participate in the brutal suppression of the Jeju uprising. Suppression of this rebellion by the southern regime led to hundreds of civilian deaths.<ref>[https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/332032.html “439 Civilians Confirmed Dead in Yeosu-Suncheon Uprising of 1948.”] Jan. 8, 2009. Hankyoreh. [https://web.archive.org/web/20230614174428/https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/332032.html Archived] 2023-06-14.</ref> Furthermore, paramilitary groups from the Republic of Korea illegally crossed the border into the DPRK on multiple occasions.

In DPRK, a two-year economic plan for 1949-1950 was adopted on the basis of the previous plans of 1947 and 1948, with plans for furthering the socialist transformation of the economy as well as the continued correction of distortions in the economy which were the result of the colonial period. However, this plan had to be suspended due to the escalation of the war in 1950.<ref name=":9" />

===Fatherland Liberation War===
[[File:CIA document pages 1 and 2.jpg|thumb|1950 CIA document stating that after the Korean People's Army entered Seoul, more than 50% of students were actively aiding communists, many volunteering for the army, and that the working class of Seoul generally supported the north.<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=CIA Reading Room|title=SUBJECT: The Korean Situstion|date=1950-07-19|url=https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/1950-07-19b.pdf|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210608142706/https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/1950-07-19b.pdf|archive-date=2021-06-08|retrieved=2025-08-21}}</ref>]]
{{Main article|Fatherland Liberation War}}
During the Fatherland Liberation War, DPRK forces almost repelled the illegal occupation army; however, the [[United Nations]] and the United States sent extra forces to fight DPRK troops. Western forces pushed DPRK forces all the way to the border of the newly formed [[China|People's Republic of China]], which had itself repelled reactionary [[Kuomintang]] forces from the [[People's Republic of China|mainland]]. PRC forces intervened to protect Korean sovereignty, repelling Western troops once more as part of the War to Resist the U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea campaign. The majority of the fighting during the rest of the [[Fatherland Liberation War]] took place near the 38th Parallel North, with only minor border changes occurring after a ceasefire was signed. The DPRK technically remains at war with its illegitimate southern neighbour as no truce has been signed between the two.
[[File:Thatched huts go up in flames after B-26 bombers unload napalm bombs on a village near Hanchon, North Korea, on May 10, 1951 (AP photo).png|thumb|Thatched huts go up in flames after B-26 bombers unload napalm bombs on a village near Hanchon, DPRK, on May 10, 1951.]]
Virtually all of the major cities in DPRK were severely damaged and hundreds of thousands of civilians killed by U.S. saturation bombing during the war. The tonnage of bombs dropped on the north was about the same as the total dropped by the U.S. against Japan during the Second World War. By 1952, the bombing was so complete that the U.S. Air Force had run out of targets. According to an AP News article, the U.S. dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea during the war, most of it in the north, including 32,500 tons of [[napalm]]. In the present day, DPRK citizens continue to find unexploded ordinance and be injured by old bombs that were dropped by the US and UN forces, and have to evacuate areas and send in bomb squads where such bombs are found, as well as educate citizens, especially children, about the explosives.<ref>Talmadge, Eric. [https://apnews.com/article/international-news-asia-pacific-ap-top-news-north-korea-dd6256bad51e458cb2e8a1bf64b5c2b6 “64 Years after Korean War, North Still Digging up Bombs.”] AP NEWS. Associated Press. April 22, 2021. [https://web.archive.org/web/20230313163201/https://apnews.com/article/international-news-asia-pacific-ap-top-news-north-korea-dd6256bad51e458cb2e8a1bf64b5c2b6 Archived] 2023-03-13.</ref>

US sanctions on DPRK began in conjunction with the 1950 escalation of the war, with the US imposing an export ban on DPRK and forbidding financial transactions by or on behalf of DPRK. This began with U.S. President [[Harry S. Truman]] ordering naval blockade of Korean coast and imposing a total trade embargo against the DPRK in June of 1950. This was followed by the Trading with the Enemy Act in December 1950, to terminate all US economic contacts with the DPRK and freezing its assets. Truman also imposed an embargo against China, freezing Chinese assets in US at this time. In 1952, an embargo was imposed on all exports of industrial equipment and raw materials.<ref name=":2">Gary Clyde Hufbauer (PIIE), Jeffrey J. Schott (PIIE), Kimberly Ann Elliott (PIIE) and Barbara Oegg (PIIE). [https://www.piie.com/commentary/speeches-papers/case-50-1-and-93-1 “US and UN v. North Korea: Case 50-1 and 93-1.”] 2016. Peterson Institute for International Economics. May 1, 2008. [https://web.archive.org/web/20220909082604/https://www.piie.com/commentary/speeches-papers/case-50-1-and-93-1 Archived] 2022-09-09.

‌</ref>

===Post-Fatherland Liberation War===
[[File:Pyongyang after U.S. Air Force bombing.jpg|thumb|Pyongyang after its destruction by U.S. Air Force bombing during the war.]]
[[File:Chollima monument at night.jpg|thumb|The Chollima Monument at night, with the [[Pyongyang]] skyline in the background.]]
Following the war, the people of DPRK were faced with the task of converting the armistice into a lasting peace, rebuilding the destroyed economy as soon as possible, improving the people's living conditions, and strengthening the country politically, economically, and militarily as the base of the Korean revolution and converting it into a powerful material force for the reunification of Korea.

The sixth plenum of the Central Committee of the Korean Workers' Party was called on August 5, 1953 to consider these pressing tasks. A decision was made to promote postwar rehabilitation and development of the people's economy in three basic stages, according to a proposal by Kim II Sung. The first stage would be a period of six months to a year in which preparations and adjustments would be made for general rehabilitation. In the second stage, a Three Year Plan would be carried out to recover the economy to pre-war levels. In the third stage, a Five Year Plan would be worked out to complete the first stage of industrialization, to lay the foundation for socialist industrialization.<ref name=":9" /> Author Kim Han Gil writes that the general task of laying the foundations of socialism was largely defined in two aspects: [[Relations of production|production relations]] and [[productive forces]]. In the first aspect, the task was to transform all the relations of production along socialist lines. In the second aspect the task was to establish the solid foundation of an independent national economy while laying the foundation for industrialization.<ref>Kim Han Gil. [https://archive.org/details/ModernHistoryOfKorea/mode/1up?q=peasant&view=theater "Modern History of Korea."] Foreign Languages Publishing House, Pyongyang, Korea, 1979.</ref>

A focus was placed on developing heavy industry as a priority, while simultaneously developing light industry and agriculture. Heavy industry was needed in order to maintain an independent national economy and to make the development of light industry and agriculture possible, while light industry and agriculture were necessary for improving the living conditions of the people, impoverished by the wartime destruction.<ref name=":9" />

After nine months, the first stage of the three-stage recovery and development plan was successfully carried out. During this stage, several thousands of temporary houses were built in the towns and countryside and rehabilitation and construction in the countryside were started. Prices were lowered, cities began being rebuilt, factories were restored and repaired, and various industrial and agricultural enterprises went into operation, beginning with the Kangson Steel Works, Songjin Steel Works, Sunghori Cement Factory and Komusan Cement Factory, with various enterprises in light industry such as Nampo Glass Factory and Pyongyang Spinning Mill being prepared for full-scale operation.<ref name=":9" />

Following this preparatory stage, the Party proposed a Three Year Plan for 1954-1956, the second stage of the recovery and development plan adopted after the war's end. The Three Year Plan aimed to restore the economy to pre-war levels, further raise the peoples' living standards, as well as correct the distortions of the economy resulting from the Japanese colonial period, and to continue developing heavy industry to lay a basis for socialist industrialization. The plan aimed to increase industrial production beyond 1949 levels, to produce grain at 1949 levels (the highest recorded previous grain production), further mechanization of agriculture, and to double the output of foodstuff and daily necessities compared to 1949 levels, as well as a five-fold increase in the production of cotton fabrics and a three-fold increase in production of rubber shoes. According to ''Modern Korea'', these aims were met in two years and four months, and by the end of January 1955, industrial production of state-run and cooperative enterprises exceeded the level set for 1956 in the Three Year Plan. Additionally, on the basis of results accomplished during an experimental period in 1953-1954, the trend toward agricultural cooperatives was phased into a mass movement in 1956, and by the end of February 1956, 14,651 agricultural cooperatives were organized, comprising 65.2% of total farm households and accounting for 62.1% of the total land under cultivation.<ref name=":9" />

After the armistice agreement, the US continued to prohibit all US economic contacts with DPRK in line with its general strategic controls against socialist countries.<ref name=":2" />

In 1988, South Korean and the US eased isolation of People's Korea by opening bilateral dialogue and allowing limited export of goods to the North for humanitarian purposes. Some travel restrictions were also lifted on a case-by-case basis. However, in that same year, DPRK was added to the [[U.S. State Department]] [[State Sponsors of Terrorism]] list.<ref name=":3">[https://nodutdol.org/sanctions-of-empire/ "제국의 제재 - Sanctions of Empire."] Nodutdol. October 20, 2020. [https://nodutdol.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Sanctions-of-Empire.pdf PDF]. [https://web.archive.org/web/20220520095404/https://nodutdol.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Sanctions-of-Empire.pdf Archive].</ref><ref>[https://www.state.gov/reports/country-reports-on-terrorism-2019/democratic-peoples-republic-of-korea/ “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”] United States Department of State.</ref>

A unified team under the name Korea (KOR) competed in 1991 World Table Tennis Championships and FIFA World Youth Championship with athletes from both North and South Korea. In 1991, the team used the Unification Flag and the anthem "Arirang".

In 1992, the ROK announced suspension of the "Team Spirit" military training exercise normally conducted each year in conjunction with US forces stationed in South Korea. On January 22, US Undersecretary of State Arnold Kanter and Korean Workers' Party Secretary Kim Yong Sun held the first of a series of bilateral talks, focusing on the future of US–People's Korean relations and unification issues on the peninsula. However, following difficulties regarding the Joint Nuclear Control Committee, the US and ROK decided to conduct the Team Spirit exercise after all, and DPRK refused to negotiate bilateral nuclear inspections unless the Team Spirit exercise would be cancelled. By 1993, the US and South Korea confirmed that Team Spirit would proceed as planned, and DPRK ended negotiations.<ref name=":2" />

In July 1993, President [[Bill Clinton]], during a visit to the South Korean side of the DMZ, warned that the United States would respond to DPRK use of nuclear weapons with massive conventional or nuclear retaliation. In later January/early February of 1994, US officials in Washington let it be known they were considering transferring Patriot missiles to South Korea as a defensive move. In Seoul, a Defense Ministry official called for the resumption of Team Spirit unless the North agreed to full nuclear inspections. The US warned DPRK that unless it would allow inspections, it would bring a sanctions resolution before the UN Security Council.<ref name=":2" />

In July 1994, Kim Il-sung passed away at the age of 82.

===Arduous March===
The period of economic crisis, floods, and famine in DPRK known as the Arduous March (Korean: 고난의 행군) lasted from approximately 1994 to 1998. Compounding factors such as the [[overthrow of the Soviet Union]] (and subsequent worldwide economic shifts), unprecedented natural disasters, and economic sanctions imposed on the DPRK all contributed to the severity of the crisis at that time. The thriving Korean economy, which had exceeded south Korea's in production of electricity, coal, fertilizer, machine tools and steel even into the 1980s, was thrown into turmoil as it faced these factors in the 1990s.<ref>Kim, Crystal. [https://www.liberationnews.org/north-koreans-mourn-death-of-html/ “North Koreans Mourn Death of Leader Kim Jong Il.”] Liberation News, 22 Dec. 2011, Accessed 10 Apr. 2023. [https://web.archive.org/web/20230410044940/https://www.liberationnews.org/north-koreans-mourn-death-of-html/ Archived] 2023-04-10.</ref><ref>[https://www.north-korea-travel.com/north-korean-history.html “North Korean History 1980s & 1990s | KTG® Tours.”] North-Korea-Travel.com.</ref>

The imperialist United States and its allies took advantage of this period, attempting to make the situation more deadly and more economically devastating via economic sanctions, to push DPRK into total collapse. It was at this time that the "military-first" policy of Songun (Korean: 선군; Hanja: 先軍) was initiated under the leadership of Kim Jong Il, in response to the constant threat of military aggression from the United States aimed at DPRK's destruction. The policy came of the determination that maintaining a strong military was essential for the defense of the country and the protection of its socialist system, and that the military was the backbone of the revolution and that it was necessary to give military affairs priority in order to proceed with socialist construction.<ref>[https://exploredprk.com/articles/the-evolution-of-dprks-socialist-lifestyle/ "The Evolution of DPRK’s Socialist Lifestyle."] Explore DPRK. [https://web.archive.org/web/20230928110755/https://exploredprk.com/articles/the-evolution-of-dprks-socialist-lifestyle/ Archived] 1012-09-28.</ref><ref name=":14">Ri Jong Chol. "Songun Politics in Korea." Foreign Languages Publishing House. Pyongyang, Korea, Juche 101 (2012). [https://web.archive.org/web/20230523072842/https://kkfonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Songun-Politics-In-Korea.pdf <nowiki>[PDF]</nowiki>]</ref><ref>[https://www.tongiltimes.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=1435 <nowiki>"[북현대사] 선군정치의 시작." ("[North Modern History] The beginning of Songun politics.")</nowiki>] 한반도정론: 북 바로알기. 통일시대. 2023-02-27. [https://web.archive.org/web/20230927173059/https://www.tongiltimes.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=1435 Archived] 2023-09-27.</ref>

During this time, DPRK deployed the People's Army to major construction sites as well as rural areas for flood recovery and food production, in order to overcome the Arduous March in each region and sector. Notably, they were able to construct important infrastructure such as the Anbyon Youth Power Station at this time, erected by the service personnel of the People's Army in spite of harsh environmental conditions. Rather than yielding to the economic pressures imposed by the U.S. in combination with the environmental disasters and the worldwide economic upheavals, DPRK endured the hardships, defended the socialist system, and built structures of lasting value.<ref>[https://www.tongiltimes.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=1421&page=2&total=125 <nowiki>"[북현대사] 고난의 행군과 강계정신" ("[North Modern History] Arduous March and Ganggye Spirit")</nowiki>], 한반도정론: 북 바로알기. 통일시대. 2023-02-18. [https://web.archive.org/web/20230927171532/https://www.tongiltimes.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=1421&page=2&total=125 Archived] 2023-09-27.</ref><ref>[https://archive.org/details/juche-destiny/page/n75/mode/2up "Man's Destiny and Juche Idea."] Foreign Languages Publishing House. Pyongyang, Korea, Juche 101 (2012).</ref><ref name=":14" /> The end of the Arduous March was declared in October 2000.<ref>[https://www.tongiltimes.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=1544 <nowiki>"[북현대사] 36년 만에 열린 조선로동당 제7차 대회" ("[North Modern History] The 7th Congress of the Workers' Party of Korea held after 36 years").</nowiki>] 한반도정론: 북 바로알기. 통일시대. 2023-05-06. [https://web.archive.org/web/20230928173958/https://www.tongiltimes.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=1544 Archived] 2023-09-28.</ref>

===6.15 Declaration and ROK's "Sunshine Policy"===
[[File:President Kim Dae-jung and Chairman Kim Jong-il join hands at Inter-Korean summit.jpg|thumb|[[Republic of Korea|South Korean]] President [[Kim Dae-jung]] and Chairman [[Kim Jong-il]] join hands at the 2000 Inter-Korean summit, which resulted in the 6.15 Inter-Korean Joint Declaration.]]
The South Korean policy towards DPRK from the late 1990s to mid 2000s is known as the "Sunshine Policy" and is primarily associated with the [[Kim Dae-jung]] administration (1998–2003) and the [[Roh Moo-hyun]] administration (2003–2008). During this time, a notable attitude of reconciliation between north and south Korea was expressed by south Korean leadership.

On June 13-15, 2000 leaders of the ROK and DPRK meet for the first time since the war. South Korean president Kim Dae-jung and DPRK leader Kim Jong-il signed an agreement calling for family reunions, economic cooperation, social and cultural exchanges and follow-up governmental contacts between the North and South to ease tensions.<ref name=":2" /> This is known as the June 15th North–South Joint Declaration or the 6.15 Inter-Korean Joint Declaration.

The date "6.15" would subsequently become a popular reference among the Korean reunification movement. Additionally, the phrase ''uri minjok kkiri'' (Hangeul: 우리 민족끼리), which can be translated as "among our nation" or "between our people" can be found in the joint document signed by Kim Dae Jung and Kim Jong Il at the 6.15 talks. The phrase implies the idea of solving the questions of unification and peace on the Korean peninsula without the influence or meddling of outside powers. The numbers "6.15" and the phrase "uri minjok kkiri" can frequently be seen and heard in Korean unification-oriented media, publications, and activism.

===2000s–present===
[[File:Kim-Jiang.jpg|thumb|Kim Jong-il with [[People's Republic of China|Chinese]] president, [[Jiang Zemin]] in 2000.]]
In 2002, President Bush's State of the Union address singled out [[Islamic Republic of Iran|Iran]], [[Republic of Iraq|Iraq]] and DPRK as the so-called "[[Axis of Evil]]" for their supposed pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.<ref name=":2" />

According to Nodutdol, in 2018, 3,968 people in the DPRK, who were mostly children under the age of 5, died as a result of shortages and delays to UN aid programs caused by sanctions.<ref name=":3" />

Talks between General secretary [[Kim Jong-un]] and U.S. [[President of the United states|President]] [[Donald Trump]] began on June of 2019 to discuss disarmament and potential reunification with the [[Republic of Korea]].

In January 2020, South Korean President [[Moon Jae-in]] expressed interest in developing tourism to People's Korea, but the US ambassador Harry Harris blocked this effort. Harris claimed that "independent" tourism plans would have to undergo US consultation. He emphasized that the items inside South Korean tourists' luggage could violate sanctions, demonstrating the extent of US interference in inter-Korean affairs.<ref name=":3" />

[[Yoon Suk Yeol]]'s presidency in the Republic of Korea (in office 2022-2025) marked a turn away from rapprochement with the North. Yoon abandoned Sunshine Policy and strengthened ties with the US, shown most overtly in his April visit to the Pentagon.<ref>{{Web citation|author=Jim Garamone|newspaper=U.S. Department of Defense|title=South Korean President Yoon Visits Pentagon, Discusses Deterrence|date=2023-04-27|url=https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3377397/south-korean-president-yoon-visits-pentagon-discusses-deterrence/|retrieved=2024-3-3}}</ref> Since 2022, the Republic of Korea has stepped up joint military exercises with the United States,<ref>{{Web citation|author=Hyonhee Shin|newspaper=Reuters|title=Defence chiefs of U.S., S.Korea vow to step up drills to counter North|date=2023-01-31|url=https://www.reuters.com/world/austin-south-korea-yoon-seeks-greater-us-nuclear-assurances-2023-01-30/|retrieved=2024-3-3}}</ref> covertly sent artillery shells to Ukraine (via the United States to avoid official state policy against sending weapons to an active warzone),<ref>{{Web citation|author=Lee Bon-young, Kwon Hyuk-chul|newspaper=Hankyoreh|title=WaPo: Seoul supplied more shells to Ukraine than all of Europe|date=2023-12-06|url=https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_international/1119320|retrieved=2024-3-3}}</ref> and suspended a military agreement with the North designed to deescalate tensions.<ref>{{Web citation|author=Jean Mackenzie|newspaper=BBC|title=North Korea spy satellite: South partially suspends military deal after launch|date=2023-11-22|url=https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67494007|retrieved=2024-3-3}}</ref> In response to the ROK's apparent inseparability from US occupation, the DPRK announced in January that it was ending its long-standing policy of peaceful reunification with the ROK.<ref>{{Web citation|author=Justin McCurry|newspaper=The Guardian|title=Unification with South Korea no longer possible, says Kim Jong-un|date=2024-01-15|url=https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/16/unification-with-south-korea-no-longer-possible-says-kim-jong-un|retrieved=2024-3-3}}</ref> This demonstrates a recognition that a "[[Library:The governance of China/Chapter 10: "One Country, Two Systems"|one country two systems]]" style reunification with the South is no longer possible, as the North would never accept such a reunification if the US military was still allowed to occupy the peninsula. Reunification is only possible with the end of US military occupation and dismantling of the ROK state.

==== Nuclear weapons program ====
The DPRK joined the [[Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons|Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty]] in 1985. It withdrew in 1993 according to the terms of the treaty in order to preserve its sovereignty against U.S. aggression.<ref name=":11022">{{Citation|author=Stephen Gowans|year=2018|title=Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom|chapter=Byungjin|page=208–214|pdf=https://ipfs.io/ipfs/bafykbzaced4iiga4ngtxusr2civjxewbili5jne2sbpefbx2s3im2kphattzc?filename=Stephen%20Gowans%20-%20Patriots%2C%20Traitors%20and%20Empires_%20The%20Story%20of%20Korea%E2%80%99s%20Struggle%20for%20Freedom-Baraka%20Books%20%282018%29.pdf|city=Montreal|publisher=Baraka Books|isbn=9781771861427|lg=https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=8435F6FF91279531705764823FDC2A7F}}</ref>

Since the beginning of the DPRK nuclear tests in 2003, the [[George W. Bush|Bush]] and [[Barack Obama|Obama]] regimes respectively lifted some sanctions to facilitate negotiations around DPRK denuclearization, and then reinstated them when the negotiations failed to produce the results desired by the US.<ref name=":3" />

The DPRK detonated its first nuclear bomb on 2006 October 9. The invasions of [[Republic of Iraq|Iraq]] and [[Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (1977–2011)|Libya]] proved this decision correct when those countries fell to [[North Atlantic Treaty Organization|NATO]] occupation after giving up their nuclear programs.<ref name=":11022" />

==Economy==
The DPRK has maintained one of the most centralized economies in the world since the 1940s. For several decades, it has followed the Soviet pattern of five-year plans with the ultimate goal of achieving self-sufficiency. DPRK is also one of the most sanctioned countries in the world, and has been subject to sanctions since just after its foundation. The economy is heavily nationalized. Food and housing are extensively subsidized by the state, education and healthcare are free, and the payment of taxes was officially abolished in 1974.<ref>{{Web citation|author=Zak Brown|newspaper=Anti-Imperialism.org|title=Towards a concrete analysis of the DPRK|date=2023-11-18|url=https://anti-imperialism.org/2013/11/18/towards-a-concrete-analysis-of-the-dprk/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200118135119/https://anti-imperialism.org/2013/11/18/towards-a-concrete-analysis-of-the-dprk/|archive-date=2020-01-18|retrieved=2023-03-12}}</ref> The DPRK follows policy of ''[[Byungjin]]'', meaning it simultaneously develops its nuclear weapons program and the economy.<ref>{{News citation|author=Ankit Panda|newspaper=[[The Diplomat]]|title=Is North Korea’s ‘Byungjin Line’ on the US-China Strategic Agenda?|url=https://thediplomat.com/2015/06/is-north-koreas-byungjin-line-on-the-us-china-strategic-agenda/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220321104122/https://thediplomat.com/2015/06/is-north-koreas-byungjin-line-on-the-us-china-strategic-agenda/|archive-date=2022-03-21|retrieved=2022-04-24}}</ref>

A 2020 book published in DPRK summarizes the DPRK's economic line of development as follows: "The DPRK has consistently adhered to the line of building an independent national economy in economic construction. In Juche 42 (1953) it put put forward the basic line of socialist economic construction, developing heavy industry preferentially and ensuring the simultaneous development of light industry and agriculture. True to this line, it laid solid material and technological foundations for an independent national economy. In the 1960s when the hostile forces’ moves of aggression became undisguised, the WPK advanced the line of simultaneously carrying on economic construction and building up defences, thus establishing a socialist industrial state while increasing its defence capabilities."<ref>[https://archive.org/details/dprk-photobook/page/n53/mode/1up "DPRK Photobook."] Foreign Languages Publishing House, Printing Plant of Foreign Languages Publishing House, October Juche 109 (2020).</ref>

According to DPRK's constitution, the DPRK regards the steady improvement of the material and cultural standards of the people as "the supreme principle of its activities", and holds that the state "shall provide all the working people with every condition for obtaining food, clothing and housing." Furthermore, the constitution states that DPRK's economy relies on socialist relations of production and on the foundation of an independent national economy, with the means of production owned in some cases by the state and in other cases owned collectively by social cooperative organizations. The eventual goal of the DPRK is to "combine the two forms of property in an organic way", and to gradually transform the means of production owned by cooperative organizations into the property of the people as a whole (i.e., into state property), based on the voluntary will of the social cooperative organizations' members. While the means of production are under the ownership of the working class in the form of state property and social cooperative organizations, property that is owned and consumed by individual citizens is also legally protected, including products of individual sideline activities such as products from kitchen gardens and income from other legal economic activities. This type of personal property is protected by the state and guaranteed by law the right for people to inherit it.<ref name=":11">[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Socialist_Constitution_of_the_Democratic_People%27s_Republic_of_Korea_(2019) "Socialist Constitution of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (2019)."] Wikisource. [https://manoa.hawaii.edu/koreanstudies/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/DPRK-Constitution-2019-EN.pdf <nowiki>[PDF]</nowiki>] on manoa.hawaii.edu.</ref>

=== Socialist economic management ===
Throughout DPRK's development, systems of socialist economic management and methods of work have been developed, adapted to the country's particular needs. Notable among them is the Taean (or Daean) work system, an industrial management system which grew out of the Chongsanri agricultural management system. Each system has been described by Korean author and politician [[Kim Byong Sik]] as implementations of the [[mass line]] in production, which were developed in response to DPRK's changing needs as it transitioned away from individualistic, bureaucratic capitalist-style management toward collective socialist-style management in production. As Kim Byong Sik explains, "the Daean work system means, in a word, to embody the mass line in economic control; to get rid of survivals of capitalism in economic management such as bureaucracy, over-centralization and individualism, and to implement the Chongsanri spirit and method, enabling workers to contribute to the maximum in accelerating [[socialist construction]]."<ref name=":9">[[Kim Byong Sik]]. [https://archive.org/details/ModernKoreaKimByongSik/ "Modern Korea: The Socialist North, Revolutionary Perspectives in the South, and Unification."] International Publishers, 1970.</ref>

Each method is named after a location in which it saw early implementation: Chongsanri refers to Chongsanri Cooperative Farm in Kangso county, South Pyongan province, while the Taean work system is named after Taean Electric Machine Factory.<ref name=":9" />

Kim Il Sung noted that in the DPRK's early development, the factory management system "still retained many capitalist elements" despite being socialist. These lingering capitalist elements in management led to bureaucracy, departmentalism, and individualism hampering the activity and initiative of the workers, as well as led to a lack of cooperative spirit between workshops and to insufficient worker participation in management. Quoted in Kim Byong Sik's ''Modern Korea'', Kim Il Sung described the problem as follows: <blockquote>It must be admitted that the old system of factory management, though socialist, still retained many capitalist elements. Bureaucracy, departmentalism, and individualism were found in large measure. Superiors shouted commands at their subordinates in a bureaucratic manner instead of going to help them; a spirit of cooperation between workshops was lacking; and among some people there was a tendency toward individualism of the “You attend to your business, I’ll stick to mine!” variety. Therefore, under the old system of work, it was not possible to give full play to the activity and initiative of workers, people busied themselves for nothing, and no sizable achievements were made in production.<ref name=":9" /> </blockquote>Kim Byong Sik adds that in factories administered exclusively by managers, the lingering capitalist elements were the most concentrated. In such factories, workers lacked interest in whether production was going well or not because they did not have sufficient participation in management. The managers who held sole decision-making powers engaged in arbitrary control, subjective discretion, and other bureaucratic methods, and so the workers felt their job was to "work for eight hours, as assigned, and then go home" which gave little room for stimulating their "political, moral and material interest" in their work or giving full play to their creativity and talent. Therefore it was necessary to bring factory management in line with a socialist management system. In contrast with the lingering capitalist style of management, in the Daean work system, the people cooperate with each other and work units help one another in economic management, with the essential purpose of the Daean work system being to enable people to give maximum play to their revolutionary enthusiasm and creative talent, to increase production, and to control and to manage the economy through promoting comradely accommodation and close cooperation among producers and producing units. Kim Byong Sik also notes that the Daean work system, as a socialist management system, is a prototype of communist economic management, stating "it is clear that economic management in a communist society will take the form of collective management by millions of conscious, communist working people."<ref name=":9" />

=== Special Economic Zones ===
Foreign trade surpassed pre-crisis levels in 2005 and continues to expand. The DPRK has a number of special economic zones (SEZs) and Special Administrative Regions where foreign companies can operate with tax and tariff incentives while DPRK establishments gain access to improved technology.<ref>{{News citation|title=Special Economic Zones in the DPRK|url=https://www.ncnk.org/resources/briefing-papers/all-briefing-papers/special-economic-zones-dprk}}</ref><ref>{{News citation|title=North Korea’s Special Economic Zones: Plans vs. Progress|url=https://www.38north.org/reports/2015/11/nk-sez-plans-vs-progress/}}</ref>

=== Economic sanctions ===
''See also: [[Economic sanctions#Democratic People's Republic of Korea]]''

The US first imposed sanctions on DPRK during the 1950s.<ref name=":2" /> The United States has repeatedly targeted the DPRK with sanctions, citing its nuclear weapons program as their reason.<ref>{{News citation|newspaper=[[TeleSur]]|title=US Reps Pass "Harshest Sanctions Ever" Against North Korea|date=2017-10-25|url=https://wp.telesurtv.net/english/news/US-Reps-Pass-Harshest-Sanctions-Ever-Against-North-Korea-20171025-0006.html|retrieved=2022-04-24}}</ref> Following the country’s 2006 nuclear test, the US, EU, and others added more stringent sanctions, which have periodically intensified since then. In 2017, sanctions imposed by the UN caused thousands of DPRK workers who had been working abroad to be forced to return to DPRK as well as led to the closure of numerous DPRK companies and joint ventures.<ref>[https://www.asianews.it/news-en/North-Korean-workers-leave-China-because-of-UN-sanctions-41942.html “North Korean Workers Leave China because of UN Sanctions.”] Asianews.it. 2017. [https://web.archive.org/web/20220909073331/https://www.asianews.it/news-en/North-Korean-workers-leave-China-because-of-UN-sanctions-41942.html Archived] 2022-09-09.</ref> Sanctions now target oil imports, and cover most finance and trade, and the country’s key minerals sector.<ref>Galant, Michael. [https://cepr.net/cepr-sanctions-watch-may-june-2022/ “CEPR Sanctions Watch, May-June 2022”] Center for Economic and Policy Research. July 8, 2022. [https://web.archive.org/web/20220907145545/https://cepr.net/cepr-sanctions-watch-may-june-2022/ Archived] 2022-09-07</ref> However, 49 countries, including [[Republic of Cuba|Cuba]], [[Islamic Republic of Iran|Iran]], and [[Syrian Arab Republic|Syria]] have violated these sanctions and traded with the DPRK anyways.<ref>{{News citation|author=Rishi Iyengar|newspaper=[[CNN]]|title=Report: 49 countries have been busting sanctions on North Korea|date=2017-12-06|url=https://money.cnn.com/2017/12/06/news/north-korea-sanctions-countries-violation/index.html|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210508065837/https://money.cnn.com/2017/12/06/news/north-korea-sanctions-countries-violation/index.html|archive-date=2021-05-08|retrieved=2022-04-24}}</ref>

According to Foreign Policy in Focus, sanctions on DPRK have "demonstrably failed." FPIF notes that sanctions didn’t deter DPRK from pursuing a nuclear weapons program, nor have they been subsequently responsible for pushing it toward denuclearization, and adds that DPRK has been under sanctions for nearly its entire existence and it doesn’t have a strong international economic presence that can be penalized, and "has been willing to suffer the effects of isolation in order to build what it considers to be a credible deterrence against foreign attack."<ref>Feffer, John. 2021. [https://fpif.org/the-problem-of-sanctions-against-north-korea/ “The Problem of Sanctions against North Korea.”] Foreign Policy in Focus. November 22, 2021. [https://web.archive.org/web/20220909072424/https://fpif.org/the-problem-of-sanctions-against-north-korea/ Archived] 2022-09-09. ‌</ref>

==Government==

===Central government===
The highest organ of state power is the [[Supreme People's Assembly]], which is elected for a term of five years. It elects a Speaker and Deputy Speaker to preside over its sessions. While the Supreme People's Assembly is not in session, the Presidium is the highest organ of state power. It consists of a President, Vice-Presidents, and other members.

The Supreme People's Assembly also elects a [[State Affairs Commission]] consisting of a Chairman, multiple Vice-Chairmen, and other members and a Cabinet consisting of a Premier, Vice-Premiers, Chairmen, Ministers, and other members. The Premier organizes the work of the cabinet and is the head of government of the DPRK.<ref name=":6">{{Citation|author=12th Supreme People's Assembly|year=2016|title=Socialist Constitution of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea|title-url=https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Socialist_Constitution_of_the_Democratic_People%27s_Republic_of_Korea_(2016)|chapter=State Organs}}</ref>

===Local government===
Provinces, cities, and counties elect local people's assemblies for a term of four years. The local people's assembly elects a speaker to preside over its sessions and a local people's committee. Local people's assemblies and committees are subordinate to the Supreme People's Assembly and Cabinet.<ref name=":6" />

== Administrative divisions ==
[[File:Provinces of Korea.png|thumb|333x333px|Provinces of Korea.]]
DPRK is divided into nine provinces, the direct-administered capital city, and three special cities.

The nine provinces (Korean: 도; Hanja: 道) of DPRK are [[Chagang Province|Chagang]], [[North Hamgyong Province|North Hamgyong]], [[South Hamgyong Province|South Hamgyong]], [[North Hwanghae Province|North Hwanghae]], [[South Hwanghae Province|South Hwanghae]], [[Kangwon Province|Kangwon]], [[North Pyongan Province|North Pyongan]], [[South Pyongan Province|South Pyongan]], and [[Ryanggang Province|Ryanggang]].

Pyongyang is designated as the capital city, or the direct-administered city (Korean: 직할시; Hanja: 直轄市) while three other cities, namely [[Rason]], [[Nampo]], [[Kaesong]], are special cities (Korean: 특별시; Hanja: 特別市).

A 2014 demographic survey of DPRK, conducted as a joint project between DPRK's Central Bureau of Statistics and the [[United Nations]] Population Fund, found that the majority of the country's population resides in four contiguous provinces: South Pyongan (17% of population), Pyongyang (14%), South Hamgyong (13%), and North Pyongan (12%). Together, these four contiguous provinces account for over 55% of the country's population. The highest population density area was in the capital city of Pyongyang, while the lowest population density was in Ryanggang. It was also found that more than six out of ten persons reside in urban areas in the country, at 61.2% of the population, while 38.8% of the population lives in rural areas.<ref>Central Bureau of Statistics, Pyongyang and United Nations Population Fund. [https://archive.org/details/2014SDHSReportEFinal "Democratic People's Republic of Korea Socio-Economic, Demographic and Health Survey, 2014."] December, Juche 104 (2015).</ref>

DPRK's method of administrative division is similar to that in south Korea, as both are based on the common system in Korea as a whole, having its roots in the mid-Goryo dynasty in the 11th century.<ref>DPRK Explained. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWmNve0oUkU “DPRK Provinces EXPLAINED - Part One | North Korea’s Provinces.”] YouTube Video.</ref>

As a result of the division of Korea, three provinces, namely Hwanghae, Gyeonggi, and Kangwon, were split due to being on the line of division. The smaller portions of post-division Hwanghae and Gyeonggi provinces were mostly incorporated into nearby provinces, with the larger part of Hwanghae ending up in DPRK and the larger part of Gyeonggi in south Korea. However, Kangwon was divided roughly in half, and as a result, both DPRK and south Korea have a Kangwon province, romanized as Kangwon in DPRK and Gangwon in the south.

==Foreign relations==
Article 17 of the DPRK's constitution states that independence, peace, and friendship are the basic ideals of the foreign relations of the DPRK. Additionally, the constitution holds that the state "shall establish diplomatic as well as political, economic and cultural relations with all friendly countries, on the principles of complete equality, independence, mutual respect, non-interference in each other’s affairs and mutual benefit" and "promote unity with people all over the world who defend their independence, and resolutely support and encourage the struggles of all people who oppose all forms of aggression and interference and fight for their countries’ independence and national and class emancipation."<ref name=":11" />

DPRK does not reject foreign exchange, nor reject foreign knowledge, nor adhere to an [[Isolationism|isolationist]] policy, nor does it aim to promote national [[chauvinism]].<ref>{{Citation|author=Kim Il Sung|title=Collected Works Volume 17|chapter=On Further Developing the Chollima Workteam Movement|page=276|quote=In educating the working people in socialist patriotism, care should be taken to prevent the growth of tendencies to national chauvinism and restorationism. One may be apt to head for chauvinism on the plea of building an independent national economy by one’s own efforts and promoting national pride. If we steer in the direction of chauvinism as Regent Taewongun pursued a policy of national isolation, we will come to reject international exchange and advanced science and technology from other countries and, accordingly, hinder the development of our country.|pdf=https://www.marxists.org/archive/kim-il-sung/cw/17.pdf}}</ref> Rather, DPRK upholds [[proletarian internationalism]], [[national liberation]], and [[anti-imperialism]], and aims for international exchanges based in mutual respect. Speaking on DPRK's attitude toward international exchange and the study and adoption of foreign knowledge, Kim Il Sung clarifies that it is not DPRK's position to reject foreign things, but rather to adopt them critically and non-[[Dogmatism|dogmatically]], with Korea's sovereignty and particular conditions in mind: "What we are opposing is the [[Nihilism|nihilistic]] attitude of looking down upon our nation, while looking up to foreign countries, as well as the dogmatist attitude of uncritically swallowing up foreign things in disregard of the actual conditions of our country."<ref>Kim Il Sung. [https://www.marxists.org/archive/kim-il-sung/cw/17.pdf "On Improving Education in Universities."] April 18, 1963. Collected Works, Volume 17.</ref>

Kim Il-sung has said that completing the Korean revolution is the internationalist duty of the Korean people, and explained that, in the modern conditions where imperialism and borders still exist (as opposed to a stateless, communist future), and in conditions where Korea currently remains divided and antagonized by imperialism, DPRK's socialist patriotism is "indispensable for us who have to drive out the US imperialist aggressors and accomplish the national-liberation revolution", and that "the Korean revolution is the internationalist duty devolving on the Korean people. For this reason, only when the Korean people satisfactorily carry out the Korean revolution as their first priority, will they be performing their internationalist duty faithfully."<ref name=":13">Kim Il Sung. [https://www.marxists.org/archive/kim-il-sung/cw/17.pdf "Our People's Army Is an Army of the Working Class, An Army of the Revolution; Class and Political Education Should Be Continuously Strengthened."] February 8, 1963. Kim Il Sung Collected Works, Volume 17. [https://web.archive.org/web/20230403214034/https://www.marxists.org/archive/kim-il-sung/cw/17.pdf Archived] 2023-04-03.</ref>

Opposing chauvinism and promoting proletarian internationalism, Kim Il-sung has emphasized that care should be taken to prevent the growth of national chauvinism when promoting socialist patriotism, explaining that DPRK should not pursue a chauvinist policy or national isolation, and that Koreans should be educated in the spirit of internationalism "to fight in close unity with many other peoples of the world" against imperialism as well as against both right and left opportunism.<ref>Kim Il Sung. [https://www.marxists.org/archive/kim-il-sung/cw/17.pdf "On Strengthening the Work of Factory Party Committees And Further Developing the Chollima Workteam Movement."] Collected Works Volume 17. May 15, 1963. [https://web.archive.org/web/20230403214034/https://www.marxists.org/archive/kim-il-sung/cw/17.pdf Archived] 2023-04-03.</ref> While in the present day, defense of national sovereignty and socialist patriotism holds importance in DPRK, Kim Il-sung notes: "Needless to say, it will be another matter after imperialism is completely overthrown and socialism and communism emerge victorious throughout the world in the future, and the boundaries of nations vanish and states cease to exist."<ref name=":13" />

=== Support for anti-imperialist liberation ===
[[File:DPRK Che Guevara poster.png|thumb|Korean poster of [[Ernesto Guevara|Che Guevara]]]]
The DPRK's revolutionary government has supported other liberation struggles around the world. The support has at times included material support such as providing weapons and military training to various movements, hosting delegations representing various liberation struggles, as well as gestures and expressions of solidarity such as in speeches at the UN General Assembly and support for liberation movements written about in official DPRK publications.

The DPRK trained two thousand guerrilla fighters from twenty-five countries from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s, including members of the [[Japanese Red Army]], [[Palestinian Liberation Organization]], and the [[Official Irish Republican Army]]. The training in these camps lasted from six to eighteen months, and during that time, the DPRK military taught foreign revolutionaries Korean martial arts. The foreign revolutionaries were also put through training such as running through the mountains at night while carrying one hundred pound sandbags.<ref name=":7">[https://apjjf.org/2015/13/12/Benjamin-Young/4303.html “Juche in the United States: The Black Panther Party’s Relations with North Korea, 1969-1971.”] 2015. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. [https://web.archive.org/web/20230325033325/https://apjjf.org/2015/13/12/Benjamin-Young/4303.html Archived] 2023-03-25. </ref>

DPRK has supported liberation struggles in [[Africa]] both materially and through expressions of solidarity.<ref>[https://libya360.wordpress.com/2017/04/17/president-kim-il-sungs-immortal-contributions-to-african-liberation/ President Kim Il Sung’s Immortal Contributions to African Liberation] APRIL 17, 2017 by Internationalist 360º on libya360.wordpress.com </ref> President Kim Il Sung was a staunch opponent of both [[Republic of South Africa|South African]] and [[Zionism|Zionist]] [[apartheid]].<ref name=":8">[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1006972472015708160.html <nowiki>“Thread by @Uhusofree: ‘a Quick Thread on the DPRK and African and Diaspora Liberation Movements. I Hope It Reaches Someone Who Didn’t Know Before. President Kim Il […].’”</nowiki>] Threadreaderapp.com. Thread Reader. [https://web.archive.org/web/20230325040407/https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1006972472015708160.html Archived] 2023-03-25.</ref>

When [[Kwame Nkrumah]]'s government in [[Republic of Ghana|Ghana]] was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup in 1966, Kim Il-sung sent a letter to Nkrumah shortly afterword, stating, "We are especially enraged at the reactionary coup d’état which took place in Ghana at the instigation of the imperialists [...] The imperialists engineer similar plots and perpetrate subversive activities against progressive countries everywhere. We resolutely condemn the machinations of the imperialists against the just cause of the peoples for national liberation, independence and progress. We express our unreserved support to your Excellency’s determination to fight for the freedom of Ghana on your return to Africa."<ref>Nkrumah, Kwame. [https://archive.org/details/san_0975/page/160/mode/1up?view=theater&q=Pyongyang ''Dark Days in Ghana''. "Appendix."] 1968.</ref>

On March 31, 1970, nine members of the Japanese Red Army (JRA) hijacked a Japan Air Lines plane and landed it in Pyongyang. These nine members eventually settled in a housing complex on the outskirts of Pyongyang and the DPRK government used the JRA connection to send money and arms to various Third World-oriented organizations, such as the PLO, the [[Red Army Faction]], and the [[Italian Red Brigades]].<ref name=":7" />

During the 1980s, the DPRK sent free weapons to Cuba.<ref>{{News citation|author=David Iocanangelo|newspaper=Latin Times|title=Fidel Castro Says North Korea Sent Cuba Free Weapons During Cold War|date=2013-08-14|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200118135109/https://www.latintimes.com/fidel-castro-says-north-korea-sent-cuba-free-weapons-during-cold-war-130279|archive-date=2020-01-18}}</ref>

DPRK Minister of Foreign Affairs Ri Yong Ho's 2017 UN General Assembly statements of solidarity with Cuba, [[Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela|Venezuela]], and [[Syrian Arab Republic|Syria]] and condemning [[State of Israel|Israel]]:<blockquote>My delegation takes this opportunity to extend strong support to and solidarity with the Cuban government and people who are fighting to defend national sovereignty and realize international justice against the high-handedness, arbitrariness and unilateral embargo of the U.S.

We also express strong support to and solidarity with the government and people of Venezuela who are fighting to defend the national sovereignty and the cause of socialism.

The unjust and contemptible acts such as turning a blind eye to the heinous acts of Israel while condemning in every manner only the Syrian government fighting to protect its national sovereignty and security should not be tolerated any longer.

The DPRK government will certainly defend peace and security of the country with its powerful nuclear deterrence and also contribute to safeguarding world peace and security.<ref name=":0" /></blockquote>The DPRK representative Kim Song at the 2021 UN General Assembly spoke on the DPRK delegation extending "its full support and encouragement to the Cuban government and people who continue to move forward holding aloft the banner of socialism in the face of the U.S. moves to impose illegal sanctions and blockade and to undermine Cuba from within" and expressed "constant support to and solidarity with the independent countries including Syria and [[State of Palestine|Palestine]] and their peoples in their unyielding struggle to defend the national dignity, sovereignty and territorial integrity."<ref name=":1" />

=== Support for Black liberation in the United States ===
[[File:Korean BPP poster.png|thumb|Korean poster of [[Huey P. Newton|Huey Newton]]]]
Kim Il-sung praised the [[Black Panther Party]] (BPP) for their "just struggle to abolish the cursed system of racial discrimination of the US imperialists".<ref>{{Web citation|author=Tania Branigan|newspaper=The Guardian|title=How Black Panthers turned to North Korea in fight against US imperialism|date=2014-06-19|url=https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/19/black-panthers-north-korea-us-imperialism|archive-url=https://archive.is/yJajx|archive-date=2022-09-13|retrieved=2025-08-21|quote=Meanwhile, the then leader Kim Il-sung hailed the American party’s “just struggle to abolish the cursed system of racial discrimination of the US imperialists”.}}</ref> The Black Panther Party sent a delegation to the DPRK to meet with President Kim Il Sung and other officials to exchange ideas.<ref name=":8" />{{Better source needed|helper-text=Twitter is not a reliable source}} Numerous examples of writings in support of the DPRK and against U.S. imperialism can be found in BPP publications, while many articles in support of the BPP and denouncing U.S. imperialism and systemic racism can be found in DPRK publications.

In addition to specific support of the BPP, it is common to find DPRK publications calling out and denouncing the United States as racist, and voicing support for Black people and other racial minorities of the U.S. in their struggle against it. For example, DPRK state media commented on the shooting of [[Trayvon Martin]], stating: "The U.S. true colors as a kingdom of racial discrimination was fully revealed by last year’s case that the [[Florida]] Court gave a verdict of not guilty to a white policeman who shot to death an innocent Black boy." DPRK has also made commentary on the case of [[George Floyd protests|George Floyd]], emphasizing the hypocrisy for the US to preach about human rights while perpetrating racial oppression against its own citizens. An official from Central Committee stated via the state newspaper [[Rodong Sinmun]]: "Demonstrators enraged by the extreme racists throng even to the White House. This is the reality in the U.S. today" and further stated "American liberalism and democracy put the cap of leftist on the demonstrators and threaten to unleash even dogs for suppression."<ref>[https://www.youngpioneertours.com/dprk-black-civil-rights-movement/ “North Korea and the Black Civil Rights Movement.”] Young Pioneer Tours. December 23, 2020. [https://web.archive.org/web/20221129235716/https://www.youngpioneertours.com/dprk-black-civil-rights-movement/ Archived] 2022-11-29.</ref>

===DPRK-US relations===
The core of US policy toward DPRK has been summarized in a 2008 book from DPRK as follows: "The US attempt to crush the DPRK and realize domination over the whole Korean peninsula constitutes the core of its policy towards the DPRK and the key to its building of a foundation on which to achieve world hegemony."<ref>[https://archive.org/details/terrorismwar/page/n1/mode/1up?view=theater "The United States: 'War Against Terrorism'."] Foreign Languages Publishing House, Pyongyang, Korea. Juche 97 (2008).</ref>

In a 2021 speech to the United Nations General Assembly, the DPRK's representative Kim Song stated, "In the course of the DPRK-U.S. showdown spanning over half a century, we have been very much accustomed to the U.S. military threats, and we know well how to deal with the U.S., the most hostile country. We have learned the mode of existence to cope with the U.S. hostile policy and accumulated rich experience."<ref name=":1" /> The representative further characterized the DPRK-US relationship in the following way:<blockquote>From the first day of the foundation of the DPRK, the U.S. has not recognized our sovereignty, treating us as an enemy state, and openly showed its hostility towards the socialist system chosen by our people. The U.S. designated the DPRK as a "communist state" and a "state of non-market economy", and it completely blocked, both institutionally and legislatively, the establishment of relations between the DPRK and the U.S. in the fields of politics, economy and trade, under the unreasonable pretexts of "human rights issue", "proliferation of the WMD", "sponsoring of terrorism", "oppression of religion", "money laundering" and etc.

If it is not a hostile policy, should it be called a "friendly policy"?

The U.S. hostile policy against the DPRK finds its clearest expression in its military threats against us. Not a single foreign troop, not a single foreign military base exists in the territory of the DPRK. But in south Korea, almost 30,000 U.S. troops are stationing at numerous military bases, maintaining a war posture to take military action against the DPRK at any moment. The DPRK has no record of having conducted a military exercise even a single time around the U.S., but the U.S. has annually staged all sorts of war drills on and around the Korean peninsula and in the Korean waters for the last several decades, by mobilizing army, naval and air forces across the world including the U.S. troops in south Korea, and it has threatened us through military demonstrations of intimidating nature while deploying numerous armaments to south Korea from time to time.<ref name=":1" /> </blockquote>The representative also noted that the possible outbreak of a new war on the Korean peninsula is contained "not because of the U.S.’s mercy on the DPRK" but because the DPRK "is growing reliable deterrent that can control the hostile forces in their attempts for military invasion".<ref name=":1" />

Kim Yo Jong, First Vice Department Director of Central Committee of Workers’ Party of Korea, in response to being called a “rogue state” by the US Defense Secretary, has been quoted by Nodutdol as saying, "the sufferings imposed upon us by the U.S. have now turned into the hatred for the U.S., and this hatred would drive us to break through the blockade of persistent sanctions led by the U.S. and to live our own way by our own efforts."<ref name=":3" />

The 2018 book ''Origin of the Korean Question'' published in DPRK analyzes the USA's long history of imperialist aggression toward Korea, even prior to the division of the Korean nation into north and south. The book explains: "From the first days of its emergence from the sea of blood of [[American Indians]], the US waged ceaseless wars of conquest with the ambition of territorial expansion. [...] Having accomplished transition from capitalism to imperialism by achieving [[Primitive accumulation of capital|forced initial accumulation of capital]] through aggression and plunder, in the 19th century the US and European powers made their colony of extensive regions in Africa, America, Southeast Asia and on the shores of the Pacific. Not satisfied with it, they plunged into a competition for seizing before anyone else Korea, [[Qing dynasty (1636–1912)|Qing China]] and Japan that had been still outside of any other country's influence. [...] The US, a latecomer in this competition, tried to contain the intervention of other powers in the Far East; its primary efforts in the Far East were directed to Korea." The authors further explain that towards the end of the Second World War, the US began to advocate a "new order of the US-led world," backpedaling on its commitments to the [[Anti-fascism|anti-fascist]] Allied Powers, and that since then, it has openly pursued policy of stamping out socialism on the globe and seeking to achieve world supremacy. The authors note that the Asia-Pacific area has since become the center of global trade and that the US has a "huge economic dependence" on it. Due to the growing influence of Asian economies, the US is "hell bent on winning control over Asia", and has determined that it must dominate the Korean peninsula, a regional strategic point politically, militarily and economically, in order to complete its goal of hegemonic power. For this reason, the US regards it as a major goal to stamp out the DPRK and dominate the Korean peninsula as a whole, setting the DPRK as a major target in the "axis of evil", and "resorting to every means to internationalize the Korean question", treating the issue arbitrarily in international arenas such as the UN, in collaboration with its satellite countries.<ref name=":10">[https://archive.org/details/origin-of-the-korean-question-foreign-languages-publishing-house-pyongyang-juche-107-2018/ "Origin of the Korean Question."] Foreign Languages Publishing House, Pyongyang, Juche 107 (2018).</ref>

Describing the history of the USA's imperialist designs on Korea, which continues to this day in modern Korea-US relations, the book's authors note that the USA has had its eyes on Korea since the 1800s, due to the importance of Korea's strategic position, the Korean peninsula being good springboard for advance into Asia. Additionally, the authors explain that the USA was compelled toward imperialist expansion by the fact that its industry demanded overseas markets for selling its products, and that the USA saw Korea as a suitable market for its commodities. Finally, Korea was seen as a key location where ships from the USA could refuel on their way to China. Several incidents, such as the criminal intrusion of the USA's ship ''General Sherman'' into the [[Taedong river]] in 1866, which, demanding "trade" and refusing to leave, perpetrated theft, violence, and kidnapping and killing of Koreans until Pyongyang citizens finally were able to set the boat on fire and sink it, was followed by other incidents with USA's naval vessels continuing to intrude into Korean territory as well as conducting illegal gold prospecting in Korea.<ref name=":10" />

Eventually, after a Korea-US treaty was made in 1882, the US won many privileges including the extraterritorial right and "most favoured nation" treatment. Thus the US moved to reduce Korea to its commodity market, a source of precious metals and other raw materials, and an object of capital investment. The US capitalists brought surplus goods like old firearms, petroleum, tobacco and drops to sell them at exorbitant prices, meanwhile purchasing Korea's precious metals including gold and silver at low prices. Over time, [[Christianity|Christian]] missionaries promoted pro-US sentiment and sent "bourgeois sycophants" and "traitors to the nation" such as future dictator [[Syngman Rhee]] to the US to study, "at the expense of part of the colossal wealth obtained by bleeding the Korean people white."<ref name=":10" />

By 1905, in a meeting referred to as the [[Taft-Katsura agreement]], the USA's secretary of war and soon-to-be president, [[William Howard Taft]], and Japan's prime minister [[Katsura Taro]] had a confidential discussion in which they expressed their respective views on control over nations in the Pacific, with Japan emphasizing that it had no designs on the [[Republic of the Philippines|Philippines]], and the USA expressing that it would be "logical" for Japan to assert control over Korea. The USA's secretary of war and future president expressed his view that "the establishment by Japan of a [[suzerainty]] over Corea to the extent of requiring that Corea enter into no foreign treaties without the consent of Japan" would directly contribute to "permanent peace" in East Asia.<ref>[https://www.icasinc.org/history/katsura.html "The Taft-Katsura Agreed Memorandum, July 29, 1905."] ICAS Historical Document, Institute for Corean-American Studies. [https://www.icasinc.org/history/katsura.pdf PDF] of document. [https://web.archive.org/web/20230829070912/https://www.icasinc.org/history/katsura.pdf Archived] 2023-08-29.</ref><ref>[https://kls.law.columbia.edu/content/korea-legal-history "Korea: A Legal History: Taft-Katsura Agreed Memorandum."] Korean Legal Studies. Columbia.edu. [https://web.archive.org/web/20230829072908/https://kls.law.columbia.edu/content/korea-legal-history Archived] 2023-08-29.</ref> The authors of ''Origin of the Korean Question'' point out that in the Taft-Katsura Agreement, the US recognized Japan's protection of Korea and, in return, Japan promised not to interfere with the US supremacy over the Philippines. Placing this agreement in the context of the USA's series of aggressions and intrusions into Korea, its imperialistic trade relations, its promotion of pro-US bourgeois ideology through Christian missionaries, and its disregard for agreements made in the 1882 Korea-US treaty, it demonstrates the USA's longstanding record of aggressive, imperialist self-interest in its dealings with Korea as a key country for the US to subjugate on its path to imperialist world hegemony. In line with this history, the authors evaluate that the US of the present day spreads misinformation about the DPRK and misuses the UN and other international apparatuses to "isolate and suffocate the recalcitrant country that aspires after independence [...] to bring the Korean people to their knees by internationalizing the Korean question at all costs in pursuit of its world strategy."<ref name=":10" />

===DPRK-ROK relations===
[[File:Unification vs Peaceful Coexistence 2016-2021.png|thumb|Attitudes in South Korea towards unification vs peaceful coexistence with DPRK, according to the 2021 KINU Unification Survey.<ref name=":5">Dr. Sang Sin Lee, et. al. [https://www.kinu.or.kr/pyxis-api/1/digital-files/87cb5812-a81a-4fdc-824c-8d359544e8f7 "KINU Unification Survey 2021: Executive Summary."] July, 2021. Korea Institute for National Unification.</ref>]]
Among the political leadership, bourgeoisie, and working people of South Korea, there is variation in attitudes toward DPRK. For the majority of South Korea's history, its leaders have been far-right anti-communist military dictators as well as corrupt oligarchs. A handful of ROK presidents are notable for their "Sunshine Policy" stance toward DPRK, a stance of reconciliation. Most notably associated with this attitude are Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun. The more recent president, [[Moon Jae-in]], has been described as having revived certain elements of the Sunshine Policy era. However, his presidency was followed by the right-wing [[Yoon Suk-yeol]] who took office in 2022, and has a much more aggressive pro-US stance.

In regard to public opinion in South Korea, the 2021 KINU Unification Survey<ref name=":5" /> reported that positive responses to the question “If North Korea open the borders to each other and cooperate on political and economic matters, such a state can be considered unification even if the two Koreas are not one country” have reached 63.2%. In addition, the survey found there is a growing tendency to be indifferent to DPRK and to "give up expectations" rather than a negative view for the future of inter-Korean relations. The IMF generation and millennial generations clearly show a high level of indifference toward the DPRK compared to the older generations. (IMF generation 68.3%, Millennial generation 74.1%).

According to the survey, the gap between ‘Prefers unification’ and ‘Prefers peaceful coexistence’ is very huge in the millennial generation. In the 2021 survey, the percentage of ‘Prefers peaceful coexistence’ was 71.4% and the percentage of ‘Prefers unification’ was 12.4%, showing a difference of 59%P. The summary of the results suggests that "the trend that younger generations view North Korea as the subject of coexistence and not unification will become stronger in the future." The younger generation tends to loosely favor confederations. The Millennial generation most actively preferred confederations and has the lowest percentage of preference for unitary state system at only 6.5%. The preference for unification in the unitary state system, which is the traditional unification view, was relatively high among the war generation (17.8%). However, more` than half of the War generation (52.1%) preferred confederations.

67.7% of survey respondents agreed to the statement “The agreements between the two Koreas should be continued regardless of the government's change” and 90.3% of the respondents said ‘necessary’ to the question “Do you think that U.S. Armed Forces in Korea is needed now?” 69% of respondents showed a positive attitude toward the question “Do you think U.S. President [[Joe Biden|Biden]] should hold a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un?” The survey also found that people under 30 are apparently more vulnerable to fake news about DPRK than those over 40. Income level, residence area, political ideology, and party identification also seem to influence the reception of fake news on DPRK and unification issues.<ref name=":5" />

The US consistently interferes in inter-Korean affairs and polices Korean reunification efforts by citing sanctions. According to Nodutdol, only a few months after the Korean leaders signed the Panmunjeom Declaration, the US-led UN Command which oversees the DMZ, blocked development of the inter-Korean railway. In January 2020, South Korean President Moon Jae-In expressed interest in developing tourism to People's Korea, but the US ambassador Harry Harris blocked this effort. Harris claimed that "independent" tourism plans would have to undergo US consultation. He emphasized that the items inside South Korean tourists' luggage could violate sanctions, demonstrating the extent of US interference.<ref name=":3" />

During Moon Jae-in's presidency, a number of inter-Korean activities took place, such as the 2018 inter-Korean summit. In the 2018 Winter Olympics, the teams representing DPRK and south Korea entered the Opening Ceremony marching under the Korean Unification Flag, while in women's ice hockey there was a single united Korean team. A music concert titled "Spring is Coming" was also held in 2018, in which a number of south Korean artists performed alongside People's Korean artists in [[Pyongyang]], DPRK.

Pro-DPRK voices in South Korea are stifled by the existence of the National Security Law. The National Security Law is a south Korean law enforced since 1948 following events such as the [[Jeju Uprising]] where Koreans opposed the division of the country into north and south. The National Security Law has the avowed purpose "to secure the security of the State and the subsistence and freedom of nationals, by regulating any anticipated activities compromising the safety of the State." Behaviors or speeches in favor of the DPRK or communism can be punished by the National Security Law. In an article from The Diplomat, it was referred to as a "Cold War holdover" that "allows the government to selectively prosecute anyone who 'praises, incites or propagates the activities of an anti-government organization'" which the article describes as "a deliberately vague clause that broadly implies the North Korean state and its sympathizers." The article continues, explaining "Under Article 7, individuals have been prosecuted and imprisoned for merely possessing North Korean publications or satirically tweeting North Korean propaganda. In recent years this clause has been harshly criticized by [[Amnesty International]] and [[Human Rights Watch]], who claim the government abuses the law to repress dissenting voices."<ref>Meredith Shaw and Joseph Yi. (2022-03-15). [https://thediplomat.com/2022/03/will-yoon-suk-yeol-finally-reform-south-koreas-national-security-law/ "Will Yoon Suk-yeol Finally Reform South Korea’s National Security Law?"] ''The Diplomat''.</ref>

According to the [[People's Democracy Party]] (PDP), a revolutionary workers' party in south Korea, the continued U.S. military occupation of south Korea is the primary barrier to peaceful reunification of the Korean peninsula.<ref>People's Democracy Party and Liberation School. [https://www.liberationschool.org/korean-war-70-years/ “70 Years Too Long: The Struggle to End the Korean War – Liberation School.”] ''Liberation School – Revolutionary Marxism for a New Generation of Fighters'', 25 June 2020. [https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://www.liberationschool.org/korean-war-70-years/ Archived]. ‌</ref>

On August 13, 2022, thousands of south Korean unionists and their progressive supporters rallied in downtown Seoul to protest against joint US-south Korea war game exercises. In a video uploaded by [[Press TV]], Oh Eun-Jung of the National Teachers Union was quoted as saying: <blockquote>"The threat of nuclear war is growing on the Korean peninsula, conservative forces of Yoon Suk-yeol in south Korea and those in the U.S. are frantically conducting aggressive war drills in the sky, the land, and the sea, and are about to start large-scale military exercises, aimed at the invasion of North Korea. We must stamp out this behavior of anti-reunification forces." </blockquote>In the same video, construction worker Lee Seung-Woo stated: <blockquote>"We not only oppose the war exercises, but we want the U.S. Forces Korea, which is actually controlling and interfering with the Korean peninsula to leave this land. We believe that only then will the eighty million Koreans from both north and south be able to live peacefully."<ref>Frank Smith. [https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2022/08/13/687322/South-Korean-unionists-protest-US-South-Korea-war-games “‘South Korean Unionists Protest US-South Korea War Games.’”] PressTV News. August 13, 2022. [https://web.archive.org/web/20220826124551/https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2022/08/13/687322/South-Korean-unionists-protest-US-South-Korea-war-games Archived] 2022-08-28.</ref></blockquote>[[File:Unconverted long-term prisoners in south Korea.jpg|alt=People stand in a row at a demonstration calling for a second repatriation of unconverted long-term prisoners in south Korea. Their Korean-language sign reads "비전향장기수 송환 촉구". (Meaning "Call for repatriation of non-converted long-term prisoners")|thumb|A demonstration calling for a repatriation to DPRK for unconverted long-term prisoners in south Korea.]]

====Unconverted long-term prisoners====
{{Main article|Unconverted long-term prisoners}}

Unconverted long-term prisoners is a term which refers to political prisoners who have been imprisoned in south Korea, generally on charges of "anti-state" activities or views in support of communism or DPRK. The term commonly refers to people who were mostly arrested from the 1950s to 1980s and imprisoned and tortured for decades and who refused to sign a "conversion" statement renouncing communist or left-wing ideology, which had been a condition for their release. It can also refer to those who ultimately did sign the so-called "conversion" statement but do not consider it a true conversion as it was extracted under torture.<ref name=":4">[https://www.liberationschool.org/interview-with-ahn-hak-sop/ "Still fighting for Korea’s liberation: An interview with Ahn Hak-sop"] ''Liberation School'', June 27, 2023. [https://web.archive.org/web/20240227201454/https://www.liberationschool.org/interview-with-ahn-hak-sop/ Archived] 2024-02-27.</ref><ref name=":16">Kim Dong-won. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xu2mEvU29Q ''Repatriation'' (2003).] Documentary.</ref>

In the 1990s, some of the elderly prisoners began being released, and began living in the south under difficult economic, legal, and social conditions. Many sought to be repatriated to DPRK, and 63 of them were allowed to do so in the year 2000. Many who participated in the repatriation in 2000 and many of those who remained in south Korea made their decisions based on their impression at the time that there was going to be more freedom of movement between ROK and DPRK thereafter. However, further repatriations have not taken place, despite a continued movement calling for it. Meanwhile, those who remained in the south have had to live under strict surveillance by the south Korean state.<ref name=":4" /><ref name=":16" />

==Further reading==

*[[Library:DPRK Study Guide|DPRK study guide]]
*[[:Category:Library works about the DPRK|All library works about the DPRK]]
*[[:Category:Library documents from the DPRK|All library works from the DPRK]]
*[[Library:Patriots, Traitors and Empires|''Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom'']]

==External links==

=== Government, party, and other organization webpages ===
*[http://www.dprkportal.kp Portal Site of Democratic People's Republic of Korea]
*[http://www.mfa.gov.kp/ Ministry of Foreign Affairs of DPR Korea]
*[http://www.korart.sca.kp/ Ministry of Culture of DPR Korea]
*[http://www.moph.gov.kp/ Ministry of Public Health of DPR Korea]
*[http://www.ryomyong.edu.kp/ Ministry of Education of DPR Korea]
*[http://www.tourismdprk.gov.kp/ National Tourism Administration]
*[http://www.mirae.aca.kp/ State Commission of Science and Technology of DPR Korea]
*[http://www.naenara.com.kp/sites/kfpd Central Committee of the Korean Federation for Protection of the Disabled]
*[http://www.friend.com.kp/dprkrcs/ The Red Cross Society of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea]
*[http://www.kass.org.kp/ Korean Association of Social Scientists] (KASS)
*[http://www.gpsh.edu.kp/ Grand People's Study House]

=== DPRK publications and news media sites ===

* [http://www.kcna.kp/ Korean Central News Agency]
* [http://www.rodong.rep.kp Rodong Sinmun]
* [http://www.korean-books.com.kp/index.php/Main/firstpage/en Foreign Languages Publishing House]
* [http://www.naenara.com.kp/ Naenara]
* [http://www.pyongyangtimes.com.kp/ Pyongyang Times]
* [http://www.kftrade.com.kp/ Foreign Trade of DPR Korea]
* [http://www.mediaryugyong.com.kp/ Ryugyong Programming Centre]

* [http://www.youth.rep.kp/ Chongnyon Jonwi] (Youth Vanguard)
* [https://archive.org/search?query=Foreign+Languages+Publishing+House%2C+Pyongyang "Foreign Languages Publishing House, Pyongyang"] results on [[Internet Archive]]

=== Universities ===

* [http://www.ryongnamsan.edu.kp/ Kim Il Sung University]
* [http://www.kut.edu.kp/ Kim Chaek University of Technology]
* [https://www.pust.co/ Pyongyang University of Science and Technology]

=== Other links ===

* [https://exploredprk.com/ Explore DPRK], site with many articles about DPRK
* [https://www.youtube.com/@DPRKExplained DPRK Explained], YouTube channel with videos about DPRK
* [https://dprk360.com/ DPRK 360], blog featuring panoramic photos and articles about DPRK
* [https://www.youngpioneertours.com/ Young Pioneer Tours], tourism company with many articles about DPRK
* [https://www.youtube.com/@DefendKorea DefendKorea / NatalieRevolts], DPRK-focused YouTube channel
* [https://www.youtube.com/@tvminjoktv7260/ 민족TV (Minjok TV, Minjok Tongshin)], YouTube channel featuring many interviews conducted in DPRK by unification activist Noh Gil-nam (Korean: 노길남)

*https://fightbacknews.org/articles/korea-stands-strong-kim-jong-il-context
*https://www.lalkar.org/article/2654/the-democratic-structure-of-the-dprk
==References==
<references />

[[Category:Countries]]
[[Category:Democratic People's Republic of Korea]]
[[Category:Targets of regime change operations]]
[[Category:Targets of bourgeois media]]
[[Category:Marxist-Leninist states]]
[[Category:Asian countries]]
[[Category:Countries invaded by the United States]]
[[Category:Countries sanctioned by the US]]
[[Category:Juche]]

File:DPRK No RoK (orthographic projection).svg

2026-09-07T17:41:36Z

The Phantom Bull: The DPRK's current (as of September 7th, 2026) claimed territory, on an orthographic map projection. Korean reunification was officially abandoned by the DPRK in January 2024, so the DPRK no longer claims the RoK as part of its territory. Kikorangi wrote this in the official ProleWiki Discord server: "The DPRK officially changed its constitution and refers to itself as bordering the Russian Federation, People's Republic of China, and the Republic of Korea. Although the government has made...

== Summary ==
The DPRK's current (as of September 7th, 2026) claimed territory, on an orthographic map projection. Korean reunification was officially abandoned by the DPRK in January 2024, so the DPRK no longer claims the RoK as part of its territory.

Kikorangi wrote this in the official ProleWiki Discord server:

"The DPRK officially changed its constitution and refers to itself as bordering the Russian Federation, People's Republic of China, and the Republic of Korea.

Although the government has made references to this and announced its intention to update the constitution, it hadn't updated the constitution until this year, so it de jure recognised south Korea as part of its territory even though it de facto did not. Now that the constitution has been updated and it both de fact and de jure recognises the ROK as a separate country, I believe updating the map shouldn't be controversial."

Ted Kaczynski

2026-08-26T15:10:21Z

The Phantom Bull: I added a paragraph describing Kaczynski's personal motivations behind his crimes.

{{Infobox person|name=Ted Kaczynski|birth_date=May 22, 1942|birth_place=[[Chicago]], [[State of Illinois|Illinois]], [[United States of America|United States]]|nationality=Statesian|image=Ted Kaczynski Mugshot.jpg|death_date=June 10, 2023 (aged 81)|death_place=[[Federal Medical Center, Butner|FMC, Butner]], [[State of North Carolina|North Carolina]], United States}}

'''Theodore John Kaczynski''' (May 22, 1942 – June 10, 2023), also known as the '''Unabomber''', was a [[Statesian]] [[Primitivism|primitivist]] and [[Fascism|eco-fascist]] and serial bomber, known for mailing/delivering 16 bombs over a duration of almost 17 years, killing 3 people and injuring 23 more. His targets included scientists, engineers, industrialists, lobbyists, and airlines; people and institutions he felt were furthering technological progress to the detriment of society.<ref>{{Web citation|date=2023-06-09|title=Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber for years of attacks that killed 3, dies in prison at 81|url=https://apnews.com/article/ted-kaczynski-unabomber-dies-federal-prison-95fdd4f398fbfe20aaadf5d53a91dc26|newspaper=The Associated Press|retrieved=2023-06-10|author=Micheal Balsamo and Lindsay Whitehearst}}</ref>

== His Motivations Behind His Crimes ==
Despite the fact that his ideological convictions professed a proposal for giving humanity its freedom back, Kaczynski committed his crimes merely out of a personal desire for revenge. In a journal entry, he stated that he did not expect to accomplish anything productive with his crimes, and even acknowledged that his crimes might be counterproductive to his ultimate aims for humanity, yet he decided to commit his acts of murder and attempted murder anyway, due to him feeling the need to "content himself with just a little revenge".<ref>{{Web citation|author=Ted Kaczynski|newspaper=The Ted K Archive|title=Journal Entry, April 6, 1971|date=1971-04-06|url=https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/ted-kaczynski-excerpts-from-unabomber-s-journal.html|retrieved=2026-08-26}}</ref>

== References ==
<references />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kaczynski, Ted}}
[[Category:Articles with unsourced statements]]
[[Category:Statesians of Polish descent]]
[[Category:Reactionaries]]
[[Category:MKUltra victims]]

Liberalism

2026-08-24T13:56:59Z

The Phantom Bull: I slightly clarified what constitutes capitalist realism.

{{Message box/Missing Sources}}{{Quote|First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the [[white people|white]] moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the [[African|Negro]]'s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the [[Ku Klux Klan|Ku Klux Klanner]], but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of [[revolution|direct action]]"|[[Martin Luther King Jr.]]|[[Library:Letter from Birmingham Jail|Letter from Birmingham Jail]]|1963}}
[[File:Losurdo tree liberalism.png|thumb|The liberal view of [[human rights]] is based on [[private property]] while the [[Marxism|Marxist]] view is based on [[self-determination]].<ref name="Boer">{{Citation|author=Roland Boer|year=2021|title=Sovereignty and Human Rights: A Comparison Between Western Liberal and Chinese Marxist Traditions|publisher=Political Theology 23(1–2), 13–28.|doi=10.1080/1462317X.2021.1932341}}</ref>]]
'''Liberalism''' is an [[Idealism|idealist]] [[ideology]] that promotes [[capitalism]], [[free market]] principles, [[individualism]], [[fundamental rights]] (also known as [[Bourgeoisie|bourgeois]] privileges), [[separation of church and state]], [[popular sovereignty]], and [[rule of law]]. Liberalism emerged in the [[17th Century|17th century]] as the ideological component of [[capitalism]], and gained administrative power as a result of the [[Bourgeois revolution|bourgeois revolutions]] of the [[18th Century|18th]] and [[19th Century|19th centuries]] in [[North America]] and [[Europe]].<ref name=":0">{{Citation|author=I. G. Nemanov|year=1973|chapter=Liberalism|chapter-url=https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Liberalism|title=[[Great Soviet Encyclopedia]] (3rd ed.)|volume=14|page=396-398|city=Moscow|pdf=https://ia804601.us.archive.org/2/items/B-001-032-507-748-ALL/БСЭ_3изд_т14_731.pdf|trans-title=Boljšaja sovjetskaja enciklopjedija|trans-lang=Russian}}</ref> Liberalism, the philosophy behind the [[dictatorship of the bourgeoisie]], has consistently changed over the centuries, as a result of advancement in the productive forces and the development of the [[Feudalism|feudal]] serfdom into the industrial [[proletariat]], and has now turned into [[neoliberalism]], as a result of the consolidation of capital into the hands of the few, and to protect the [[ruling class]] from [[socialism]], which is currently in the process of replacing capitalism as the primary [[mode of production]].

== History ==

=== Creation ===
[[File:Base-superstructure Dialectic.png|thumb|Diagram showing how the base and superstructure relate to each other in dialectics.]]
Liberalism developed as an ideology and was adopted by members of society as capitalism (or the premises of capitalism) developed. This is generally exemplified by the [[base and superstructure]]; as the material conditions develop and factories emerge, there is a need for the superstructure to provide the institutions required for the base to survive. Since capitalism requires the free market to exist, there needed to be a guiding ideology that would allow the free market to exist and justify the existence of capitalism, the base.

Early on, liberalism expressed the interests of the young bourgeoisie in Western Europe against feudalism, absolutism, and clericalism.<ref name=":0" /> Liberalism became codified during the [[Age of Enlightenment]], which lasted from about the mid 17th century to the late 18th century, and culminated perhaps with the bourgeois [[French Revolution]] of 1789.<ref name=":0" /> Some notable liberal theorists include [[René Descartes]], [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]], or economist [[Adam Smith]].

In this sense, both [[Social democracy|social-democrats]] and classical liberals, who may seem at the opposite ends of a spectrum, are liberals since both will strive towards establishing capitalism.

=== Modern times ===
In modern times, liberalism remains the dominant ideology of the world at large. As it is inextricably linked to capitalism, and capitalism is the dominant mode of production, it follows that liberalism is the dominant guiding ideology in the world.

As the ideas of a society are the ideas of the ruling class (the bourgeoisie in capitalist societies), liberalism has become the only ''realistic'' ideology for most people living in a capitalist mode of production, as it permeates their lives from birth. It is indoctrinated into them via the media, the educational system etc.

Most people therefore do not realize that they are ideological, and that their ideology is liberalism. As they have lived their whole lives in capitalism, it is difficult for them to imagine another system (this is a phenomenon known as [[capitalist realism]]) and therefore that liberalism is the only existing or viable ideology.

== Idealist component ==
Liberalism is considered to be an [[Idealism|idealist]] ideology, as opposed to a materialist ideology, because it claims that ideas shape the material world, as opposed to the material world shaping ideas. In their pursuit for the cult of the individual, liberal philosophers used to embrace the Great Man theory of history, which states that progress is driven by great people who have high natural abilities. Therefore they had progressive ideas, and these ideas shaped the material world. As such, in classical liberal reasoning, [[Napoleon Bonaparte]] was instrumental in spreading capitalism and destroying the [[Feudalism|old order]].

Marxism, which is a materialist philosophy, understands that material conditions drive change (the [[Dialectics|dialectic]]) and will influence the ideas that people have and how they act on them. Marxism holds that capitalism was instrumental in creating a Napoleon Bonaparte and that, if he had not existed, someone else would have taken his place.

After the impact of [[scientific socialism]] in Europe, liberal thinkers started moving away from such idealist notions and co-opted some materialist theory so as to reinforce theirs and prevent communism from becoming a major ideology in the world. As such, even liberal theorists today have to admit that, to some extent, change is driven by ''forces'' at large. Liberals admit that the Industrial Revolution largely affected our daily life, in a way that completely modified it from what existed previously (e.g. the division of the work day and the importance it has in a worker's life as compared to the feudal journeyman's). However, they see this progress as an abstract, without relation to the base or superstructure, and would rather focus on the abstract consequences than the material causes. If life changed so much for the average worker after the introduction of the steam engine, it is precisely because the mode of production at large changed and required new policies to create more surplus value.

== Principles ==

=== Private property ===
Liberalism teaches that only private property, with guaruntees of freedom for certain people, can ensure social harmony and human progress. Within this is the underlying assumption that common welfare results from individuals realizing their personal goals.<ref name=":0" />

=== Free market ===
Perhaps best laid down by Adam Smith, though already existing before his work [[The Wealth of Nations|''The Wealth of Nations'']], free market policies encompass a large range of principles and laws that govern trade inside and outside a nation, so as to remove as many barriers as possible to trade.

Free trade was originally required by the bourgeoisie to destroy the old order of the nobility, who used to own monopolies and form cartels to reinforce their power. Today, free trade is also used as a vector for imperialism, notably in the [[Opium Wars]] that sought to dismantle [[Qing dynasty (1636–1912)|China]]'s protectionist trade policies in the late 19th century.

=== Individualism ===

=== Fundamental rights ===
Fundamental rights, in liberal philosophy, are rights with which all individuals are imbued with on the grounds of being human. They are more aptly described as privileges the bourgeois reluctantly allows the proletariat to enjoy.

== See also ==

* [[Neoliberalism]]
* [[Dictatorship of the bourgeoisie]]
* [[Compatible Left]]
* [[Libertarianism]]
* [[Liberalism:Quotes]]

== Further reading ==

* ''[[Library:Liberalism: A Counter-History|Liberalism: A Counter-History]]''

==References==
<references />

[[Category:Political ideology]]
[[Category:Right-wing ideologies]]

Library:Vladimir Lenin/What is to be done?

2026-08-14T14:26:35Z

The Phantom Bull: I fixed a sentence where part of one of Lenin's notes was incorrectly inserted into the main text, which interrupted a sentence.

{{Library work
| title = What is to be done?
| author=Vladimir Lenin
| written in = 1901–1902
| published = 1902
| type = Book
| source= [https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ Marxists Internet Archive]
| image =
| image_size =
| image_upright =
| image_alt =
| caption =
}}
== Preface ==
<blockquote>"...Party struggles lend a party strength and vitality; the greatest proof of a party’s weakness is its diffuseness and the blurring of clear demarcations; a party becomes stronger by purging itself..."
''(From a letter of Lassalle to Marx, of June 24, 1852)''
</blockquote>

According to the author’s original plan, the present pamphlet was to have been devoted to a detailed development of the ideas expressed in the article "Where To Begin", (''Iskra'', No. 4, May 1901). We must first apologise to the reader for the delay in fulfilling the promise made in that article (and repeated in response to many private inquiries and letters). One of the reasons for this delay was the attempt, undertaken in June of the past year (1901), to unite all the Social-Democratic organisations abroad. It was natural to wait for the results of this attempt, for, had the effort proved successful, it would perhaps have been necessary to expound ''Iskra’s'' conceptions of organisation from a somewhat different approach; in any case, such a success promised to put an end very quickly to the existence of the two trends in the Russian Social-Democratic movement. As the reader knows, the attempt failed, and, as we propose to show, was bound to fail after the new swing, of ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', in its issue No. 10, towards Economism. It was found to be absolutely essential to begin a determined struggle against this trend, diffuse and ill-defined, but for that reason the more persistent, the more capable of reasserting itself in diverse forms. Accordingly, the original plan of the pamphlet was altered and considerably enlarged.

Its main theme was to have been the three questions raised in the article "Where To Begin" – the character and main content of our political agitation; our organisational tasks; and the plan for building, simultaneously and from various sides, a militant, all-Russia organisation. These questions have long engaged the mind of the author, who tried to raise them in ''Rabochaya Gazeta'' <ref group="note">''Rabochaya Gazeta'' (''Workers’ Gazette'') — an illegal newspaper issued by the Kiev group of Social-Democrats. Two issues appeared — No. 1 in August and No. 2 in December (dated November) 1897.{{Br}}

The First Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. adopted ''Rabochaya Gazeta'' as the official organ of the Party, but the newspaper discontinued publication shortly after the Congress, as a result of a police raid on the printing-press and the arrest of the Central Committee.</ref> during one of the unsuccessful attempts to revive that paper (see Chapter V). But the original plan to confine the pamphlet to an analysis of only these three questions and to set forth our views as far as possible in a positive form, without, or almost without, entering into polemics, proved wholly impracticable, for two reasons. On the one hand, Economism proved to be much more tenacious than we had supposed (we employ the term Economism in the broad sense, as explained in ''Iskra'', No. 12 (December 1901), in the article entitled "A Talk With Defenders of Economism", which was a synopsis, so to speak, of the present pamphlet). It became clear beyond doubt that the differences regarding the solution of the three questions mentioned were explainable to a far greater degree by the basic antithesis between the two trends in the Russian Social-Democratic movement than by differences over details. On the other hand, the perplexity of the Economists over the practical application of our views in ''Iskra'' clearly revealed that we often speak literally in different tongues and therefore ''cannot'' arrive at an understanding without beginning ''ab ovo'', and that an attempt must be made, in the simplest possible style, illustrated by numerous and concrete examples, ''systematically to "clarify" all'' our basic points of difference with ''all'' the Economists. I resolved to make such an attempt at "clarification", fully realising that it would greatly increase the size of the pamphlet and delay its publication; I saw ''no other way'' of meeting my pledge I had made in the article "Where To Begin". Thus, to the apologies for the delay, I must add others for the serious literary shortcomings of the pamphlet. I had to work ''in great haste'', with frequent interruptions by a variety of other tasks.

The examination of the above three questions still constitutes the main theme of this pamphlet, but I found it necessary to begin with two questions of a more general nature – why such an "innocent" and "natural" slogan as "freedom of criticism" should be for us a veritable war-cry, and why we cannot come to an understanding even on the fundamental question of the role of Social-Democrats in relation to the spontaneous mass movement. Further, the exposition of our views on the character and substance of political agitation developed into an explanation of the difference between trade-unionist politics and Social-Democratic politics, while the exposition of our views on organisational tasks developed into an explanation of the difference between the amateurish methods which satisfy the Economists, and the organisation of revolutionaries which we hold to be indispensable. Further, I advance the "plan" for an all-Russia political newspaper with all the more insistence because the objections raised against it are untenable, and because no real answer has been given to the question I raised in the article "Where To Begin" as to how we can set to work from all sides simultaneously to create the organisation we need. Finally, in the concluding part, I hope to show that we did all we could to prevent a decisive break with the Economists, a break which nevertheless proved inevitable; that ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' acquired a special significance, a "historical" significance, if you will, because it expressed fully and strikingly, not consistent Economism, but the confusion and vacillation which constitute the distinguishing feature of ''an entire period'' in the history of Russian Social-Democracy; and that therefore the polemic with ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', which may upon first view seem excessively detailed, also acquires significance, for we can make no progress until we have completely put an end to this period.

{{Preface-sign|Lenin
February 1902}}

== Dogmatism and "freedom of criticism" ==

=== What does "freedom of criticism" mean? ===
"Freedom of criticism" is undoubtedly the most fashionable slogan at the present time, and the one most frequently employed in the controversies between socialists and democrats in all countries. At first sight, nothing would appear to be more strange than the solemn appeals to freedom of criticism made by one of the parties to the dispute. Have voices been raised in the advanced parties against the constitutional law of the majority of European countries which guarantees freedom to science and scientific investigation? "Something must be wrong here," will be the comment of the onlooker who has heard this fashionable slogan repeated at every turn but has not yet penetrated the essence of the disagreement among the disputants; evidently this slogan is one of the conventional phrases which, like nicknames, become legitimised by use, and become almost generic terms."

In fact, it is no secret for anyone that two trends have taken form in present-day international {{Refn|Incidentally, in the history of modern socialism this is a phenomenon, perhaps unique and in its way very consoling, namely, that the strife of the various trends within the socialist movement has from national become international. Formerly, the disputes between Lassalleans and Eisenachers <ref group="note" name="lasseisen" />, between Guesdists and Possibilists <ref group="note" name="guesbilist" />, between Fabians and Social-Democrats, and between Narodnaya Volya adherents and Social-Democrats, remained confined within purely national frameworks, reflecting purely national features, and proceeding, as it were, on different planes. At the present time (as is now evident), the English Fabians, the French Ministerialists, the German Bernsteinians, and the Russian Critics – all belong to the same family, all extol each other, learn from each other, and together take up arms against “dogmatic” Marxism. In this first really international battle with socialist opportunism, international revolutionary Social-Democracy will perhaps become sufficiently strengthened to put an end to the political reaction that has long reigned in Europe?|group=Lenin}} Social-Democracy. The conflict between these trends now flares up in a bright flame and now dies down and smoulders under the ashes of imposing "truce resolutions". The essence of the "new" trend, which adopts a "critical" attitude towards "obsolete dogmatic" Marxism, has been clearly enough ''presented'' by Bernstein and ''demonstrated'' by Millerand.

Social-Democracy must change from a party of social revolution into a democratic party of social reforms. Bernstein has surrounded this political demand with a whole battery of well-attuned "new" arguments and reasonings. Denied was the possibility of putting socialism on a scientific basis and of demonstrating its necessity and inevitability from the point of view of the materialist conception of history. Denied was the fact of growing impoverishment, the process of proletarisation, and the intensification of capitalist contradictions; the very concept, "''ultimate aim''", was declared to be unsound, and the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat was completely rejected. Denied was the antithesis in principle between liberalism and socialism. Denied was ''the theory of the class struggle,'' on the alleged grounds that it could not be applied to a strictly democratic society governed according to the will of the majority, etc.

Thus, the demand for a decisive turn from revolutionary Social-Democracy to bourgeois social-reformism was accompanied by a no less decisive turn towards bourgeois criticism of all the fundamental ideas of Marxism. In view of the fact that this criticism of Marxism has long been directed from the political platform, from university chairs, in numerous pamphlets and in a series of learned treatises, in view of the fact that the entire younger generation of the educated classes has been systematically reared for decades on this criticism, it is not surprising that the "new critical" trend in Social-Democracy should spring up, all complete, like Minerva from the head of Jove. The content of this new trend did not have to grow and take shape, it was transferred bodily from bourgeois to socialist literature.

To proceed. If Bernstein’s theoretical criticism and political yearnings were still unclear to anyone, the French took the trouble strikingly to demonstrate the "new method". In this instance, too, France has justified its old reputation of being "the land where, more than anywhere else, the historical class struggles were each time fought out to a decision..." (Engels, Introduction to Marx’s ''Der 18 Brumaire''). The French socialists have begun, not to theorise, but to act. The democratically more highly developed political conditions in France have permitted them to put "Bernsteinism into practice" immediately, with all its consequences. Millerand has furnished an excellent example of practical Bernsteinism; not without reason did Bernstein and Vollmar rush so zealously to defend and laud him. Indeed, if Social-Democracy, in essence, is merely a party of reform and must be bold enough to admit this openly, then not only has a socialist the right to join a bourgeois cabinet, but he must always strive to do so. If democracy, in essence, means the abolition of class domination, then why should not a socialist minister charm the whole bourgeois world by orations on class collaboration? Why should he not remain in the cabinet even after the shooting-down of workers by gendarmes has exposed, for the hundredth and thousandth time, the real nature of the democratic collaboration of classes? Why should he not personally take part in greeting the tsar, for whom the French socialists now have no other name than hero of the gallows, knout, and exile (''knouteur, pendeur et deportateur)''? And the reward for this utter humiliation and self-degradation of socialism in the face of the whole world, for the corruption of the socialist consciousness of the working masses – the only basis that can guarantee our victory – the reward for this is pompous ''projects'' for miserable reforms, so miserable in fact that much more has been obtained from bourgeois governments!

He who does not deliberately close his eyes cannot fail to see that the new "critical" trend in socialism is nothing more nor less than a new variety of ''opportunism''. And if we judge people, not by the glittering uniforms they don or by the highsounding appellations they give themselves, but by their actions and by what they actually advocate, it will be clear that "freedom of criticism" means’ freedom for an opportunist trend in Social-Democracy, freedom to convert Social-Democracy into a democratic party of reform, freedom to introduce bourgeois ideas and bourgeois elements into socialism.

"Freedom" is a grand word, but under the banner of freedom for industry the most predatory wars were waged, under the banner of freedom of labour, the working people were robbed. The modern use of the term "freedom of criticism" contains the same inherent falsehood. Those who are really convinced that they have made progress in science would not demand freedom for the new views to continue side by side with the old, but the substitution of the new views for the old. The cry heard today, "Long live freedom of criticism", is too strongly reminiscent of the fable of the empty barrel.

We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire. We have combined, by a freely adopted decision, for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not of retreating into the neighbouring marsh, the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into an exclusive group and with having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation. And now some among us begin to cry out: Let us go into the marsh! And when we begin to shame them, they retort: What backward people you are! Are you not ashamed to deny us the liberty to invite you to take a better road! Oh, yes, gentlemen! You are free not only to invite us, but to go yourselves wherever you will, even into the marsh. In fact, we think that the marsh is your proper place, and we are prepared to render you every assistance to get there. Only let go of our hands, don’t clutch at us and don’t besmirch the grand word freedom, for we too are "free" to go where we please, free to fight not only against the marsh, but also against those who are turning towards the marsh!

===The new advocates of "freedom of criticism"===
Now, this slogan ("freedom of criticism") has in recent times been solemnly advanced by ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' (No. 10), organ of the Union of Russian Social-Democrats Abroad, not as a theoretical postulate, but as a political demand, as a reply to the question, "Is it possible to unite the Social-Democratic organisations operating abroad?": "For a durable unity, there must be freedom of criticism" (p. 36).

From this statement two definite conclusions follow:

# that ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' has taken under its wing the opportunist trend in international Social-Democracy in general, and
# that ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' demands freedom for opportunism in Russian Social-Democracy. Let us examine these conclusions.

''Rabocheye Dyelo'' is "particularly" displeased with the "inclination of ''Iskra'' and ''Zarya'' to predict a rupture between the ''Mountain'' and the ''Gironde'' in international Social-Democracy". {{Refn|A comparison of the two trends within the revolutionary proletariat (the revolutionary and the opportunist), and the two trends within the revolutionary bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century (the Jacobin, known as the Mountain, and the Girondist) was made in the leading article in No. 2 of Iskra (February 1901). The article was written by Plekhanov. The Cadets,<ref group="note" name="cadets" /> the Bezzaglavtsi,<ref group="note" name="bezzaglavtsi" /> and the Mensheviks to this day love to refer to Jacobinism in Russian Social-Democracy. But how Plekhanov came to apply this concept for the first time against the Right wing of Social-Democracy – about this they prefer to keep silent or to forget|group=Lenin}}<blockquote>"Generally speaking," writes B. Krichevsky, editor of ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', "this talk of the ''Mountain'' and the ''Gironde'' heard in the ranks of Social-Democracy represents a shallow historical analogy, a strange thing to come from the pen of a Marxist. The Mountain and the Gironde did not represent different temperaments-, or intellectual trends, as the historians of social thought may think, but different classes or strata – the middle bourgeoisie, on the one hand, and the petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat, on the other. In the modern socialist movement, however, there is no conflict of class interests; the socialist movement in its entirety, in ''all'' of its diverse forms (Krichevsky’s italics), including the most pronounced Bernsteinians, stands on the basis of the class interests of the proletariat and its class struggle for political and economic emancipation" (pp. 32-33).</blockquote>A bold assertion! Has not Krichevsky heard of the fact, long ago noted, that it is precisely the extensive participation of an "academic" ''stratum'' in the socialist movement in recent years that has promoted such a rapid spread of Bernsteinism? And what is most important – on what does our author found his opinion that even "the most pronounced Bernsteinians" stand on the basis of the class struggle for the political and economic emancipation of the proletariat? No one knows. This determined defence of the most pronounced Bernsteinians is not supported by any argument or reasoning whatever. Apparently, the author believes that if he repeats what the most pronounced Bernsteinians say about themselves his assertion requires no proof. But can anything more "shallow" be imagined than this judgement of an entire trend based on nothing more than what the representatives of that trend say about themselves? Can anything more shallow be imagined than the subsequent "homily" on the two different and even diametrically opposite types, or paths, of party development? (''Rabocheye Dyelo'', pp. 34-35.) The German Social-Democrats, in other words, recognise complete freedom of criticism, but the French do not, and it is precisely their example that demonstrates the "bane of intolerance".

To this we can only say that the very example B. Krichevsky affords us attests to the fact that the name Marxists is at times assumed by people who conceive history literally in the "Ilovaisky manner".<ref group="note">''Ilovaisky, D. I.'' (1832–1920) — historian; author of numerous official textbooks of history that were extensively used in primary and secondary schools in pre-revolutionary Russia. In Ilovaisky’s texts history was reduced mainly to acts of kings and generals; the historical process was explained through secondary and fortuitous circumstances.</ref> To explain the unity of the German Socialist Party and the disunity of the French Socialist Party, there is no need whatever to go into the special features in the history of these countries, to contrast the conditions of military semiabsolutism in the one with republican parliamentarism in the other, to analyse the effects of the Paris Commune and the effects of the Exceptional Law Against the Socialists, to compare the economic life and economic development of the two countries, or to recall that "the unexampled growth of German Social-Democracy" was accompanied by a strenuous struggle, unique in the history of socialism, not only against erroneous theories (Mühlberger, Dühring <ref group="Lenin">At the time Engels dealt his blows at Duhring, many representatives of German Social-Democracy inclined towards the latter’s views, and accusations of acerbity, intolerance, uncomradely polemics, etc., were hurled at Engels even publicly at a Party Congress.{{Br}}

At the Congress of 1877, Most, and his supporters, introduced a resolution to prohibit the publication of Engels’s articles in ''Vorwarts'' because “they do not interest the overwhelming majority of the readers”, and VahIteich declared that their publication had caused great damage to the Party, that Duhring too had rendered services to Social-Democracy: “We must utilise everyone in the interests of the Party; let the professors engage in polemics if they care to do so, but ''Vorwarts'' is not the place in which to conduct them” (''Vorwarts'', No. 65, June 6, 1877). {{Br}}

Here we have another example of the defence of “freedom of criticism”, and our legal critics and illegal opportunists, who love so much to cite the example of the Germans, would do well to ponder it</ref>, the ''Katheder''-Socialists <ref group="note">''Katheder-Socialism'' — a trend in bourgeois political economy that emerged in Germany in the seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century. Under the guise of socialism the Katheder-Socialists preached bourgeois-liberal reformism from university chairs (''Katheder''). {{Br}}

They maintained that the bourgeois state was above classes, that it was capable of reconciling hostile classes and gradually introducing “socialism”, without affecting the interests of the capitalists, while, at the same time, taking the demands of the workers as far as possible into consideration. In Russia the views of the Katheder-Socialists were disseminated by the “legal marxists”.</ref>) but also against erroneous tactics (Lassalle), etc., etc. All that is superfluous! The French quarrel among themselves because they are intolerant; the Germans are united because they are good boys.

And observe, this piece of matchless profundity is designed to "refute" the fact that puts to rout the defence of the Bernsteinians. The question whether or not the Bernsteinians ''stand'' on the basis of the class struggle of the proletariat is one that can be completely and irrevocably answered only by historical experience. Consequently, the example of France holds greatest significance in this respect, because France is the only country in which the Bernsteinians attempted ''to stand'' independently, on their own feet, with the warm approval of their German colleagues (and partly also of the Russian opportunists; cf. ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', No. 2-3, pp. 83-84). The reference to the "intolerance" of the French, apart from its "historical" significance (in the Nozdryov <ref group="note">''Nozdryov'' — a character In Gogol’s ''Dead Souls'' whom the author called “an historical personage” for the reason that wherever he went he left behind him a scandalous “history”.</ref> sense), turns out to be merely an attempt to –hush up very unpleasant facts with angry invectives.

Nor are we inclined to make a present of the Germans to Krichevsky and the numerous other champions of "freedom of criticism". If the "most pronounced Bernsteinians" are still tolerated in the ranks of the German party, it is only to the extent that they ''submit'' to the Hanover resolution <ref group="note">''The Hanover'' resolution — resolution on “Attacks on the Fundamental Views and Tactics of the Party”, adopted by the German Social-Democratic Party Congress at Hanover, September 27 – October 2 (October 9–14), 1899. A discussion of this question at the Congress and the adoption of a special resolution were necessitated by the fact that the opportunists, led by Bernstein, launched a revisionist attack on Marxist theory and demanded a reconsideration of Social-Democratic revolutionary policy and tactics.{{Br}}

The resolution adopted by the Congress rejected the demands of the revisionists, but failed to criticise and expose Bernsteinism. Bernstein’s supporters also voted for the resolution.</ref>, which emphatically rejected Bernstein’s "amendments", and to the Lubeck resolution, which (notwithstanding the diplomatic terms in which it is couched) contains a direct warning to Bernstein. It is debatable, from the standpoint of the interests of the German party, whether diplomacy was appropriate and whether, in this case, a bad peace is better than a good quarrel; in short, opinions may differ as to the expediency of any one of the ''methods'' employed to reject Bernsteinism, but that the German party ''did reject'' Bernsteinism on two occasions, is a fact no one can fail to see. Therefore, to think that the German example confirms the thesis that "the most pronounced Bernsteinians stand on the basis of the class struggle of the proletariat, for political and economic emancipation", means to fail completely to understand what is going on under our very eyes. {{Refn|It should be observed that Rabocheye Dyelo has always confined itself to a bare statement of facts concerning Bernsteinism in the German party and completely “refrained” from expressing its own opinion.
See, for instance, the reports of the Stuttgart Congress <ref group="note" name="stuttcong" /> in No. 2-3 (p. 66), in which all the disagreements are reduced to “tactics” and the statement is merely made that the overwhelming majority remain true to the previous revolutionary tactics. Or, No. 4-5 (p. 25, et seq.), in which we have nothing but a paraphrasing of the speeches delivered at the Hanover Congress, with a reprint of Bebel’s resolution. An exposition and a criticism of Bernstein’s views are again put olf (as was the case in No. 2-8) to be dealt with in a “special article”. Curiously enough, in No. 4-5 (p. 33), we read the following: “...the views expounded by Bebel have the support of the vast majority of the Congress,” and a few lines thereafter: “... David defended Bernstein’s views.... First of all, he tried to show that ... Bernstein and his friends, after all is said and done (sic!), stand on the basis of the class struggle...” This was written in December 1899, and in September 1901 Rabocheye Dyelo, apparently no longer believing that Bebel was right, repeats David’s views as its own!|group=Lenin}}

Nor is that all. As we have seen, ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' demands "freedom of criticism" and defends Bernsteinism before ''Russian'' Social-Democracy. Apparently it convinced itself that we were unfair to our "Critics" and Bernsteinians. But to which ones? who? where? when? What did the unfairness represent? About this, not a word. ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' does not name a single Russian Critic or Bernsteinian! We are left with but one of two possible suppositions. ''Either'' the unfairly treated party is none other than ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' itself (this is confirmed by the fact that in the two articles in No. 10 reference is made only to the wrongs suffered by ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' at the hands of ''Zarya'' and ''Iskra''). If that is the case, how is the strange fact to be explained that ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', which always vehemently dissociated itself from all solidarity with Bernsteinism, could not defend itself without putting in a word in defence of the "most pronounced Bernsteinians" and of freedom of criticism? Or some third persons have been treated unfairly. if this is the case, then what reasons may there be for not naming them?

We see, therefore, that ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' is continuing to play the game of hide-and-seek it has played (as we shall show below) ever since its founding. And let us note further this ''first'' practical application of the vaunted "freedom of criticism". In actual fact, not only was it forthwith reduced to abstention from all criticism, but also to abstention from expressing independent views altogether. The very ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', which avoids mentioning Russian Bernsteinism as if it were a shameful disease (to use Starover’s <ref group="note">''Starover'' (Old Believer)—the pseudonym of A. N. Potresov, a member of the ''Iskra'' Editorial Board; he subsequently became a Menshevik.</ref> apt expression), proposes, for the treatment of this disease, to copy word for word the latest German prescription for the German variety of the malady! Instead of freedom of criticism slavish (worse: apish) imitation! The very same social and political content of modern international opportunism reveals itself in a variety of ways according to national peculiarities. In one country the opportunists have long ago come out under a separate flag; in another, they have ignored theory and in fact pursued the policy of the Radicals-Socialists; in a third, some members of the revolutionary party have deserted to the camp of opportunism and strive to achieve their aims, not in open struggle for principles and for new tactics, but by gradual, imperceptible, and, if one may so put it, unpunishable corruption of their party; in a fourth country, similar deserters employ the same methods in the gloom of political slavery, and with a completely original combination of "legal" and "illegal" activity, etc. To talk of freedom of criticism and of Bernsteinism as a condition for uniting the ''Russian'' Social Democrats and not to explain how ''Russian'' Bernsteinism has manifested itself and what particular fruits it has borne, amounts to talking with the aim of saying nothing.

Let us ourselves try, if only in a few words, to say what ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' did not want to say (or which was, perhaps, beyond its comprehension).

===Criticism in Russia===
The chief distinguishing feature of Russia in regard to the point we are examining is that ''the very beginning'' of the spontaneous working-class movement, on the one hand, and of the turn of progressive public opinion towards Marxism, on the other, was marked by the combination of manifestly heterogeneous elements under a common flag to fight the common enemy (the obsolete social and political world outlook). We refer to the heyday of "legal Marxism". Speaking generally, this was an altogether curious phenomenon that no one in the eighties or the beginning of the nineties would have believed possible. In a country ruled by an autocracy, with a completely enslaved press, in a period of desperate political reaction in which even the tiniest outgrowth of political discontent and protest is persecuted, the theory of revolutionary Marxism suddenly forces its way into the ''censored'' literature and, though expounded in Aesopian language, is understood by all the "interested". The government had accustomed itself to regarding only the theory of the (revolutionary) Narodnaya Volya as dangerous, without, as is usual, observing its internal evolution, and rejoicing at any criticism levelled against it. Quite a considerable time elapsed (by our Russian standards) before the government realised what had happened and the unwieldy army of censors and gendarmes discovered the new enemy and flung itself upon him. Meanwhile, Marxist books were published one after another, Marxist journals and newspapers were founded, nearly everyone became a Marxist, Marxists were flattered, Marxists were courted, and the book publishers rejoiced at the extraordinary, ready sale of Marxist literature. It was quite natural, therefore, that among the Marxian neophytes who were caught up in this atmosphere, there should be more than one "author who got a swelled head..."

We can now speak calmly of this period as of an event of the past. It is no secret that the brief period in which Marxism blossomed on the surface of our literature was called forth by an alliance between people of extreme and of very moderate views. In point of fact, the latter were bourgeois democrats; this conclusion (so markedly confirmed by their subsequent "critical" development) suggested itself to some even when the "alliance" was still intact.

That being the case, are not the revolutionary Social-Democrats who entered into the alliance with the future "Critics" mainly responsible for the subsequent "confusion"? This question, together with a reply in the affirmative, is sometimes heard from people with too rigid a view. But such people are entirely in the wrong. Only those who are not sure of themselves can fear to enter into temporary alliances even with unreliable people; not a single political party could exist without such alliances. The combination with the legal Marxists was in its way the first really political alliance entered into by Russian Social -Democrats. Thanks to this alliance, an astonishingly rapid victory was obtained over Narodism, and Marxist ideas (even though in a vulgarised form) became very widespread. Moreover, the alliance was not concluded altogether without "conditions". Evidence of this is the burning by the censor, in 1895, of the Marxist collection ''Material on the Question of the Economic Development of Russia''. If the literary agreement with the legal Marxists can be compared with a political alliance, then that book can be compared with a political treaty.

The rupture, of course, did not occur because the "allies" proved to be bourgeois democrats. On the contrary, the representatives of the latter trend are natural and desirable allies of Social-Democracy insofar as its democratic tasks, brought to the fore by the prevailing situation in Russia, are concerned. But an essential condition for such an alliance must be the full opportunity for the socialists to reveal to the working class that its interests are diametrically opposed to the interests of the bourgeoisie. However, the Bernsteinian and "critical" trend, to which the majority of the legal Marxists turned, deprived the socialists of this opportunity and demoralised the socialist consciousness by vulgarising Marxism, by advocating the theory of the blunting of social contradictions, by declaring the idea of the social revolution and of the dictatorship of the proletariat to be absurd, by reducing the working-class movement and the class struggle to narrow trade-unionism and to a "realistic" struggle for petty, gradual reforms. This was synonymous with bourgeois democracy’s denial of socialism’s right to independence and, consequently, of its right to existence; in practice it meant a striving to convert the nascent working-class movement into an appendage of the liberals.

Naturally, under such circumstances the rupture was necessary. But the "peculiar" feature of Russia manifested itself in the fact that this rupture simply meant the elimination of the Social-Democrats from the most accessible and widespread "legal" literature. The "ex-Marxists", who took up the flag of "criticism" and who obtained almost a monopoly to "demolish Marxism, entrenched themselves in this literature. Catchwords like "Against orthodoxy" and "Long live freedom of criticism" (now repeated by ''Rabocheye Dyelo'') forthwith became the vogue, and the fact that neither the censor nor the gendarmes could resist this vogue is apparent from the publication of ''three'' Russian editions of the work of the celebrated Bernstein (celebrated in the Herostratean sense) and from the fact that the works of Bernstein, Mr. Prokopovich, and others were recommended by Zubatov (''Iskra'', No. 10). A task now devolved upon the Social Democrats that was difficult in itself and was made incredibly more difficult by purely external obstacles – the task of combating the new trend. This trend did not confine itself to the sphere of literature. The turn towards "criticism" was accompanied by an infatuation for Economism among Social-Democratic practical workers.

The manner in which the connection between, and interdependence of, legal criticism and illegal Economism arose and grew is in itself an interesting subject, one that could serve as the theme of a special article. We need only note here that this connection undoubtedly existed. The notoriety deservedly acquired by the ''Credo'' was due precisely to the frankness with which it formulated this connection and blurted out the fundamental political tendency of Economism – let the workers carry on the economic struggle (it would be more correct to say the trade unionist struggle, because the latter also embraces specifically working class politics) and let the Marxist intelligentsia merge with the liberals for the political "struggle." Thus, trade-unionist work "among the people" meant fulfilling the first part of this task, while legal criticism meant fulfilling the second. This statement was such an excellent weapon against Economism that, had there been no ''Credo'', it would have been worth inventing one.

The Credo was not invented, but it was published without the consent and perhaps even against the will of its authors. At all events, the present writer, who took part in dragging this new "programme" into the light of day, has heard complaints and reproaches to the effect that copies of the resume of the speakers’ views were distributed, dubbed the ''Credo'', and even published in the press together with the protest! We refer to this episode because it reveals a very peculiar feature of our Economism – fear of publicity. This is a feature of Economism generally, and not of the authors of the ''Credo'' alone. It was revealed by that most outspoken and honest advocate of Economism, ''Rabochaya Mysl'', and by ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' (which was indignant over the publication of "Economist" documents in the Vademecum), as well as by the Kiev Committee, which two years ago refused to permit the publication of its ''profession de foi'', together with a repudiation of it, and by many other individual representatives of Economism.

This fear of criticism displayed by the advocates of freedom of criticism cannot be attributed solely to craftiness (although, on occasion, no doubt craftiness is brought into play: it would be improvident to expose the young and as yet frail shoots of the new trend. to attacks by opponents). No, the majority of the Economists look with sincere resentment (as by the very nature of Economism they must) upon all theoretical controversies, factional disagreements, broad political questions, plans for organising revolutionaries, etc. "Leave all that to the people abroad!" said a fairly consistent Economist to me one day, thereby expressing a very widespread (and again purely trade-unionist) view; our concern is the working-class movement, the workers, organisations here, in our localities; all the rest is merely the invention of doctrinaires, "the overrating of ideology", as the authors of the letter, published in ''Iskra'', No. 12, expressed it, in unison with ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', No. 10.

The question now arises: such being the peculiar features of Russian "criticism" and Russian Bernsteinism, what should have been the task of those who sought to oppose opportunism in deeds and not merely in words? First, they should have made efforts to resume the theoretical work that had barely begun in the period of legal Marxism and that fell anew on the shoulders of the comrades working underground. Without such work the successful growth of the movement was impossible. Secondly, they should have actively combated the legal "criticism" that was perverting people’s minds on a considerable scale. Thirdly, they should have actively opposed confusion and vacillation in the practical movement, exposing and repudiating every conscious or unconscious attempt to degrade our programme and our tactics.

That ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' did none of these things is well known; we shall have occasion below to deal with this well-known fact in detail and from various aspects. At the moment, however, we desire merely to show the glaring contradiction that exists between the demand for "freedom of criticism" and the specific features of our native criticism and Russian Economism. It suffices but to glance at the text of the resolution in which the Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad endorsed the point of view of ''Rabocheye Dyelo''.<blockquote>"In the interests of the further ideological development of Social-Democracy, we recognise the freedom of criticism of Social-Democratic theory in Party literature to be absolutely necessary insofar as the criticism does not run counter to the class and revolutionary character of this theory" (''Two Conferences'', p. 10).</blockquote>And the motivation? The resolution "in its first part coincides with the resolution of the Lubeck Party Congress on Bernstein". . . . In the simplicity of their souls the "Unionists" failed to observe what a ''testimonium paupertatis'' (attestation of poverty) they betray with this copying. . .. "But ... in its second part, it restricts freedom of criticism much more than did the Lubeck Party Congress."

The resolution of the Union Abroad, then, is directed against the Russian Bernsteinians? If it is not, then the reference to Lubeck would be utterly absurd. But it is not true to say that it "restricts freedom of criticism". In adopting their Hanover resolution, the Germans, point by point, rejected ''precisely'' the amendments proposed by Bernstein, while in their Lubeck resolution they cautioned ''Bernstein personally'', by naming him. Our "free" imitators, however, make ''not a single allusion'' to a ''single'' manifestation of specifically Russian "criticism" and Russian Economism. In view of this omission, the bare reference to the class and revolutionary character of the theory leaves far wider scope for misinterpretation, particularly when the Union Abroad refuses to identify "so-called Economism" with opportunism (''Two Conferences'', p. 8, Paragraph 1). But all this, in passing. The main thing to note is that the positions of the opportunists in relation to the revolutionary Social-Democrats in Russia are diametrically opposed to those in Germany. In that country, as we know, the revolutionary Social-Democrats are in favour of preserving that which exists – the old programme and the tactics, which are universally known and have been elucidated in all their details by many decades of experience. But the "Critics" desire to introduce changes, and since these Critics represent an insignificant minority, and since they are very timid in their revisionist efforts, one can understand the motives of the majority in confining themselves to the dry rejection of "innovations". In Russia, however, it is the Critics and the Economists who are in favour of preserving that which exists: the "Critics" want us to go on regarding them as Marxists and to guarantee them the "freedom of criticism" they enjoyed to the full (for, in fact, they never recognised any kind of ''party'' ties <ref group="Lenin">The fact alone of the absence of public party ties and party traditions, representing as it does a cardinal difference between Russia and Germany, should have warned all sensible socialists against blind imitation. But here is an instance of the lengths to which “freedom of criticism” goes in Russia. Mr. Bulgakov, the Russian Critic, utters the following reprimand to the Austrian Critic, Hertz: “Notwithstanding the independence of his conclusions, Hertz on this point on the question of co-operative societies) apparently remains excessively bound by the opinions of his party, and although he disagrees with it in details, he dare not reject the common principle” (''Capitalism and Agriculture'', Vol. II, p. 287). The subject of a politically enslaved state, in which nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand of the population are corrupted to the marrow by political subservience and completely lack the conception of party honour and party ties, superciliously reproves a citizen of a constitutional state for being excessively “bound by the opinions of his party”! Our illegal organisations have nothing else to do, of course, but draw up resolutions on freedom of criticism....</ref>, and, moreover, we never had a generally recognised party body that could "restrict" freedom of criticism, if only by counsel); the Economists want the revolutionaries to recognise the sovereign character of the present movement" (''Rabocheye Dyelo'', No. 10, p. 25), i.e., to recognise the "legitimacy" of that which exists; they want the "ideologists" not to try to "divert" the movement from the path that "is determined by the interaction of material. elements and material environment" ("Letter" in ''Iskra'', No. 12); they want to have that struggle recognised as desirable "which it is possible for the workers to wage under the present conditions", and as the only possible struggle, that "which they are actually waging at the present time" ("''Separate Supplement''" to ''Rabochaya Mysl'', p. 14). We revolutionary Social-Democrats, on the contrary, are dissatisfied with this worship of spontaneity, i.e., of that which exists "at the present moment". We demand that the tactics that have prevailed in recent years he changed; we declare that "before we can unite, and in order that we may unite, we must first of all draw firm and definite lines of demarcation". In a word, the Germans stand for that which exists and reject changes; we demand a change of that which exists, and reject subservience thereto and reconciliation to it.

This "slight" difference our "free" copyists of German resolutions failed to notice.

===Engels on the importance of the theoretical struggle===
"Dogmatism, doctrinairism", "ossification of the party – the inevitable retribution that follows the violent strait-lacing of thought" – these are the enemies against which the knightly champions of "freedom of criticism" in ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' rise up in arms. We are very glad that this question has been placed on the order of the day and we would only propose to add to it one other:

And who are the judges?

We have before us two publishers’ announcements. One, "The Programme of the Periodical Organ of the Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad – ''Rabocheye Dyelo''" (reprint from No. 1 of ''Rabocheye Dyelo''), and the other, the "Announcement of the Resumption of the Publications of the Emancipation of Labour Group". Both are dated 1899, when the "crisis of Marxism" had long been under discussion. And what do we find? We would seek in vain in the first announcement for any reference to this phenomenon, or a definite statement of the position the new organ intends to adopt on this question. Not a word is said about theoretical work and the urgent tasks that now confront it, either in this programme or in the supplements to it that were adopted by the Third Congress of the Union Abroad in 1901 (''Two Conferences'', pp. 15-18). During this entire time the Editorial Board of ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' ignored theoretical questions, in spite of the fact that these were questions that disturbed the minds of all Social-Democrats the world over.

The other announcement, on the contrary, points first of all to the declining interest in theory in recent years, imperatively demands "vigilant attention to the theoretical aspect of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat", and calls for "ruthless criticism of the Bernsteinian and other anti-revolutionary tendencies" in our movement. The issues of ''Zarya'' to date show how this programme has been carried out.

Thus, we see that high-sounding phrases against the ossification of thought, etc., conceal unconcern and helplessness with regard to the development of theoretical thought. The case of the Russian Social-Democrats manifestly illustrates the general European phenomenon (long ago noted also by the German Marxists) that the much vaunted freedom of criticism does not imply substitution of one theory for another, but freedom from all integral and pondered theory; it implies eclecticism and lack of principle. Those who have the slightest acquaintance with the actual state of our movement cannot but see that the wide spread of Marxism was accompanied by a certain lowering of the theoretical level. Quite a number of people with very little, and even a total lack of theoretical training joined the movement because of its practical significance and its practical successes. We can judge from that how tactless ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' is when, with an air of triumph, it quotes Marx’s statement: "Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes." To repeat these words in a period of theoretical disorder is like wishing mourners at a funeral many happy returns of the day. Moreover, these words of Marx are taken from his letter on the Gotha Programme <ref group="note">''The Gotha Programme'' — the programme adopted by the German Social-Democratic Party at the Gotha Congress in 1875 when the Eisenachers and Lassalleans united. The programme suffered from eclecticism and opportunism, since the Eisenachers made concessions to the Lassalleans on the most important points and accepted their formulations. Marx and Engels subjected the Gotha Programme to scathing criticism and characterised it as a retrograde step as compared with the Eisenach Programme of 1869</ref>, in which he ''sharply condemns'' eclecticism in the formulation of principles. If you must unite, Marx wrote to the party leaders, then enter into agreements to satisfy the practical aims of the movement, but do not allow any bargaining over principles, do not make theoretical "concessions". This was Marx’s idea, and yet there are people among us who seek-in his name to belittle the significance of theory!

Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. This idea cannot be insisted upon too strongly at a time when the fashionable preaching of opportunism goes hand in hand with an infatuation for the narrowest forms of practical activity. Yet, for Russian Social-Democrats the importance of theory is enhanced by three other circumstances, which are often forgotten: first, by the fact that our Party is only in process of formation, its features are only just becoming defined, and it has as yet far from settled accounts with the other trends of revolutionary thought that threaten to divert the movement from the correct path. On the contrary, precisely the very recent past was marked by a revival of non-Social-Democratic revolutionary trends (an eventuation regarding which Axelrod long ago warned the Economists). Under these circumstances, what at first sight appears to be an "unimportant" error may lead to most deplorable consequences, and only short-sighted people can consider factional disputes and a strict differentiation between shades of opinion inopportune or superfluous. The fate of Russian Social-Democracy for very many years to come may depend on the strengthening of one or the other "shade".

Secondly, the Social-Democratic movement is in its very essence an international movement. This means, not only that we must combat national chauvinism, but that an incipient movement in a young country can be successful only if it makes use of the experiences of other countries. In order to make use of these experiences it is not enough merely to be acquainted with them, or simply to copy out the latest resolutions. What is required is the ability to treat these experiences critically and to test them independently. He who realises how enormously the modern working-class movement has grown and branched out will understand what a reserve of theoretical forces and political (as well as revolutionary) experience is required to carry out this task.

Thirdly, the national tasks of Russian Social-Democracy are such as have never confronted any other socialist party in the world. We shall have occasion further on to deal with the political and organisational duties which the task of emancipating the whole people from the yoke of autocracy imposes upon us. At this point, we wish to state only that the ''role of vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory.'' To have a concrete understanding of what this means, let the reader recall such predecessors of Russian Social Democracy as Herzen, Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, and the brilliant galaxy of revolutionaries of the seventies; let him ponder over the world significance which Russian literature is now acquiring; let him. . . but be that enough!

Let us quote what Engels said in 1874 concerning the significance of theory in the Social-Democratic movement. Engels recognizes, ''not two'' forms of the great struggle of Social Democracy (political and economic), as is the fashion among us, ''but three, placing the theoretical struggle on a par with the first two''. His recommendations to the German working-class movement, which had become strong, practically and politically, are so instructive from the standpoint of present-day problems and controversies, that we hope the reader will not be vexed with us for quoting a long passage from his prefatory note to ''Der deutsche Bauernkrieg'', which has long become a great bibliographical rarity:<blockquote>"The German workers have two important advantages over those of the rest of Europe. First, they belong to the most theoretical people of Europe; and they have retained that sense of theory which the so-called ’educated’ classes of Germany have almost completely lost. Without German philosophy, which preceded it, particularly that of Hegel, German scientific socialism – the only scientific socialism that has ever existed – would never have come into being. Without a sense of theory among the workers, this scientific socialism would never have entered their flesh and blood as much as is the case. What an immeasurable advantage this is may be seen, on the one hand, from the indifference towards all theory, which is one of the main reasons why the English working-class movement crawls along so slowly in spite of the splendid organisation of the individual unions; on the other hand, from the mischief and confusion wrought by Proudhonism, in its original form, among the French and Belgians, and, in the form further caricatured by Bakunin, among the Spaniards and Italians.

"The second advantage is that, chronologically speaking, the Germans were about the last to come into the workers’ movement. Just as German theoretical socialism will never forget that it rests on the shoulders of Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen – three men who, in spite of all their fantastic notions and all their utopianism, have their place among the most eminent thinkers of all times, and whose genius anticipated innumerable things, the correctness of which is now being scientifically proved by us – so the practical workers’ movement in Germany ought never to forget that it has developed on the shoulders of the English and French movements, that it was able simply to utilise their dearly bought experience, and could now avoid their mistakes, which in their time were mostly unavoidable. Without the precedent of the English trade unions and French workers’ political struggles, without the gigantic impulse given especially by the Paris Commune, where would we be now?

"It must be said to the credit of the German workers that they have exploited the advantages of their situation with rare understanding. For the first time since a workers’ movement has existed, the struggle is being conducted pursuant to its three sides – the. theoretical, the political, and the practical-economic (resistance to the capitalists) – in harmony and in its interconnections, and in a systematic way. It is precisely in this, as it were, concentric attack, that the strength and invincibility of the German movement lies.

"Due to this advantageous situation, on the one hand, and to the insular peculiarities of the English and the forcible suppression of the French movement, on the other, the German workers have for the moment been placed in the vanguard of the proletarian struggle. How long events will allow them to occupy this post of honour cannot be foretold. But let us hope that as long as they occupy it, they will fill it fittingly. This demands redoubled efforts in every field of struggle and agitation. In particular, it will be the duty of the leaders to gain an ever clearer insight into all theoretical questions, to free themselves more and more from the influence of traditional phrases inherited from the old world outlook, and constantly to keep in mind that socialism, since it has become a science, demands that it be pursued as a science, i.e., that it be studied. The task will be to spread with increased zeal among the masses of the workers the ever more clarified understanding thus acquired, to knit together ever more firmly the organisation both of the party and of the trade unions (...)

"If the German workers progress in this way, they will not. be marching exactly at the head of the movement – it is not at all in the interest of this movement that the workers of any particular country should march at its head – but they will occupy an honourable place in the battle line; and they will stand armed for battle when either unexpectedly grave trials or momentous events demand of them increased courage, increased determination and energy."</blockquote>Engels’s words proved prophetic. Within a few years the German workers were subjected to unexpectedly grave trials in the form of the Exceptional Law Against the Socialists. And they met those trials armed for battle and succeeded in emerging from them victorious.

The Russian proletariat will have to undergo trials immeasurably graver; it will have to fight a monster compared with which an antisocialist law in a constitutional country seems but a dwarf. History has now confronted us with an immediate task which is the ''most revolutionary'' of all the ''immediate'' tasks confronting the proletariat of any country. The fulfilment of this task, the destruction of the most powerful bulwark, not only of European, but (it may now be said) of Asiatic reaction, would make the Russian proletariat the vanguard of the international revolutionary proletariat. And we have the right to count upon acquiring this honourable title, already earned by our predecessors, the revolutionaries of the seventies, if we succeed in inspiring our movement, which is a thousand times broader and deeper, with the same devoted determination and vigour.

==The spontaneity of the masses and the consciousness of the social-democrats ==
We have said that our movement, much more extensive and deep than the movement of the seventies, must be inspired with the same devoted determination and energy that inspired the movement at that time. Indeed, no one, we think, has until now doubted that the strength of the present-day movement lies in the awakening of the masses (principally, the industrial proletariat) and that its weakness lies in the lack of consciousness and initiative among the revolutionary leaders.

However, of late a staggering discovery has been made, which threatens to disestablish all hitherto prevailing views on this question. This discovery was made by ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', which in its polemic with ''Iskra'' and ''Zarya'' did not confine itself to making objections on separate points, but tried to ascribe "general disagreements" to a more profound cause — to the "different appraisals of the ''relative'' importance of the spontaneous and consciously ‘methodical’ element". ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' formulated its indictment as a "''belittling of the significance of the objective or the spontaneous element of development''". To this we say: Had the polemics with ''Iskra'' and ''Zarya'' resulted in nothing more than causing ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' to hit upon these "general disagreements", that alone would give us considerable satisfaction, so significant is this thesis and so clear is the light it sheds on the quintessence of the present-day theoretical and political differences that exist among Russian Social-Democrats.

For this reason the question of the relation between consciousness and spontaneity is of such enormous general interest, and for this reason the question must be dealt with in great detail.

=== The beginning of the spontaneous upsurge===
In the previous chapter we pointed out how ''universally'' absorbed the educated youth of Russia was in the theories of Marxism in the middle of the nineties. In the same period the strikes that followed the famous St. Petersburg industrial war of 1896 assumed a similar general character. Their spread over the whole of Russia clearly showed the depth of the newly awakening popular movement, and if we are to speak of the "spontaneous element" then, of course, it is this strike movement which, first and foremost, must be regarded as spontaneous. But there is spontaneity and spontaneity. Strikes occurred in Russia in the seventies and sixties (and even in the first half of the nineteenth century), and they were accompanied by the "spontaneous" destruction of machinery, etc. Compared with these "revolts", the strikes of the nineties might even be described as "conscious", to such an extent do they mark the progress which the working-class movement made in that period. This shows that the "spontaneous element", in essence, represents nothing more nor less than. consciousness in an ''embryonic form''. Even the primitive revolts expressed the awakening of consciousness to a certain extent. The workers were losing their age-long faith in the permanence of the system which oppressed them and began... I shall not say to understand, but to sense the necessity for collective resistance, definitely abandoning their slavish submission to the authorities. But this was, nevertheless, more in the nature of outbursts of desperation and vengeance than of ''struggle''. The strikes of the nineties revealed far greater flashes of consciousness; definite demands were advanced, the strike was carefully timed, known cases and instances in other places were discussed, etc. The revolts were simply the resistance of the oppressed, whereas the systematic strikes represented the class struggle in embryo, but only in embryo. Taken by themselves, these strikes were simply trade union struggles, not yet Social Democratic struggles. They marked the awakening antagonisms between workers and employers; but the workers, were not, and could not be, conscious of the irreconcilable antagonism of their interests to the whole of the modern political and social system, i.e., theirs was not yet Social-Democratic consciousness. In this sense, the strikes of the nineties, despite the enormous progress they represented as compared with the "revolts", remained a purely spontaneous movement.

We have said that ''there could not have been'' Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc. <ref group="Lenin">Trade-unionism does not exclude “politics” altogether, as some imagine. Trade unions have always conducted some political (but not Social-Democratic) agitation and struggle. We shall deal with the difference between trade union politics and Social-Democratic politics in the next chapter.</ref> The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia. In the very same way, in Russia, the theoretical doctrine of Social-Democracy arose altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of the working-class movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of thought among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia. In the period under discussion, the middle nineties, this doctrine not only represented the completely formulated programme of the Emancipation of Labour group, but had already won over to its side the majority of the revolutionary youth in Russia.

Hence, we had both the spontaneous awakening of the working masses, their awakening to conscious life and conscious struggle, and a revolutionary youth, armed with Social-Democratic theory and straining towards the workers. In this connection it is particularly important to state the oft-forgotten (and comparatively little-known) fact that, although the ''early'' Social-Democrats of that period ''zealously carried on economic agitation'' (being guided in this activity by the truly useful indications contained in the pamphlet ''On Agitation'', <ref group="note">The pamphlet ''On Agitation'' was written by A. Kremer (later an organiser of the Bund) and edited by Y. O. Tsederbaum (Martov) in Vilno in 1894; it was at first circulated in handwritten and hectographed copies, but at the end of 1897 it was printed in Geneva and supplied with a preface and a concluding piece by P. B. Axelrod. The pamphlet summarised the experiences gained in Social-Democratic work in Vilno and exerted a great influence on Russian Social-Democrats, since it called on them to reject narrow study-circle propaganda and to go over to mass agitation among the workers on issues of their everyday needs and demands. It exaggerated the role of the purely economic struggle, however, to the detriment of political agitation on issues of general democratic demands, and was the embryo of the future “Economism”. P. B. Axelrod not ed the one-sidedness of the “Vilno Economism” in his concluding piece to the Geneva edition; G. V. Plekhanov made a critical analysis of the pamphlet ''On Agitation'' in his ''Once More on Socialism and the Political Struggle''.</ref> then still in manuscript), they did not regard this as their sole task. On the contrary, ''from the very beginning'' they set for Russian Social-Democracy the most far-reaching historical tasks, in general, and the task of overthrowing the autocracy, in particular. Thus, towards the end of 1895, the St. Petersburg group of Social-Democrats, which founded the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, prepared the first issue of a newspaper called ''Rabocheye Dyelo''. This issue was ready to go to press when it was seized by the gendarmes, on the night of December 8, 1895, in a raid on the house of one of the members of the group, Anatoly Alexeyevich Vaneyey, <ref group="Lenin">A. A. Vaneyev died in Eastern Siberia in 1899 from consumption, which he contracted during solitary confinement in prison prior to his banishment. That is why we considered it possible to publish the above information, the authenticity of which we guarantee, for it comes from persons who were closely and directly acquainted with A. A. Vaneyev.</ref> so that the first edition of ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' was not destined to see the light of day. The leading article in this issue (which perhaps thirty years hence some ''Russkaya Starina'' <ref group="note">''Russkaya Starina'' (''The Russian Antiquary'') — a monthly magazine dealing with historical problems published in St. Petersburg from 1870 to 1918.</ref> will unearth in the archives of the Department of Police) outlined the historical tasks of the working class in Russia and placed the achievement of political liberty at their head. The issue also contained an article entitled "What Are Our Ministers Thinking About?" which dealt with the crushing of the elementary education committees by the police. In addition, there was some correspondence from St. Petersburg, and from other parts of Russia (e.g., a letter on the massacre of the workers in Yaroslavl Gubernia). This, "first effort", if we are not mistaken, of the Russian Social-Democrats of the nineties was not a purely local, or less still, "Economic", newspaper, but one that aimed to unite the strike movement with the revolutionary movement against the autocracy, and to win over to the side of Social-Democracy all who were oppressed by the policy of reactionary obscurantism. No one in the slightest degree acquainted with the state of the movement at that period could doubt that such a paper would have met with warm response among the workers of the capital and the revolutionary intelligentsia and would have had a wide circulation. The failure of the enterprise merely showed that the Social-Democrats of that period were unable to meet the immediate requirements of the time owing to their lack of revolutionary experience and practical training. This must be said, too, with regard to the ''S. Peterburgsky Rabochy Listok'' <ref group="note">''S. Peterburgsky Rabochy Listok'' (''St.Petersburg Workers’ Paper'') — an illegal newspaper, organ of the St. Petersburg League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. Two issues appeared: No. 1 in February 1897 (dated January and mimeographed in Russia in an edition of 300—400 copies) and No. 2 in September 1897 in Geneva.</ref> and particularly with regard to Rabochaya Gazeta and the ''Manifesto'' of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, founded in the spring of 1898. Of course, we would not dream of blaming the Social Democrats of that time for this unpreparedness. But in order to profit from the experience of that movement, and to draw practical lessons from it, we must thoroughly understand the causes and significance of this or that shortcoming. It is therefore highly important to establish the fact that a part (perhaps even a majority) of the Social-Democrats, active in the period of 1895-98, justly considered it possible even then, at the very beginning of the "spontaneous" movement, to come forward with a most extensive programme and a militant tactical line. <ref group="Lenin">''“In adopting a hostile attitude towards the activities of the Social-Democrats of the late nineties, Iskra ignores the absence at that time of conditions for any work other than the struggle for petty demands,”'' declare the Economists in their “Letter to Russian Social-Democratic Organs” (''Iskra'' No. 12). The facts given above show that the assertion about “absence of conditions” ''is diametrically opposed to the truth.'' Not only at the end, but even in the mid-nineties, all the conditions existed for other work, besides the struggle for petty demands — all the conditions except adequate training of leaders. Instead of frankly admitting that we, the ideologists, the leaders, lacked sufficient training — the Economists seek to shift the blame entirely upon the “absence of conditions”, upon the effect of material environment that determines the road from which no ideologist will be able to divert the movement. What is this but slavish cringing before spontaneity, what but the infatuation of the “ideologists” with their own shortcomings?</ref> Lack of training of the majority of the revolutionaries, an entirely natural phenomenon, could not have roused any particular fears. Once the tasks were correctly defined, once the energy existed for repeated attempts to fulfil them, temporary failures represented only part misfortune. Revolutionary experience and organisational skill are things that can be acquired, provided the desire is there to acquire them, provided the shortcomings are recognised, which in revolutionary activity is more than half-way towards their removal.

But what was only part misfortune became full misfortune when this consciousness began to grow dim (it was very much alive among the members of the groups mentioned), when there appeared people—and even Social -Democratic organs—that were prepared to regard shortcomings as virtues, that even tried to invent a ''theoretical'' basis for their ''slavish cringing before spontaneity''. It is time to draw conclusions from this trend, the content of which is incorrectly and too narrowly characterised as Economism.

===Bowing to spontaneity. ''Rabochaya Mysl''===
Before dealing with the literary manifestation of this subservience to spontaneity, we should like to note the following characteristic fact (communicated to us from the above-mentioned source), which throws light on the conditions in which the two future conflicting trends in Russian Social-Democracy arose and grew among the comrades working in St. Petersburg. In the beginning of 1897, just prior to their banishment, A. A. Vaneyev and several of his comrades attended a private meeting <ref group="note">''A private meeting'' referred to here was held in St. Petersburg between February 14 and 17 (February 26 and March 1), 1897. It was attended by V. I. Lenin, A. A. Vaneyev, G. M. Krzhizhanovsky, and other members of the St. Petersburg League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, that is, by the “veterans” who had been released from prison for three days before being sent into exile to Siberia, as well as by the “young” leaders of the League of Struggle who had taken over the leadership of the League after Lenin’s arrest in December 1895.</ref> at which "old" and "young" members of the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class gathered. The conversation centred chiefly about the question of organisation, particularly about the "rules for the workers’ mutual benefit fund", which, in their final form, were published in ''"Listok" Rabotnika'', <ref group="note">“''Listok''” ''Rabotnika'' (''The Workingman’s Paper'') — published in Geneva by the Union of Russian Social-Democrats Abroad from 1896 to 1899; altogether there appeared 10 issues. Issues 1—8 were edited by the Emancipation of Labour group. But after the majority of the Union Abroad went over to “Economism”, the Emancipation of Labour group refused to continue editing the paper. Nos. 9 and 10 were issued by a new editorial board set up by the Union of Russian Social-Democrats Abroad.</ref> No. 9-10, p. 46. Sharp differences immediately showed themselves between the "old" members ("Decembrists", as the St. Petersburg Social Democrats jestingly called them) and several the "young" members (who subsequently took an active part in the work of ''Rabochaya Mysl''), with a heated discussion ensuing. The "young" members defended the main principles of the rules in the form in which they were published. The "old" members contended that the prime necessity was not this, but the consolidation of the League of Struggle into an organisation of revolutionaries to which all the various workers’ mutual benefit funds, students’ propaganda circles, etc., should be subordinated. It goes without saying that the disputing sides far from realised at the time that these disagreements were the beginning of a cleavage; on the contrary, they regarded them as something isolated and casual. But this fact shows that in Russia, too, Economism did not arise and spread without a struggle against the "old" Social-Democrats (which the Economists of today are apt to forget). And if, in the main, this struggle has not left "documentary" traces behind it, it is ''solely'' because the membership of the circles then functioning underwent such constant change that no continuity was established and, consequently, differences in point of view were not recorded in any documents.

The founding of ''Rabochaya Mysl'' brought Economism to the light of day, but not at one stroke. We must picture to ourselves concretely the conditions for activity and the short-lived character of the majority of the Russian study circles (a thing that is possible only for those who have themselves experienced it) in order to understand how much there was of the fortuitous in the successes and failures of the new trend in various towns, and the length of time during which neither the advocates nor the opponents of the "new" could make up their minds — and literally had no opportunity of so doing — as to whether this really expressed a distinct trend or merely the lack of training of certain individuals. For example, the first mimeographed copies of ''Rabochaya Mysl'' never reached the great majority of Social-Democrats, and if we are able to refer to the leading article in the first number, it is only because it was reproduced in an article by V. I. (''"Listok" Rabotnika'', No. 9-10, p. 47, et seq.), who, of course, did not fail to extol with more zeal than reason the new paper, which was so different from the papers and projects for papers mentioned above. <ref group="Lenin">It should be stated in passing that the praise of ''Rabochaya Mysl'' in November 1898, when Economism had become fully defined, especially abroad, emanated from the selfsame V. I, who very soon after became one of the editors of ''Rabocheye Dyelo''. And yet ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' denied that there were two trends in Russian Social-Democracy, and continues to deny It to this day!

</ref> It is well worth dwelling on this leading article because it brings out in bold relief ''the entire spirit of Rabochaya Mysl'' and Economism generally.

After stating that the arm of the "blue-coats" <ref group="note">The tsarist gendarmes wore blue uniforms</ref> could never halt the progress of the working-class movement, the leading article goes on to say: ". . . The virility of the working-class movement is due to the fact that the workers themselves are at last taking their fate into their own hands, and out of the hands of the leaders"; this fundamental thesis is then developed in greater detail. Actually, the leaders (i.e., the Social-Democrats, the organisers of the League of Struggle) were, one might say, torn out of the hands of the workers <ref group="Lenin">That this simile is a correct one is shown by the following characteristic fact. When, after the arrest of the “Decembrists”, the news spread among the workers of the Schlüsselburg Highway that the discovery and arrest were facilitated by an ''agent provocateur'', N. N. Mikhailov, a dentist, who had been in contact with a group associated with the “Decembrists”, the workers were so enraged that they decided to kill him.

</ref> by the police; yet it is made to appear that the workers were fighting against the leaders and liberated themselves from their yoke! Instead of sounding the call to go forward towards the consolidation of the revolutionary organisation and the expansion of political activity, the call was issued for a ''retreat'' to the purely trade union struggle. It was announced that "the economic basis of the movement is eclipsed by the effort never to forget the political ideal", and that the watchword for the working-class movement was "Struggle for economic conditions" (!) or, better still, "The workers for the workers". It was declared that strike funds "are more valuable to the movement than a hundred other Organisations" (compare this statement made in October 1897, with the polemic between the "Decembrists" and the young members in the beginning of 1897), etc. Catchwords like "We must concentrate, not on the ’cream’ of the workers, but on the ’average’, mass worker"; "Politics always obediently follows economics", {{Refn|These quotations are taken from the same leading article in the first number of Rabochaya Mysl. One can judge from this the degree of theoretical training possessed by these “V. V.s of Russian Social-Democracy”<ref group="note" name="VVs" />, who kept repeating the crude vulgarisation of “economic materialism” at a time when the Marxists were carrying on a literary war against the real Mr. V. V., who had long ago been dubbed “a past master of reactionary deeds” for holding similar views on the relations between politics and economics!|group=Lenin}} etc., etc., became the fashion, exercising an irresistible influence upon the masses of the youth who were attracted to the movement but who, in the majority of cases, were acquainted only with such fragments of Marxism as were expounded in legally appearing publications.

Political consciousness was completely overwhelmed by spontaneity — the spontaneity of the "Social-Democrats" who repeated Mr. V. V.’s "ideas", the spontaneity of those workers who were carried away by the arguments that a kopek added to a ruble was worth more than any socialism or politics, and that they must "fight, knowing that they are fighting, not for the sake of some future generation, but for themselves and their children" (leader in ''Rabochaya Mysl'', No. 1). Phrases like these have always been a favourite weapon of the West-European bourgeois, who, in their hatred for socialism, strove (like the German "''Sozial-Politiker''" Hirsch) to transplant English trade-unionism to their native soil and to preach to the workers that by engaging in the purely trade union struggle <ref group="Lenin">The Germans even have a special expression, ''Nur-Gewerkschaftler'', which means an advocate of the “pure trade union” struggle.</ref> they would be fighting for themselves and for their children, and not for some future generations with some future socialism. And now the "V. V.s of Russian Social-Democracy" have set about repeating these bourgeois phrases. It is important at this point to note three circumstances that will be useful to our further analysis of ''contemporary'' differences. <ref group="Lenin">We emphasise the word ''contemporary'' for the benefit of those who may pharisaically shrug their shoulders and say: It is easy enough to attack ''Rabochaya Mysl'' now, but is not all this ancient history? ''Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur'' [change the name and the tale is about you] is our answer to such contemporary Pharisees, whose complete subjection to the ideas of Rabochaya Mysl will be ''proved'' further on.</ref>

Secondly, in the very first literary expression of Economism we observe the exceedingly curious phenomenon — highly characteristic for an understanding of all the differences prevailing among presentday Social Democrats — that the adherents of the "labour movement pure and simple", worshippers of the closest "organic" contacts (''Rabocheye Dyelo''’s term) with the proletarian struggle, opponents of any non-worker intelligentsia (even a socialist intelligentsia), are compelled, in order to defend their positions, to resort to the arguments of the ''bourgeois'' "pure trade-unionists". This shows that from the very outset ''Rabochaya Mysl'' began — unconsciously — to implement the programme of the ''Credo''. This shows (something ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' cannot grasp) that ''all'' worship of the spontaneity of the working class movement, all belittling of the role of "the conscious element", of the role of Social-Democracy, ''means, quite independently of whether he who belittles that role desires it or not, a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the workers.'' All those who talk about "overrating the importance of ideology", about exaggerating the role of the conscious element, etc., imagine that the labour movement pure and simple can elaborate, and will elaborate, an independent ideology for itself, if only the workers "wrest their fate from the hands of the leaders". But this is a profound mistake. To supplement what has been said above, we shall quote the following profoundly true and important words of Karl. Kautsky on the new draft programme of the Austrian Social-Democratic Party:<blockquote>"Many of our revisionist critics believe that Marx asserted that economic development and the class struggle create, not only the conditions for socialist production, but also, and directly, the ''consciousness'' [K. K.’s italics] of its necessity. And these critics assert that England, the country most highly developed capitalistically, is more remote than any other from this consciousness Judging by the draft, one might assume that this allegedly orthodox Marxist view, which is thus refuted, was shared by the committee that drafted the Austrian programme. In the draft programme it is stated: ‘The more capitalist development increases the numbers of the proletariat, the more the proletariat is compelled and becomes fit to fight against capitalism. The proletariat becomes conscious of the possibility and of the necessity for socialism.’ In this connection socialist consciousness appears to be a necessary and direct result of the proletarian class struggle. But this is absolutely untrue. Of course, socialism, as a doctrine, has its roots in modern economic relationships just as the class struggle of the proletariat has, and, like the latter, emerges from the struggle against the capitalist-created poverty and misery of the masses. But socialism and the class struggle arise side by side and not one out of the other; each arises under different conditions. Modern socialist consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge. Indeed, modern economic science is as much a condition for socialist production as, say, modern technology, and the proletariat can create neither the one nor the other, no matter how much it may desire to do so; both arise out of the modern social process. The vehicle of science is not the proletariat, but the ''bourgeois intelligentsia'' [K. K.’s italics]: it was in the minds of individual members of this stratum that modern socialism originated, and it was they who communicated it to the more intellectually developed proletarians who, in their turn, introduce it into the proletarian class struggle where conditions allow that to be done. Thus, socialist consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without [''von Aussen Hineingetragenes''] and not something that arose within it spontaneously [''urwüchsig'']. Accordingly, the old Hainfeld programme quite rightly stated that the task of Social-Democracy is to imbue the proletariat (literally: saturate the proletariat) with the ''consciousness'' of its position and the consciousness of its task. There would be no need for this if consciousness arose of itself from the class struggle. The new draft copied this proposition from the old programme, and attached it to the proposition mentioned above. But this completely broke the line of thought..."</blockquote>Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement <ref group="Lenin">This does not mean, of course, that the workers have no part in creating such an ideology. They take part, however, not as workers, but as socialist theoreticians, as Proudhons and Weitlings; in other words, they take part only when they are able, and to the extent that they are able, more or less, to acquire the knowledge of their age and develop that knowledge. But in order that working men ''may succeed in this more often'', every effort must be made to raise the level of the consciousness of the workers in general; it is necessary that the workers do not confine themselves to the artificially restricted limits of “''literature for workers''” but that they learn to an increasing degree to master ''general literature''. It would be even truer to say “are not confined”, instead of “do not confine themselves”, because the workers themselves wish to read and do read all that is written for the intelligentsia, and only a few (bad) intellectuals believe that it is enough “for workers” to be told a few things about factory conditions and to have repeated to them over and over again what has long been known.

</ref>, the only choice is — either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for mankind has not created a "third" ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or an above-class ideology). Hence, to belittle the socialist ideology ''in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree'' means to strengthen bourgeois ideology. There is much talk of spontaneity. But the ''spontaneous'' development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology, ''to its development along the lines of the Credo programme;'' for the spontaneous working-class movement is trade-unionism, is ''Nur-Gewerkschaftlerei'', and trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie. Hence, our task, the task of Social-Democracy, is ''to combat spontaneity, to divert'' the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy. The sentence employed by the authors of the Economist letter published in ''Iskra'', No. 12, that the efforts of the most inspired ideologists fail to divert the working-class movement from the path that is determined by the interaction of the material elements and the material environment is therefore ''tantamount to renouncing socialism''. If these authors were capable of fearlessly, consistently, and thoroughly considering what they say, as everyone who enters the arena of literary and public activity should be, there would be nothing left for them but to "fold their useless arms over their empty breasts" and surrender the field of action to the Struves and Prokopoviches, who are dragging the working-class movement "along the line of least resistance", i.e., along the line of bourgeois trade-unionism, or to the Zubatovs, who are dragging it along the line of clerical and gendarme "ideology".

Let us recall the example of Germany. What was the historic service Lassalle rendered to the German working-class movement? It was that he ''diverted'' that movement from the path of progressionist trade-unionism and co-operativism towards which it had been spontaneously moving (''with the benign assistance of Schulze-Delitzsch and his like''). To fulfil such a task it was necessary to do something quite different from talking of underrating the spontaneous element, of tactics-as-process, of the interaction between elements and environment, etc. ''A fierce struggle against spontaneity'' was necessary, and only after such a struggle, extending over many years, was it possible, for instance, to convert the working population of Berlin from a bulwark of the progressionist party into one of the finest strongholds of Social-Democracy. This struggle is by no means over even today (as might seem to those who learn the history of the German movement from Prokopovich, and its philosophy from Struve). Even now the German working class is, so to speak, split up among a number of ideologies. A section of the workers is organised in Catholic and monarchist trade unions; another section is organised in the Hirsch-Duncker unions <ref group="note">''The Hirsch-Duncker Unions'' were established in Germany in 1868 by Hirsch and Duncker, two bourgeois liberals. They preached the “harmony of class interests”, drew the workers away from the revolutionary class struggle against the bourgeoisie, and restricted the role of the trade unions to that of mutual benefit societies and educational bodies.</ref>, founded by the bourgeois worshippers of English trade-unionism; the third is organised in Social-Democratic trade unions. The last-named group is immeasurably more numerous than the rest, but the Social-Democratic ideology was able to achieve this superiority, and will be able to maintain it, only in an unswerving struggle against all other ideologies.

But why, the reader will ask, does the spontaneous movement, the movement along the line of least resistance, lead to the domination of bourgeois ideology? For the simple reason that bourgeois ideology is far older in origin than socialist ideology, that it is more fully developed, and that it has at its disposal ''immeasurably'' more means of dissemination. <ref group="Lenin">It is often said that the working class ''spontaneously'' gravitates towards socialism. This is perfectly true in the sense that socialist theory reveals the causes of the misery of the working class more profoundly and more correctly than any other theory, and for that reason the workers are able to assimilate it so easily, ''provided'', however, this theory does not itself yield to spontaneity, ''provided'' it subordinates spontaneity to itself. Usually this is taken for granted, but it is precisely this which ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' forgets or distorts. The working class spontaneously gravitates towards socialism; nevertheless, most widespread (and continuously and diversely revived) bourgeois ideology spontaneously imposes itself upon the working class to a still greater degree.</ref> And the younger the socialist movement in any given country, the more vigorously it must struggle against all attempts to entrench non-socialist ideology, and the more resolutely the workers must be warned against the bad counsellors who shout against "overrating the conscious element", etc. The authors of the Economist letter, in unison with ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', inveigh against the intolerance that is characteristic of the infancy of the movement. To this we reply: Yes, our movement is indeed in its infancy, and in order that it may grow up faster, it must become imbued with intolerance against those who retard its growth by their subservience to spontaneity. Nothing is so ridiculous and harmful as pretending that we are "old hands" who have long ago experienced all the decisive stages of the struggle.

Thirdly, the first issue of Rabochaya Mysl shows that the term "Economism" (which, of course, we do not propose to abandon, since, in one way or another, this designation has already established itself) does not adequately convey the real character of the new trend. ''Rabochaya Mysl'' does not altogether repudiate the political struggle; the rules for a workers’ mutual benefit fund published in its first issue contain a reference to combating the government. ''Rabochaya Mysl'' believes, however, that "politics always obediently follows economics" (''Rabocheye Dyelo'' varies this thesis when it asserts in its programme that "in Russia more than in any other country, the economic struggle is ''inseparable'' from the political struggle"). ''If by politics is meant Social-Democratic politics,'' then the theses of Rabochaya Mysl and ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' are utterly incorrect. The economic struggle of the workers is very often connected (although not inseparably) with bourgeois politics, clerical politics, etc., as we have seen. ''Rabocheye Dyelo''’s theses are correct, if by politics is meant trade union politics, viz., the common striving of all workers to secure from the government measures for alleviating the distress to which their condition gives rise, but which do not abolish that condition, i.e., which do not remove the subjection of labour to capital. That striving indeed is common to the English trade-unionists, who are hostile to socialism, to the Catholic workers, to the "Zubatov" workers, etc. There is politics and politics. Thus, we see that ''Rabochaya Mysl'' does not so much deny the political struggle, as it bows to its ''spontaneity'', to its unconsciousness. While fully recognising the political struggle (better: the political desires and demands of the workers), which arises spontaneously from the working-class movement itself, it absolutely refuses ''independently to work out'' a specifically ''Social-Democratic politics'' corresponding to the general tasks of socialism and to present-day conditions in Russia. Further on we shall show that ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' commits the same error.

===The self-emancipation group and ''Rabocheye Dyelo''===
We have dealt at such length with the little-known and now almost forgotten leading article in the first issue of Rabochaya Mysl because it was the first and most striking expression of that general stream of thought which afterwards emerged into the light of day in innumerable streamlets. V. I. was perfectly right when, in praising the first issue and the leading article of ''Rabochaya Mysl'', he said that the article had been written in a "sharp and fervent" manner (''"Listok" Rabotnika'', No. 9-10, p. 49). Every man with convictions who thinks he has something new to say writes "fervently" and in such a way as to make his views stand out in bold relief. Only those who are accustomed to sitting between two stools lack "fervour"; only such people are able to praise the fervour of ''Rabochaya Mysl'' one day and attack the "fervent polemics" of its opponents the next.

We shall not dwell on the ''"Separate Supplement" to Rabochaya Mysl'' (below we shall have occasion, on various points, to refer to this work, which expresses the ideas of the Economists more consistently than any other) but shall briefly mention the "Appeal of the Self-Emancipation of the Workers Group" (March 1899, reprinted in the London ''Nakanune'', No. 7, July 1899). The authors of the "Appeal" rightly say that "the workers of Russia are ''only just awakening,'' are just beginning to look about them, and are ''instinctively clutching at the first available means of struggle"''. Yet they draw from this the same false conclusion as that drawn by ''Rabochaya Mysl'', forgetting that the instinctive is the unconscious (the spontaneous) to the aid of which socialists must come; that the "first available means of struggle" will always be, in modern society, the trade union means of struggle, and the "first available" ideology the bourgeois (trade union) ideology. Similarly, these authors do not "repudiate" politics, they merely (merely!) echo Mr. V. V. that politics is the superstructure, and therefore, "political agitation must be the superstructure to the agitation carried on in favour of the economic struggle; it must arise on the basis of this struggle and follow in its wake".

As for ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', it began its activity with the "defence" of the Economists. It stated a ''downright untruth'' in its opening issue (No. 1, pp. 141-42) in claiming that it "does not know to which young comrades Axelrod referred" when he warned the Economists in his well-known pamphlet. In the polemic that flared up with Axelrod and Plekhanov over this untruth, ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' had to admit that "in form of perplexity, it sought ''to defend'' all the younger Social-Democrats abroad from this unjust accusation" (the charge of narrowness levelled by Axelrod at the Economists). In reality this accusation was completely justified, and ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' knew perfectly well that, among others, it applied also to V. I., a member of its Editorial Board. Let me note in passing that in this polemic Axelrod was entirely right and ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' entirely wrong in their respective interpretations of my pamphlet ''The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats''. The pamphlet was written in 1897, before the appearance of ''Rabochaya Mysl'', when I thought, rightly, that the ''original tendency'' of the St. Petersburg League of Struggle, which I characterised above, was dominant. And this tendency was dominant at least until the middle of 1898. Consequently, ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' had no right whatever, in its attempt to deny the existence and danger of Economism, to refer to a pamphlet that expressed views ''forced out'' by Economist views in St. Petersburg in 1897-98. <ref group="Lenin">In defending its first untruth (“we do not know to which young comrades Axelrod referred”), ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' added a second, when it wrote in its ''Reply'': <blockquote>“Since the review of ''The Tasks'' was published, tendencies have arisen, or become more or less clearly defined, among certain Russian Social-Democrats, towards economic one-sidedness, which represent a step backwards from the state of our movement as described in ''The Tasks''” (p. 9). </blockquote>This, in the ''Reply'', published ''in 1900''. But the first issue of ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' (containing the review) appeared in ''April 1899''. Did Economism really arise only in 1899? No. The year 1899 saw the first protest of the ''Russian'' Social-Democrats against Economism (the protest against the ''Credo''). Economism arose in 1897, as ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' very well knows, for already in ''November 1898'', V. I. was praising Rabochaya Mysl (see ''“Listok” Rabotnika'', No. 9-10)</ref>

But ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' not only "defended" the Economists, it itself constantly fell into their fundamental errors. The source of this confusion is to be found in the ambiguity of the interpretation given to the following thesis of the ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' programme: "We consider that the most important phenomenon of Russian life, the one that will mainly ''determine the tasks'' [our italics] and the character of the publication activity of the Union, is the ''mass working-class movement'' [''Rabocheye Dyelo''’s italics] which has arisen in recent years." That the mass movement is a most important phenomenon is a fact not to be disputed. But the crux of the matter is, how is one to understand the statement that the mass working class movement will "determine the tasks"? It may be interpreted in one of two ways. ''Either'' it means bowing to the spontaneity of this movement, i.e., reducing the role of Social-Democracy to mere subservience to the working-class movement as such (the interpretation of ''Rabochaya Mysl'', the Self-Emancipation Group, and other Economists), or it means that the mass movement places before us new theoretical, political, and organisational tasks, far more complicated than those that might have satisfied us in the period before the rise of the mass movement. ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' inclined and still inclines towards the first interpretation, for it has said nothing definite about any new tasks, but has argued constantly as though the "mass movement" ''relieves'' us of the necessity of clearly understanding and fulfilling the tasks it sets before us. We need only point out that ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' considered that it was impossible to set the overthrow of the autocracy as the ''first'' task of the mass working-class movement, and that it degraded this task (in the name of the mass movement) to that of a struggle for immediate political demands (Reply, p. 25).

We shall pass over the article by B. Krichevsky, editor of ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', entitled "The Economic and the Political Struggle in the Russian Movement", published in No. 7 of that paper, in which these very mistakes <ref group="Lenin">The “stages theory”, or the theory of “timid zigzags”, in the political struggle is expressed, for example, in this article, in the following way: “Political demands, which in their character are common to the whole of Russia, should, however, at first (this was written in August 1900!) correspond to the experience gained by the given stratum (''sic''!) of workers in the economic struggle. Only [!] on the basis of this experience can and should political agitation be taken up,” etc. (p. 11). On page 4, the author, protesting against what he regards as the absolutely unfounded charge of Economist heresy, pathetically exclaims: “What Social-Democrat does not know that according to the theories of Marx and Engels the economic interests of certain classes play a decisive role in history, and, ''consequently'', that particularly the proletariat’s struggle for its economic interests must be of paramount importance in its class development and struggle for emancipation?” (Our italics.) The word “consequently” is completely irrelevant. The fact that economic interests play a decisive role ''does not in the least imply'' that the economic (i.e., trade union) struggle is of prime importance; for the most essential, the “decisive” interests of classes can be satisfied ''only by'' radical ''political'' changes in general. In particular the fundamental economic interests of the proletariat can be satisfied only by a political revolution that will replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by the dictatorship of the proletariat. Krichevsky repeats the arguments of the “V. V.’s of Russian Social-Democracy” (viz., that politics follows economics, etc.) and of the Bernsteinians of German Social-Democracy (e.g., by similar arguments Woltmann sought to prove that the workers must first of all acquire “economic power” before they can think about political revolution)</ref> are repeated, and proceed directly to ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', No. 10. We shall not, of course, enter in detail into the various objections raised by Krichevsky and Martynov against ''Zarya'' and ''Iskra''. We are here interested solely in the basis of principles on which ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', in its tenth issue, took its stand. Thus, we shall not examine the strange fact that ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' saw a "diametrical contradiction" between the proposition:<blockquote>"Social-Democracy does not, tie its hands, it does not restrict its activities to some one preconceived plan or method of political struggle; it recognises all means of struggle as long as they correspond to the forces at-the disposal of the Party," etc. (''Iskra'', No. 1).</blockquote>and the proposition:<blockquote>"Without a strong organisation skilled in waging political struggle under all circumstances and at all times, there can be no question of that systematic plan of action, illumined by firm principles and steadfastly carried out, which alone is worthy of the name of tactics" (''Iskra'', No. 4).</blockquote>To confound recognition, ''in principle'', of all means of struggle, of all plans and methods, provided they are expedient, with the demand ''at a given political moment'' to be guided by a strictly observed plan is tantamount, if we are to talk of tactics, to confounding the recognition by medical science of various methods of treating diseases with the necessity for adopting a certain definite method of treatment for a given disease. The point is, however, that ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', itself the victim of a disease which we have called bowing to spontaneity, refuses to recognise any "method of treatment" for that disease. Hence, it has made the remarkable discovery that "tactics-as-plan contradicts the fundamental spirit of Marxism" (No. 10, p. 18), that tactics are "''a process of growth of Party tasks, which grow together with the Party''" (p. 11, ''Rabocheye Dyelo''’s italics). This remark has every chance of becoming a celebrated maxim, a permanent monument to the ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' "trend". To the question, whither? the leading organ replies: Movement is a process of changing the distance between the starting-point and subsequent points of the movement. This matchless example of profundity is not merely a curiosity (were it that, it would not be worth dealing with at length), but ''the programme of a whole trend'', the very programme which R. M. (in the "''Separate Supplement''" to ''Rabochaya Mysl'') expressed in the words: That struggle is desirable which is possible, and the struggle which is possible is that which is going on at the given moment. This is precisely the trend of unbounded opportunism, which passively adapts itself to spontaneity.

"Tactics-as-plan contradicts the essence of Marxism!" But this is a slander of Marxism; it means turning Marxism into the caricature held up by the Narodniks in their struggle against us. It means belittling the initiative and energy of class-conscious fighters, whereas Marxism, on the contrary, gives a gigantic impetus to the initiative and energy of the Social-Democrat, opens up for him the widest perspectives, and (if one may so express it) places at his disposal the mighty force of many millions of workers "spontaneously" rising for the struggle. The entire history of international Social-Democracy teems with plans advanced now by one, now by another political leader, some confirming the far-sightedness and the correct political and organisational views of their authors and others revealing their short-sightedness and their political errors. At the time when Germany was at one of the crucial turning-points in its history — the formation of the Empire, the opening of the Reichstag, and the granting of universal suffrage — Liebknecht had one plan for Social-Democratic politics and work in general, and Schweitzer had another. When the anti-socialist law came down on the heads of the German socialists, Most and Hasselmann had one plan — they were prepared then and there to call for violence and terror; Hochbert, Schramm, and (partly) Bernstein had another — they began to preach to the Social-Democrats that they themselves had provoked the enactment of the law by being unreasonably bitter and revolutionary, and must now earn forgiveness by their exemplary conduct. There was yet a third plan, proposed by those who prepared and carried out the publication of an illegal organ. It is easy, of course, with hindsight, many years after the struggle over the selection of the path to be followed, and after history has pronounced its verdict as to the expediency of the path selected, to utter profound maxims about the growth of Party tasks, which grow together with the Party. But at a time of confusion, when the Russian "Critics" and Economists are degrading Social-Democracy to the level of trade-unionism, and when the terrorists are strongly advocating the adoption of "tactics-as-plan" that repeats the old mistakes, at such a time, to confine oneself to profundities of this kind, means simply to issue to oneself a "certificate of poverty". At a time when many Russian Social-Democrats suffer from a lack of initiative and energy, from an inadequate "scope of political propaganda, agitation, and organisation," from a lack of "plans" for a broader organisation of revolutionary work, at such a time, to declare that "tactics-as-plan" contradicts the essence of Marxism means not only to vulgarise Marxism in the realm of theory, but ''to drag the Party backward'' in practice.

''Rabocheye Dyelo'' goes on to sermonise:<blockquote>"The task of the revolutionary Social-Democrat is only to accelerate objective development by his conscious work, not to obviate it or substitute his own subjective plans for this development. ''Iskra'' knows all this in theory; but the enormous importance which Marxism justly attaches to conscious revolutionary work causes it in practice, owing to its doctrinaire view of tactics, ''to belittle the significance of the objective or the spontaneous element of development"'' (p. 18).</blockquote>Another example of the extraordinary theoretical confusion worthy of Mr. V. V. and his fraternity. We would ask our philosopher: how may a designer of subjective plans "belittle" objective development? Obviously by losing sight of the fact that this objective development creates or strengthens, destroys or weakens certain classes, strata, or groups, certain nations or groups of nations, etc., and in this way serves to determine a given international political alignment of forces, or the position adopted by revolutionary parties, etc. If the designer of plans did that, his guilt would not be that he belittled the spontaneous element, but, on the contrary, that he belittled the ''conscious'' element, for he would then show that he lacked the "consciousness" properly to understand objective development. Hence, the very talk of "estimating the ''relative'' significance" (''Rabocheye Dyelo''’s italics) of spontaneity and consciousness itself reveals a complete lack of "consciousness". If certain "spontaneous elements of development" can be grasped at all by human understanding, then an incorrect estimation of them will be tantamount to "belittling the conscious element". But if they cannot be grasped, then we do not know them, and therefore cannot speak of them. What then is Krichevsky discussing? If he thinks that ''Iskra''’s "subjective plans" are erroneous (as he in fact declares them to be), he should have shown what objective facts they ignore, and only then charged ''Iskra'' with ''lacking political consciousness'' for ignoring them, with "belittling the conscious element", to use his own words. If, however, displeased with subjective plans, he can bring forward no argument other than that of "belittling the spontaneous element" (!), he merely shows:

# that, theoretically, he understands Marxism ''a la'' Kareyev and Mikhailovsky, who have been sufficiently ridiculed by Beltov; and
# that, practically, he is quite satisfied with the "spontaneous elements of development" that have drawn our legal Marxists towards Bernsteinism and our Social-Democrats towards Economism, and that he is "full of wrath" against those who have determined at all costs ''to divert'' Russian Social-Democracy from the path of "spontaneous" development.

Further, there follow things that are positively droll. "Just as human beings will reproduce in the old-fashioned way despite all the discoveries of natural science, so the birth of a new social order will come about, in the future too, ''mainly'' as a result of elemental outbursts, despite all the discoveries of social science and the increase in the number of conscious fighters" (p. 19). Just as our grandfathers in their old-fashioned wisdom used to say, Anyone can bring children into the world, so today the "modern socialists" (''a la'' Nartsis Tuporylov) <ref group="note">''Nartsis Tuporylov'' (''Narcissus Blunt-Snout'') was the pseudonym under which Y. O. Martov published his satirical poem “Hymn of the Contemporary Russian Socialist” in ''Zarya'', No. 1, April 1901. The “Hymn” ridiculed the “Economists” and their adaptations to spontaneous events.

</ref> say in their wisdom, Anyone can participate in the spontaneous birth of a new social order. We too hold that anyone can. All that is required for participation of that kind is ''to yield'' to Economism when Economism reigns and to terrorism when terrorism arises. Thus, in the spring of this year, when it was so important to utter a note of warning against infatuation with terrorism, ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' stood in amazement, confronted by a problem that was "new" to it. And now, six months after, when the problem has become less topical, it presents us at one and the same time with the declaration: "We think that it is not and should not be the task of Social-Democracy to counteract the rise of terroristic sentiments" (''Rabocheye Dyelo'', No. 10, p. 23), and with the Conference resolution: "The Conference regards systematic and aggressive terror as being inopportune" (''Two Conferences'', p. 18). How beautifully clear and coherent this is! Not to counteract, but to declare inopportune, and to declare it in such a way that unsystematic and defensive terror does not come within the scope of the "resolution". It must be admitted that such a resolution is extremely safe and is fully insured against error, just as a man who talks, but says nothing, insures himself against error. All that is needed to frame such a resolution is an ability to keep ''at the tail end'' of the movement. When ''Iskra'' ridiculed ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' for declaring the question of terror to be new, the latter angrily accused ''Iskra'' of "having the incredible effrontery to impose upon the Party organisation solutions of tactical questions proposed by a group of emigrant writers more than fifteen years ago" (p. 24). Effrontery. indeed, and what an overestimation of the conscious element — first to resolve questions theoretically beforehand, and then to try to convince the organisation, the Party, and the masses of the correctness of this solution! <ref group="Lenin">Nor must it be forgotten that in solving “theoretically” the problem of terror, the Emancipation of Labour group ''generalised'' the experience of the antecedent revolutionary movement</ref> How much better it would be to repeat the elements and, without "imposing" anything upon anybody, swing with every "turn" — whether in the direction of Economism or in the direction of terrorism. ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' even generalises this great precept of worldly wisdom and accuses ''Iskra'' and ''Zarya'' of "setting up their programme against the movement, like a spirit hovering over the formless chaos" (p. 29). But what else is the function of Social-Democracy if not to be a "spirit" that not only hovers over the spontaneous movement, but also ''raises'' this movement ''to the level of "its programme"?'' Surely, it is not its function to drag at the ''tail'' of the movement. At best, this would be of no service to the movement; at worst, it would be exceedingly harmful. ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', however, not only follows this "tactics-as-process", but elevates it to a principle, so that it would be more correct to describe its tendency not as opportunism, but as ''tail-ism'' (from the word ''tail''). And it must be admitted that those who are determined always to follow behind the movement and be its tail are absolutely and forever guaranteed against "belittling the spontaneous element of development".

And so, we have become convinced that the fundamental error committed by the "new trend" in Russian Social-Democracy is its bowing to spontaneity and its failure to understand that the spontaneity of the masses demands a high degree of consciousness from us Social-Democrats. The greater the spontaneous upsurge of the masses and the more widespread the movement, the more rapid, incomparably so, the demand for greater consciousness in the theoretical, political and organisational work of Social-Democracy.

The spontaneous upsurge of the masses in Russia proceeded (and continues) with such rapidity that the young Social Democrats proved unprepared to meet these gigantic tasks. This unpreparedness is our common misfortune, the misfortune of ''all'' Russian Social-Democrats. The upsurge of the masses proceeded and spread with uninterrupted continuity; it not only continued in the places where it began, but spread to new localities and to new strata of the population (under the influence of the working class movement, there was a renewed ferment among the student youth, among the intellectuals generally, and even among the peasantry). Revolutionaries, however, ''lagged behind'' this upsurge, both in their "theories" and in their activity; they failed to establish a constant and continuous organisation capable of ''leading'' the whole movement.

In Chapter I, we established that ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' belittled our theoretical tasks and that it "spontaneously" repeated the fashionable catchword "freedom of criticism"; those who repeated this catchword lacked the "consciousness" to understand that the positions of the opportunist "Critics" and those of the revolutionaries in Germany and in Russia are diametrically opposed.

In the following chapters, we shall show how this bowing to spontaneity found expression in the sphere of the political tasks and in the organisational work of Social-Democracy.

== Trade-unionist politics and social-democratic politics==
We shall again begin by praising ''Rabocheye Dyelo''. "Literature of Exposure and the Proletarian Struggle" is the title Martynov gave the article on his differences with ''Iskra'' published in ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', No. 10. He formulated the substance of the differences as follows: "We cannot confine ourselves solely to exposing the system that stands in its (the working-class party’s) path of development. We must also react to the immediate and current interests of the proletariat.... ''Iskra'' . . . is in fact an organ of revolutionary opposition that exposes the state of affairs in our country, particularly the political state of affairs.... We, however, work and shall continue to work for the cause of the working class in close organic contact with the proletarian struggle" (p. 63). One cannot help being grateful to Martynov for this formula. It is of outstanding general interest, because substantially it embraces not only our disagreements with ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', but the general disagreement between ourselves and the Economists on the political struggle. We have shown that the Economists do not altogether repudiate "politics", but that they are constantly straying from the Social-Democratic to the trade-unionist conception of politics. Martynov strays in precisely this way, and we shall therefore take his views as a ''model'' of Economist error on this question. As we shall endeavour to prove, neither the authors of the "''Separate Supplement''" to ''Rabochaya Mysl'' nor the authors of the manifesto issued by the Self-Emancipation Group, nor the authors of the Economist letter published in ''Iskra'', No. 12, will have any right to complain against this choice.

=== Political agitation and its restriction by the economists===
Everyone knows that the economic[1] [1] To avoid misunderstanding, we must point out that here, and throughout this pamphlet, by economic struggle, we imply (in keeping with the accepted usage among us) the "practical economic struggle", which Engels, in the passage quoted above, described as "resistance to the capitalists", and which in free countries is known as the organised-labour syndical, or trade union struggle.—''Lenin'' struggle of the Russian workers underwent widespread development and consolidation simultaneously with the production of "literature" exposing economic (factory and occupational) conditions. The "leaflets" were devoted mainly to the exposure of the factory system, and very soon a veritable passion for exposures was roused among the workers. As soon as the workers realised that the Social-Democratic study circles desired to, and could, supply them with a new kind of leaflet that told the whole truth about their miserable existence, about their unbearably hard toil, and their lack of rights, they began to send in, actually flood us with, correspondence from the factories and workshops. This "exposure literature" created a tremendous sensation, not only in the particular factory exposed in the given leaflet, but in all the factories to which news of the, revealed facts spread. And since the poverty and want among the workers in the various enterprises and in the various trades are much the same, the "truth about the life of the workers" stirred everyone. Even among the most backward workers, a veritable passion arose to "get into print" — a noble passion for this rudimentary form of war against the whole of the present social system which is based upon robbery and oppression. And in the overwhelming majority of cases these "leaflets" were in truth a declaration of war, because the exposures served greatly to agitate the workers; they evoked among them common demands for the removal of the most glaring outrages and roused in them a readiness to support the demands with strikes. Finally, the employers themselves were compelled to recognise the significance of these leaflets as a declaration of war, so much so that in a large number of cases they did not even wait for the outbreak of hostilities. As is always the case, the mere publication of these exposures made them effective, and they acquired the significance of a strong moral influence. On more than one occasion, the mere appearance of a leaflet proved sufficient to secure the satisfaction of all or part of the demands put forward. In a word, economic (factory) exposures were and remain an important lever in the economic struggle. And they will continue to retain this significance as long as there is capitalism, which makes it necessary for the workers to defend themselves. Even in the most advanced countries of Europe it can still be seen that the exposure of abuses in some backward trade, or in some forgotten branch of domestic industry, serves as a starting-point for the awakening of class-consciousness, for the beginning of a trade union struggle, and for the spread of socialism.[2]

The overwhelming majority of Russian Social-Democrats have of late been almost entirely absorbed by this work of organising the exposure of factory conditions. Suffice it to recall Rabochaya Mysl to see the extent to which they have been absorbed by it — so much so, indeed, that they have lost sight of the fact that this, ''taken by itself'', is in essence still not Social-Democratic work, but merely trade union work. As a matter of fact, the exposures merely dealt with the relations between the workers ''in a given trade'' and their employers, and all they achieved was that the sellers of labour power learned to sell their "commodity" on better terms and to fight the purchasers over a purely commercial deal. These exposures could have served (if properly utilised by an organisation of revolutionaries) as a beginning and a component part of Social-Democratic activity; but they could also have led (and, given a worshipful attitude towards spontaneity, were bound to lead) to a "purely trade union" struggle and to a non-Social-Democratic working-class movement. Social-Democracy leads the struggle of the working class, not only for better terms for the sale of labour-power, but for the abolition of the social system that compels the propertyless to sell themselves to the rich. Social-Democracy represents the working class, not in its relation to a given group of employers alone, but in its relation to all classes of modern society and to the state as an organised political force. Hence, it follows that not only must Social-Democrats not confine themselves exclusively to the economic struggle, but that they must not allow the organisation of economic exposures to become the predominant part of their activities. We must take up actively the political education of the working class and the development of its political consciousness. ''Now'' that ''Zarya'' and ''Iskra'' have made the first attack upon Economism, "all are agreed" on this (although some agree only in words, as we shall soon see).

The question arises, what should political education consist in? Can it be confined to the propaganda of working-class hostility to the autocracy? Of course not. It is not enough ''to explain'' to the workers that they are politically oppressed (any more than it is ''to explain'' to them that their interests are antagonistic to the interests of the employers). Agitation must be conducted with regard to every concrete example of ''this'' oppression (as we have begun to carry on agitation round concrete examples of economic oppression). Inasmuch as this oppression affects the most diverse classes of society, inasmuch as it manifests itself in the most varied spheres of life and activity — vocational, civic, personal, family, religious, scientific, etc., etc. — is it not evident that ''we shall not be fulfilling our task'' of developing the political consciousness of the workers if we do not ''undertake'' the organisation of the ''political exposure'' of the autocracy in ''all its aspects?'' In order to carry on agitation round concrete instances of oppression, these instances must be exposed (as it is necessary to expose factory abuses in order to carry on economic agitation).

One might think this to be clear enough. It turns out, however, that it is only in words that "all" are agreed on the need to develop political consciousness, ''in all its aspects''. It turns out that ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', for example, far from tackling the task of organising (or making a start in organising) comprehensive political exposure, is even trying ''to drag Iskra'', which has undertaken this task, ''away from it''. Listen to the following: "The political struggle of the working class is merely [it is certainly not ‘merely’] the most developed, wide, and effective form of economic struggle" (programme of ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', published in issue No. 1, p. 3). "The Social-Democrats are now confronted with the task of lending the economic struggle itself, as far as possible, a political character" (Martynov, ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', No. 10, p. 42). "The economic struggle is the most widely applicable means of drawing the masses into active political struggle" (resolution adopted by the Conference of the Union Abroad and "amendments" thereto, ''Two Conferences'', pp. 11 and 17). As the reader will observe, all these theses permeate ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' from its very first number to the latest "Instructions to the Editors", and all of them evidently express a single view regarding political agitation and struggle. Let us examine this view from the standpoint of the opinion prevailing among all Economists, that political agitation must ''follow'' economic agitation. Is it true that, in general,[3] the economic struggle "is the most widely applicable means" of drawing the masses into the political struggle? It is entirely untrue. ''Any and every'' manifestation of police tyranny and autocratic outrage, not only in connection with the economic struggle, is not one whit less "widely applicable" as a means of "drawing in" the masses. The rural superintendents and the flogging of peasants, the corruption of the officials and the police treatment of the "common people" in the cities, the fight against the famine-stricken and the suppression of the popular striving towards enlightenment and knowledge, the extortion of taxes and the persecution of the religious sects, the humiliating treatment of soldiers and the barrack methods in the treatment of the students and liberal intellectuals — do all these and a thousand other similar manifestations of tyranny, though not directly connected with the "economic" struggle, represent, in general, ''less'' "widely applicable" means and occasions for political agitation and for drawing the masses into the political struggle? The very opposite is true. Of the sum total of cases in which the workers suffer (either on their own account or on account of those closely connected with them) from tyranny, violence, and the lack of rights, undoubtedly only a small minority represent cases of police tyranny in the trade union struggle as such. Why then should we, beforehand, ''restrict'' the scope of political agitation by declaring only ''one'' of the means to be "the most widely applicable", when Social-Democrats must have, in addition, other, generally speaking, no less "widely applicable" means?

In the dim and distant past (a full year ago! ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' wrote: "The masses begin to understand immediate political demands after one strike, or at all events, after several", "as soon as the government sets the police and gendarmerie against them" [''August'' (No. 7) 1900, p. 15]. This opportunist theory of stages has now been rejected by the Union Abroad, which makes a concession to us by declaring: "There is no need whatever to conduct political agitation right from the beginning, exclusively on an economic basis" (''Two Conferences'', p. 11). The Union’s repudiation of part of its former errors will show the future historian of Russian Social-Democracy better than any number of lengthy arguments the depths to which our Economists have degraded socialism! But the Union Abroad must be very naive indeed to imagine that the abandonment of one form of restricting politics will induce us to agree to another form. Would it not be more logical to say, in this case too, that the economic struggle should be conducted on the widest possible basis, that it should always be utilised for political agitation, but that "there is no need whatever" to regard the economic struggle as the ''most'' widely applicable means of drawing the masses into active political struggle?

The Union Abroad attaches significance to the fact that it has substituted the phrase "most widely applicable means" for the phrase "the best means" contained in one of the resolutions of the Fourth Congress of the Jewish Workers’ Union (Bund). We confess that we find it difficult to say which of these resolutions is the better one. In our opinion they are ''both worse''. Both the Union Abroad and the Bund fall into the error (partly, perhaps unconsciously, under the influence of tradition) of giving an Economist, trade-unionist interpretation to politics. Whether this is done by employing the word "best" or the words "most widely applicable" makes no essential difference whatever. Had the Union Abroad said that "political agitation on an economic basis" is the most widely applied (not "applicable") means, it would have been right in regard to a certain period in the development of our Social-Democratic movement. It would have been right in regard to the ''Economists'' and to many (if not the majority) of the practical workers of 1898-1901; for these practical Economists ''applied'' political agitation (to the extent that they applied it at all) ''almost exclusively on an economic basis''. Political agitation on such lines was recognised and, as we have seen, even recommended by Rabochaya Mysl and the Self-Emancipation Group. ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' should have ''strongly condemned'' the fact that the useful work of economic agitation was accompanied by the harmful restriction of the political struggle; instead, it declares the means most widely ''applied (by the Economists)'' to be the most widely ''applicable''! It is not surprising that when we call these people Economists, they can do nothing but pour every manner of abuse upon us; call us "mystifiers", "disrupters", "papal nuncios", and "slanderers"[4] go complaining to the whole world that we have mortally offended them; and declare almost on oath that "not a single Social-Democratic organisation is now tinged with Economism".[5] Oh, those evil, slanderous politicians! They must have deliberately invented this Economism, out of sheer hatred of mankind, in order mortally to offend other people.

What concrete, real meaning attaches to Martynov’s words when he sets before Social-Democracy the task of "lending the economic struggle itself a political character"? The economic struggle is the collective struggle of the workers against their employers for better terms ''in the sale of their labour-power'', for better living and working conditions. This struggle is necessarily a trade union struggle, because working conditions differ greatly in different trades, and, consequently, the struggle ''to improve'' them can only be conducted on the basis of trade organisations (in the Western countries, through trade unions; in Russia, through temporary trade associations and through leaflets, etc.). Lending "the economic struggle itself a political character" means, therefore, striving to secure satisfaction of these trade demands, the improvement of working conditions in each separate trade by means of "legislative and administrative measures" (as Martynov puts it on the ensuing page of his article, p. 43). This is precisely what all workers’ trade unions do and always have done. Read the works of the soundly scientific (and "soundly" opportunist) Mr. and Mrs. Webb and you will see that the British trade unions long ago recognised, and have long been carrying out, the task of "lending the economic struggle itself a political character"; they have long been fighting for the right to strike, for the removal of all legal hindrances to the co-operative and trade union movements, for laws to protect women and children, for the improvement of labour conditions by means of health and factory legislation, etc.

Thus, the pompous phrase about "lending the economic struggle ''itself'' a political character", which sounds so "terrifically" profound and revolutionary, serves as a screen to conceal what is in fact the traditional striving ''to degrade'' Social-Democratic politics to the level of trade union politics. Under the guise of rectifying the onesidedness of ''Iskra'', which, it is alleged, places "the revolutionising of dogma higher than the revolutionising of life",[6] we are presented with the ''struggle for economic reforms'' as if it were something entirely new. In point of fact, the phrase "lending the economic struggle itself a political character" means nothing more than the struggle for economic reforms. Martynov himself might have come to this simple conclusion, had he pondered over the significance of his own words. "Our Party," he says, training his heaviest guns on ''Iskra'', "could and should have presented concrete demands to the government for legislative and administrative measures against economic exploitation, unemployment, famine, etc." (''Rabocheye Dyelo'', No. 10, pp. 42-43). Concrete demands for measures — does not this mean demands for social reforms? Again we ask the impartial reader: Are we slandering the ''Rabocheye Dyelo''-ites (may I be forgiven for this awkward, currently used designation!) by calling them concealed Bernsteinians when, as their point of ''disagreement with Iskra'', they advance their thesis on the necessity of struggling for economic reforms?

Revolutionary Social-Democracy has always included the struggle for reforms as part of its activities. But it utilises "economic" agitation for the purpose of presenting to the government, not only demands for all sorts of measures, but also (and primarily) the demand that it cease to be an autocratic government. Moreover, it considers it its duty to present this demand to the government on the basis, not of the economic struggle ''alone'', but of all manifestations in general of public and political life. In a word, it subordinates the struggle for reforms, as the part to the whole, to the revolutionary struggle for freedom and for socialism. Martynov, however, resuscitates the theory of stages in a new form and strives to prescribe, as it were, an exclusively economic path of development for the political struggle. By advancing at this moment, when the revolutionary movement is on the upgrade, an alleged special "task" of struggling for reforms, he is dragging the Party backwards and is playing into the hands of both "Economist" and liberal opportunism.

To proceed. Shamefacedly hiding the struggle for reforms behind the pompous thesis of "lending the economic struggle itself a political character", Martynov advanced, as if it were a special point, ''exclusively economic'' (indeed, exclusively factory) ''reforms''. As to the reason for his doing that, we do not know it. Carelessness, perhaps? Yet if he had in mind something else besides "factory" reforms, then the whole of his thesis, which we have cited, loses all sense. Perhaps he did it because he considers it possible and probable that the government will make "concessions" only in the economic sphere?[7] If so, then it is a strange delusion. Concessions are also possible and are made in the sphere of legislation concerning flogging, passports, land redemption payments, religious sects, the censorship, etc., etc. "Economic" concessions (or pseudo-concessions) are, of course, the cheapest and most advantageous from the government’s point of view, because by these means it hopes to win the confidence of the working masses. For this very reason, we Social-Democrats ''must not'' under any circumstances or in any way whatever create grounds for the belief (or the misunderstanding) that we attach greater value to economic reforms, or that we regard them as being particularly important, etc. "Such demands," writes Martynov, speaking of the concrete demands for legislative and administrative measures referred to above, "would not be merely a hollow sound, because, promising certain palpable results, they might be actively supported by the working masses...." We are not Economists, oh no! We only cringe as slavishly before the "palpableness" of concrete results as do the Bernsteins, the Prokopoviches, the Struves, the R.M.s, and ''tutti quanti!'' We only wish to make it understood (together with Nartsis Tuporylov) that all which "does not promise palpable results" is merely a "hollow sound"! We are only trying to argue as if the working masses were incapable (and had not already proved their capabilities, notwithstanding those who ascribe their own philistinism to them) of actively supporting ''every'' protest against the autocracy, even if it ''promises absolutely no palpable results whatever!''

Let us take, for example, the very "measures" for the relief of unemployment and the famine that Martynov himself advances. ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' is engaged, judging by what it has promised, in drawing up and elaborating a programme of "concrete [in the form of bills?] demands for legislative and administrative measures", "promising palpable results", while ''Iskra'', which "constantly places the revolutionising of dogma higher than the revolutionising of life", has tried to explain the inseparable connection between unemployment and the whole capitalist system, has given warning that "famine is coming", has exposed the police "fight against the famine-stricken", and the outrageous "provisional penal servitude regulations"; and ''Zarya'' has published a special reprint, in the form of an agitational pamphlet, of a section of its "Review of Home Affairs", dealing with the famine.[8] But good God! How "onesided" were these incorrigibly narrow and orthodox doctrinaires, how deaf to the calls of "life itself"! Their articles contained — oh horror! — ''not a single'', can you imagine it? not a single "concrete demand" "promising palpable results"! Poor doctrinaires! They ought to be sent to Krichevsky and Martynov to be taught that tactics are a process of growth, of that which grows, etc., and that the economic struggle ''itself'' should be given a political character!

"In addition to its immediate revolutionary significance, the economic struggle of the workers against the employers and the government ["''economic'' struggle against the government"!] has also this significance: it constantly brings home to the workers the fact that they have no political rights" (Martynov, p. 44). We quote this passage, not in order to repeat for the hundredth and thousandth time what has been said above, but in order to express particular thanks to Martynov for this excellent new formula: "the economic struggle of the workers against the employers and the government". What a gem! With what inimitable skill and mastery in eliminating all partial disagreements and shades of differences among Economists this clear and concise proposition expresses the ''quintessence'' of Economism, from summoning the workers "to the political struggle, which they carry on in the general interest, for the improvement of the conditions of all the workers",[9] continuing through the theory of stages, and ending in the resolution of the Conference on the "most widely applicable", etc. "Economic struggle against the government" is precisely trade-unionist politics, which is still very far from being Social-Democratic politics.

===How Martynov rendered Plekhanov more profound===
"What a large number of Social-Democratic Lomonosovs have appeared among us lately!" observed a comrade one day, having in mind the astonishing propensity of many who are inclined toward Economism to, arrive, "necessarily, by their own under standing", at great truths (e.g., that the economic struggle stimulates the workers to ponder over their lack of rights) and in doing so to ignore, with the supreme contempt of born geniuses, all that has been produced by the antecedent development of revolutionary thought and of the revolutionary movement. Lomonosov-Martynov is precisely such a born genius. We need but glance at his article "Urgent Questions" to see how by "his own understanding" he ''arrives at'' what was long ago said by Axelrod (of whom our Lomonosov, naturally, says not a word); how, for instance, he is ''beginning'' to understand that we cannot ignore the opposition of such or such strata of the bourgeoisie (''Rabocheye Dyelo'', No. 9, pp. 61, 62, 71; compare this with Rabocheye Dyelo’s Reply to Axelrod, pp. 22, 23-24), etc. But alas, he is only "arriving" and is only "beginning", not more than that, for so little has he understood Axelrod’s ideas, that hetalks about "the economic struggle against the employers and the government". For three years (1898-1901) ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' has tried hard to understand Axelrod, but has so far not understood him! Can one of the reasons be that Social-Democracy, "like mankind", always sets itself only tasks that can be achieved?

But the Lomonosovs are distinguished not only by their ignorance of many things (that would be but half misfortune!), but also by their unawareness of their own ignorance. Now this is a real misfortune; and it is this misfortune that prompts them without further ado to attempt to render Plekhanov "more profound".<blockquote>"Much water," Lomonosov-Martynov says, "has flowed under the bridge since Plekhanov wrote his book (''Tasks of the Socialists in the Fight Against the Famine in Russia''). The Social-Democrats who for a decade led the economic struggle of the working class ... have failed as yet to lay down a broad theoretical basis for Party tactics. This question has now come to a head, and if we should wish to lay down such a theoretical basis, we should certainly have to deepen considerably the principles of tactics developed at one time by Plekhanov.... Our present definition of the distinction between propaganda and agitation would have to be different from Plekhanov’s (Martynov has just quoted PIekhanov’s words: "A propagandist presents many ideas to one or a few persons; an agitator presents only one or a few ideas, but he presents them to a mass of people.") By propaganda we would understand the revolutionary explanation of the present social system, entire or in its partial manifestations, whether that be done in a form intelligible to individuals or to broad masses. By agitation, in the strict sense of the word (''sic''!), we would understand the call upon the masses to undertake definite, concrete actions and the promotion of the direct revolutionary intervention of the proletariat in social life."</blockquote>We congratulate Russian-and international-Social-Democracy on having found, thanks to Martynov, a new terminology, more strict and more profound. Hitherto we thought (with Plekhanov, and with all the leaders of the international working class movement) that the propagandist, dealing with, say, the question of unemployment, must explain the capitalistic nature of crises, the cause of their inevitability in modern society, the necessity for the transformation of this society into a socialist society, etc. In a word, he must present "many ideas", so many, indeed, that they will be understood as an integral whole only by a (comparatively) few persons. The agitator, however, speaking on the same subject, will take as an illustration a fact that is most glaring and most widely known to his audience, say, the death of an unemployed worker’s family from starvation, the growing impoverishment, etc., and, utilising this fact, known to all, will direct his efforts to presenting a ''single idea'' to the "masses", e.g., the senselessness of the contradiction between the increase of wealth and the increase of poverty; he will strive ''to rouse'' discontent and indignation among the masses against this crying injustice, leaving a more complete explanation of this contradiction to the propagandist. Consequently, the propagandist operates chiefly by means of the ''printed'' word; the agitator by means of the ''spoken'' word. The propagandist requires qualities different from those of the agitator. Kautsky and Lafargue, for example, we term propagandists; Bebel and Guesde we term agitators. To single out a third sphere, or third function, of practical activity, and to include in this function "the call upon the masses to undertake definite concrete actions", is sheer nonsense, because the "call", as a single act, either naturally and inevitably supplements the theoretical treatise, propagandist pamphlet, and agitational speech, or represents a purely executive function. Let us take, for example, the struggle the German Social-Democrats are now waging against the corn duties. The theoreticians write research works on tariff policy, with the "call", say, to struggle for commercial treaties and for Free Trade. The propagandist does the same thing in the periodical press, and the agitator in public speeches. At the present time, the "concrete action" of the masses takes the form of signing petitions to the Reichstag against raising the corn duties. The call for this action comes indirectly from the theoreticians, the propagandists, and the agitators, and, directly, from the workers who take the petition lists to the factories and to private homes for the gathering of signatures. According to the "Martynov terminology", Kautsky and Bebel are both propagandists, while those who solicit the signatures are agitators. Isn’t it clear?

The German example recalled to my mind the German word which, literally translated, means "Ballhorning". Johann Ballhorn, a Leipzig publisher of the sixteenth century, published a child’s reader in which, as was the custom, he introduced a drawing of a cock, but a cock without spurs and with a couple of eggs lying near it. On the cover he printed the legend, "''Revised'' edition by Johann Ballhorn". Ever since then, the Germans describe any "revision" that is really a worsening as "ballhorning". And one cannot help recalling Ballhorn upon seeing how the Martynovs try to render Plekhanov "more profound".

Why did our Lomonosov "invent" this confusion? In order to illustrate how ''Iskra'' "devotes attention only to one side of the case, just as Pleklianov did a decade and a half ago" (39). "With ''Iskra'', propagandist tasks force agitational tasks into the background, at least for the present" (52). If we translate this last proposition from the language of Martynov into ordinary human language (because mankind has not yet managed to learn the newly-invented terminology), we shall get the following: with ''Iskra'', the tasks of political propaganda and political agitation force into the background the task of "presenting to the government concrete demands for legislative and administrative measures" that "promise certain palpable results" (or demands for social reforms, that is, if we are permitted once again to employ the old terminology of the old mankind not yet grown to Martynov’s level). We suggest that the reader compare this thesis with the following tirade:<blockquote>"What also astonishes us in these programmes [the programmes advanced by revolutionary Social-Democrats] is their constant stress upon the benefits of workers’ activity in parliament (non-existent in Russia), though they completely ignore (thanks to their revolutionary nihilism) the importance of workers’ participation in the legislative manufacturers’ assemblies on factory affairs [which do exist in Russia] ... or at least the importance of workers’ participation in municipal bodies...."</blockquote>The author of this tirade expresses in a somewhat more forthright and clearer manner the very idea which Lomonosov-Martynov discovered by his own understanding. The author is R. M., in the "''Separate Supplement" to Rabochaya Mysl'' (p. 15).


===Political exposures and "training in revolutionary activity"===
In advancing against ''Iskra'' his theory of "raising the activity of the working masses", Martynov actually betrayed an urge ''to belittle'' that activity, for he declared the very economic struggle before which all economists grovel to be the preferable, particularly important, and "most widely applicable" means of rousing this activity and its broadest field. This error is characteristic, precisely in that it is by no means peculiar to Martynov. In reality, it is possible to "raise the activity of the working masses" ''only'' when this activity ''is not restricted'' to "political agitation on an economic basis". A basic condition for the necessary expansion of political agitation is the organisation of ''comprehensive'' political exposure. ''In no way'' except by means of such exposures ''can'' the masses be trained in political consciousness and revolutionary activity. Hence, activity of this kind is one of the most important functions of international Social-Democracy as a whole, for even political freedom does not in any way eliminate exposures; it merely shifts somewhat their sphere of direction. Thus, the German party is especially strengthening its positions and spreading its influence, thanks particularly to the untiring energy with which it is conducting its campaign of political exposure. Working-class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to ''all'' cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter ''what class'' is affected — unless they are trained, moreover, to respond from a Social-Democratic point of view and no other. The consciousness of the working masses cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events to observe ''every'' other social class in ''all'' the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life; unless they learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of ''all'' aspects of the life and activity of ''all'' classes, strata, and groups of the population. Those who concentrate the attention, observation, and consciousness of the working class exclusively, or even mainly, upon itself alone are not Social-Democrats; for the self-knowledge of the working class is indissolubly bound up, not solely with a fully clear theoretical understanding — or rather, not so much with the theoretical, as with the practical, understanding — of the relationships between ''all'' the various classes of modern society, acquired through the experience of political life. For this reason the conception of the economic struggle as the most widely applicable means of drawing the masses into the political movement, which our Economists preach, is so extremely harmful and reactionary in its practical significance. In order to become a Social-Democrat, the worker must have a clear picture in his mind of the economic nature and the social and political features of the landlord and the priest, the high state official and the peasant, the student and the vagabond; he must know their strong and weak points; he must grasp the meaning of all the catchwords and sophisms by which each class and each stratum ''camouflages'' its selfish strivings and its real "inner workings"; he must understand what interests are reflected by certain institutions and certain laws and how they are reflected. But this "clear picture" cannot be obtained from any book. It can be obtained only from living examples and from exposures that follow close upon what is going on about us at a given moment; upon what is being discussed, in whispers perhaps, by each one in his own way; upon what finds expression in such and such events, in such and such statistics, in such and such court sentences, etc., etc. These comprehensive political exposures are an essential and ''fundamental'' condition for training the masses in revolutionary activity.

Why do the Russian workers still manifest little revolutionary activity in response to the brutal treatment of the people by the police, the persecution of religious sects, the flogging of peasants, the outrageous censorship, the torture of soldiers, the persecution of the most innocent cultural undertakings, etc.? Is it because the "economic struggle" does not "stimulate" them to this, because such activity does not "promise palpable results", because it produces little that is "positive"? To adopt such an opinion, we repeat, is merely to direct the charge where it does not belong, to blame the working masses for one’s own philistinism (or Bernsteinism). We must blame ourselves, our lagging behind the mass movement, for still being unable to organise sufficiently wide, striking, and rapid exposures of all the shameful outrages. When we do that (and we must and can do it), the most backward worker will understand, ''or will feel'', that the students and religious sects, the peasants and the authors are being abused and outraged by those same dark forces that are oppressing and crushing him at every step of his life. Feeling that, he himself will be filled with an irresistible desire to react, and he will know how to hoot the censors one day, on another day to demonstrate outside the house of a governor who has brutally suppressed a peasant uprising, on still another day to teach a lesson to the gendarmes in surplices who are doing the work of the Holy Inquisition, etc. As yet we have done very little, almost nothing, ''to bring'' before the working masses prompt exposures on all possible issues. Many of us as yet do not recognise this as our ''bounden duty'' but trail spontaneously in the wake of the "drab everyday struggle", in the narrow confines of factory life. Under such circumstances to say that "''Iskra'' displays a tendency to minimise the significance of the forward march of the drab everyday struggle in comparison with the propaganda of brilliant and complete ideas" (Martynov, op. cit., p. 61), means to drag the Party back, to defend and glorify our unpreparedness and backwardness.

As for calling the masses to action, that will come of itself as soon as energetic political agitation, live and striking exposures come into play. To catch some criminal red-handed and immediately to brand him publicly in all places is of itself far more effective than any number of "calls"; the effect very often is such as will make it impossible to tell exactly who it was that "called" upon the masses and who suggested this or that plan of demonstration, etc. Calls for action, not in the general, but in the concrete, sense of the term can be made only at the place of action; only those who themselves go into action, and do so immediately, can sound such calls. Our business as Social-Democratic publicists is to deepen, expand, and intensify political exposures and political agitation.

A word in passing about "calls to action". The ''only newspaper'' which ''prior'' to the spring events ''called upon'' the workers to intervene actively in a matter that certainly did not ''promise'' any ''palpable results'' whatever for the workers, i.e., the drafting of the students into the army, was ''Iskra''. Immediately after the publication of the order of January 11, on "drafting the 183 students into the army", ''Iskra'' published an article on the matter (in its February issue, No. 2),[10] and, ''before'' any demonstration was begun, forthwith ''called upon'' "the workers to go to the aid of the students", called upon the "people" openly to take up the government’s arrogant challenge. We ask: how is the remarkable fact to be explained that although Martynov talks so much about "calls to action", and even suggests "calls to action" as a special form of activity, he said not a word about ''this'' call? After this, was it not sheer philistinism on Martynov’s part to allege that ''Iskra'' was ''one-sided'' because it did not issue sufficient "calls" to struggle for demands "promising palpable results"?

Our Economists, including ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', were successful because they adapted themselves to the backward workers. But the Social-Democratic worker, the revolutionary worker (and the number of such workers is growing) will indignantly reject all this talk about struggle for demands "promising palpable results", etc., because he will understand that this is only a variation of the old song about adding a kopek to the ruble. Such a worker will say to his counsellors from ''Rabochaya Mysl'' and ''Rabocheye Dyelo'': you are busying yourselves in vain, gentlemen, and shirking your proper duties, by meddling with such excessive zeal in a job that we can very well manage ourselves. There is nothing clever in your assertion that the Social-Democrats’ task is to lend the economic struggle itself a political character; that is only the beginning, it is not the main task of the Social-Democrats. For all over the world, including Russia, ''the police themselves often take the initiative in lending'' the economic struggle a political character, and the workers themselves learn to understand whom the government supports.[11] [11] The demand "to lend the economic struggle itself a political character" most strikingly expresses ''subservience to spontaneity'' in the sphere of political activity. Very often the economic struggle ''spontaneously'' assumes a political character, that is to say, without the intervention of the "revolutionary bacilli — the intelligentsia", without the intervention of the class-conscious Social-Democrats. The economic struggle of the English workers, for instance, also assumed a political character without any intervention on the part of the socialists. The task of the Social-Democrats, however, is not exhausted by political agitation on an economic basis; their task is ''to convert'' trade-unionist politics into Social-Democratic political struggle, ''to utilise'' the sparks of political consciousness which the economic struggle generates among the workers, for the purpose of ''raising'' the workers to the level of ''Social-Democratic'' political consciousness. The Martynovs, however, instead of raising and stimulating the spontaneously awakening political consciousness of the workers, ''bow to spontaneity'' and repeat over and over ''ad nauseam'', that the economic struggle "Impels" the workers to realise their own lack of political rights. It is unfortunate, gentlemen, that the spontaneously awakening trade-unionist political consciousness does not "''impel''" you to an understanding of your Social-Democratic tasks.—''Lenin'' The "economic struggle of the workers against the employers and the government", about which you make as much fuss as if you had discovered a new America, is being waged in all parts of Russia, even the most remote, by the workers themselves who have heard about strikes, but who have heard almost nothing about socialism. The "activity" you want to stimulate among us workers, by advancing concrete demands that promise palpable results, we are already displaying and in our everyday, limited trade union work we put forward these concrete demands, very often without any assistance whatever from the intellectuals. But ''such'' activity is not enough for us; we are not children to be fed on the thin gruel of "economic" politics alone; we want to know everything that others know, we want to learn the details of ''all'' aspects of political life and to take part ''actively'' in every single political event. In order that we may do this, the intellectuals must talk to us less of what we already know.[12] and tell us more about what we do not yet know and what we can never learn from our factory and "economic" experience, namely, political knowledge. You intellectuals can acquire this knowledge, and it is your ''duty'' to bring it to us in a hundred- and a thousand-fold greater measure than you have done up to now; and you must bring it to us, not only in the form of discussions, pamphlets, and articles (which very often — pardon our frankness — are rather dull), but precisely in the form of vivid ''exposures'' of what our government and our governing classes are doing at this very moment in all spheres of life. Devote more zeal to carrying out this duty and talk less about "''raising the activity of the working masses''". We are far more active than you think, and we are quite able to support, by open street fighting, even demands that do not promise any "palpable results" whatever. It is not for you to "raise" our activity, because ''activity is precisely the thing you yourselves lack.'' Bow less in subservience to spontaneity, and think more about raising your own activity, gentlemen!

===What is there in common between economism and terrorism? ===
In the last footnote we cited the opinion of an Economist and of a non-Social -Democratic terrorist, who showed themselves to be accidentally in agreement. Speaking generally, however, there is not an accidental, but a necessary, inherent connection between the two, of which we shall have need to speak later, and which must be mentioned here in connection with the question of education for revolutionary activity. The Economists and the root, namely, ''subservience to spontaneity'', with which we dealt in the preceding chapter as a general phenomenon and which we shall now examine in relation to its effect upon political activity and the political struggle. At first sight, our assertion may appear paradoxical, so great is the difference between those who stress the "drab everyday struggle" and those who call for the most self sacrificing struggle of individuals. But this is no paradox. The Economists and the terrorists merely bow to different poles of spontaneity; the Economists bow to the spontaneity of "the labour movement pure and simple", while the terrorists bow to the spontaneity of the passionate indignation of intellectuals, who lack the ability or opportunity to connect the revolutionary struggle and the working-class movement into an integral whole. It is difficult indeed for those who have lost their belief, or who have never believed, that this is possible, to find some outlet for their indignation and revolutionary energy other than terror. Thus, both forms of subservience to spontaneity we have mentioned are nothing but ''the beginning of the implementation'' of the notorious ''Credo'' programme: Let the workers wage their "economic struggle against the employers and the government" (we apologise to the author of the ''Credo'' for expressing her views in Martynov’s words. We think we have a right to do so since the ''Credo'', too, says that in the economic struggle the workers "come up against the political regime and let the intellectuals conduct the political struggle by their own efforts — with the aid of terror, of course! This is an absolutely logical and inevitable ''conclusion'' which must be insisted on — ''even though those'' who are beginning to carry out this programme ''do not themselves realise'' that it is inevitable. Political activity has its logic quite apart from the consciousness of those who, with the best intentions, call either for terror or for lending the economic struggle itself a political character. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and, in this case, good intentions cannot save one from being spontaneously drawn "along the line of least resistance", along the line of the ''purely bourgeois Credo'' programme. Surely it is no accident either that many Russian liberals — avowed liberals and liberals that wear the mask of Marxism — whole-heartedly sympathise with terror and try to foster the terrorist moods that have surged up in the present time.

The formation of the Revolutionary-Socialist ''Svoboda'' Group which set itself the aim of helping the working-class movement in every possible way, but which included in its ''programme'' terror, and emancipation, so to speak, from Social-Democracy — once again confirmed the remarkable perspicacity of P. B. Axelrod, who ''literally foretold'' these results of Social-Democratic waverings ''as far back as the end of 1897 (Present Tasks and Tactics)'', when he outlined his famous "two perspectives". All the subsequent disputes and disagreements among Russian Social-Democrats are contained, like a plant in the seed, in these two perspectives.[13]

From this point of view it also becomes clear why ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', unable to withstand the spontaneity of Economism, has likewise been unable to withstand the spontaneity of terrorism. It is highly interesting to note here the specific arguments that ''Svoboda'' has advanced in defence of terrorism. It "completely denies" the deterrent role of terrorism (''The Regeneration of Revolutionism'', p. 64), but instead stresses its "excitative significance". This is characteristic, first, as representing one of the stages of the breakup and decline of the traditional (pre-Social-Democratic) cycle of ideas which insisted upon terrorism. The admission that the government cannot now be "terrified" and hence disrupted, by terror, is tantamount to a complete condemnation of terror as a system of struggle, as a sphere of activity sanctioned by the programme. Secondly, it is still more characteristic as an example of the failure to understand our immediate tasks in regard to "education for revolutionary activity". ''Svoboda'' advocates terror as a means of "exciting" the working-class movement and of giving it a "strong impetus". It is difficult to imagine an argument that more thoroughly disproves itself. Are there not enough outrages committed in Russian life without special "excitants" having to be invented? On the other hand, is it not obvious that those who are not, and cannot be, roused to excitement even by Russian tyranny will stand by "twiddling their thumbs" and watch a handful of terrorists engaged in single combat with the government? The fact is that the working masses are roused to a high pitch of excitement by the social evils in Russian life, but we are unable to gather, if one may so put it, and concentrate all these drops and streamlets of popular resentment that are brought forth to a far larger extent than we imagine by the conditions of Russian life, and that must be combined into a single gigantic torrent. That this can be accomplished is irrefutably proved by the enormous growth of the working-class movement and the eagerness, noted above, with which the workers clamour for political literature. On the other hand, calls for terror and calls to lend the economic struggle itself a political character are merely two different forms of ''evading'' the most pressing duty now resting upon Russian revolutionaries, namely, the organisation of comprehensive political agitation. ''Svoboda'' desires to ''substitute'' terror for agitation, openly admitting that "as soon as intensified and strenuous agitation is begun among the masses the excitative function of terror will be ended" (''The Regeneration of Revolutionism'', p. 68). This proves precisely that both the terrorists and the Economists ''underestimate'' the revolutionary activity of the masses, despite the striking evidence of the events that took place in the spring,[14] and whereas the one group goes out in search of artificial "excitants", the other talks about "concrete demands". But both fail to devote sufficient attention to the development of ''their own activity'' in political agitation and in the organisation of political exposures. And no other work can serve as a ''substitute'' for this task either at the present time or at any other.

===The working class as vanguard fighter for democracy===
We have seen that the conduct of the broadest political agitation and, consequently, of all-sided political exposures is an absolutely necessary and a ''paramount'' task of our activity, if this activity is to be truly Social-Democratic. However, we arrived at this conclusion solely on the grounds of the pressing needs of the working class for political knowledge and political training. But such a presentation of the question is too narrow, for it ignores the general democratic tasks of Social-Democracy, in particular of present-day Russian Social-Democracy. In order to explain the point more concretely we shall approach the subject from an aspect that is "nearest" to the Economist, namely, from the practical aspect. "Everyone agrees" that it is necessary to develop the political consciousness of the working class. The question is, ''how'' that is to be done and what is required to do it. The economic struggle merely "impels" the workers to realise the government’s attitude towards the working class. Consequently, ''however much we may try'' to "lend the economic, struggle itself a political character", ''we shall never be able'' to develop the political consciousness of the workers (to the level of Social-Democratic political consciousness) by keeping within the framework of the economic struggle, for ''that framework is too narrow.'' The Martynov formula has some value for us, not because it illustrates Martynov’s aptitude for confusing things, but because it pointedly expresses the basic error that all the Economists commit, namely, their conviction that it is possible to develop the class political consciousness of the workers ''from within'', so to speak, from their economic struggle, i.e., by making this struggle the exclusive (or, at least, the main) starting-point, by making it the exclusive (or, at least, the main) basis. Such a view is radically wrong. Piqued by our polemics against them, the Economists refuse to ponder deeply over the origins of these disagreements, with the result that we simply cannot understand one another. It is as if we spoke in different tongues.

Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers ''only from without'', that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships of ''all'' classes and strata to the state and the government, the sphere of the interrelations between ''all'' classes. For that reason, the reply to the question as to what must be done to bring political knowledge to the workers cannot be merely the answer with which, in the majority of cases, the practical workers, especially those inclined towards Economism, mostly content themselves, namely: "To go among the workers." To bring political knowledge to the ''workers'' the Social Democrats must ''go among all classes of the population''; they must dispatch units of their army ''in all directions''.

We deliberately select this blunt formula, we deliberately express ourselves in this sharply simplified manner, not because we desire to indulge in paradoxes, but in order to "impel" the Economists to a realisation of their tasks which they unpardonably ignore, to suggest to them strongly the difference between trade-unionist and Social-Democratic politics, which they refuse to understand. We therefore beg the reader not to get wrought up, but to hear us patiently to the end.

Let us take the type of Social-Democratic study circle that has become most widespread in the past few years and examine its work. It has "contacts with the workers" and rests content with this, issuing leaflets in which abuses in the factories, the government’s partiality towards the capitalists, and the tyranny of the police are strongly condemned. At workers’ meetings the discussions never, or rarely ever, go beyond the limits of these subjects. Extremely rare are the lectures and discussions held on the history of the revolutionary movement, on questions of the government’s home and foreign policy, on questions of the economic evolution of Russia and of Europe, on the position of the various classes in modern society, etc. As to systematically acquiring and extending contact with other classes of society, no one even dreams of that. In fact, the ideal leader, as the majority of the members of such circles picture him, is something far more in the nature of a trade union secretary than a socialist political leader. For the secretary of any, say English, trade union always helps the workers to carry on the economic struggle, he helps them to expose factory abuses, explains the injustice of the laws and of measures that hamper the freedom to strike and to picket (i. e., to warn all and sundry that a strike is proceeding at a certain factory), explains the partiality of arbitration court judges who belong to the bourgeois classes, etc., etc. In a word, every trade union secretary conducts and helps to conduct "the economic struggle against the employers and the government". It cannot be too strongly maintained that ''this is still not'' Social-Democracy, that the Social-Democrat’s ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but ''the tribune of the people'', who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth ''before all'' his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for ''all'' and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat. Compare, for example, a leader like Robert Knight (the well-known secretary and leader of the Boiler-Makers’ Society, one of the most powerful trade unions in England), with Wilhelm Liebknecht, and try to apply to them the contrasts that Martynov draws in his controversy with ''Iskra''. You will see — I am running through Martynov’s article — that Robert Knight engaged more in "calling the masses to certain concrete actions" (Martynov, op. cit., p. 39), while Willielin Liebknecht engaged more in "the revolutionary elucidation of the whole of the present system or partial manifestations of it" (38-39); that Robert Knight "formulated the immediate demands of the proletariat and indicated the means by which they can be achieved" (41), whereas Wilhelm Liebknecht, while doing this, did not hold back from "simultaneously guiding the activities of various opposition strata", "dictating a positive programme of action for them"[15] (41); that Robert Knight strove "as far as possible to lend the economic struggle itself a political character" (42) and was excellently able "to submit to the government concrete demands promising certain palpable results" (43), whereas Liebknecht engaged to a much greater degree in "one-sided" "exposures" (40); that Robert Knight attached more significance to the "forward march of the drab everyday struggle" (61), whereas Liebknecht attached more significance to the "propaganda of brilliant and completed ideas" (61); that Liebknecht converted the paper he was directing into "an organ of revolutionary opposition that exposed the state of affairs in our country, particularly the political state of affairs, insofar as it affected the interests of the most varied strata of the population" (63), whereas Robert Knight "worked for the cause of the working class in close organic connection with the proletarian struggle" (63) — if by "close and organic connection" is meant the subservience to spontaneity which we examined above, by taking the examples of Krichevsky and Martynov — and "restricted the sphere of his influence", convinced, of course, as is Martynov, that "by doing so he deepened that influence" (63). In a word, you will see that ''de facto'' Martynov reduces Social-Democracy to the level of trade-unionism, though he does so, of course, not because he does not desire the good of Social-Democracy, but simply because he is a little too much in a hurry to render Plekhanov more profound, instead of taking the trouble to understand him.

Let us return, however, to our theses. We said that a Social Democrat, if he really believes it necessary to develop comprehensively the political consciousness of the proletariat, must "go among all classes of the population". This gives rise to the questions: how is this to be done? have we enough forces to do this? is there a basis for such work among all the other classes? will this not mean a retreat, or lead to a retreat, from the class point of view? Let us deal with these questions.

We must "go among all classes of the population" as theoreticians, as proagandists, as agitators, and as organisers. Noone doubts that the theoretical work of Social-Democrats should aim at studying all the specific features of the social and political condition of the various classes. But extremely little is done in this direction as compared with the work that is done in studying the specific features of factory life. In the committees and study circles, one can meet people who are immersed in the study even of some special branch of the metal industry; but one can hardly ever find members of organisations (obliged, as often happens, for some reason or other to give up practical work) who are especially engaged in gathering material on some pressing question of social and political life in our country which could serve as a means for conducting Social-Democratic work among other strata of the population. In dwelling upon the fact that the majority of the present-day leaders of the working-class movement lack training, we cannot refrain from mentioning training in this respect also, for it too is bound up with the Economist conception of "close organic connection with the proletarian struggle". The principal thing, of course, is ''propaganda'' and ''agitation'' among all strata of the people. The work of the West European Social-Democrat is in this respect facilitated by the public meetings and rallies which ''all'' are free to attend, and by the fact that in parliament he addresses the representatives of ''all'' classes. We have neither a parliament nor freedom of assembly; nevertheless, we are able to arrange meetings of workers who desire to listen to ''a Social-Democrat''. We must also find ways and means of calling meetings of representatives of all social classes that desire to listen to ''a democrat''; for he is no Social-Democrat who forgets in practice that "the Communists support every revolutionary movement", that we are obliged for that reason to expound and emphasise ''general democratic tasks before the whole people'', without for a moment concealing our socialist convictions. He is no Social-Democrat who forgets in practice his obligation to be ''ahead of all'' in raising, accentuating, and solving ''every'' general democratic question.

"But everyone agrees with this!" the impatient reader will exclaim, and the new instructions adopted by the last conference of the Union Abroad for the Editorial Board of ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' definitely say: "All events of social and political life that affect the proletariat either directly as a special class or as ''the vanguard of all the revolutionary forces in the struggle for freedom'' should serve as subjects for political propaganda and agitation" (''Two Conferences'', p. 17, our italics). Yes, these are very true and very good words, and we would be fully satisfied if ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' understood them ''and if it refrained from saying in the next breath things that contradict them''. For it is not enough to call ourselves the "vanguard", the advanced contingent; we must act in such a way that all the other contingents recognise and are obliged to admit that we are marching in the vanguard. And we ask the reader: Are the representatives of the other "contingents" such fools as to take our word for it when we say that we are the "vanguard"? just picture to yourselves the following: a Social-Democrat comes to the "contingent" of Russian educated radicals, or liberal constitutionalists, and says, We are the vanguard; "the task confronting us now is, as far as possible, to lend the economic struggle itself a political character". The radical, or constitutionalist, if he is at all intelligent (and there are many intelligent men among Russian radicals and constitutionalists), would only smile at such a speech and would say (to himself, of course, for in the majority of cases he is an experienced diplomat): "Your ’vanguard’ must be made up of simpletons. They do not even understand that it is our task, the task of the progressive representatives of bourgeois democracy to lend the workers’ economic struggle ''itself'' a political character. Why, we too, like the West-European bourgeois, want to draw the workers into politics, ''but only into trade-unionist, not into Social-Democratic politics.'' Trade-unionist politics of the working class is precisely ''bourgeois politics'' of the working class, and this ‘vanguard’s’ formulation of its task is the formulation of trade-unionist politics! Let them call themselves Social-Democrats to their heart’s content, I am not a child to get excited over a label. But they must not fall under the influence of those pernicious orthodox doctrinaires, let them allow ’freedom of criticism’ to those who unconsciously are driving Social-Democracy into trade-unionist channels."

And the faint smile of our constitutionalist will turn into Homeric laughter when he learns that the Social-Democrats who talk of Social-Democracy as the vanguard, today, when spontaneity almost completely dominates our movement, fear nothing so much as "belittling the spontaneous element", as "underestimating the significance of the forward movement of the drab everyday struggle, as compared with the propaganda of brilliant and completed ideas", etc., etc.! A "vanguard" which fears that consciousness will outstrip spontaneity, which fears to put forward a bold "plan" that would compel general recognition even among those who differ with us. Are they not confusing "vanguard" with "rearguard"?

Indeed, let us examine the following piece of reasoning by Martynov. On page 40 he says that ''Iskra'' is one-sided in its tactics of exposing abuses, that "however much we may spread distrust and hatred of the government, we shall not achieve our aim until we have succeeded in developing sufficient active social energy for its overthrow". This, it may be said parenthetically, is the familiar solicitude for the activation of the masses, with a simultaneous striving to restrict one’s own activity. But that is not the main point at the moment. Martynov speaks here, accordingly, of ''revolutionary'' energy ("for overthrowing"). And what conclusion does he arrive at? Since in ordinary times various social strata inevitably march separately, "it is therefore, clear that we Social-Democrats cannot simultaneously guide the activities of various opposition strata, we cannot dictate to them a positive programme of action, we cannot point out to them in what manner they should wage a day-to-day struggle for their interests.... The liberal strata will themselves take care of the active struggle for their immediate interests, the struggle that will bring them face to face with our political regime" (p. 41). Thus, having begun with talk about revolutionary energy, about the active struggle for the overthrow of the autocracy, Martynov immediately turns toward trade union energy and active struggle for immediate interests! It goes without saying that we cannot guide the struggle of the students, liberals, etc., for their "immediate interests"; but this was not the point at issue, most worthy Economist! The point we were discussing was the possible and necessary participation of various social strata in the overthrow of the autocracy; and not only are we ''able'', but it is our bounden duty, to guide ''these'' "activities of the various opposition strata", if we desire to be the "vanguard". Not only will our students and liberals, etc., themselves take care of "the struggle that brings them face to face with our political regime"; the police and the officials of the autocratic government will see to this first and foremost. But if "we" desire to be front-rank democrats, we must make it our concern to ''direct'' the thoughts of those who are dissatisfied only with conditions at the university, or in the Zemstvo, etc., to the idea that the entire political system is worthless. ''We'' must take upon ourselves the task of organising an all-round political struggle under the leadership of our Party in such a manner as to make it possible for all oppositional strata to render their fullest support to the struggle and to our Party. ''We'' must train our Social-Democratic practical workers to become political leaders, able to guide all the manifestations of this all-round struggle, able at the right time to "dictate a positive programme of action" for the aroused students, the discontented Zemstvo people, the incensed religious sects, the offended elementary schoolteachers, etc., etc. For that reason, Martynov’s assertion that "with regard to these, we can function ''merely in the negative'' role of exposers of abuses... we can only dissipate their hopes in various government commissions" ''is completely false'' (our italics). By saying this, Martynov shows that he ''absolutely fails to understand'' the role that the revolutionary "vanguard" must really play. If the reader bears this in mind, he will be clear as to the ''real meaning'' of Martynov’s concluding remarks: "''Iskra'' is the organ of the revolutionary opposition which exposes the state of affairs in our country, particularly the political state of affairs, insofar as it affects the interests of the most varied strata of the population. We, however, work and will continue to work for the cause of the working class in close organic contact with the proletarian struggle. By restricting the sphere of our active influence we deepen that influence" (63). The true sense of this conclusion is as follows: ''Iskra'' desires ''to elevate'' the trade-unionist politics of the working class (to which, through misconception, through lack of training, or through conviction, our practical workers frequently confine themselves) to the level of Social-Democratic politics. ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', however, desires ''to degrade'' Social-Democratic politics to trade-unionist politics. Moreover, it assures the world that the two positions are "entirely compatible within the common cause" (63). ''0, sancta simplicitas!''

To proceed. Have we sufficient forces to direct our propaganda and agitation among ''all'' social classes? Most certainly. Our Economists, who are frequently inclined to deny this, lose sight of the gigantic progress our movement has made from (approximately) 1894 to 1901. Like real "tail-enders" they often go on living in the bygone stages of the movement’s inception. In the earlier period , indeed, we had astonishingly few forces, and it was perfectly natural and legitimate then to devote ourselves exclusively to activities among the workers and to condemn severely any deviation from this course. The entire task then was to consolidate our position in the working class. At the present time, however, gigantic forces have been attracted to the movement. The best representatives of the younger generation of the educated classes are coming over to us. Everywhere in the provinces there are people, resident there by dint of circumstance, who have taken part in the movement in the past or who desire to do so now and who, are gravitating towards Social-Democracy (whereas in 1894 one could count the Social-Democrats on the fingers of one’s hand). A basic political and organisational shortcoming of our movement is our ''inability'' to utilise all these forces and give them appropriate work (we shall deal with this more fully in the next chapter). The overwhelming majority of these forces entirely lack the opportunity of "going among the workers", so that there are no grounds for fearing that we shall divert forces from our main work. In order to be able to provide the workers with real, comprehensive, and live political knowledge, we must have "our own people", Social-Democrats, everywhere, among all social strata, and in all positions from which we can learn the inner springs of our state mechanism. Such people are required, not only for propaganda and agitation, but in a still larger measure for organisation.

Is there a basis for activity among all classes of the population? Whoever doubts this lags in his consciousness behind the spontaneous awakening of the masses. The working-class movement has aroused and is continuing to arouse discontent in some, hopes of support for the opposition in others, and in still others the realisation that the autocracy is unbearable and must inevitably fall. We would be "politicians" and Social-Democrats in name only (as all too often happens in reality), if we failed to realise that our task is to utilise every manifestation of discontent, and to gather and turn to the best account every protest, however small. This is quite apart from the fact that the millions of the labouring peasantry, handicraftsmen, petty artisans, etc., would always listen eagerly to the speech of any Social-Democrat who is at all qualified. Indeed, is there a single social class in which there are no individuals, groups, or circles that are discontented with the lack of rights and with tyranny and, therefore, accessible to the propaganda of Social-Democrats as the spokesmen of the most pressing general democratic needs? To those who desire to have a clear idea of what the political agitation of a Social-Democrat among ''all'' classes and strata of the population should be like, we would point to ''political exposures'' in the broad sense of the word as the principal (but, of course, not the sole) form of this agitation.<blockquote>"We must arouse in every section of the population that is at all politically conscious a passion for ''political'' exposure," I wrote in my article "Where To Begin" [''Iskra'', May (No. 4), 1901], with which I shall deal in greater detail later. "We must not be discouraged by the fact that the voice of political exposure is today so feeble, timid, and infrequent. This is not because of a wholesale submission to police despotism, but because those who are able and ready to make exposures have no tribune from which to speak, no eager and encouraging audience, they do not see anywhere among the people that force to which it would be worth while directing their complaint against the ’omnipotent’ Russian Government.... We are now in a position to provide a tribune for the nation-wide exposure of the tsarist government, and it is our duty to do this. That tribune must be a Social-Democratic newspaper."[16]</blockquote>The ideal audience for political exposure is the working class, which is first and foremost in need of all-round and live political knowledge, and is most capable of converting this knowledge into active struggle, even when that struggle does not promise "palpable results". A tribune for ''nation-wide'' exposures can be only an all-Russia newspaper. "Without a political organ, a political movement deserving that name is inconceivable in the Europe of today"; in this respect Russia must undoubtedly be included in present-day Europe. The press long ago became a power in our country, otherwise the government would not spend tens of thousands of rubles to bribe it and to subsidise the Katkovs and Meshcherskys. And it is no novelty in autocratic Russia for the underground press to break through the wall of censorship and ''compel'' the legal and conservative press to speak openly of it. This was the case in the seventies and even in the fifties. How much broader and deeper are now the sections of the people willing to read the illegal underground press, and to learn from it "how to live and how to die", to use the expression of a worker who sent a letter to ''Iskra'' (No. 7).[25] Political exposures are as much a declaration of war against the ''government'' as economic exposures are a declaration of war against the factory owners. The moral significance of this declaration of war will be all the greater, the wider and more powerful the campaign of exposure will be and the more numerous and determined the social ''class'' that has ''declared war in order to begin the war''. Hence, political exposures in themselves serve as a powerful instrument for ''disintegrating'' the system we oppose, as a means for diverting from the enemy his casual or temporary allies, as a means for spreading hostility and distrust among the permanent partners of the autocracy.

In our time only a party that will ''organise'' really ''nation-wide'' exposures can become the vanguard of the revolutionary forces. The word "nation-wide" has a very profound meaning. The overwhelming majority of the non-working- class exposers (be it remembered that in order to become the vanguard, we must attract other classes) are sober politicians and level-headed men of affairs. They know perfectly well how dangerous it is to "complain" even against a minor official, let alone against the "omnipotent" Russian Government. And they will come ''to us'' with their complaints only when they see that these complaints can really have effect, and that we represent ''a political force''. In order to become such a force in the eyes of outsiders, much persistent and stubborn work is required ''to raise'' our own consciousness, initiative, and energy.. To accomplish this it is not enough to attach a "vanguard" label to rearguard theory and practice.

But if we have to undertake the organisation of a really nationwide exposure of the government, in what way will then the class character of our movement be expressed? — the overzealous advocate of "close organic contact with the proletarian struggle" will ask us, as indeed he does. The reply is manifold: we Social-Democrats will organise these nation-wide exposures; all questions raised by the agitation will he explained in a consistently Social-Democratic spirit, without any concessions to deliberate or undeliberate distortions of Marxism; the all-round political agitation will be conducted by a party which unites into one inseparable whole the assault on the government in the name of the entire people, the revolutionary training of the proletariat, and the safeguarding of its political independence, the guidance of the economic struggle of the working class, and the utilisation of all its spontaneous conflicts with its exploiters which rouse and bring into our camp increasing numbers of the proletariat.

But a most characteristic feature of Economism is its failure to understand this connection, more, this identity of the most pressing need of the proletariat (a comprehensive political education through the medium of political agitation and political exposures) with the need of the general democratic movement. This lack of understanding is expressed, not only in "Martynovite" phrases, but in the references to a supposedly class point of view identical in meaning with these phrases. Thus, the authors of the Economist letter in ''Iskra'', No. 12, state:[17] [17] Lack of space has prevented us from replying in detail, in ''Iskra'', to this letter, which is highly characteristic of the Economists. We were very glad at its appearance, for the allegations that ''Iskra'' did not maintain a consistent class point of view had reached us long before that from various sources, and we were waiting for an appropriate occasion, or for a formulated expression of this fashionable charge, to give our reply. Moreover, it is our habit to reply to attacks, not by defence, but by counter-attack.—''Lenin'' "This basic drawback of ''Iskra'' (overestimation of ideology) is also the cause of its inconsistency on the question of the attitude of Social-Democracy to the various social classes and tendencies. By theoretical reasoning (not by "the growth of Party tasks, which grow together with the Party"), ''Iskra'' solved the problem of the immediate transition to the struggle against absolutism. In all probability it senses the difficulty of such a task for the workers under the present state of affairs (not only senses, but knows full well that this task appears less difficult to the workers than to the Economist intellectuals with their nursemaid concern, for the workers are prepared to fight even for demands which, to use the language of the never-to-be-forgotten Martynov, do not "promise palpable results") but lacking the patience to wait until the workers will have gathered sufficient forces for this struggle, ''Iskra'' begins to seek allies in the ranks of the liberals and intellectuals". . . .

Yes, we have indeed lost all "patience" "waiting" for the blessed time, long promised us by diverse "conciliators", when the Economists will have stopped charging the workers with their own backwardness and justifying their own lack of energy with allegations that the workers lack strength. We ask our Economists: What do they mean by "the gathering of workingclass strength for the struggle"? Is it not evident that this means the political training of the workers, so that all the aspects of our vile autocracy are revealed to them? And is it not clear that ''precisely for this work'' we need "allies in the ranks of the liberals and intellectuals", who are prepared to join us in the exposure of the political attack on the Zemstvos, on the teachers, on the statisticians, on the students, etc.? Is this surprisingly "intricate mechanism" really so difficult to understand? Has not P. B. Axelrod constantly repeated since 1897 that "the task before the Russian Social-Democrats of acquiring adherents and direct and indirect allies among the non-proletarian classes will be solved principally and primarily by the character of the propagandist activities conducted among the proletariat itself"? But the Martynovs and the other Economists continue to imagine that "by economic struggle against the employers and the government" the workers must ''first'' gather strength (for trade-unionist politics) and ''then'' "go over" — we presume from trade-unionist "training for activity" to Social-Democratic activity!

"...In this quest," continue the Economists, "''Iskra'' not infrequently departs from the class point of view, obscures class antagonisms, and puts into the forefront the common nature of the discontent with the government, although the causes and the degree of the discontent vary considerably among the ’allies’. Such, for example, is ''Iskra''’s attitude towards the Zemstvo . . ." ''Iskra'', it is alleged, "promises the nobles that are dissatisfied with the government’s sops the assistance of the working class, but it does not say a word about the class antagonism that exists between these social strata." If the reader will turn to the article "The Autocracy and the Zemstvo" (''Iskra'', Nos. 2 and 4), to which, ''in all probability'', the authors of the letter refer, he will find that they[18] deal with the attitude of the ''government'' towards the "mild agitation of the bureaucratic Zemstvo, which is based on the social-estates", and towards the "independent activity of even the propertied classes". The article states that the workers cannot look on indifferently while the government is waging a struggle against the Zemstvo, and the Zemstvos are called upon to stop making mild speeches and to speak firmly and resolutely when revolutionary Social-Democracy confronts the government in all its strength. What the authors of the letter do not agree with here is not clear. Do they think that the workers will "not understand" the phrases "propertied classes" and "bureaucratic Zemstvo based on the social-estates"? Do they think that ''urging'' the Zemstvo to abandon mild speeches and to speak firmly is "overestimating ideology"? Do they imagine the workers can "gather strength" for the struggle against the autocracy if they know nothing about the attitude of the autocracy towards the Zemstvo ''as well?'' All this too remains unknown. One thing alone is clear and that is that the authors of the letter have a very vague idea of what the political tasks of Social-Democracy are. This is revealed still more clearly by their remark: "Such, too, is ''Iskra''’s attitude towards the student movement" (i.e., it also "obscures the class antagonisms"). Instead of calling on the workers to declare by means of public demonstrations that the real breeding-place of unbridled violence, disorder, and outrage is not the university youth but the Russian Government (''Iskra'', No. 2[19]) we ought probably to have inserted arguments in the spirit of ''Rabochaya Mysl''! Such ideas were expressed by Social-Democrats in the autumn of 1901, after the events of February and March, on the eve of a fresh upsurge of the student movement, which reveals that even in this sphere the "spontaneous" protest against the autocracy is ''outstripping'' the conscious Social-Democratic leadership of the movement. The spontaneous striving of the workers to defend the students who are being assaulted by the police and the Cossacks surpasses the conscious activity of the Social-Democratic organisation!

"And yet in other articles," continue the authors of the letter, "''Iskra'' sharply condemns all compromise and defends, for instance, the intolerant conduct of the Guesdists." We would advise those who are wont so conceitedly and frivolously to declare that the present disagreements among the Social-Democrats are unessential and do not justify a split, to ponder these words. Is it possible for people to work together in the same organisation, when some among them contend that we have done extremely little to explain the hostility of the autocracy to the various classes and to inform the workers of the opposition displayed by the various social strata to the autocracy, while others among them see in this clarification a "compromise" — evidently a compromise with the theory of "economic struggle against the employers and the government"?

We urged the necessity of carrying the class struggle into the rural districts in connection with the fortieth anniversary of the emancipation of the peasantry (issue No. 3[20] and spoke of the irreconcilability of the local government bodies and the autocracy in relation to Witte’s secret Memorandum (No. 4). In connection with the new law we attacked the feudal landlords and the government which serves them (No. 8[21]) and we welcomed the illegal Zemstvo congress. We urged the Zemstvo to pass over from abject petitions (No. 8[22]) to struggle. We encouraged the students, who had begun to understand the need for the political struggle, and to undertake this struggle (No. 3), while, at the same time, we lashed out at the "outrageous incomprehension" revealed by the adherents of the "purely student" movement, who called upon the students to abstain from participating in the street demonstrations (No. 3, in connection with the manifesto issued by the Executive Committee of the Moscow students on February 25). We exposed the "senseless dreams" and the "lying hypocrisy" of the cunning liberals of ''Rossiya''[26] (No. 5), while pointing to the violent fury with which the government-gaoler persecuted "peaceful writers, aged professors, scientists, and well-known liberal Zemstvo members" (No. 5, "Police Raid on Literature"). We exposed the real significance of the programme of "state protection for the welfare of the workers" and welcomed the "valuable admission" that "it is better, by granting reforms from above, to forestall the demand for such reforms from below than to wait for those demands to be put forward" (No. 6[23]). We encouraged the protesting statisticians (No. 7) and censured the strike-breaking statisticians (No. 9). He who sees in these tactics an obscuring of the class-consciousness of the proletariat and ''a compromise with liberalism'' reveals his utter failure to understand the true significance of the programme of the ''Credo'' and ''carries out that programme de facto'', however much he may repudiate it. For by ''such an approach'' he drags Social-Democracy towards the "economic struggle against the employers and the government" and ''yields to liberalism'', abandons the task of actively intervening in every "liberal" issue and of determining ''his own'', Social-Democratic, attitude towards this question.

===Once more "slanderers", once more "mystifiers"===
These polite expressions, as the reader will recall, belong to ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', which in this way answers our charge that it "is indirectly preparing the ground for converting the working-class movement into an instrument of bourgeois democracy". In its simplicity of heart ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' decided that this accusation was nothing more than a polemical sally: these malicious doctrinaires are bent on saying all sorts of unpleasant things about us, and, what can be more unpleasant than being an instrument of bourgeois democracy? And so they print in bold type a "refutation": "Nothing but downright slander", "mystification", "mummery" (''Two Conferences'', pp. 30, 31, 33). Like Jove, ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' (although bearing little resemblance to that deity) is wrathful because it is wrong, and proves by its hasty abuse that it is incapable of understanding its opponents’ mode of reasoning. And yet, with only a little reflection it would have understood why ''any'' subservience to the spontaneity of the mass movement and ''any'' degrading of Social-Democratic politics to the level of trade-unionist politics mean preparing the ground for converting the working-class movement into an instrument of bourgeois democracy. The spontaneous working-class movement is by itself able to create (and inevitably does create) only trade-unionism, and working-class trade-unionist politics is precisely working-class bourgeois politics. The fact that the working class participates in the political struggle, and even in the political revolution, does not in itself make its politics Social-Democratic politics. Will ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' make bold to deny this? Will it, at long last, publicly, plainly, and without equivocation explain how it understands the urgent questions of international and of Russian Social-Democracy? Hardly. It will never do anything of the kind, because it holds fast to the trick, which might be described as the "not here" method — "It’s not me, it’s not my horse, I’m not the driver. We are not Economists; ''Rabochaya Mysl'' does not stand for E’conomism; there is no Economism at all in Russia." This is a remarkably adroit and "political" trick, which suffers from the slight defect, however, that the publications practising it are usually nicknamed, "At your service, sir".

''Rabocheye Dyelo'' imagines that bourgeois democracy in Russia is, in general, merely a "phantom" (''Two Conferences'', p. 32).[24] [24] There follows a reference to the "concrete Russian conditions which fatalistically impel the working-class movement on to the revolutionary path". But these people refuse to understand that the revolutionary path of the working-class movement might not be a Social-Democratic path. When absolutism reigned, the entire West-European bourgeoisie "impelled", deliberately impelled, the workers on to the path of revolution. We Social-Democrats, however, cannot be satisfied with that. And if we, by any means whatever, degrade Social-Democratic politics to the level of spontaneous trade-unionist politics, we thereby play into the hands of bourgeois democracy.—''Lenin'' Happy people! Ostrich-like, they bury their heads in the sand and imagine that everything around has disappeared. Liberal publicists who month after month proclaim to the world their triumph over the collapse and even the disappearance of Marxism; liberal newspapers (''S. Peterburgskiye Vedomosti'',[27] ''Russkiye Vedomosti'', and many others) which encourage the liberals who bring to the workers the Brentano[28] conception of the class struggle and the trade-unionist conception of politics; the galaxy of critics of Marxism, whose real tendencies were so very well disclosed by the ''Credo'' and whose literary products alone circulate in Russia without let or hindrance; the revival of revolutionary ''non''-Social-Democratic tendencies, particularly after the February and March events — all these, apparently, are just phantoms! All these have nothing at all to do with bourgeois democracy!

''Rabocheye Dyelo'' and the authors of the Economist letter published in ''Iskra'', No. 12, should "ponder over the reason why the events of the spring brought about such a revival of revolutionary non-Social-Democratic tendencies instead of increasing the authority and the prestige of Social-Democracy".

The reason lies in the fact that we failed to cope with our tasks. The masses of the workers proved to be more active than we. We lacked adequately trained revolutionary leaders and organisers possessed of a thorough knowledge of the mood prevailing among all the opposition strata and able to head the movement, to turn a spontaneous demonstration into a political one, broaden its political character, etc. Under such circumstances, our backwardness will inevitably be utilised by the more mobile and more energetic non-Social-Democratic revolutionaries, and the workers, however energetically and self-sacrificingly they may fight the police and the troops, however revolutionary their actions may be, will prove to be merely a force supporting those revolutionaries, the rearguard of bourgeois democracy, and not the Social-Democratic vanguard. Let us take, for example, the German Social-Democrats, whose weak aspects alone our Economists desire to emulate. Why is there ''not a single'' political event in Germany that does not add to the authority and prestige of Social-Democracy? Because Social-Democracy is always found to be in advance of all others in furnishing the most revolutionary appraisal of every given event and in championing every protest against tyranny. It does not lull itself with arguments that the economic struggle brings the workers to realise that they have no political rights and that the concrete conditions unavoidably impel the working-class movement on to the path of revolution. It intervenes in every sphere and in every question of social and political life; in the matter of Wilhelm’s refusal to endorse a bourgeois progressist as city mayor (our Economists have not yet managed to educate. the Germans to the understanding that such an act is, in fact, a compromise with liberalism!); in the matter of the law against "obscene" publications and pictures; in the matter of governmental influence on the election of professors, etc., etc. Everywhere the Social-Democrats are found in the forefront, rousing political discontent among all classes, rousing the sluggards, stimulating the laggards, and providing a wealth of material for the development of the political consciousness and the political activity of the proletariat. As a result, even the avowed enemies of socialism are filled with respect for this advanced political fighter, and not infrequently an important document from bourgeois, and even from bureaucratic and Court circles, makes its way by some miraculous means into the editorial office of ''Vorwarts.''

This, then, is the resolution of the seeming "contradiction" that surpasses ''Rabocheye Dyelo''’s powers of understanding to such an extent that it can only throw up its hands and cry, "Mummery!" Indeed, just think of it: We, ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', regard the ''mass'' working-class movement as the ''corner-stone'' (and say so in bold type!); we warn all and sundry against belittling the significance of the element of spontaneity; we desire to lend the economic struggle itself — ''itself'' — a political character; we desire to maintain close and organic contact with the proletarian struggle. And yet we are told that we are preparing the ground for the conversion of the working-class movement into an instrument of bourgeois democracy! And who are they that presume to say this? People who "compromise" with liberalism by intervening in every "liberal" issue (what a gross misunderstanding of "organic contact with the proletarian struggle"!), by devoting so much attention to the students and even (oh horror!) to the Zemstvos! People who in general wish to devote a greater percentage (compared with the Economists) of their efforts to activity among non-proletarian classes of the population! What is this but "mummery"?

Poor ''Rabocheye Dyelo!'' Will it ever find the solution to this perplexing puzzle?

== The primitiveness of the economists and the organization of the revolutionaries ==
''Rabocheye Dyelo’s'' assertions, which we have analyzed, that the economic struggle is the most widely applicable means of political agitation and that our task now is to lend the economic struggle itself a political character, etc., express a narrow view, not only of our political, but also of our organizational tasks. The "economic struggle against the employers and the government" does not at all require an all-Russia centralized organization, and hence this struggle can never give rise to such an organization as will combine, in one general assault, all the manifestations of political opposition, protest, and indignation, an organization that will consist of professional revolutionaries and be led by the real political leaders of the entire people. This stands to reason. The character of any organization is naturally and inevitably determined by the content of its activity. Consequently, ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', by the assertions analyzed above, sanctifies and legitimizes not only narrowness of political activity, but also of organizational work. In this case, ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', as always, proves itself an organ whose consciousness yields to spontaneity. Yet subservience to spontaneously developing forms of organisation, failure to realise the narrowness and primitiveness of our organisational work, of our "handicraft" methods in this most important sphere, failure to realise this, I say, is a veritable ailment from which our movement suffers. It is not an ailment that comes with decline, but one, of course, that comes with growth. It is however at the present time, when the wave of spontaneous indignation, as it were, is sweeping over us, leaders and organisers of the movement, that an irreconcilable struggle must be waged against all defence of backwardness, against any legitimation of narrowness in this matter. It is particularly necessary to arouse in all who participate in practical work, or are preparing to take up that work, discontent with the ''amateurism'' prevailing among us and an unshakable determination to rid ourselves of it.

===What is primitiveness?===
We shall try to answer this question by giving a brief description of the activity of a typical Social-Democratic study circle of the period 1894-1901. We have noted that the entire student youth of the period was absorbed in Marxism. Of course, these students were not only, or even not so much, interested in Marxism as a theory; they were interested in it as an answer to the question, "What is to be done?", as a call to take the field against the enemy. These new warriors marched to battle with astonishingly primitive equipment and training. In a vast number of cases they had almost no equipment and absolutely no training. They marched to war like peasants from the plough, armed only with clubs. A students’ circle establishes contacts with workers and sets to work, without any connection with the old members of the movement, without any connection with study circles in other districts, or even in other parts of the same city (or in other educational institutions), without any organisation of the various divisions of revolutionary work, without any systematic plan of activity covering any length of time. The circle gradually expands its propaganda and agitation; by its activities it wins the sympathies of fairly large sections of workers and of a certain section of the educated strata, which provide it with money and from among whom the "committee" recruits new groups of young people. The attractive power of the committee (or League of Struggle) grows, its sphere of activity becomes wider, and the committee expands this activity quite spontaneously; the very people who a year or a few months previously spoke at the students’ circle gatherings and discussed the question, "Whither?", who established and maintained contacts with the workers and wrote and published leaflets, now, establish contacts with other groups of revolutionaries, procure literature, set to work to publish a local newspaper, begin to talk of organising a demonstration, and finally turn to open warfare (which may, according to circumstances, take the form of issuing the first agitational leaflet or the first issue of a newspaper, or of organising the first demonstration). Usually the initiation of such actions ends in an immediate and complete fiasco. Immediate and complete, because this open warfare was not the result of a systematic and carefully thought-out and gradually prepared plan for a prolonged and stubborn struggle, but simply the result of the spontaneous growth of traditional study circle work; because, naturally, the police, in almost every case, knew the principal leaders of the local movement, since they had already "gained a reputation" for themselves in their student days, and the police waited only for the right moment to make their raid. They deliberately allowed the study circle sufficient time to develop its work so that they might, obtain a palpable ''corpus delicti'', and they always permitted several of the persons known to them to remain at liberty "for breeding" (which, as far as I know, is the technical term used both by our people and by the gendarmes). One cannot help comparing this kind of warfare with that conducted by a mass of peasants, armed with clubs, against modern troops. And one can only wonder at the vitality of the movement which expanded, grew, and scored victories despite the total lack of training on the part of the fighters. True, from the historical point of view, the primitiveness of equipment was not only inevitable at first, but ''even legitimate'' as one of the conditions for the wide recruiting of fighters, but as soon as serious war operations began (and they began in fact with the strikes in the summer of 1896), the defects in our fighting organisations made themselves felt to an ever-increasing degree. The government, at first thrown into confusion and committing a number of blunders (e.g., its appeal to the public describing the misdeeds of the socialists, or the banishment of workers from the capitals to provincial industrial centres), very soon adapted itself to the new conditions of the struggle and managed to deploy well its perfectly equipped detachments of ''agents provocateurs'', spies, and gendarmes. Raids became so frequent, affected such a vast number of people, and cleared out the local study circles so thoroughly that the masses of the workers lost literally all their leaders, the movement assumed an amazingly sporadic character, and it became utterly impossible to establish continuity and coherence in the work. The terrible dispersion of the local leaders; the fortuitous character of the study circle memberships; the lack of training in, and the narrow outlook on, theoretical, political, and organisational questions were all the inevitable result of the conditions described above. Things have reached such a pass that in several places the workers, because of our lack of self-restraint and the inability to maintain secrecy, begin to lose faith in the intellectuals and to avoid them; the intellectuals, they say, are much too careless and cause police raids!

Anyone who has the slightest knowledge of the movement is aware that all thinking Social-Democrats have at last begun to regard these amateurish methods as a disease. In order that the reader who is not acquainted with the movement may have no grounds for thinking that we are "inventing" a special stage or special disease of the movement, we shall refer once again to the witness we have quoted. We trust we shall be forgiven for the length of the passage:<blockquote>"While the gradual transition to more extensive practical activity," writes B-v in ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', No. 6, "a transition that is directly dependent on the general transitional period through which the Russian working-class movement is now passing, is a characteristic feature, . . . there is, however, another, no less interesting feature in the general mechanism of the Russian workers’ revolution. ''We refer to the general lack of revolutionary forces fit for action'', [all italics ours — Lenin] which is felt not only in St. Petersburg, but throughout Russia. With the general revival of the working-class movement, with the general development of the working masses, with the growing frequency of strikes, with the increasingly open mass struggle of the workers, and with the intensified government persecution, arrests, deportation, and exile, this ''lack of highly skilled revolutionary forces is becoming more and more marked'' and, without a doubt, ''cannot but affect the depth and the general character of the movement.'' Many strikes take place without any strong and direct influence upon them by the revolutionary organisations.... A shortage of agitational leaflets and illegal literature Is felt.... The workers’ study circles are left without agitators.... In addition, there is a constant dearth of funds. In a word, ''the growth of the working class movement is outstripping the growth and development of the revolutionary organisations.'' The numerical strength of the active revolutionaries is too small to enable them to concentrate in their own hands the influence exercised upon the whole mass of discontented workers, or to give this discontent even a shadow of coherence and organisation.... The separate study circles, the separate revolutionaries, scattered, uncombined, do not represent a single, strong, and disciplined organisation with proportionately developed parts. . . ." Admitting that the immediate organization of fresh study circles to replace those that have been broken up merely proves the vitality of the movement ... but does not prove the existence of an adequate number of adequately prepared revolutionary workers, the author concludes: "The lack of practical training among the St. Petershurg revolutionaries is seen in the results of their work. The recent trials, especially that of the Self-Emancipation Group and the Labour-against-Capital group,<ref group="note">The full name of this small organisation was ''Workers’ Group for the Struggle Against Capital''; its views were close to those of the “Economists”. The group was formed in St. Petersburg in the spring of 1899; it prepared a mimeographed leaflet, “Our Programme”, which was never circulated, owing to the arrest of the group.</ref> clearly showed that the young agitator, lacking a detailed knowledge of working class conditions and, consequently, of the conditions under which agitation can be carried on in a given factory, ignorant of the principles of secrecy, and understanding only the general principles of Social-Democracy [if he does], is able to carry on his work for perhaps four, five, or six months. Then come arrests, which frequently lead to the break-up of the entire organisation, or at all events, of part of it. The question arises, therefore, can the group conduct successful activity if its existence is measured by months?... Obviously, the defects of the existing organisations cannot be wholly ascribed to the transitional period.... Obviously, the numerical, and above all the qualitative, make-up of the functioning organisations is no small factor, and the first task our Social-Democrats must undertake ... is that of ''effectively combining the organisations and making a strict selection of their membership."''</blockquote>

===Primitiveness and economism===
We must now deal with a question that has undoubtedly come to the mind of every reader. Can a connection be established between primitiveness as growing pains that affect the ''whole'' movement, and Economism, which is ''one'' of the currents in Russian Social-Democracy? We think that it can. Lack of practical training, of ability to carry on organisational work is certainly common ''to us all'', including those who have from the very outset unswervingly stood for revolutionary Marxism. Of course, were it only lack of practical training, no one could blame the practical workers. But the term "primitiveness" embraces something more than lack of training; it denotes a narrow scope of revolutionary work generally, failure to understand that a good organisation of revolutionaries cannot be built on the basis of such narrow activity, and lastly — and this is the main thing — attempts to justify this narrowness and to elevate it to a special "theory", i.e., subservience to spontaneity on this question too. Once such attempts were revealed, it became clear that primitiveness is connected with Economism and that we shall never rid ourselves of this narrowness of our organisational activity until we rid ourselves of Economism generally (i.e., the narrow conception of Marxist theory, as well as of the role of Social-Democracy and of its political tasks). These attempts manifested themselves in a twofold direction. Some began to say that the working masses themselves have not yet advanced the broad and militant political tasks which the revolutionaries are attempting to "impose" on them; that they must continue to struggle for ''immediate'' political demands, to conduct "the economic struggle against the employers and the government"<ref group="Lenin">''Rabochaya Mysl'' and ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', especially the ''Reply'' to Plekhanov.</ref> (and, naturally, corresponding to this struggle which is "accessible" to the mass movement there must be an organisation that will be "accessible" to the most untrained youth). Others, far removed from any theory of "gradualness", said that it is possible and necessary to "bring about a political revolution", but that this does not require building a strong organisation of revolutionaries to train the proletariat in steadfast and stubborn struggle. All we need do is to snatch up our old friend, the "accessible" cudgel. To drop metaphor, it means that we must organise a general strike,<ref group="Lenin">See “Who Will Bring About the Political Revolution?” in the collection published in Russia, entitled ''The Proletarian Struggle.'' Re-issued by the Kiev Committee.</ref> or that we must stimulate the "spiritless" progress of the working-class movement by means of "excitative terror".<ref group="Lenin">''Regeneration of Revolutionism'' and the journal ''Svoboda''.</ref> Both these trends, the opportunists and the "revolutionists", bow to the prevailing amateurism; neither believes that it can be eliminated, neither understands our primary and imperative practical task to establish ''an organisation of revolutionaries'' capable of lending energy, stability, and continuity to the political struggle.

We have quoted the words of B-v: "The growth of the working-class movement is outstripping the growth and development of the revolutionary organisations." This "valuable remark of a close observer" (''Rabocheye Dyelo''’s comment on B-v’s article) has a twofold value for us. It shows that we were right in our opinion that the principal cause of the present crisis in Russian Social-Democracy is the ''lag of the leaders'' ("ideologists", revolutionaries, Social-Democrats) behind ''the spontaneous upsurge of the masses''. It shows that all the arguments advanced by the authors of the Economist letter (in ''Iskra'', No. 12), by Krichevsky and by Martynov, as to the danger of belittling the significance of the spontaneous element, of the drab everyday struggle, as to tactics-as-process, etc., are nothing more than a glorification and a defence of primitiveness. These people who cannot pronounce the word "theoretician" without a sneer, who describe their genuflections to common lack of training and backwardness as a "sense for the realities of life", reveal in practice a failure to understand our most imperative ''practical'' tasks. To laggards they shout: Keep in step! Don’t run ahead! To people suffering from a lack of energy and initiative in organisational work, from a lack of "plans" for wide and bold activity, they prate about "tactics-as-process"! The worst sin we commit is that we ''degrade'' our political ''and organisational'' tasks to the level of the immediate, "palpable", "concrete" interests of the everyday economic struggle; yet they keep singing to us the same refrain: Lend the economic struggle itself a political character! We repeat: this kind of thing displays as much "sense for the realities of life" as was displayed by the hero in the popular fable who cried out to a passing funeral procession, "Many happy returns of the day!"

Recall the matchless, truly "Narcissus-like" superciliousness with which these wiseacres lectured Plekhanov on the "workers’ ''circles'' generally" (sic!) being "unable to cope with political tasks in the real and ''practical'' sense of the word, i.e., in the sense of the expedient and successful ''practical'' struggle for political demands" (''Rabocheye Dyelo’s Reply,'' p. 24). There are circles and circles, gentlemen! Circles of "amateurs" are not, of course, capable of coping with political tasks so long as they have not become aware of their amateurism and do not abandon it. If, besides this, these amateurs are enamoured of their primitive methods, and insist on writing the word "practical" in italics, and imagine that being practical demands that one’s tasks be reduced to the level of understanding of the most backward strata of the masses, then they are hopeless amateurs and, of course, certainly cannot ''in general cope with any political tasks''. But a circle of leaders, of the type of Alexeyev and Myshkin, of Khalturin and Zhelyabov, is capable of coping with political tasks in the genuine and most practical sense of the term, for the reason and to the extent that their impassioned propaganda meets with response among the spontaneously awakening masses, and their sparkling energy is answered and supported by the energy of the revolutionary class. Plekhanov was profoundly right, not only in pointing to this revolutionary class and proving that its spontaneous awakening was inevitable, but in setting even the "workers’ circles" a great and lofty political task. But you refer to the mass movement that has sprung up since that time in order to ''degrade'' this task, to ''curtail'' the energy and scope of activity of the "workers’ circles". If you are not amateurs enamoured of your primitive methods, what are you then? You boast that you are practical, but you fail to see what every Russian practical worker knows, namely, the miracles that the energy, not only of a circle, but even of an individual person is able to perform in the revolutionary cause. Or do you think that our movement cannot produce leaders like those of the seventies? If so, why do you think so? Because we lack training? But we are training ourselves, we will go on training ourselves, and we will be trained! Unfortunately it is true that the surface of the stagnant waters of the "economic struggle against the employers and the government" is overgrown with fungus; people have appeared among us who kneel in prayer to spontaneity, gazing with awe (to take an expression from Plekhanov) upon the "posterior" of the Russian proletariat. But we will get rid of this fungus. The time has come when Russian revolutionaries, guided by a genuinely revolutionary theory, relying upon the genuinely revolutionary and spontaneously awakening class, can at last — at long last! — rise to full stature in all their giant strength. All that is required is for the masses of our practical workers, and the still larger masses of those who dreamed of practical work when they were still at school, to pour scorn and ridicule upon any suggestion that may be made to degrade our political tasks and to restrict the scope of our organisational work. And we will achieve that, rest assured, gentlemen!

In the article "Where To Begin", I wrote in opposition to ''Rabocheye Dyelo'': "The tactics of agitation in relation to some special question, or the tactics with regard to some detail of party organisation may be changed in twenty-four hours; but only people devoid of all principle are capable of changing, in twenty-four hours, or, for that matter, in twenty-four months, their view on the necessity — in general, constantly, and absolutely — of an organisation of struggle and of political agitation among the masses."<ref group="note">See ''Collected Works'', Vol. 5, p. 18</ref> To this ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' replied: "This, the only one of ''Iskra''’s charges that makes a pretence of being based on facts, is totally without foundation. Readers of ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' know very well that from the outset we not only called for political agitation, without waiting for the appearance of ''Iskra'' ... [saying at the same time that not only the workers’ study circles, "but also the mass working-class movement could not regard as its first political task the overthrow of absolutism", but only the struggle for immediate political demands, and that "the masses begin to understand immediate political demands after one, or at all events, after several strikes"], . . . but that with our publications which we furnished from abroad for the comrades working in Russia, we provided the ''only'' Social-Democratic political and agitational material ... [and in this sole material you not only based the widest political agitation exclusively on the economic struggle, but you even went to the extent of claiming that this restricted agitation was the "most widely applicable". And do you not observe, gentlemen, that your own argument — that this was the ''only'' material provided — proves the necessity for ''Iskra''’s appearance, and its struggle against ''Rabocheye Dyelo''?].... On the other hand, our publishing activity actually prepared the ground for the tactical unity of the Party... [unity in the conviction that tactics is a process of growth of Party tasks that grow together with the Party? A precious unity indeed!]... and by that rendered possible the creation of a ’militant organisation’ for which the Union Abroad did all that an organisation abroad could do" (''Rabocheye Dyelo'', No. 10, p. 15). A vain attempt at evasion! I would never dream of denying that you did all you possibly could. I have asserted and assert now that the ''limits'' of what is "possible" for you to do are restricted by the narrowness of your outlook. It is ridiculous to talk of a "militant organisation" to fight for "immediate political demands", or to conduct the economic struggle against the employers and the government".

But if the reader wishes to see the pearls of "Economist" infatuation with amateurism, he must, of course, turn from the eclectic and vacillating ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' to the consistent and determined ''Rabochaya Mysl''. In its ''Separate Supplement'', p. 13, R. M. wrote: "Now two words about the so-called revolutionary intelligentsia proper. True, on more than one occasion it has proved itself prepared ’to enter into determined battle with tsarism’. The unfortunate thing, however, is that our revolutionary intelligentsia, ruthlessly persecuted by the political police, imagined the struggle against the political police to be the political struggle against the autocracy. That is why, to this day, it cannot understand ’where the forces for the struggle against the autocracy are to be obtained’."

Truly matchless is the lofty contempt for the struggle against the police displayed by this worshipper (in the worst sense of the word) of the ''spontaneous'' movement! He is prepared ''to justify'' our inability to organise secret activity by the argument that with the spontaneous mass movement it is not at all important for us to struggle against the political police! Very few people indeed would subscribe to this appalling conclusion; to such an extent have our deficiencies in revolutionary organisations become a matter of acute importance. But if Martynov, for example, refuses to subscribe to this, it will only be because he is unable, or lacks the courage, to think out his ideas to their logical conclusion. Indeed, does the "task" of advancing concrete demands by the masses, demands that promise palpable results, call for special efforts to create a stable, centralised, militant organisation of revolutionaries? Cannot such a "task" be carried out even by masses that do not "struggle against the political police" at all? Could this task, moreover, be fulfilled if, in addition to the few leaders, it were not undertaken by such workers (the overwhelming majority) as are quite ''incapable'' of "struggling against the political police"? Such workers, average people of the masses, are capable of displaying enormous energy and selfsacrifice in strikes and in street, battles with the police and the troops, and are capable (in fact, are alone capable) of ''determining'' the outcome of our entire movement — but the struggle against the ''political'' police requires special qualities; it requires ''professional'' revolutionaries. And we must see to it, not only that the masses "advance" concrete demands, but that the masses of the workers "advance" an increasing number of such professional revolutionaries. Thus, we have reached the question of the relation between an organisation of professional revolutionaries and the labour movement pure and simple. Although this question has found little reflection in literature, it has greatly engaged us "politicians" in conversations and polemics with comrades who gravitate more or less towards Economism. It is a question meriting special treatment. But before taking it up, let us offer one further quotation by way of illustrating our thesis on the connection between primitiveness and Economism.

In his ''Reply'', Mr. N. N.<ref group="note">''N. N.''—pseudonym of S. N. Prokopovich, an active “Economist” who later became a Cadet.</ref> wrote: "The Emancipation of Labour group demands direct struggle against the government without first considering where the material forces for this struggle are to be obtained, and without indicating the ''path of the struggle''." Emphasising the last words, the author adds the following footnote to the word "Path": "This cannot be explained by purposes of secrecy, because the programme does not refer to a plot but to ''a mass movement.'' And the masses cannot proceed by secret paths. Can we conceive of a secret strike? Can we conceive of secret demonstrations and petitions?" (''Vademecum'', p. 59.) Thus, the author comes quite close to the question of the "material forces" (organisers of strikes and demonstrations) and to the "paths" of the struggle, but, nevertheless, is still in a state of consternation, because he "worships" the mass movement, i.e., he regards it as something that ''relieves'' us of the necessity of conducting revolutionary activity and not as something that should encourage us and ''stimulate'' our revolutionary activity. It is impossible for a strike to remain a secret to those participating in it and to those immediately associated with it, but it may (and in the majority of cases does) remain a "secret" to the masses of the Russian workers, because the government takes care to cut all communication with the strikers, to prevent all news of strikes from spreading. Here indeed is where a special "struggle against the political police" is required, a struggle that can never be conducted actively by such large masses as take part in strikes. This struggle must be organised, according to "all the rules of the art", by people who are professionally engaged in revolutionary activity. The fact that the masses are spontaneously being drawn into the movement does not make the organisation of this struggle ''less necessary''. On the contrary, it makes it ''more necessary;'' for we socialists would be failing in our direct duty to the masses if we did not prevent the police from making a secret of every strike and every demonstration (and if we did not ourselves from time to time secretly prepare strikes and demonstrations). And we ''will succeed in doing this'', because the spontaneously awakening masses will ''also produce'' increasing, numbers of "professional revolutionaries" ''from their own ranks'' (that is, if we do not take it into our heads to advise the workers to keep on marking time).

===Organisation of workers and organisation of revolutionaries===
It is only natural to expect that for a Social-Democrat whose conception of the political struggle coincides with the conception of the "economic struggle against the employers and the government", the "organisation of revolutionaries" will more or less coincide with the "organisation of workers". This, in fact, is what actually happens; so that when we speak of organisation, we literally speak in different tongues. I vividly recall, for example, a conversation I once had with a fairly consistent Economist, with whom I had not been previously acquainted. We were discussing the pamphlet, ''Who Will Bring About the Political Revolution?'' and were soon of a mind that its principal defect was its ignoring of the question of organisation. We had begun to assume full agreement between us; but, as the conversation proceeded, it became evident that we were talking of different things. My interlocutor accused the author of ignoring strike funds, mutual benefit societies, etc., whereas I had in mind an organisation of revolutionaries as an essential factor in "bringing about" the political revolution. As soon as the disagreement became clear, there was hardly, as I remember, a single question of principle upon which I was in agreement with the Economist!

What was the source of our disagreement? It was the fact that on questions both of organisation and of politics the Economists are forever lapsing from Social-Democracy into trade-unionism. The political struggle of Social-Democracy is far more extensive and complex than the economic struggle of the workers against the employers and the government. Similarly (indeed for that reason), the organisation of the revolutionary Social-Democratic Party must inevitably be of ''a kind different'' from the organisation of the workers designed for this struggle. The workers’ organisation must in the first place be a trade union organisation; secondly, it must be as broad as possible; and thirdly, it must be as public as conditions will allow (here, and further on, of course, I refer only to absolutist Russia). On the other hand, the organisation of the revolutionaries must consist first and foremost of people who make revolutionary activity their profession (for which reason I speak of the organisation of ''revolutionaries'', meaning revolutionary Social-Democrats). In view of this common characteristic of the members of such an organisation, ''all distinctions as between workers and intellectuals'', not to speak of distinctions of trade and profession, in both categories, ''must be effaced''. Such an organisation must perforce not be very extensive and must be as secret as possible. Let us examine this threefold distinction.

In countries where political liberty exists the distinction between a trade union and a political organisation is clear enough, as is the distinction between trade unions and Social-Democracy. The relations between the latter and the former will naturally vary in each country according to historical, legal, and other conditions; they may be more or less close, complex, etc. (in our opinion they should be as close and as little complicated as possible); but there can be no question in free countries of the organisation of trade unions coinciding with the organisation of the Social-Democratic Party. In Russia, however, the yoke of the autocracy appears at first glance to obliterate all distinctions between the Social-Democratic organisation and the workers’ associations, since ''all'' workers’ associations and ''all'' study circles are prohibited, and since the principal manifestation and weapon of the workers’ economic struggle — the strike — is regarded as a criminal (and sometimes even as a political!) offence. Conditions in our country, therefore, on the one hand, strongly "impel" the workers engaged in economic struggle to concern themselves with political questions, and, on the other, they "impel" Social-Democrats to confound trade-unionism with Social-Democracy (and our Krichevskys, Martynoys, and Co., while diligently discussing the first kind of "impulsion", fail to notice the second). Indeed, picture to yourselves people who are immersed ninety-nine per cent in "the economic struggle against the employers and the government". Some of them will never, during the ''entire'' course of their activity (from four to six months), be impelled to think of the need for a more complex organisation of revolutionaries. Others, perhaps, will come across the fairly widely distributed Bernsteinian literature, from which they will become convinced of the profound importance of the forward movement of "the drab everyday struggle". Still others will be carried away, perhaps, by the seductive idea of showing the world a new example of "close and organic contact with the proletarian struggle" — contact between the trade union and the Social Democratic movements. Such people may argue that the later a country enters the arena of capitalism and, consequently, of the working-class movement, the more the socialists in that country may take part in, and support, the trade union movement, and the less the reason for the existence of non-Social-Democratic trade unions. So far the argument is fully correct; unfortunately, however, some go beyond that and dream of a complete fusion of Social-Democracy with trade-unionism. We shall soon see, from the example of the Rules of the St. Petersburg League of Struggle, what a harmful effect such dreams have upon our plans of organisation.

The workers’ organisations for the economic struggle should be trade union organisations. Every Social-Democratic worker should as far as possible assist and actively work in these organisations. But, while this is true, it is certainly not in our interest to demand that only Social-Democrats should be eligible for membership in the "trade" unions, since that would only narrow the scope of our influence upon the masses. Let every worker who understands the need to unite for the struggle against the employers and the government join the trade unions. The very aim of the trade unions would be impossible of achievement, if they did not unite all who have attained at least this elementary degree of understanding, if they were not very ''broad'' organisations. The broader these organisations, the broader will be our influence over them — an influence due, not only to the "spontaneous" development of the economic struggle, but to the direct and conscious effort of the socialist trade union members to influence their comrades. But a broad organisation cannot apply methods of strict secrecy (since this demands far greater training than is required for the economic struggle). How is the contradiction between the need for a large membership and the need for strictly secret methods to be reconciled? How are we to make the trade unions as public as possible? Generally speaking, there can be only two ways to this end: either the trade unions become legalised (in some countries this preceded the legalisation of the socialist and political unions), or the organisation is kept secret, but so "free" and amorphous, ''lose'' as the Germans say, that the need for secret methods becomes almost negligible as far as the bulk of the members is concerned.

The legalisation of non-socialist and non-political labour unions in Russia has begun, and there is no doubt that every advance made by our rapidly growing Social-Democratic working-class movement will multiply and encourage attempts at legalisation — attempts proceeding for the most part from supporters of the existing order, but partly also from the workers themselves and from liberal intellectuals. The banner of legality has already been hoisted by the Vasilyevs and the Zubatovs. Support has been promised and rendered by the Ozerovs and the Wormses, and followers of the new tendency are now to be found among the workers. Henceforth, we cannot but reckon with this tendency. How we are to reckon with it, on this there can be no two opinions among Social-Democrats. We must steadfastly expose any part played in this movement by the Zubatovs and the Vasilyeys, the gendarmes and the priests, and explain their real intentions to the workers. We must also expose all the conciliatory, "harmonious" notes that will be heard in the speeches of liberal politicians at legal meetings of the workers, irrespective of whether the speeches are motivated by an earnest conviction of the desirability of peaceful class collaboration, by a desire to curry favour with the powers that be, or whether they are simply the result of clumsiness. Lastly, we must warn the workers against the traps often set by the police, who at such open meetings and permitted societies spy out the "fiery ones" and try to make use of legal organisations to plant their ''agents provocateurs'' in the illegal organisations.

Doing all this does not at all mean forgetting that ''in the long'' run the legalisation of the working-class movement will be, to our advantage, and not to that of the Zubatovs. On the contrary, it is precisely our campaign of exposure that will help us to separate the tares from the wheat. What the tares are, we have already indicated. By the wheat we mean attracting the attention of ever larger numbers, including the most backward sections, of the workers to social and political questions, and freeing ourselves, the revolutionaries, from functions that are essentially legal (the distribution of legal books, mutual aid, etc.), the development of which will inevitably provide us with an increasing quantity of material for agitation. In this sense, we may, and should, say to the Zubatovs and the Ozerovs: Keep at it, gentlemen, do your best! Whenever you place a trap in the path of the workers (either by way of direct provocation, or by the "honest" demoralisation of the workers with the aid of "Struvism") we will see to it that you are exposed. But whenever you take a real step forward, though it be the most "timid zigzag", we will say: Please continue! And the only step that can be a real step forward is a real, if small, extension of the workers’ field of action. Every such extension will be to our advantage and will help to hasten the advent of legal societies of the kind in which it will not be ''agents provocateurs'' who are detecting socialists, but socialists who are gaining adherents. in a word, our task is to fight the tares. It is not our business to grow wheat in flower-pots. By pulling up the tares, we clear the soil for the wheat. And while the Afanasy Ivanoviches and Pulkheria Ivanovnas are tending their flower-pot crops, we must prepare the reapers, not only to cut down the tares of today, but to reap the wheat of tomorrow.[6]

Thus, we cannot by means of legalisation ''solve'' the problem of creating a trade union organisation that will be as little secret and as extensive as possible (but we should be extremely glad if the Zubatovs and the Ozerovs disclosed to us even a partial opportunity for such a solution — to this end, however, ''we must'' strenuously combat them). There remain secret trade union organisations, and we must give all possible assistance to the workers who (as we definitely know) are adopting this course. Trade union organisations, not only can be of tremendous value in developing and consolidating the economic struggle, but can also become a very important auxiliary to political agitation and revolutionary organisation. In order to achieve this purpose, and in order to guide the nascent trade union movement in the channels desired by Social-Democracy, we must first understand clearly the absurdity of the plan of organisation the St. Petersburg Economists have been nursing for nearly five years. That plan is set forth in the "Rules for a Workers’ Mutual Benefit Fund" of July 1897 ("''Listok''" ''Rabotnika'', No. 9-10, p. 46, taken from ''Rabochaya Mysl'', No. 1), as well as in the "Rules for a Trade Union Workers’ Organisation" of October 1900 (special leaflet printed in St. Petersburg and referred to in ''Iskra'', No. 1). Both these sets of rules have one main shortcoming: they set up the broad workers’ organisation in a rigidly specified structure and confound it with the organisation of revolutionaries. Let us take the last-mentioned set of rules, since it is drawn up in greater detail. The body consists of ''fifty-two'' paragraphs. Twenty-three deal with the structure, the method of functioning, and the competence of the "workers’ circles", which are to be organised in every factory ("a maximum of ten persons") and which elect "central (factory) groups". "The central group," says paragraph 2, "observes all that goes on in its factory or workshop and keeps a record of events." "The central group presents to subscribers a monthly financial account" (par. 17), etc. Ten paragraphs are devoted to the "district organisation", and nineteen to the highly complex interconnection between the Committee of the Workers’ Organisation and the Committee of the St. Petersburg League of Struggle (elected representatives of each district and of the "executive groups" — "groups of propagandists, groups for maintaining contact with the provinces, and with the organisation abroad, groups for managing stores; publications, and funds").

Social-Democracy = "executive groups" in relation to the economic struggle of the workers! It would be difficult to show more glaringly how the Economists’ ideas deviate from Social-Democracy to trade-unionism, and how alien to them is any idea that a Social-Democrat must concern himself first and foremost with an organisation of revolutionaries capable of guiding the ''entire'' proletarian struggle for emancipation. To talk of "the political emancipation of the working class" and of the struggle against "tsarist despotism", and at the same time to draft rules like these, means to have no idea whatsoever of the real political tasks of Social-Democracy. Not one of the fifty or so paragraphs reveals even a glimmer of understanding that it is necessary to conduct the widest possible political agitation among the masses, an agitation highlighting every aspect of Russian absolutism and the specific features of the various social classes in Russia. Rules like these are of no use even for the achievement of trade union, let alone political, aims, since trade unions are organised by ''trades'', of which no mention is made.

But most characteristic, perhaps, is the amazing top-heaviness of the whole "system", which attempts to bind each single factory and its "committee" by a permanent string of uniform and ludicrously petty rules and a three-stage system of election. Hemmed in by the narrow outlook of Economism, the mind is lost in details that positively reek of red tape and bureaucracy. In practice, of course, three-fourths of the clauses are never applied; on the other hand, a "secret" organisation of this kind, with its central group in each factory, makes it very easy for the gendarmes to carry out raids on a vast scale. The Polish cornrades have passed through a similar phase in their movement, with everybody enthusiastic about the extensive organisation of workers’ benefit funds; but they very quickly abandoned this idea when they saw that such organisations only provided rich harvests for the gendarmes. If we have in mind broad workers’ organisations, and not widespread arrests, if we do not want to provide satisfaction to the gendarmes, we must see to it that these organisations remain without any rigid formal structure. But will they be able to function in that case?

Let us see what the functions are: ". . . To observe all that goes on in the factory and keep a record of events" (par. 2 of the Rules). Do we really require a formally established group for this purpose? Could not the purpose be better served by correspondence conducted in the illegal papers without the setting up of special groups? ". . . To lead the struggles of the workers for the improvement of their workshop conditions" (par. 3). This, too, requires no set organisational form. Any sensible agitator can in the course of ordinary conversation gather what the demands of the workers are and transmit them to a narrow — not a broad — organisation of revolutionaries for expression in a leaflet. " ... To organise a fund ... to which subscriptions of two kopeks per ruble<ref group="note">Of wages earned.</ref> should be made" (par. 9) — and then to present to subscribers a monthly financial account (par. 17), to expel members who fail to pay their contributions (par. 10), and so forth. Why, this is a very paradise for the police; for nothing would be easier for them than to penetrate into such a secrecy of a "central factory fund", confiscate the money, and arrest the best people. Would it not be simpler to issue one-kopek or two-kopek coupons bearing the official stamp of a well-known (very narrow and very secret) organisation, or to make collections without coupons of any kind and to print reports in a certain agreed code in an illegal paper? The object would thereby be attained, but it would be a hundred times more difficult for the gendarmes to pick up clues.

I could go on analysing the Rules, but I think that what has been said will suffice. A small, compact core of the most reliable, experienced, and hardened workers, with responsible representatives in the principal districts and connected by all the rules of strict secrecy with the organisation of revolutionaries, can, with the widest support of the masses and without any formal organisation, perform ''all'' the functions of a trade union organisation, in a manner, moreover, desirable to Social-Democracy. Only in this way can we secure the ''consolidation'' and development of a ''Social-Democratic'' trade union movement, despite all the gendarmes.

It may be objected that an organisation which is so ''lose'' that it is not even definitely formed, and which has not even an enrolled and registered membership, cannot be called an organisation at all. Perhaps so. Not the name is important. What is important is that this "organisation without members" shall do everything that is required, and from the very outset ensure a solid connection between our future trade unions and socialism. Only an incorrigible utopian would have a ''broad'' organisation of workers, with elections, reports, universal suffrage, etc., under the autocracy.

The moral to be drawn from this is simple. If we begin with the solid foundation of a strong organisation of revolutionaries, we can ensure the stability of the movement as a whole and carry out the aims both of Social-Democracy and of trade unions proper. If, however, we begin with a broad workers’ organisation, which is supposedly most "accessible" to the masses (but which is actually most accessible to the gendarmes and makes revolutionaries most accessible to the police), we shall achieve neither the one aim nor the other; we shall not eliminate our rule-of-thumb methods, and, because we remain scattered and our forces are constantly broken up by the police, we shall only make trade unions of the Zubatov and Ozerov type the more accessible to the masses.

What, properly speaking, should be the functions of the organisation of revolutionaries? We shall deal with this question in detail. First, however, let us examine a very typical argument advanced by our terrorist, who (sad fate!) in this matter also is a next-door neighbour to the Economist. ''Svoboda'', a journal published for workers, contains in its first issue an article entitled "Organisation", the author of which tries to defend his friends, the Economist workers of Ivanovo-Voznesensk. He writes:<blockquote>"It is bad when the masses are mute and unenlightened, when the movement does not come from the rank and file. For instance, the students of a university town leave for their homes during the summer and other holidays, and immediately the workers’ movement comes to a standstill. Can a workers’ movement which has to be pushed on from outside be a real force? No, indeed.... It has not yet learned to walk, it is still in leading-strings. So it is in all matters. The students go off, and everything comes to a standstill. The most capable are seized; the cream is skimmed and the milk turns sour. If the ’committee’ is arrested, everything comes to a standstill until a new one can he formed. And one never knows what sort of committee will be set up next — it may be nothing like the former. The first said one thing, the second may say the very opposite. Continuity between yesterday and tomorrow is broken, the experience of the past does not serve as a guide for the future. And all because no roots have been struck in depth, in the masses; the work is carried on not by a hundred fools, but by a dozen wise men. A dozen wise men can be wiped out at a snap, but when the organisation embraces masses, everything proceeds from them, and nobody, however he tries, can wreck the cause" (p. 63).</blockquote>The facts are described correctly. The picture of our amateurism is well drawn. But the conclusions are worthy of ''Rabochaya Mysl'', both as regards their stupidity and their lack of political tact. They represent the height of stupidity, because the author confuses the philosophical and social-historical question of the "depth" of the "roots" of the movement with the technical and organisational question of the best method in combating the gendarmes. They represent the height of political tactlessness, because, instead of appealing from bad leaders to good leaders, the author appeals from the leaders in general to the "masses" . This is as much an attempt to drag us back organisationally as the idea of substituting excitative terrorism for political agitation drags us back politically. Indeed, I am experiencing a veritable ''embarras de richesses'', and hardly know where to begin to disentangle the jumble offered up by ''Svoboda''. For clarity, let me begin by citing an example. Take the Germans. It will not be denied, I hope, that theirs is a mass organisation, that in Germany everything proceeds from the masses, that the working-class movement there has learned to walk. Yet observe how these millions value their "dozen" tried political leaders, how firmly they cling to them. Members of the hostile parties in parliament have often taunted the socialists by exclaiming: "Fine democrats you are indeed! Yours is a working-class movement only in name; in actual fact the same clique of leaders is always in evidence, the same Bebel and the same Liebknecht, year in and year out, and that goes on for decades. Your supposedly elected workers’ deputies are more permanent than the officials appointed by the Emperor!" But the Germans only smile with contempt at these demagogic attempts to set the "masses" against the "leaders", to arouse bad and ambitious instincts in the former, and to rob the movement of its solidity and stability by undermining the confidence of the masses in their "dozen wise men". Political thinking is sufficiently developed among the Germans, and they have accumulated sufficient political experience to understand that without the "dozen" tried and talented leaders (and talented men are not born by the hundreds), professionally trained, schooled by long experience, and working in perfect harmony, no class in modern society can wage a determined struggle. The Germans too have had demagogues in their ranks who have flattered the "hundred fools", exalted them above the "dozen wise men", extolled the "horny hand" of the masses, and (like Most and Hasselmann) have spurred them on to reckless "revolutionary" action and sown distrust towards the firm and steadfast leaders. It was only by stubbornly and relentlessly combating all demagogic elements within the socialist movement that German socialism has managed to grow and become as strong as it is. Our wiseacres, however, at a time when Russian Social-Democracy is passing through a crisis entirely due to the lack of sufficiently trained, developed, and experienced leaders to guide the spontaneously awakening masses, cry out ,with the profundity of fools: "It is a bad business when the movement does not proceed from the rank and file."

"A committee of students is of no use; it is not stable." Quite true. But the conclusion to be drawn from this is that we must have a committee of professional ''revolutionaries'', and it is immaterial whether a student or a worker is capable of becoming a professional revolutionary. The conclusion you draw, how. ever, is that the working-class movement must not be pushed on from outside! In your political innocence you fail to notice that you are playing into the hands of our Economists and fostering our amateurism. Wherein, may I ask, did our students "push on" our workers? ''In the sense'' that the student brought to the worker the fragments of political knowledge he himself possesses, the crumbs of socialist ideas he has managed to acquire (for the principal intellectual diet of the present-day student, legal Marxism, could furnish only the rudiments, only scraps of knowledge). There has never been too much of ''such'' "pushing on from outside"; on the contrary, there has so far been all too little of it in our movement, for we have been stewing too assiduously in our own juice; we have bowed far too slavishly to the elementary "economic struggle of the workers against the employers and the government". We professional revolutionaries must and will make it our business to engage in ''this kind'' of "pushing on" a hundred times more forcibly than we have done hitherto. But the very fact that you select so hideous a phrase as "pushing on from outside" — a phrase which cannot but rouse in the workers (at least in the workers who are as unenlightened as you yourselves) a sense of distrust towards ''all'' who bring them political knowledge and revolutionary experience from outside, which cannot but rouse in them an instinctive desire to resist ''all'' such people — proves you to be demagogues, and ''demagogues'' are the worst enemies of the working class.

And, please — don’t hasten howling about my "uncomradely methods" of debating. I have not the least desire to doubt the purity of your intentions. As I have said, one may become a demagogue out of sheer political innocence. But I have shown that you have descended to demagogy, and I will never tire of repeating that demagogues are the worst enemies of the working class. The worst enemies, because they arouse base instincts in the masses, because the unenlightened worker is unable to recognise his enemies in men who represent themselves, and sometimes sincerely so, as his friends. The worst enemies, because in the period of disunity and vacillation, when our movement is just beginning to take shape, nothing is easier than to employ demagogic methods to mislead the masses, who can realise their error only later by bitter experience. That is why the slogan of the day for the Russian Social-Democrat must be — resolute struggle against Svoboda and ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', both of which have sunk to the level of demagogy. We shall deal with this further in greater detail.<ref group="Lenin">For the moment let us observe merely that our remarks on “pushing on from outside” and ''Svoboda’s'' other disquisitions on organisation apply in ''their entirety to all'' the Economists, including the adherents of ''Rabocheye Dyelo''; for some of them have actively preached and defended such views on organisation, while others among them have drifted into them.</ref>

"A dozen wise men can be more easily wiped out than a hundred fools." This wonderful truth (for which the hundred fools will always applaud you) appears obvious only because in the very midst of the argument you have skipped from one question to another. You began by talking and continued to talk of the unearthing of a "committee", of the unearthing of an "organisation", and now you skip to the question of unearthing the movement’s "roots" in their "depths". The fact is, of course, that our movement cannot be unearthed, for the very reason that it has countless thousands of roots deep down among the masses; but that is not the point at issue. As far as "deep roots" are concerned, we cannot be "unearthed" even now, despite all our amateurism, and yet we all complain, and cannot but complain, that the "''organisations''" are being unearthed and as a result it is impossible to maintain continuity in the movement. But since you raise the question of ''organisations'' being unearthed and persist in your opinion, I assert that it is far more difficult to unearth a dozen wise men than a hundred fools. This position I will defend, no matter how much you instigate the masses against me for my "anti-democratic" views, etc. As I have stated repeatedly, by "wise men", in connection with organisation, I mean ''professional revolutionaries'', irrespective of whether they have developed from among students or working men. I assert:

# that no revolutionary movement can endure without a stable organisation of leaders maintaining continuity;
# that the broader the popular mass drawn spontaneously into the struggle, which forms the basis of the movement and participates in it, the more urgent the need for such an organisation, and the more solid this organisation must be (for it is much easier for all sorts of demagogues to side-track the more backward sections of the masses);
# that such an organisation must consist chiefly of people professionally engaged in revolutionary activity;
# that in an autocratic state, the more we ''confine'' the membership of such an organisation to people who are professionally engaged in revolutionary activity and who have been professionally trained in the art of combating the political police, the more difficult will it be to unearth the organisation; and
# the ''greater'' will be the number of people from the working class and from the other social classes who will be able to join the movement and perform active work in it.

I invite our Economists, terrorists, and "Economists-terrorists"<ref group="Lenin">This term is perhaps more applicable to ''Svoboda'' than the former, for in an article entitled “The Regeneration of Revolutionisin” the publication defends terrorism, while in the article at present under review it defends Economism. One might say of ''Svoboda'' that “it would if it could, but it can’t”. Its wishes and intentions are of the very best — but the result is utter confusion; this is chiefly due to the fact that, while ''Svoboda'' advocates continuity of organisation, it refuses to recognise continuity of revolutionary thought and Social-Democratic theory. It wants to revive the professional revolutionary (“The Regeneration of Revolutionism”), and to that end proposes, first, excitative terrorism, and, secondly, — an organisation of average workers" (''Svoboda'', No. 1, p. 66, et seq.), as less likely to be “pushed on from outside”. In other words, it proposes to pull the house down to use the timber for heating it.</ref> to confute these propositions. At the moment, I shall deal only with the last two points. The question as to whether it is easier to wipe out "a dozen wisemen" or "a hundred fools" reduces itself to the question, above considered, whether it is possible to have a mass ''organisation'' when the maintenance of strict secrecy is essential. We can never give a mass organisation that degree of secrecy without which there can be no question of persistent and continuous struggle against the government. To concentrate all secret functions in the hands of as small a number of professional revolutionaries as possible does not mean that the latter will "do the thinking for all" and that the rank and file will not take an active part in the ''movement''. On the contrary, the membership will promote increasing numbers of the professional revolutionaries from its ranks; for it will know that it is not enough for a few students and for a few working men waging the economic struggle to gather in order to form a "committee", but that it takes years to train oneself to be a professional revolutionary; and the rank and file will "think", not only of amateurish methods, but of such training. Centralisation of the secret functions of the ''organisation'' by no means implies centralisation of all the functions of the ''movement''. Active participation of the widest masses in the illegal press will not diminish because a "dozen" professional revolutionaries centralise the secret functions connected with this work; on the contrary, it will ''increase'' tenfold. In this way, and in this way alone, shall we ensure that reading the illegal press, writing for it, and to some extent even distributing it, will ''almost cease to be secret work'', for the police will soon come to realise the folly and impossibility of judicial and administrative red-tape procedure over every copy of a publication that is being distributed in the thousands. This holds not only for the press, but for every function of the movement, even for demonstrations. The active and widespread participation of the masses will not suffer; on the contrary, it will benefit by the fact that a "dozen" experienced revolutionaries, trained professionally no less than the police, will centralise all the secret aspects of the work — the drawing up of leaflets, the working out of approximate plans; and the appointing of bodies of leaders for each urban district, for each institution, etc. (I know that exception will be taken to my "undemocratic" views, but I shall reply below fully to this anything but intelligent objection.) Centralisation of the most secret functions in an organisation of revolutionaries will not diminish, but rather increase the extent and enhance the quality of the activity of a large number of other organisations that are intended for a broad public and are therefore as loose and as non-secret as possible, such as workers’ trade unions; workers’ self-education circles and circles for reading illegal literature; and socialist, as well as democratic, circles among ''all'' other sections of the population; etc., etc. We must have such circles, trade unions, and organisations everywhere in ''as large a number as possible'' and with the widest variety of functions; but it would be absurd and harmful ''to confound'' them with the organisation of ''revolutionaries'', to efface the border-line between them, to make still more hazy the all too faint recognition of the fact that in order to "serve" the mass movement we must have people who will devote themselves exclusively to Social-Democratic activities, and that such people must ''train'' themselves patiently and steadfastly to be professional revolutionaries.

Yes, this recognition is incredibly dim. Our worst sin with regard to organisation consists in the fact that by ''our primitiveness we have lowered the prestige of revolutionaries in Russia''. A person who is flabby and shaky on questions of theory, who has a narrow outlook, who pleads the spontaneity of the masses as an excuse for his own sluggishness, who resembles a trade union secretary more than a spokesman of the people, who is unable to conceive of a broad and bold plan that would command the respect even of opponents, and who is inexperienced and clumsy in his own professional art — the art of combating the political police — such a man is not a revolutionary, but a wretched amateur!

Let no active worker take offence at these frank remarks, for as far as insufficient training is concerned, I apply them first and foremost to myself. I used to work in a study circle<ref group="note">Lenin refers here to his own revolutionary activity in St. Petersburg in 1893-95.</ref> that set itself very broad, all-embracing tasks; and all of us, members of that circle, suffered painfully and acutely from the realisation that we were acting as amateurs at a moment in history when we might have been able to say, varying a well-known statement: "Give us an organisation of revolutionaries, and we will overturn Russia" The more I recall the burning sense of shame I then experienced, the bitterer become my feelings towards those pseudo-Social-Democrats whose preachings "bring disgrace on the calling of a revolutionary", who fail to understand that our task is not to champion the degrading of the revolutionary to the level of an amateur, but to ''raise'' the amateurs to the level of revolutionaries.

===The scope of organisational work===

We have heard B-v tell us about "the lack of revolutionary forces fit for action which is felt not only in St. Petersburg, but throughout Russia". Hardly anyone will dispute this fact. But the question is, how is it to be explained? B-v writes:<blockquote>"We shall not go into an explanation of the historical causes of this phenomenon; we shall merely state that a society, demoralised by prolonged political reaction and split by past and present economic changes, promotes from its own ranks an ''extremely small number of persons fit for revolutionary work''; that the working class does produce revolutionary workers who to some extent reinforce the ranks of the illegal organisations, but that the number of such revolutionaries is inadequate to meet the requirements of the times. This is all the more so because the worker who spends eleven and a half hours a day in the factory is in such a position that he can, in the main, perform only the functions of an agitator; but propaganda and organisation, the delivery and reproduction of illegal literature, the issuance of leaflets, etc., are duties which must necessarily fall mainly upon the shoulders of an extremely small force of intellectuals" (''Rabocheye Dyelo'', No. 6, pp. 38-39).</blockquote>On many points we disagree with B-v, particularly with those we have emphasised, which most saliently reveal that, although weary of our amateurism (as is every thinking practical worker), B-v cannot find the way out of this intolerable situation because he is weighted down by Economism. The fact is that society produces very ''many'' persons fit for "the cause", but we are unable to make use of them all. The critical, transitional state of our movement in this respect may be formulated as follows: ''There are no people — yet there is a mass of people''. There is a mass of people, because the working class and increasingly varied social strata, year after year, produce from their ranks an increasing number of discontented people who desire to protest, who are ready to render all the assistance they can in the struggle against absolutism, the intolerableness of which, though not yet recognised by all, is more and more acutely sensed by increasing masses of the people. At the same time, we have no people, because we have no leaders, no political leaders, no talented organisers capable of arranging. extensive and at the same time uniform and harmonious work that would employ all forces, even the most inconsiderable. "The growth and development of the revolutionary organisations" lag, not only behind the growth of the working-class movement, which even B-v admits, but behind that of the general democratic movement among all strata of the people. (In passing, probably B-V would now regard this as supplementing his conclusion.) The scope of revolutionary work is too narrow, as compared with the breadth of the spontaneous basis of the movement. It is too hemmed in by the wretched theory of "economic struggle against the employers and the government". Yet, at the present time, not only Social-Democratic political agitators, but Social-Democratic organisers must "go among all classes of the population".<ref group="Lenin">Thus, an undoubted revival of the democratic spirit has recently been observed among persons in military service, partly as a consequence of the more frequent street battles with “enemies” like workers and students. As soon as our available forces permit, we must without fail devote the most serious attention to propaganda and agitation among soldiers and officers, and to the creation of “military organisations” affiliated to our Party.</ref> There is hardly a single practical worker who will doubt that the Social-Democrats could distribute the thousand and one minute functions of their organisational work among individual representatives of the most varied classes. Lack of specialisation is one of the most serious defects of our technique, about which B-v justly and bitterly complains. The smaller each separate "operation" in our common cause the more people we can find capable of carrying out such operations (people who, in the majority of cases, are completely incapable of becoming professional revolutionaries); more difficult will it be for the police to "net" all these "detail workers", and the more difficult will it be for them to frame up, out of an arrest for some petty affair, a "case" that would justify the government’s expenditure on "security". As for the number of people ready to help us, we referred in the preceding chapter to the gigantic change that has taken place in this respect in the last five years or so. On the other hand, in order to unite all these tiny fractions into one whole, in order not to break up the movement while breaking up its functions, and in order to imbue the people who carry out the minute functions with the conviction that their work is necessary and important, without which conviction they will never do the work,<ref group="Lenin">I recall that once a comrade told me of a factory inspector who wanted to help the Social-Democrats, and actually did, but complained bitterly that he did not know whether his “information” reached the proper revolutionary centre, how much his help was really required, and what possibilities there were for utilising his small and petty services. Every practical worker can, of course, cite many similar instances in which our primitiveness deprived us of allies. These services, each “small” in itself, but invaluable when taken in the mass, could and would be rendered to us by office employees and officials, not only in factories, but in the postal service, on the railways, in the Customs, among the nobility, among the clergy, and in ''every'' other walk of life, including even the police and the Court! Had we a real party, a real militant organisation of revolutionaries, we would not make undue demands on every one of these “aides”, we would not hasten always and invariably to bring them right into the very heart of our “illegality”, but, on the contrary, we would husband them most carefully and would even train people especially for such functions, bearing in mind that many students could be of much greater service to the Party as “aides” holding some official post than as “short-term” revolutionaries. But, I repeat, only an organisation that is firmly established and has no lack of active forces would have the right to apply such tactics.</ref> it is necessary to have a strong organisation of tried revolutionaries. The more secret such an organisation is, the stronger and more widespread will be the confidence in the Party. As we know, in time of war, it is not only of the utmost importance to imbue one’s own army with confidence in its strength, but it is important also to convince the enemy and all ''neutral'' elements of this strength; friendly neutrality may sometimes decide the issue. If such an organisation existed, one built up on a firm theoretical foundation and possessing a Social-Democratic organ, we should have no reason to fear that the movement might be diverted from its path by the numerous "outside" elements that are attracted to it. (On the contrary, it is precisely at the present time, with amateurism prevalent, that we see many Social-Democrats leaning towards the ''Credo'' and only imagining that they are Social Democrats.) In a word, specialisation necessarily presupposes centralisation, and in turn imperatively calls for it.

But B-v himself, who has so excellently described the necessity for specialisation, underestimates its importance, in our opinion, in the second part of the argument we have quoted. The number of working-class revolutionaries is inadequate, he says. This is perfectly true, and once again we stress that the "valuable communication of a close observer" fully confirms our view of the causes of the present crisis in Social-Democracy, and, consequently, of the means required to overcome it. Not only are revolutionaries in general lagging behind the spontaneous awakening of the masses, but even worker-revolutionaries are lagging behind the spontaneous awakening of the working-class masses. This ''fact'' confirms with clear evidence, from the "practical" point of view, too, not only the absurdity but even the ''politically reactionary nature'' of the "pedagogics" to which we are so often treated in the discussion of our duties to the workers. This fact proves that our very first and most pressing duty is to help to train working-class revolutionaries who will he on the same level ''in regard to Party activity'' as the revolutionaries from amongst the intellectuals (we emphasise the words "in regard to Party activity", for, although necessary, it is neither so easy nor so pressingly necessary to bring the workers up to the level of intellectuals in other respects). Attention, therefore, must be devoted ''principally to raising'' the workers to the level of revolutionaries; it is not at all our task ''to descend'' to the level of the "working masses" as the Economists wish to do, or to the level of the "average worker" as ''Svoboda'' desires to do (and by this ascends to the second grade of Economist "pedagogics"). I am far from denying the necessity for popular literature for the workers, and especially popular (of course, not vulgar) literature for the especially backward workers. But what annoys me is this constant confusion of pedagogics with questions of politics and organisation. You, gentlemen, who are so much concerned about the "average worker", as a matter of fact, rather insult the workers by your desire ''to talk down'' to them when discussing working-class politics and working-class organisation. Talk about serious things in a serious manner; leave pedagogics to the pedagogues, and not to politicians and organisers! Are there not advanced people, "average people", and "masses" among the intelligentsia too? Does not everyone recognise that popular literature is also required for the intelligentsia, and is not such literature written? Imagine someone, in an article on organising college or high-school students, repeating over and over again, as if he had made a new discovery, that first of all we must have an organisation of "average students". The author of such an article would be ridiculed, and rightly so. Give us your ideas on organisation, if you have any, he would be told, and we ourselves will decide who is "average", who above average, and who below. But if you have no organisational ideas ''of your own'', then all your exertions in behalf of the "masses" and "average people" will be simply boring. You must realise that these questions of "politics" and "organisation" are so serious in themselves that they cannot be dealt with in any other but a serious way. We can and must ''educate'' workers (and university and Gymnasium students) so that we ''may be able to discuss'' these questions with them. But once you do bring up these questions, you must give real replies to them; do not fall back on the "average", or on the "masses"; do not try to dispose of the matter with facetious remarks and mere phrases.<ref group="Lenin">''Svoboda'', No. 1, p. 66, in the article “Organisation”: “The heavy tread of the army of workers will reinforce all the demands that will be advanced in behalf of Russian Labour” — Labour with a capital L, of course. And the author exclaims: “I am not in the least hostile towards the intelligentsia, but [but — the word that Shchedrin translated as meaning: The ears never grow higher than the forehead!] — but I always get frightfully annoyed when a man comes to me uttering beautiful and charming words and demands that they be accepted for their [his?] beauty and other virtues” (p. 62). Yes, I always get “frightfully annoyed”, too.</ref>

To be fully prepared for his task, the worker-revolutionary must likewise become a professional revolutionary. Hence B-v is wrong in saying that since the worker spends eleven and a half hours in the factory, the brunt of all other revolutionary functions (apart from agitation) "''must necessarily'' fall mainly upon the shoulders of an extremely small force of intellectuals". But this condition does not obtain out of sheer "necessity". It obtains because we are backward, because we do not recognise our duty to assist every capable worker to become a ''professional'' agitator, organiser, propagandist, literature distributor, etc., etc. In this respect, we waste our strength in a positively shameful manner; we lack the ability to husband that which should be tended and reared with special care. Look at the Germans: their forces are a hundredfold greater than ours. But they understand perfectly well that really capable agitators, etc., are not often promoted from the ranks of the "average". For this reason they immediately try to place every capable working man in conditions that will enable him to develop and apply his abilities to the fullest: he is made a professional agitator, he is encouraged to widen the field of his activity, to spread it from one factory to the whole of the industry, from a single locality to the whole country. He acquires experience and dexterity in his profession; he broadens his outlook and increases his knowledge; he observes at close quarters the prominent political leaders from other localities and of other parties; he strives to rise to their level and combine in himself the knowledge of the working-class environment and the freshness of socialist convictions with professional skill, without which. the proletariat ''cannot'' wage a stubborn struggle against its excellently trained enemies. In this way alone do the working masses produce men of the stamp of Bebel and Auer. But what is to a great extent automatic in a politically free country must in Russia be done deliberately and systematically by our organisations. A worker-agitator who is at all gifted and "promising" ''must not be left'' to work eleven hours a day in a factory. We must arrange that he be maintained by the Party; that he may go underground in good time; that he change the place of his activity, if he is to enlarge his experience, widen his outlook, and be able to hold out for at least a few years in the struggle against the gendarmes. As the spontaneous rise of their movement becomes broader and deeper, the working-class masses promote from their ranks not only an increasing number of talented agitators, but also talented organisers, propagandists, and "practical workers" in the best sense of the term (of whom there are so few among our intellectuals who, for the most part, in the Russian manner, are somewhat careless and sluggish in their habits). When we have forces of specially trained worker-revolutionaries who have gone through extensive preparation (and, of course, revolutionaries "of all arms of the service"), no political police in the world will then be able to contend with them, for these forces, boundlessly devoted to the revolution, will enjoy the boundless confidence of the widest masses of the workers. We are directly to ''blame'' for doing too little to "stimulate" the workers to take this path, common to them and to the "intellectuals", of professional revolutionary training, and for all too often dragging them back by our silly speeches about what is "accessible" to the masses of the workers, to the "average workers", etc.

In this, as in other respects, the narrow scope of our organisational work is without a doubt due directly to the fact (although the overwhelming majority of the "Economists" and the novices in practical work do not perceive it) that we restrict our theories and our political tasks to a narrow field. Subservience to spontaneity seems to inspire a fear of taking even one step away from what is "accessible" to the masses, a fear of rising too high above mere attendance on the immediate and direct requirements of the masses. Have no fear, gentlemen! Remember that we stand so low on the plane of organisation that the very idea that we could rise ''too'' high is absurd!

==="Conspiratorial" organisation and "democratism"===
Yet there are many people among us who are so sensitive to the "voice of life" that they fear it more than anything in the world and charge the adherents of the views here expounded with following a Narodnaya Volya line, with failing to understand "democratism", etc. These accusations, which, of course, have been echoed by ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', need to be dealt with.

The writer of these lines knows very well that the St. Petersburg Economists levelled the charge of Narodnaya Volya tendencies also against ''Rabochaya Gazeta'' (which is quite understandable when one compares it with ''Rabochaya Mysl''). We were not in the least surprised, therefore, when, soon after the appearance of ''Iskra'', a comrade informed us that the Soclal-Democrats in the town of X describe ''Iskra'' as a Narodnaya Volya organ. We, of course, were flattered by this accusation; for what decent Social-Democrat has not been accused by the Economists of being a Narodnaya Volya sympathiser?

These accusations are the result of a twofold misunderstanding. First, the history of the revolutionary movement is so little known among us that the name "Narodnaya Volya" is used to denote any idea of a militant centralised organisation which declares determined war upon tsarism. But the magnificent organisation that the revolutionaries had in the seventies, and that should serve us as a model, was not established by the Narodnaya Volya, but by the ''Zemlya i Volya'', which split up into the Chorny Peredel and the Narodnaya Volya. Consequently, to regard a militant revolutionary organisation as something specifically Narodnaya Volya in character is absurd both historically and logically; for ''no'' revolutionary trend, if it seriously thinks of struggle, can dispense with such an organisation. The mistake the Narodnaya Volya committed was not in striving to enlist all the discontented in the organisation and to direct this organisation to resolute struggle against the autocracy; on the contrary, that was its great historical merit. The mistake was in relying on a theory which in substance was not a revolutionary theory at all, and the Narodnaya Volya members either did not know how, or were unable, to link their movement inseparably with the class struggle in the developing capitalist society. Only a gross failure to understand Marxism (or an "understanding" of it in the spirit of "Struveism") could prompt the opinion that the rise of a mass, spontaneous working-class movement ''relieves'' us of the duty of creating as good an organisation of revolutionaries as the Zemlya i Volya had, or, indeed, an incomparably better one. On the contrary, this movement ''imposes'' the duty upon us; for the spontaneous struggle of the proletariat will not become its genuine "class struggle" until this struggle is led by a strong organisation of revolutionaries.

Secondly, many people, including apparently B. Krichevsky (''Rabocheye Dyelo'', No. 10, p. 18), misunderstand the polemics that Social-Democrats have always waged against the "conspiratorial" view of the political struggle. We have always protested, and will, of course, continue to protest against ''confining'' the political struggle to conspiracy.<ref group="Lenin">Cf''. The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats, p. 21,'' polemics against P. L. Lavrov.</ref> But this does not, of course, mean that we deny the need for a strong revolutionary organisation. Thus, in the pamphlet mentioned in the preceding footnote, after the polemics against reducing the political struggle to a conspiracy, a description is given (as a Social-Democratic ideal) of an organisation so strong as to be able to "resort to. . .rebellion" and to every other form of attack, in order to "deliver a smashing blow against absolutism".<ref group="Lenin">''The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats, p. 23.'' Apropos, we shall give another illustration ''of'' the fact that ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' either does not understand what it is talking about or changes its views “with the wind”. In No. 1 of ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', we find the following passage in italics: “''The substance set forth in the pamphlet accords entirely with the editorial programme of ’Rabocheye Dyelo’” (p. 142).'' Really? Does the view that the overthrow of the autocracy must not be set as the first task ''of'' the mass movement accord with the views expressed in ''The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats?'' Do the theory of “the economic struggle against the employers and the government” and the stages theory accord with the views expressed in that pamphlet? We leave it to the reader to judge whether a periodical that understands the meaning of “accordance in opinion” in this peculiar manner can have firm principles.</ref> In ''form'' such a strong revolutionary organisation in an autocratic country may also be described as a "conspiratorial" organisation, because the French word "conspiration" is the equivalent of the Russian word ''"zagovar"'' ("conspiracy"), and such an organisation must have the utmost secrecy. Secrecy is such a necessary condition for this kind of organisation that all the other conditions (number and selection of members, functions, etc.) must be made to conform to it. It would be extremely naive indeed, therefore, to fear the charge that we Social-Democrats desire to create a conspiratorial organisation. Such a charge should be as flattering to every opponent of Economism as the charge of following a Narodnaya Volya line.

The objection may be raised that such a powerful and strictly secret organisation, which concentrates in its hands all the threads of secret activities, an organisation which of necessity is centralised, may too easily rush into a premature attack, may thoughtlessly intensify the movement before the growth of political discontent, the intensity of the ferment and anger of the working class, etc., have made such an attack possible and necessary. Our reply to this is: Speaking abstractly, it cannot be denied, of course, that a militant organisation may thoughtlessly engage in battle, which ''may'' end in a defeat entirely avoidable under other conditions. But we cannot confine ourselves to abstract reasoning on such a question, because every battle bears within itself the abstract possibility of defeat, and there is no way of ''reducing'' this possibility except by organised preparation for battle. If, however, we proceed from the concrete conditions at present obtaining in Russia, we must come to the positive conclusion that a strong revolutionary organisation is absolutely necessary precisely for the purpose of giving stability to the movement and of ''safeguarding'' it against the possibility of making thoughtless attacks. Precisely at the present time, when no such organisation yet exists, and when the revolutionary movement is rapidly and spontaneously growing, we ''already observe'' two opposite extremes (which, as is to be expected, "meet"). These are: the utterly unsound Economism and the preaching of moderation, and the equally unsound "excitative terror", which strives "artificially to call forth symptoms of the end of the movement, which is developing and strengthening itself, when this movement is as yet nearer to the start than to the end" (V. Zasulich, in ''Zarya'', No. 2-3, p. 353). And the instance of ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' shows that ''there'' exist Social-Democrats who give way to both these extremes. This is not surprising, for, apart from other reasons, the "economic struggle against the employers and the government" can ''never'' satisfy revolutionaries, and opposite extremes will therefore always appear here and there. Only a centralised, militant organisation that consistently carries out a Social-Democratic policy, that satisfies, so to speak, all revolutionary instincts and strivings, can safeguard the movement against making thoughtless attacks and prepare attacks that hold out the promise of success.

A further objection may be raised, that the views on organisation here expounded contradict the "democratic principle". Now, while the earlier accusation was specifically Russian in origin, this one ''is specifically foreign'' in character. And only an organisation abroad (the Union of Russian Social-Democrats Abroad) was capable of giving its Editorial Board instructions like the following:<blockquote>"''Organisational Principle.'' In order to secure the successful development and unification of Social-Democracy, the broad democratic principle of Party organisation must be emphasised, developed, and fought for; this is particularly necessary in view of the anti-democratic tendencies that have revealed themselves in the ranks of our Party" (''Two Conferences'', p. 18).</blockquote>We shall see in the next chapter how ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' combats ''Iskra''’s "anti-democratic tendencies". For the present, we shall examine more closely the "principle" that the Economists advance. Everyone will probably agree that "the broad democratic principle" presupposes the two following conditions: first, full publicity, and secondly, election to all offices. It would be absurd to speak of democracy without publicity, moreover, without a publicity that is not limited to the membership of the organisation. We call the German Socialist Party a democratic organisation because all its activities are carried out publicly; even its party congresses are held in public. But no one would call an organisation democratic that is hidden from every one but its members by a veil of secrecy. What is the use, then, of advancing "the ''broad'' democratic principle" when the fundamental condition for this principle ''cannot be fulfilled'' by a secret organisation? "The broad principle" proves itself simply to be a resounding but hollow phrase. Moreover, it reveals a total lack of understanding of the urgent tasks of the moment in regard to organisation. Everyone knows how great the lack of secrecy is among the "broad" masses of our revolutionaries. We have heard the bitter complaints of B-v on this score and his absolutely just demand for a "strict selection of members" (''Rabocheye Dyelo'', No. 6, p. 42). Yet, persons who boast a keen "sense of realities" ''urge'', in a situation like this, not the strictest secrecy and the strictest (consequently, more restricted) selection, of members, but "''the broad'' democratic principle"! This is what you call being wide of the mark.

Nor is the situation any better with regard to the second attribute of democracy, the principle of election. In politically free countries, this condition is taken for granted. "They are members of the Party who accept the principles of the Party programme and render the Party all possible support," reads Clause 1 of the Rules of the German Social-Democratic Party. Since the entire political arena is as open to the public view as is a theatre stage to the audience, this acceptance or non-acceptance, support or opposition, is known to all from the press and from public meetings. Everyone knows that a certain political figure began in such and such a way, passed through such and such an evolution, behaved in a trying moment in such and such a manner, and possesses such and such qualities; consequently, ''all'' party members, knowing all the facts, can elect or refuse to elect this person to a particular party office. The general control (in the literal sense of the term) exercised over every act of a party man in the political field brings into existence an automatically operating mechanism which produces what in biology is called the "survival of the fittest". "Natural selection" by full publicity, election, and general control provides the assurance that, in the last analysis, every political figure will be "in his proper place", do the work for which lie is best fitted by his powers and abilities, feel the effects of his mistakes on himself, and prove before all the world his ability to recognise mistakes and to avoid them.

Try to fit this picture into the frame of our autocracy! Is it conceivable in Russia for all who accept the principles of the Party programme and render the Party all possible support to control every action of the revolutionary working in secret? Is it possible for all to elect one of these revolutionaries to any particular office, when, in the very interests of the work, the revolutionary must conceal his identity from nine out of ten of these "all"? Reflect somewhat over the real meaning of the high-sounding phrases to which''Rabocheye Dyelo'' gives utterance, and you will realise that "broad democracy" in Party organisation, amidst the gloom of the autocracy and the domination of gendarmerie, is nothing more than a ''useless and harmful'' toy. It is a useless toy because, in point of fact, no revolutionary organisation has ever practiced, or could practice, ''broad'' democracy, however much it may have desired to do so. It is a harmful toy because any attempt to practise "the broad democratic principle" will simply facilitate the work of the police in carrying out large-scale raids, will perpetuate the prevailing primitiveness, and will divert the thoughts of the practical workers from the serious and pressing task of training themselves to become professional revolutionaries to that of drawing up detailed "paper" rules for election systems. Only abroad, where very often people with no opportunity for conducting really active work gather, could this "playing at democracy" develop here and there, especially in small groups.

To show the unseemliness of ''Rabocheye Dyelo''’s favourite trick of advancing the plausible "principle" of democracy in revolutionary affairs, we shall again summon a witness. This witness, Y. Serebryakov, editor of the London magazine, ''Nakanune'', has a soft spot for ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' and is filled with a great hatred for Plekhanov and the "Plekhanovites". In its articles on the split in the Union of Russian Social-Democrats Abroad, ''Nakanune'' definitely sided with ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' and poured a stream of petty abuse upon Plekhanov. All the more valuable, therefore, is this witness in the question at issue. In ''Nakanune'' for July (No. 7) 1899, an article entitled "Concerning the Manifesto of the Self-Emancipation of the Workers Group", Serebryakov argued that it was "indecent" to talk about such things as "self-deception, leadership, and the so-called Areopagus in a serious revolutionary movement" and, ''inter alia'', wrote:<blockquote>"Myshkin, Rogachov, Zhelyabov, Mikhailov, Perovskaya, Figner, and others never regarded themselves as leaders, and no one ever elected or appointed them as such, although in actuality, they were leaders, because, in the propaganda period, as well as in the period of the struggle against the government, they took the brunt of the work upon themselves, they went into the most dangerous places, and their activities were the most fruitful. They became leaders, not because they wished it, but because the comrades surrounding them had confidence in their wisdom, in their energy, in their loyalty. To be afraid of some kind of Areopagus (if it is not feared, why write about it?) that would arbitrarily govern the movement is far too naive. Who would pay heed to it?"</blockquote>We ask the reader, in what way does the "Areopagus" differ from "anti democratic tendencies"? And is it not evident that ''Rabocheye Dyelo''’s "plausible" organisational principle is equally naive and indecent; naive, because no one would pay heed to the "Areopagus", or people with "anti- democratic tendencies", if "the comrades surrounding them had" no "confidence in their wisdom, energy, and loyalty"; indecent, because it is a demagogic sally calculated to play on the conceit of some, on the ignorance of others regarding the actual state of our movement, and on the lack of training and the ignorance of the history of the revolutionary movement on the part of still others. The only serious organisational principle for the active workers of our movement should he the strictest secrecy, the strictest selection of members, and the training of professional revolutionaries. Given these qualities, something even more than "democratism" would be guaranteed to us, namely, complete, comradely, mutual confidence among revolutionaries. This is absolutely essential for us, because there can be no question of replacing it by general democratic control in Russia. It would be a great mistake to believe that the impossibility of establishing real "democratic" control renders the members of the revolutionary organisation beyond control altogether. They have not the time to think about toy forms of democratism (democratism within a close and compact body of comrades in which complete, mutual confidence prevails), but they have a lively sense of their ''responsibility'', knowing as they do from experience that an organisation of real revolutionaries will stop at nothing to rid itself of an unworthy member. Moreover, there is a fairly well-developed public opinion in Russian (and international) revolutionary circles which has a long history behind it, and which sternly and ruthlessly punishes every departure from the duties of comradeship (and "democratism", real and not toy democratism, certainly forms a component part of the conception of comradeship). Take all this into consideration and you will realise that this talk and these resolutions about "anti-democratic tendencies" have the musty odour of the playing at generals which is indulged in abroad.

It must be observed also that the other source of this talk, viz., naivete is likewise fostered by the confusion of ideas concerning the meaning of democracy. In Mr. and Mrs. Webb’s book on the English trade unions there is an interesting chapter entitled "Primitive Democracy". In it the authors relate how the English workers, in the first period of existence of their unions, considered it an indispensable sign of democracy for all the members to do all the work of managing the unions; not only were all questions decided by the vote of all the members, but all official duties were fulfilled by all the members in turn. A long period of historical experience was required for worker’s to realise the absurdity of such a conception of democracy and to make them understand the necessity for representative institutions, on the one hand, and for full-time officials, on the other. Only after a number of cases of financial bankruptcy of trade union treasuries had occurred did the workers realise that the rates of contributions and benefits cannot be decided merely by a democratic vote, but that this requires also the advice of insurance experts. Let us take also Kautsky’s book on parliamentarism and legislation by the people. There we find that the conclusions drawn by the Marxist theoretician coincide with the lessons learned from many years of practical experience by the workers who organised "spontaneously". Kautsky strongly protests against Rittinghausen’s primitive conception of democracy; he ridicules those who in the name of democracy demand that "popular newspapers shall be edited directly by the people"; he shows the’ need for ''professional'' journalists, parliamentarians, etc., for the Social-Democratic leadership of the proletarian class struggle; he attacks the socialism of anarchists and ''litterateurs'' who in their "striving for effect" extol direct legislation by the whole people, completely failing to understand that this idea can be applied only relatively in modern society.

Those who have performed practical work in our movement know how widespread the "primitive" conception of democracy is among the masses of the students and workers. It is not surprising that this conception penetrates also into rules of organisations and into literature. The Economists of the Bernsteinian persuasion included in their rules the following: "§ 10. All affairs affecting the interests of the whole of the union organisation shall be decided by a majority vote of all its members." The Economists of the terrorist persuasion repeat after them. "The decisions of the committee shall become effective only after they have been referred to all the circles" ''(Svoboda'', No. 1, p. 67). Observe that this proposal for a widely applied referendum is advanced ''in addition'' to the demand that ''the whole of'' the organisation be built on an elective basis! We would not, of course, on this account condemn practical workers who have had too few opportunities for studying the theory and practice of real democratic organisations. But when ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', which lays claim to leadership, confines itself, under such conditions, to a resolution on broad democratic principles, can this be described as anything but a mere "striving for effect"?

===Local and all-Russia work===
The objections raised against the plan of organisation here outlined on the grounds that it is undemocratic and conspiratorial are totally unsound. Nevertheless, there remains a question which is frequently put and which deserves detailed examination. This is the question of the relations between local work and all-Russia work. Fears are expressed that the formation of a centralised organisation may shift the centre of gravity from the former to the latter, damage the movement through weakening our contacts with the working masses and the continuity of local agitation generally. To these fears we reply that our movement in the past few years has suffered precisely from the fact that local workers have been too absorbed in local work; that therefore it is absolutely necessary to shift the centre of gravity somewhat to national work; and that, far from weakening this would strengthen our ties and the continuity of our local agitation. Let us take the question of central and local newspapers. I would ask the reader not to forget that we cite the publication of newspapers only as ''an example'' illustrating an immeasurably broader and more varied revolutionary activity in general.

In the first period of the mass movement (1896-98), an attempt was made by local revolutionary workers to publish an all-Russia paper — ''Rabochaya Gazeta''. In the next period (1898-1900), the movement made an enormous stride forward, but the attention of the leaders was wholly absorbed by local publications. If we compute the total number of the local papers that were published, we shall find that on the average one issue per month was published.{{Refn|See ''Report to the Paris Congress'',<ref group="note" name="paris-congress" /> p. 14. From that time (1897) to the spring of 1900, thirty issues of various papers were published in various places.... On an average, over one issue per month was published".|group="Lenin"}} Does this not clearly illustrate our amateurism? Does this not clearly show that our revolutionary organisation lags behind the spontaneous growth of the movement? If ''the same number'' of issues had been published, not by scattered local groups, but by a single organisation, we would not only have saved an enormous amount of effort, but we would have secured immeasurably greater stability and continuity in our work. This simple point is frequently lost sight of by those practical workers who work ''actively'' and almost exclusively on local publications (unfortunately this is true even now in the overwhelming majority of cases), as well as by the publicists who display an astonishing quixotism on this question. The practical workers usually rest content with the argument that "it is difficult"<ref group="Lenin">This difficulty is more apparent than real. In fact, ''there is not'' a single local study circle that lacks the opportunity of taking up some function or other in connection with all-Russia work. “Don’t say, I can’t; say, I won’t.”</ref> for local workers to engage in the organisation of an all-Russia newspaper, and that local newspapers are better than no newspapers at all. This argument is, of course, perfectly just, and we, no less than any practical worker, appreciate the enormous importance and usefulness of local newspapers ''in general.'' But not this is the point. The point is, can we not overcome the fragmentation and primitiveness that are so glaringly expressed in the thirty issues of local newspapers that have been published throughout Russia in the course of two and a half years? Do not restrict yourselves to the indisputable, but too general, statement about the usefulness of local newspapers generally; have the courage frankly to admit their negative aspects revealed by the experience of two and a half years. This experience has shown that under the conditions in which we work, these local newspapers prove, in the majority of cases, to be unstable in their principles, devoid of political significance, extremely costly in regard to expenditure of revolutionary forces, and totally unsatisfactory from a technical point of view (I have in mind, of course, not the technique of printing, but the frequency and regularity of publication). These defects are riot accidental; they are the inevitable outcome of the fragmentation which, on the one hand, explains the predominance of local newspapers in the period under review, and, on the other, is ''fostered by'' this predominance. It is positively beyond the strength of a separate local organisation to raise its newspaper to the level of a political organ maintaining stability of principles; it is ''beyond its strength'' to collect and utilise sufficient material to shed light on the whole of our political life. The argument usually advanced to support the need for numerous local newspapers in free countries that the cost of printing by local workers is low and that the people can be kept more fully and quickly informed — this argument as experience has shown, speaks ''against'' local newspapers in Russia. They turn out to be excessively costly in regard to the expenditure of revolutionary forces, and appear very rarely, for the simple reason that the publication of an ''illegal'' newspaper, however small its size, requires an extensive secret apparatus, such as is possible with large-scale factory production; for this apparatus cannot be created in a small, handicraft workshop. Very frequently, the primitiveness of the secret apparatus (every practical worker can cite numerous cases) enables the police to take advantage of the publication and distribution of one or two issues to make ''mass'' arrests, which result in such a clean sweep that it becomes necessary to start all over again. A well-organised secret apparatus requires professionally well-trained revolutionaries and a division of labour applied with the greatest consistency, but both these requirements are beyond the strength of a separate local organisation, however strong it may be at any given moment. Not only the general interests of our movement as a whole (training of the workers in consistent socialist and political principles) but also specifically local interests are ''better served by non-local newspapers''. This may seem paradoxical at first sight, but it has been proved to the hilt by the two and a half years of experience referred to. Everyone will agree that had all the local forces that were engaged in the publication of the thirty issues of newspapers worked on a single newspaper, sixty, if not a hundred, issues could easily have been published, with a fuller expression, in consequence, of all the specifically local features of the movement. True, it is no easy matter to attain such a degree of organisation, but we must realise the need for it. Every local study circle must think about it and ''work actively'' to achieve it, without waiting for an impetus from outside, without being tempted by the popularity and closer proximity of a local newspaper which, as our revolutionary experience has shown, proves to a large extent to be illusory.

And it is a bad service indeed those publicists render to the practical work who, thinking themselves particularly (close to the practical workers, fail to see this illusoriness, and make shift with the astoundingly hollow and cheap argument that we must have local newspapers, we must have district newspapers, and we must have all-Russia newspapers. Generally speaking, of course, all these are necessary, but once the solution of a concrete organisational problem is undertaken, surely time and circumstances must be taken into consideration. Is it not quixotic for ''Svoboda'' (No. 1, p. 68) to write in a special article "dealing with ''the question of a newspaper''": "It seems to us that every locality, with any appreciable number of workers, should have its own workers’ newspaper; not a newspaper imported from somewhere, but its very own." If the publicist who wrote these words refuses to think of their meaning, then at least the reader may do it for him. How many scores, if not hundreds, of "localities" with any appreciable number of workers there are in Russia, and what a perpetuation of our amateurish methods this would mean if indeed every local organisation set about publishing its own. newspaper! How this diffusion would facilitate the gendarmerie’s task of netting — and without "any appreciable" effort — the local revolutionary workers at the very outset of their activity and of preventing them from developing into real revolutionaries. A reader of an all-Russia newspaper, continues the author, would find little interest in the descriptions of the. malpractices of the factory owners and the "details of factory life in various towns not his own". But "an inhabitant of Orel would not find Orel affairs dull reading. In every issue he would learn who had been ’picked for a lambasting’ and who had been ’flayed’, and he would be in high spirits" (p. 69). Certainly, the Orel reader is in high spirits, but our publicist’s flights of imagination are also high — too high. He should have asked himself whether such concern with trivialities is tactically in order. We are second to none in appreciating the importance and necessity of factory exposures, but it must be borne in mind that we have reached a stage when St. Petersburg folk find it dull reading the St. Petersburg correspondence of the St. Petersburg ''Rabochaya Mysl''. Leaflets are the medium through which local factory exposures have always been ''and must continue'' to be made, but we must raise the level of the ''newspaper'', not lower it to the level of a factory leaflet. What we ask of a newspaper is not so much "petty" exposures, as exposures of the major, typical evils of factory life, exposures based on especially striking facts and capable, therefore, of arousing the interest of all workers and all leaders of the movement, of really enriching their knowledge, broadening their outlook, and serving as a starting-point for awakening new districts and workers from ever-newer trade areas.

"Moreover, in a local newspaper, all the malpractices of the factory administration and other authorities may he denounced then and there. In the case of a general, distant newspaper, however, by the time the news reaches it the facts will have been forgotten in the source localities. The reader, on getting the paper, will exclaim: ’When was that-who remembers it?’" (''ibid''.). Precisely — who remembers it! From the same source we learn that the 30 issues of newspapers which appeared in the course of two and a half years were published in six cities. This averages ''one issue per city per half-year''! And even if our frivolous publicist ''trebled'' his estimate of the productivity of local work (which would be wrong in the case of an average town, since it is impossible to increase productivity to any considerable extent by our rule-of-thumb methods), we would still get only one issue every two months, i.e., nothing at all like "denouncing then and there". It would suffice, however, for ten local organisations to combine and send their delegates to take an active part in organising a general newspaper, to enable us every fortnight to "denounce", over the ''whole of Russia'', not petty, but really outstanding and typical evils. No one who knows the state of affairs in our organisations can have the slightest doubt on that score. As for catching the enemy red-handed — if we mean it seriously and not merely as a pretty phrase — that is quite beyond the ability of an illegal paper generally. It can be done only by a leaflet, because the time limit for exposures of that nature can be a day or two at the most (e.g., the usual brief strikes, violent factory clashes, demonstrations, etc.).

"The workers live not only at the factory, but also in the city," continues our author, rising from the particular to the general, with a strict consistency that would have done honour to Boris Krichevsky himself; and he refers to matters like municipal councils, municipal hospitals, municipal schools, and demands that workers’ newspapers should not ignore municipal affairs in general.

This demand — excellent in itself — serves as a particularly vivid illustration of the empty abstraction to which discussions of local newspapers are all too frequently limited. In the first place, if indeed newspapers appeared "in every locality with any appreciable number of workers" with such detailed information on municipal affairs as ''Svoboda'' desires, this would, under our Russian conditions, inevitably degenerate into actual concern with trivialities, lead to a weakening of the consciousness of the importance of an all-Russia revolutionary assault upon the tsarist autocracy, and strengthen the extremely virile shoots — not uprooted but rather hidden or temporarily suppressed — of the tendency that has become noted as a result of the famous remark about revolutionaries who talk a great deal about non-existent parliaments and too little about existent municipal councils. We say "inevitably", in order to emphasise that ''Svoboda'' obviously does not desire this, but the contrary, to come about. But good intentions are not enough. For municipal affairs to be dealt with in their proper perspective, in relation to our entire work, this perspective must ''first'' be clearly conceived, firmly established, not only by argument, but by numerous examples, so that it may acquire the stability of a ''tradition''. This is still far from being the case with us. Yet this must be done ''first'', before we can allow ourselves to think and talk about an extensive local press.

Secondly, to write really well and interestingly about municipal affairs, one must have first-hand knowledge, not book knowledge, of the issues. But there are hardly any Social-Democrats ''anywhere in Russia'' who possess such knowledge. To be able to write in newspapers (not in popular pamphlets) about municipal and state affairs, one must have fresh and varied material gathered and written up by able people. And in order to be able to gather and write up such material, we must have something more than the "primitive democracy" of a primitive circle, in which everybody does everything and all entertain themselves by playing at referendums. It is necessary to have a staff of expert writers and correspondents, an army of Social-Democratic reporters who establish contacts far and wide, who are able to fathom all sorts of "state secrets" (the knowledge of which makes the Russian government official so puffed up, but the blabbing of which is such an easy matter to him), who are able to penetrate "behind the scenes" — an army of’ people who must, as their "official duty", be ubiquitous and omniscient. And we, the Party that fights against all economic, political, social, and national oppression, can and must find, gather, train, mobilise, and set into motion such an army of omniscient people — all of which requires still to be done. Not only has not a single step in this direction been taken in the overwhelming majority of localities, but even the recognition of its necessity is very often lacking. One will search in vain in our Social-Democratic press for lively and interesting articles, correspondence, and exposures dealing with our big and little affairs — diplomatic, military, ecclesiastical, municipal, financial, etc., etc. There is ''almost nothing'', or very little, about these matters.{{Refn|That is why even examples of exceptionally good local newspapers fully confirm our point of view. For example, ''Yuzhny Rabochy''<ref group="note" name="yuzhny" /> is an excellent newspaper, entirely free of instability of principle. But it has been unable to provide what it desired for the local movement, owing to the infrequency of its publication and to extensive police raids. Principled presentation of the fundamental questions of the movement and wide political agitation, which our Party most urgently requires at the present time, has proved too big a job for the local newspaper. The material of particular value it has published, like the articles on the mine owners’ convention and on unemployment, was not strictly local material, ''it was required for the whole of Russia'', not for the South alone. No such articles have appeared in any of our Social-Democratic newspapers.|group="Lenin"}} That is why "it always annoys me frightfully when a man comes to me, utters beautiful and charming words" about the need for newspapers in "every locality with any appreciable number of workers" that will expose factory, municipal, and government evils.

The predominance of the local papers over a central press may be a sign of either poverty or luxury. Of poverty, when the movement has not yet developed the forces for large-scale production, continues to flounder in amateurism, and is all but swamped with "the petty details of factory life". Of luxury, when the movement ''has fully mastered'' the task of comprehensive exposure and comprehensive agitation, and it becomes necessary to publish numerous local newspapers in addition to the central organ. Let each decide for himself what the predominance of local newspapers implies in present-day Russia. I shall limit myself to a precise formulation of my own conclusion, to leave no grounds for misunderstanding. Hitherto, the majority of our local organisations have thought almost exclusively in terms of local newspapers, and have devoted almost all their activities to this work. This is abnormal; the very opposite should have been the case. The majority of the local organisations should think principally of the publication of an all-Russia newspaper and devote their activities chiefly to it. Until this is done, we shall not be able to establish a ''single'' newspaper capable, to any degree, of serving the movement with ''comprehensive'' press agitation. When this is done, however, normal relations between the necessary central newspaper and the necessary local newspapers will be established automatically.

It would seem at first glance that the conclusion on the necessity for shifting the centre of gravity from local to all-Russia work does not apply to the sphere of the specifically economic struggle. In this struggle, the immediate enemies of the workers are the individual employers or groups of employers, who are not bound by any organisation having even the remotest resemblance to the purely military, strictly centralised organisation of the Russian Government — our immediate enemy in the political struggle — which is led in all its minutest details by a single will.

But that is not the case. As we have repeatedly pointed out, the economic struggle is a trade struggle, and for that reason it requires that the workers be organised according to trades, not only according to place of employment. Organisation by trades becomes all the more urgently necessary, the more rapidly our employers organise in all sorts of companies and syndicates. Our fragmentation and our amateurism are an outright hindrance to this work of organisation which requires the existence of a single, all-Russia body of revolutionaries capable of giving leadership to the all-Russia trade unions. We have described above the type of organisation that is needed for this purpose; we shall now add but a few words on the question of our press in this connection.

Hardly anyone will doubt the necessity for every Social-Democratic newspaper to have a ''special department'' devoted to the trade union (economic) struggle. But the growth of the trade union movement compels us to think about the creation of a trade union press. It seems to us, however, that with rare exceptions, there can be no question of trade union newspapers in Russia at the present time; they would be a luxury, and many a time we lack even our daily bread. The form of trade union press that would suit the conditions of our illegal work and is already required at the present time is ''trade union pamphlets.'' In these pamphlets, ''legal'' and illegal material should be gathered and grouped systematically, on the working conditions in a given trade, on the differences in this respect in the various parts of, Russia; on the main demands advanced by the workers in the given trade; on the inadequacies of legislation affecting that trade; on outstanding instances of economic struggle by the workers in the trade; on the beginnings, the present state, and the requirements of their trade union organisation, etc. Such pamphlets would, in the first place, relieve our Social-Democratic press of a mass of trade details that are of interest only to workers in the given trade. Secondly, they would record the results of our experience in the trade union struggle, they would preserve the gathered material, which now literally gets lost in a mass of leaflets and fragmentary correspondence; and they would summarise this material. Thirdly, they could serve as guides for agitators, because working conditions change relatively slow ly and the main demands of the workers in a given trade are extremely stable (cf., for example, the demands advanced by the weavers in the Moscow district in 1885 and in the St. Petersburg district in 1896). A compilation of such demands and needs might serve for years as an excellent handbook for agitators on economic questions in backward localities or among the backward strata of the workers. Examples of successful strikes in a given region, information on higher living standards, on improved working conditions, in one locality, would encourage the workers in other localities to take up the fight again and again. Fourthly, having made a start in generalising the trade union struggle and in this way strengthening the link between the Russian trade union movement and socialism, the Social-Democrats would at the same time see to it that our trade union work occupied neither too small nor too large a place in our Social-Democratic work as a whole. A local organisation that is cut off from organisations in other towns finds it very difficult, sometimes almost impossible, to maintain a correct sense of pro portion (the example of ''Rabochaya Mysl'' shows what a monstrous exaggeration can be made in the direction of trade-unionism) But an all-Russia organisation of revolutionaries that stands undeviatingly on the basis of Marxism, that leads the entire political struggle and possesses a staff of professional agitators, will never find it difficult to determine the proper proportion.

==The "plan" for an all-Russia political newspaper==
"The most serious blunder ''Iskra'' committed in this connection" writes B. Krichevsky (''Rabocheye Dyelo,'' No. 10, p. 30), charging us with a tendency to "convert theory into a lifeless doctrine by isolating it from practice", "was its ’plan’ for a general party organisation" (viz., the article entitled "Where To Begin"<ref group="note">See ''Collected Works'', Vol. 5, pp. 13-24</ref>). Martynov echoes this idea in declaring that "''Iskra''’s tendency to belittle the significance of the forward march of the drab everyday struggle in comparison with the propaganda of brilliant and completed ideas ... was crowned with the plan for the organisation of a party which it sets forth in the article entitled ’Where To Begin’ in issue No. 4" (ibid., p. 61). Finally, L. Nadezhdin has of late joined in the chorus of indignation against this "plan" (the quotation marks were meant to express sarcasm). In his pamphlet, which we have just received, entitled ''The Eve of the Revolution'' (published by the "Revolutionary-Socialist Group" ''Svoboda'', whose acquaintance we have made), he declares (p. 126): "To speak now of an organisation held together by an all-Russia newspaper means propagating armchair ideas and armchair work" and represents a manifestation of "bookishness", etc.

That our terrorist turns out to be in agreement with the champions of the "forward march of the drab everyday struggle" is not surprising, since we have traced the roots of this intimacy between them in the chapters on politics and organisation. But must draw attention here to the fact that Nadezhdin is the only one who has conscientiously tried to grasp the train of thought in an article he disliked and has made an attempt to reply to the point, whereas ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', has said nothing that is material to the subject, but has tried merely to confuse the question by a series of unseemly, demagogic sallies. Unpleasant though the task may be, we must first spend some time in cleansing this Augean stable.

===Who was offended by the article ''"Where to begin"''===
Let us present a small selection of the expletives and exclamations that ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' hurled at us. <blockquote>"It is not a newspaper that can create a party organisation, but vice versa...." </blockquote>A newspaper, standing above the party, outside of its control, and independent of it, thanks to its having its own staff of agents. <blockquote>"By what miracle has ''Iskra'' forgotten about the actually existing Social-Democratic organisations of the party to which it belongs?...."

"Those who possess firm principles and a corresponding plan are the supreme regulators of the real struggle of the party and dictate to it their plan...."

"The plan drives our active and virile organisations into the kingdom of shadows and desires to call into being a fantastic network of agents...."

"Were ''Iskra’s'' plan carried into effect, every trace of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, which is taking shape, would be obliterated...."

"A propagandist organ becomes an uncontrolled autocratic law-maker for the entire practical revolutionary struggle...."

"How should our Party react to the suggestion that it be ''completely'' subordinated to an autonomous editorial board?", etc., etc.</blockquote>As the reader can see from the contents and the tone of these above quotations, ''Rabocheye Dyelo has taken offence.'' Offence, not for its own sake, but for the sake of the organisations and committees of our Party which it alleges ''Iskra'' desires to drive into the kingdom of shadows and whose very traces it would obliterate. How terrible! But a curious thing should be noted. The article "Where To Begin" appeared in May 1901. The articles in ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' appeared in September 1901. Now we are in mid-January 1902. During these five months (prior to and after September), ''not a single'' committee and ''not a single'' organisation of the Party protested formally against this monster that seeks to drive them into the kingdom of shadows; and yet scores and hundreds of communications from all parts of Russia have appeared during this period in ''Iskra'', as well as in numerous local and non-local publications. How could it happen that those who would be driven into the realm of shadows are not aware of it and have not taken offence, though a third party has?

The explanation is that the committees and other organisations are engaged in real work and are not playing at "democracy". The committees read the article "Where To Begin", saw that it represented an attempt "to elaborate a definite plan for an organisation, so ''that its formation may be undertaken from all aspects";'' and since they knew and saw very well that ''not one'' of these "sides" would dream of "setting about to build it" until it was convinced of its necessity, and of the correctness of the architectural plan, it has naturally never occurred to them to take offence at the boldness of the people who said in ''Iskra'':<blockquote>"In view of the pressing importance of the question we, on our part, take the liberty of submitting to the comrades a skeleton plan to be developed in greater detail in a pamphlet now in preparation for the print." </blockquote>With a conscientious approach to the work, was it possible to view things otherwise than that if the comrades ''accepted'' the plan submitted to them, they would carry it out, not because they are "subordinate", but because they would be convinced of its necessity for our common cause, and that if they ''did not accept it'', then the "skeleton" (a pretentious word, is it not?) would remain merely a skeleton? Is it not demagogy to fight against the skeleton of a plan, not only by "picking it to pieces" and advising comrades to reject it, but by ''inciting'' people inexperienced in revolutionary matters against its authors ''merely on the grounds'' that they ''dare'' to "legislate" and come out as the "supreme regulators", i.e., because they dare ''to propose'' an outline of a plan? Can our Party develop and make progress if an attempt ''to raise'' local functionaries to broader views, tasks, plans, etc., is objected to, not only with the claim that these views are erroneous, but on the grounds that the very "desire" ''to'' "''raise''" us gives "offence"? Nadezhdin, too, "picked" our plan "to pieces", but he did not sink to such demagogy as cannot be explained solely by naivete or by primitiveness of political views. From the outset, he emphatically rejected the charge that we intended to establish an "inspectorship over the Party". That is why Nadezhdin’s criticism of the plan can and should be answered on its merits, while ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' deserves only to be treated with contempt.

But contempt for a writer who sinks so low as to shout about autocracy and "subordination" does not relieve us of the duty of disentangling the confusion that such people create in the minds of their readers. Here we can clearly demonstrate to the world the nature of catchwords like "broad democracy". We are accused of forgetting the committees, of desiring or attempting to drive them into the kingdom of shadows, etc. How can we reply to these charges when, out of considerations of secrecy, we can give the reader ''almost no facts'' regarding our real relationships with the committees? Persons hurling vehement accusations calculated to provoke the crowd prove to be ahead of us because of their brazenness and their disregard of the duty of a revolutionary to conceal carefully from the eyes of the world the relationships and contacts which he maintains, which he is establishing or trying to establish. Naturally, we refuse once and for all to compete with such people in the field of "democratism". As to the reader who is not initiated in all Party affairs, the only way in which we can discharge our duty to him is to acquaint him, not with what is and what is ''im Werden'' but with ''a particle'' of what has taken place and what may be told as a thing of the past.

The Bund hints that we are "impostors";<ref group="Lenin">''Iskra'', No. 8.The reply of the Central Committee of the General Jewish Union of Russia and Poland to our article on the national question.</ref> the Union Abroad accuses us of attempting to obliterate all traces of the Party. Gentlemen, you will get complete satisfaction when we relate to the public ''four facts'' concerning the past.

First fact.{{Refn|We deliberately refrain from relating these facts<ref group="note" name="secret-facts" /> in the sequence of their occurrence.|group="Lenin"}} The members of one of the Leagues of Struggle, who took a direct part in founding our Party and in sending a delegate to the Inaugural Party Congress, reached agreement with a member of the ''Iskra'' group regarding the publication of a series of books for workers that were to serve the entire movement. The attempt to publish the series failed and the pamphlets written for it, ''The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats'' and ''The New Factory Law'',<ref group="note">See ''Collected Works,'' Vol. 2, pp. 323-51 and 267-315</ref> by a circuitous course and through the medium of third parties, found their way abroad, where they were published.<ref group="note">The reference is to the negotiations between the St. Petersburg League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class and Lenin who, in the second half of 1897, wrote the two pamphlets mentioned.</ref>

Second fact. Members of the Central Committee of the Bund approached a member of the ''Iskra'' group with the proposal to organise what the Bund then described as a "literary laboratory". In making the proposal, they stated that unless this was done, the movement would greatly retrogress. The result of these negotiations was the appearance of the pamphlet ''The Working-Class Cause in Russia''.{{Refn|The author requests me to state that, like his previous pamphlets, this one was sent to the Union Abroad on the assumption that its publications were edited by the Emancipation of Labour group (owing to certain circumstances, he could not then — February 1899 — know of the change in editorship). The pamphlet will be republished by the League<ref group="note" name="league" /> at an early date.|group="Lenin"}}

Third fact. The Central Committee of the Bund, via a provincial town, approached a member of the ''Iskra'' group with the proposal that he undertake the editing of the revived ''Rabochaya Gazeta'' and, of course, obtained his consent. The offer was later modified: the comrade in question was invited to act as a contributor, in view of a new plan for the composition of the Editorial Board. Also this proposal, of course, obtained his consent.<ref group="note">The reference is to the negotiations between Lenin and the Central Committee of the Bund.</ref> Articles were sent (which we managed to preserve): "Our Programme" which was a direct protest against Bernsteinism, against the change in the line of the legal literature and of ''Rabochaya Mysl''; "Our Immediate Task" ("to publish a Party organ that shall appear regularly and have close contacts with all the local groups", the drawbacks of the prevailing "amateurism"), "An Urgent Question" (an examination of the objection that it is necessary ''first'' to develop the activities of local groups before undertaking the publication of a common organ; an insistence on the paramount importance of a "revolutionary organisation" and on the necessity of "developing organisation, discipline, and the technique of secrecy to the highest degree of perfection").<ref group="note">See ''Collected Works,'' Vol. 4, pp. 210-14, 215-20, 221-26</ref> The proposal to resume publication of ''Rabochaya Gazeta'' was not carried out, and the articles were not published.

Fourth fact. A member of the committee that was organising the second regular congress of our Party communicated to a member of the ''Iskra'' group the programme of the congress and proposed that group as editorial board of the revived ''Rabochaya Gazeta''. This preliminary step, as it were, was later sanctioned by the committee to which this member belonged, and by the Central Committee of the Bund.<ref group="note">The “''fourth fact''” of which Lenin speaks was the attempt of the Union of Russian Social-Democrats Abroad and the Bund to convene the Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. in the spring of 1900. The “''member of the committee''” referred to was I. H. Lalayants (a member of the Ekaterinoslav Social-Democratic Committee) who came to Moscow in February 1900 for talks with Lenin.</ref> The ''Iskra'' group was notified of the place and time of the congress and (uncertain of being able, for certain reasons, to send a delegate) drew up a written report for the congress. In the report, the idea was suggested that the mere election of a Central Committee would not only fail to solve the question of unification at a time of such complete disorder as the present, but would even compromise the grand idea of establishing a party, in the event of an early, swift, and thorough police round-up, which was more than likely in view of the prevailing lack of secrecy; that therefore, a beginning should be made by inviting all committees and all other organisations to support the revived common organ, which would establish ''real'' contacts between all the committees and ''really'' train a group of leaders for the entire movement; and that the committees and the Party would very easily be able to transform such a group into a Central Committee as soon as the group had grown and become strong. In consequence of a number of police raids and arrests, however, the congress could not take place. For security reasons the report was destroyed, having been read only by a few comrades, including the representatives of one committee.

Let the reader now judge for himself the character of the methods employed by the Bund in hinting that we were impostors, or by ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', which accuses us of trying to relegate the committees to the kingdom of shadows and to "substitute" for the organisation of a party an organisation disseminating the ideas advocated by a single newspaper. It was to the committees, ''on their repeated invitation'', that we reported on the necessity for adopting a definite plan of concerted activities. It was precisely for the Party organisation that we elaborated this plan, in articles sent to ''Rabochaya Gazeta'', and in the report to the Party congress, again on the invitation of those who held such an influential position in the Party that they took the initiative in its (actual) restoration. Only after the ''twice'' repeated attempts of the Party organisation, ''in conjunction with ourselves, officially''to revive the central organ of the Party had failed, did we consider it our bounden duty to publish an ''unofficial'' organ, in order that with the ''third'' attempt the comrades might have before them the results of ''experience'' and not merely conjectural proposals. Now certain results of this experience are present for all to see, and all comrades may now judge whether we properly understood our duties and what should be thought of people that strive to mislead those unacquainted with the immediate past, simply because they are piqued at our having pointed out to some their inconsistency on the "national" question, and to others the inadmissibility of their vacillation in matters of principle.

===Can a newspaper be a collective organiser?===

The quintessence of the article "Where To Begin" consists in the fact that it discusses ''precisely'' this question and gives an affirmative reply to it. As far as we know, the only attempt to examine this question on its merits and to prove that it must be answered in the negative was made by L. Nadezhdin, whose argument we reproduce in full:<blockquote>"... It pleased us greatly to see ''Iskra'' (No. 4) present the question of the need for an all-Russia newspaper; but we cannot agree that this presentation bears relevance to the title ’Where To Begin’. Undoubtedly this is an extremely important matter, but neither a newspaper, nor a series of popular leaflets, nor a mountain of manifestoes, can serve as the basis for a militant organisation in revolutionary times. We must set to work to build strong political organisations in the localities. We lack such organisations; we have been carrying on our work mainly among enlightened workers, while the masses have been engaged almost exclusively in the economic struggle. ''If strong political organisations are not trained locally, what significance will even an excellently organised all-Russia newspaper have?'' It will be a burning bush, burning without being consumed, but firing no one! ''Iskra'' thinks that around it and in the activities in its behalf people will gather and organise. ''But they will find it far easier to gather and organise around activities that are more concrete''. This something more concrete must and should be the extensive organisation of local newspapers, the immediate preparation of the workers’ forces for demonstrations, the constant activity of local organisations among the unempIoyed (indefatigable distribution of pamphlets and leaflets, convening of meetings, appeals to actions of protest against the government, etc.). We must begin live political work in the localities, and when the time comes to unite on this real basis, it will not he an artificial, paper unity; not by means of newspapers can such a unification of local work into an all-Russia cause be achieved!" (''The Eve of the Revolution'', p. 54.)</blockquote>We have emphasised the passages in this eloquent tirade that most clearly show the author’s incorrect judgement of our plan, as well as the incorrectness of his point of view in general, which is here contraposed to that of ''Iskra''. Unless we train strong political organisations in the localities, even an excellently organised all-Russia newspaper will be of no avail. This is incontrovertible. But the whole point is that ''there is no other way'' of ''training'' strong political organisations except through the medium of an all-Russia newspaper. The author missed the most important statement ''Iskra'' made ''before it proceeded'' to set forth its "plan": that it was necessary "to call for the formation of a revolutionary organisation, capable of uniting all forces and guiding the movement in actual practice and ''not in name alone'', that is, ''an organisation ready at any time to support every protest and every outbrea’'' and use it to build up and consolidate the fighting forces suitable for the decisive struggle". But now after the February and March events, everyone will agree with this in principle, continues ''Iskra''. Yet what we need is not a solution of the question in principle, but its ''practical solution;'' we must immediately advance a definite constructive plan through which all may immediately set to work to build ''from every side''. Now we are again being dragged away from the practical solution towards something which in principle is correct, indisputable, and great, but which is entirely inadequate and incomprehensible to the broad masses of workers, namely, "to rear strong political organisations"! This is not the point at issue, most worthy author. The point is how to go about the rearing and how to accomplish it.

It is not true to say that "we have been carrying on our work mainly among enlightened workers, while the masses have been engaged almost exclusively in the economic struggle". Presented in such a form, the thesis reduces itself to ''Svoboda''’s usual but fundamentally false contraposition of the enlightened workers to the "masses". In recent years, even the enlightened workers have been "engaged almost exclusively in the economic struggle". That is the first point. On the other hand, the masses will never learn to conduct the political struggle until we help ''to train'' leaders for this struggle, both from among the enlightened workers and from among the intellectuals. Such leaders can acquire training ''solely'' by systematically evaluating ''all'' the everyday aspects of our political life, ''all attempts'' at protest and struggle on the part of the various classes and on various grounds. Therefore, to talk of "rearing political organisations" and at the same time ''to contrast'' the "paper work" of a political newspaper to "live political work in the localities" is plainly ridiculous. ''Iskra'' has adapted its "plan" for a newspaper to the "plan" for creating a "militant preparedness" to support the unemployed movement, peasant revolts, discontent among, the Zemstvo people, "popular indignation against some tsarist bashi-bazouk on the rampage", etc. Anyone who is at all acquainted with the movement knows full well that the vast majority of local organisations have ''never even dreamed'' of these things; that many of the prospects of "live political work" here indicated ''have never'' been realised by a single organisation; that the attempt, for example, to call attention to the growth of discontent and protest among the Zemstvo intelligentsia rouses feelings of consternation and perplexity in Nadezhdin ("Good Lord, is this newspaper intended for Zemstvo people?"—The ''Eve'', p. 129), among the Economists (Letter to ''Iskra'', No. 12), and among many practical workers. Under these circumstances, it is possible to "begin" ''only'' by inducing people ''to think'' about all these things, to summarise and generalise all the diverse signs of ferment and active struggle. In our time, when Social-Democratic tasks are being degraded, ''the only way'' "live political work" can be ''begun is'' with live political agitation, which is impossible unless we have an all-Russia newspaper, frequently issued and regularly distributed.

Those who regard the ''Iskra'' "plan" as a manifestation of "bookishness" have totally failed to understand its substance and take for the goal that which is suggested as the most suitable means for the present time. These people have not taken the trouble to study the two comparisons that were drawn to present a clear illustration of the plan. ''Iskra'' wrote: The publication of an all-Russia political newspaper must be ''the main line'' by which we may unswervingly develop, deepen, and expand the organisation (viz., the revolutionary organisation that is ever ready to support every protest and every outbreak). Pray tell me, when bricklayers lay bricks in, various parts of an enormous, unprecedentedly large structure, is it "paper" work to use a line to help them find the correct place for the bricklaying; to indicate to them the ultimate goal of the common work; to enable them to use, not only every brick, but even every piece of brick which, cemented to the bricks laid before and after it, forms a finished, continuous line? And are we not now passing through precisely such a period in our Party life when we have bricks and bricklayers, but lack the guide line for all to see and follow? Let them shout that in stretching out the line, we want to command. Had we desired to command, gentlemen, we would have written on the title page, not "''Iskra'', No. 1", but "Rabochaya ''Gazeta'', No. 3", as we were invited to do by certain comrades, and ''as we would have had a perfect right to do'' after the events described above. But we did not do that. We wished to have our hands free to wage an irreconcilable struggle against all pseudo-Social-Democrats; we wanted our line, if properly laid, to be respected because it was correct, and not because it had been laid by an official organ.

"The question of uniting local activity in central bodies runs in a vicious circle," Nadezhdin lectures us; "unification requires homogeneity of the elements, and the homogeneity can be created only by something that unites; but the unifying element may be the product of strong local organisations which at the present time are by no means distinguished for their homogeneity." This truth is as revered and as irrefutable as that we must train strong political organisations. And it is equally barren. ''Every'' question "runs in a vicious circle" because political life as a whole is an endless chain consisting of an infinite number of links. The whole art of politics lies in finding and taking as firm a grip as we can of the link that is least likely to be struck from our hands, the one that is most important at the given moment, the one that most of all guarantees its possessor the possession of the whole chain.<ref group="Lenin">Comrade Krichevsky and Comrade Martynov! I call your attention to this outrageous manifestation of “autocracy”, “uncontrolled authority”, “supreme regulating”, etc. just think of it: a desire to ''possess'' the whole chain!! Send in a complaint at once. Here you have a ready-made topic for two leading articles for No. 12 of ''Rabocheye Dyelo!''</ref> If we had a crew of experienced bricklayers who had learned to work so well together that they could lay their bricks exactly as required without a guide line (which, speaking abstractly, is by no means impossible), then perhaps we might take hold of some other link. But it is unfortunate that as yet we have no experienced bricklayers trained for teamwork, that bricks are often laid where they are not needed at all, that they are not laid according to the general line, but are so scattered that the enemy can shatter the structure as if it were made of sand and not of bricks.

’Another comparison: "A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser. In this respect ''it may be compared to the scaffolding'' erected round a building under construction; it marks the contours of the structure and facilitates communication between the builders, permitting them to distribute the work and to view the common results achieved by their organised labour."<ref group="Lenin">Martynov, in quoting the first sentence of this passage in ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' (No. 10, p. 62), omitted the second, as if desiring to emphasise either his unwillingness to discuss the essentials of the question or his inability to understand them.</ref> Does this sound anything like the attempt of an armchair author to exaggerate his role? The scaffolding is not required at all for the dwelling; it is made of cheaper material, is put up only temporarily, and is scrapped for firewood as soon as the shell of the structure is completed. As for the building of revolutionary organisations, experience shows that sometimes they may be built without scaffolding, as the seventies showed. But at the present time we cannot even imagine the possibility of erecting the building we require without scaffolding.

Nadezhdin disagrees with this, saying:<blockquote>"''Iskra'' thinks that around it and in the activities in its behalf people will gather and organise. ''But they will find it far easier'' to gather and organise around ''activities that are more concrete!''" </blockquote>Indeed, "far easier around activities that are more concrete". A Russian proverb holds: "Don’t spit into a well, you may want to drink from it." But there are people who do not object to drinking from a well that has been spat into. What despicable things our magnificent, legal "Critics of Marxism" and illegal admirers of ''Rabochaya Mysl'' have said in the name of this something more concrete! How restricted our movement is by our own narrowness, lack of initiative, and hesitation, which are justified with the traditional argument about finding it "far easier to gather around something more concrete"! And Nadezhdin — who regards himself as possessing a particularly keen sense of the "realities of life", who so severely condemns "armchair" authors and (with pretensions to wit) accuses ''Iskra'' of a weakness for seeing Economism everywhere, and who sees himself standing far above the division between the orthodox and the Critics — fails to see that with his arguments he contributes to the narrowness that arouses his indignation and that he is drinking from the most spat-in well! The sincerest indignation against narrowness, the most passionate desire to raise its worshippers from their knees, will not suffice if the indignant one is swept along without sail or rudder and, as "spontaneously" as the revolutionaries of the seventies, clutches at such things as "excitative terror", "agrarian terror", "sounding the tocsin etc. Let us take a glance at these "more concrete" activities around which he thinks it will be "far easier" to gather and organise: (1) local newspapers; (2) preparations for demonstrations; (3) work among the unemployed. It is immediately apparent that all these things have been seized upon at random as a pretext for saying something; for, however we may regard them, it would be absurd to see in them anything especially suitable for "gathering and organising". The selfsame Nadezhdin says a few pages further: "It is time we simply stated the fact that activity of a very pitiable kind is being carried on in the localities, the committees are not doing a tenth of what they could do ... the coordinating centres we have at present are the purest fiction, representing a sort of revolutionary bureaucracy, whose members mutually grant generalships to one another; and so it will continue until strong local organisations grow up." These remarks, though exaggerating the position somewhat, no doubt contain many a bitter truth; but can it be said that Nadezhdin does not perceive the connection between the pitiable activity in the localities and the narrow mental outlook of the functionaries, the narrow scope of their activities, inevitable in the circumstances of the lack of training of Party workers confined to local organisations? Has he, like the author of the article on organisation, published in ''Svoboda'', forgotten how the transition to a broad local press (from 1898) was accompanied by a strong intensification of Economism and "primitiveness"? Even if a "broad local press" could be established at all satisfactorily (and we have shown this to be impossible, save in very, exceptional cases) — even then the local organs could not "gather and organise" ''all'' the revolutionary forces for a ''general'' attack upon the autocracy and for leadership of the ''united'' struggle. Let us not forget that we are here discussing ''only'' the "rallying", organising significance of the newspaper, and we could put to Nadezhdin, who defends fragmentation, the question he himself has ironically put: "Have we been left a legacy of 200,000 revolutionary organisers?" Furthermore, "preparations for demonstrations" cannot be ''contraposed'' to ''Iskra''’s plan, for the very reason that this plan includes the organisation of the broadest possible demonstrations ''as one of its aims''; the point under discussion is the selection of the practical ''means''. On this point also Nadezhdin is confused, for he has lost sight of the fact that only forces that are "gathered and organised" can "prepare for" demonstrations (which hitherto, in the overwhelming majority of cases, have taken place spontaneously) and that we ''lack'' precisely ''the ability'' to rally and organise. "Work among the unemployed." Again the same confusion; for this too represents one of the field operations of the mobilised forces and not a plan for mobilising the forces. The extent to which Nadezhdin here too underestimates the harm caused by our fragmentation, by our lack of "200,000 organisers", can be seen from the fact that: many people (including Nadezhdin) have reproached ''Iskra'' for the paucity of the news it gives on unemployment and for the casual nature of the correspondence it publishes about the most common affairs of rural life. The reproach is justified; but ''Iskra'' is "guilty without sin". We strive "to stretch a line" through the countryside too, where there are hardly any bricklayers anywhere, and we are ''obliged'' to encourage ''everyone'' who informs us even as regards the most common facts, in the hope that this will increase the number of our contributors in the given field and will ultimately ''train us all'' to select facts that are really the most outstanding. But the material on which we can train is so scanty that, unless we generalise it for the whole of Russia, we shall have very little to train on at all. No doubt, one with at least as much ability as an agitator and as much knowledge of the life of the vagrant as Nadezhdin manifests could render priceless service to the movement by carrying on agitation among the unemployed; but such a person would be simply hiding his light under a bushel if he failed to inform all comrades in Russia as regards every step he took in his work, so that others, who, in the mass, still lack the ability to undertake new kinds of work, might learn from his example.

All without exception now talk of the importance of unity, of the necessity for "gathering and organising"; but in the majority of cases what is lacking is a definite idea of where to begin and how to bring about this unity. Probably all will agree that if we "unite", say, the district circles in a given town, it will be necessary to have for this purpose common institutions, i.e., not merely the common title of "League", but genuinely common work, exchange of material, experience, and forces, distribution of functions, not only by districts, but through specialisation on a town-wide scale. All will agree that a big secret apparatus will not pay its way (to use a commercial expression) "with the resources" (in both money and manpower, of course) of a single district, and that this narrow field will not provide sufficient scope for a specialist to develop his talents. But the same thing applies to the co-ordination of activities of a number of towns, since even a specific locality will be and, in the history of our Social-Democratic movement, has proved to be, far too narrow a field; we have demonstrated this above in detail with regard to political agitation and organisational work. What we require foremost and imperatively is to broaden the field, establish real contacts between the towns on the basis of regular, common work; for fragmentation weighs down on the people and they are "stuck in a hole" (to use the expression employed by a correspondent to ''Iskra''), not knowing what is happening in the world, from whom to learn, or how to acquire experience and satisfy their desire to engage in broad activities. I continue to insist that we can start establishing real contacts only with the aid of a common newspaper, as the only regular, all-Russia enterprise, one which will summarise the results of the most diverse forms of activity and thereby stimulate people to march forward untiringly along all the innumerable paths leading to revolution, in the same way as all roads lead to Rome. If we do not want unity in name only, we must arrange for all local study circles immediately to assign, say, a fourth of their forces to active work for the common cause, and the newspaper will immediately convey to them<ref group="Lenin">''A reservation'': that is, if a given study circle sympathises with the policy of the newspaper and considers it useful to become a collaborator, meaning by that, not only for literary collaboration, but for revolutionary collaboration generally. ''Note for Rabocheye Dyelo'': Among revolutionaries who attach value to the cause and not to playing at democracy, who do not separate “sympathy” from the most active and lively participation, this reservation is taken for granted.</ref> the general design, scope, and character of the cause; it will give them a precise indication of the most keenly felt shortcomings in the all-Russia activity, where agitation is lacking and contacts are weak, and it will point out which little wheels in the vast general mechanism a given study circle might repair or replace with better ones. A study circle that has not yet begun to work, but which is only just seeking activity, could then start, not like a craftsman in an isolated little workshop unaware of the earlier development in "industry" or of the general level of production methods prevailing in industry, but as a participant in an extensive enterprise that reflects the whole general revolutionary attack on the autocracy. The more perfect the finish of each little wheel and the larger the number of detail workers engaged in the common cause, the closer will our network become and the less will be the disorder in the ranks consequent on inevitable police, raids.

The mere function of distributing a newspaper would help to establish actual contacts (if it is a newspaper worthy of the name, i.e., if it is issued regularly, not once a month like a magazine, but at least four times a month). At the present time, communication between towns on revolutionary business is an extreme rarity, and, at all events, is the exception rather than the rule. If we had a newspaper, however, such communication would become the rule and would secure, not only the distribution of the newspaper, of course, but (what is more important) an exchange of experience, of material, of forces, and of resources. Organisational work would immediately acquire much greater scope, and the success of one locality would serve as a standing encouragement to further perfection; it would arouse the desire to utilise the experience gained by comrades working in other parts of the country. Local work would become far richer and more varied than it is at present. Political and economic exposures gathered from all over Russia would provide mental food for workers of all trades and ''all stages'' of ''development''; they would provide material and occasion for talks and readings on the most diverse subjects, which would, in addition, be suggested by hints in the legal press, by talk among the people, and by "shamefaced" government statements. Every outbreak, every demonstration, would be weighed and, discussed in its every aspect in all parts of Russia and would thus stimulate a desire to keep up with, and even surpass, the others (we socialists do not by any means flatly reject all emulation or all "competition"!) and consciously prepare that which at first, as it were, sprang up spontaneously, a desire to take advantage of the favourable conditions in a given district or at a given moment for modifying the plan of attack, etc. At the same time, this revival of local work would obviate that desperate, "convulsive" exertion of all efforts and risking of ''all'' forces which every single demonstration or the publication of every single issue of a local newspaper now frequently entails. On the one hand, the police would find it much more difficult to get at the "roots", if they did not know in what district to dig down for them. On the other hand, regular common work would train our people to adjust the force of a ''given'' attack to the strength of the given contingent of the common army (at the present time hardly anyone ever thinks of doing that, because in nine cases out of ten these attacks occur spontaneously); such regular common work would facilitate the "transportation" from one place to another, not only of literature, but also of revolutionary forces.

In a great many cases these forces are now being bled white on restricted local work, but under the circumstances we are discussing it would be possible to transfer a capable agitator or organiser from one end of the country to the other, and the occasion for doing this would constantly arise. Beginning with short journeys on Party business at the Party’s expense, the comrades would become accustomed to being maintained by the Party, to becoming professional revolutionaries, and to training themselves as real political leaders.

And if indeed we succeeded in reaching the point when all, or at least a considerable majority, of the local committees local groups, and study circles took up active work for the common cause, we could, in the not distant future, establish a weekly newspaper for regular distribution in tens of thousands of copies throughout Russia. This newspaper would become part of an enormous pair of smith’s bellows that would fan every spark of the class struggle and of popular indignation into a general conflagration. Around what is in itself still a very innocuous and very small, but regular and ''common'', effort, in the full sense of the word, a regular army of tried fighters would systematically gather and receive their training. On the ladders and scaffolding of this general organisational structure there would soon develop and come to the fore Social-Democratic Zhelyabovs from among our revolutionaries and Russian Bebels from among our workers, who would take their place at the head of the mobilised army and rouse the whole people to settle accounts with the shame and the curse of Russia.

That is what we should dream of!

"We should dream!" I wrote these words and became alarmed. I imagined myself sitting at a "unity conference" and opposite me were the ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' editors and contributors. Comrade Martynov rises and, turning to me, says sternly: "Permit me to ask you, has an autonomous editorial board the right to dream without first soliciting the opinion of the Party committees?" He is followed by Comrade Krichevsky; who (philosophically deepening Comrade Martynov, who long ago rendered Comrade Plekhanov more profound) continues even more sternly: "I go further. I ask, has a Marxist any right at all to dream, knowing that according to Marx, mankind always sets itself the tasks it can solve and that tactics is a process of the growth of Party tasks which grow together with the Party?"

The very thought of these stern questions sends a cold shiver down my spine and makes me wish for nothing but a place to hide in. I shall try to hide behind the back of Pisarev.

"There are rifts and rifts," wrote Pisarev of the rift between dreams and reality. "My dream may run ahead of the natural march of events or may fly off at a tangent in a direction in which no natural march of events will ever proceed. In the first case my dream will not cause any harm; it may even support and augment the energy of the working men.... There is nothing in such dreams that would distort or paralyse labour-power. On the contrary, if man were completely deprived of the ability to dream in this way, if he could not from time to time run ahead and mentally conceive, in an entire and completed picture, the product to which his hands are only just beginning to lend shape, then I cannot at all imagine what stimulus there would be to induce man to undertake and complete extensive and strenuous work in the sphere of art, science, and practical endeavour.... The rift between dreams and reality causes no harm if only the person dreaming believes seriously in his dream, if he attentively observes life, compares his observations with his castles in the air, and if, generally speaking, he works conscientiously for the achievement of his fantasies. If there is some connection between dreams and life then all is well."<ref group="note">Lenin cites the article by D. I. Pisarev “Blunders of Immature Thinking”.</ref>

Of this kind of dreaming there is unfortunately too little in our movement. And the people most responsible for this are those who boast of their sober views, their "closeness" to the "concrete", the representatives of legal criticism and of illegal "tail-ism".

===What type of organisation do we require? ===
From what has been said the reader will see that our "tactics. as-plan" consists in rejecting an immediate ''call'' for assault; in demanding "to lay effective siege to the enemy fortress"; or, in other words, in demanding that all efforts be directed towards gathering, organising, and ''mobilising'' a permanent army. When we ridiculed ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' for its leap from Economism to shouting for an assault (for which it clamoured in ''April 1901,'' in ''"Listok" Rabochego Dyela'', 157 No. 6) it of course came down on us with accusations of being "doctrinaire", of failing to understand our revolutionary duty, of calling for caution, etc. Of course, we were not in the least surprised to hear these accusations from those who totally lack principles and who evade all arguments by references to a profound "tactics-as-process", any more than we were surprised by the fact that these charges were repeated by Nadezhdin, who in general has a supreme contempt for durable programmes and the fundamentals of tactics.

It is said that history does not repeat itself. But Nadezhdin exerts every effort to cause it to repeat itself and he zealously imitates Tkachov<ref group="note">''Tkachov, P. N.'' (1844-1885)—one of the ideologists of revolutionary Narodism, a follower of the Auguste Blanqui.</ref> in strongly condemning "revolutionary culturism", in shouting about "sounding the tocsin" and about a special " eve-of-the-revolution point of view", etc., Apparently, he has forgotten the well-known maxim that while an original historical event represents a tragedy, its replica is merely a farce.<ref group="note">Lenin refers to the following passage from Marx’s ''The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte'': “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce” (see Marx and Engels, ''Selected Works'', Vol. 1, Moscow, 1958, p. 247).</ref> The attempt to seize power, which was prepared by the preaching of Tkachov and carried out by means of the "terrifying" terror that did really terrify, had grandeur, but the "excitative" terror of a Tkachov the Little is simply ludicrous, particularly so when it is supplemented with the idea of an organisation of average people.<blockquote>

"If ''Iskra'' would only emerge from its sphere of bookishness," wrote Nadezhdin, "it would realise that these (instances like the worker’s letter to ''Iskra'', No. 7, etc.) are symptoms of the fact that soon, very soon, the ’assault’ will begin, and to speak now [sic!] of an organisation linked with an all-Russia newspaper means to propagate armchair ideas and armchair activity."</blockquote>

What an unimaginable muddle — on the one hand, excitative terror and an "organisation of average people", along with the opinion that it is far "easier" to gather around something "more concrete", like a local newspaper, and, on the other, the view that to talk "now" about an all-Russia organisation means to propagate armchair thoughts, or, bluntly put, "now" it is already too late! But what of the "extensive organisation of local newspapers" — is it not too late for that, my dear L. Nadezhdin? And compare with this ''Iskra''’s point of view and tactical line: excitative terror is nonsense; to talk of an organisation of average people and of the ''extensive'' publication of local newspapers means to fling the door wide open to Economism. We must speak of a single all-Russia organisation of revolutionaries, and it will never be too late to talk of that until the real, not a paper, assault begins.<blockquote>"Yes, as far as organisation is concerned the situation is anything but brilliant," continues Nadezhdin. "Yes, ''Iskra'' is entirely right in saying that the mass of our fighting forces consists of volunteers and insurgents.... You do well to give such a sober picture of the state of our forces. But why, at the same time, do you forget that ''the masses are not ours at all'', and consequently, will ''not ask us'' when to begin military operations; they will simply go and ’rebel’.... When the crowd itself breaks out with its elemental destructive force it ''may'' overwhelm and sweep aside the ’regular troops’ among whom we prepared all the time to introduce extremely systematic organisation, but never ''managed'' to do so." (Our italics.)</blockquote>Astounding logic! ''For the very reason'' that the "masses are not ours" it is stupid and unseemly to shout about an immediate "assault", for assault means attack by regular troops and not a spontaneous mass upsurge. For the very reason that the masses ''may'' overwhelm and sweep aside the regular troops we must without fail "manage to keep up" with the spontaneous upsurge by our work of "introducing extremely systematic organisation" in the regular troops, for the more we "manage" to introduce such organisation the more probably will the regular troops not be overwhelmed by the masses, but will take their place at their head. Nadezhdin is confused because he imagines that troops in the course of systematic organisation are engaged in something that isolates them from the masses, when in actuality they are engaged exclusively in all-sided and all-embracing political. agitation, i.e., precisely in work that ''brings closer and merges into a single whole'' the elemental destructive force of the masses and the conscious destructive force of the organisation of revolutionaries. You, gentlemen, wish to lay the blame where it does not belong. For it is precisely the ''Svoboda'' group that, by including terror ''in its programme'', calls for an organisation of terrorists, and such an organisation would indeed prevent our troops from establishing closer contacts with the masses, which, unfortunately, are still not ours, and which, unfortunately, do not yet ask us, or rarely ask us, when and how to launch their military operations.<blockquote>"We shall miss the revolution itself," continues Nadezhdin in his attempt to scare ''Iskra'', "in the same way as we missed ..the recent events, which came upon us like a bolt from the blue."</blockquote>This sentence, taken in connection with what has been quoted above, clearly demonstrates the absurdity of the "eve-of-therevolution point of view" invented by ''Svoboda''.<ref group="Lenin">''The Eve of the Revolution, p. 62.''</ref> Plainly put, this special "point of view" boils down to this that it is too late "now" to discuss and prepare. If that is the case, most worthy opponent of "bookishness", what was the use of writing a pamphlet of 132 pages on questions of theory<ref group="Lenin">In his ''Review of Questions of Theory'', Nadezhdin, by the way, made almost no contribution whatever to the discussion of questions of theory, apart, perhaps, from the following passage, a most peculiar one from the “eve-of-the-revolution point of view”: “Bernsteinism, on the whole, is losing its acuteness for us at the present moment, as is the question whether Mr. Adamovich will prove that Mr. Struve has already earned a lacing, or, on the contrary, whether Mr. Struve will refute Mr. Adamovich and will refuse to resign — it really makes no difference, because the hour of revolution has struck” (p. 110). One can hardly imagine a more glaring illustration of Nadezhdin’s infinite disregard for theory. We have proclaimed “the eve of the revolution”, ''therefore'' “it really makes no difference” whether or not the orthodox will succeed in finally driving the Critics from their positions! Our wiseacre fails to see that it is precisely during the revolution that we shall stand in need of the results of our theoretical battles with the Critics in order to be able resolutely to combat their ''practical'' positions!</ref> and tactics"? Don’t you think it would have been more becoming for the "eve-of-the-revolution point of view" to have issued 132,000 leaflets containing the summary call, "Bang them — knock’em down!"?

Those who make nation-wide political agitation the cornerstone of their programme, ''their tactics, and their organisational work'', as ''Iskra'' does, stand the least risk of missing the revolution. The people who are now engaged throughout Russia in weaving the network of connections that spread from the all-Russia newspaper not only did not miss the spring events, but, on the contrary, gave us an opportunity to foretell them. Nor did they miss the demonstrations that were described in ''Iskra'', Nos. 13 and 14; on the contrary, they took part in them, clearly realising that it was their duty to come to the aid of the spontaneously rising masses and, at the same time, through the medium of the newspaper, help all the comrades in Russia to inform themselves of the demonstrations and to make use of their gathered experience. And if they live they ''will'' not miss the revolution, which, first and foremost, will demand of us experience in agitation, ability to support (in a Social-Democratic manner) every protest, as well as direct the spontaneous movement, while safeguarding it from the mistakes of friends and the traps of enemies.

We have thus come to the last reason that compels us so strongly to insist on the plan of an organisation centred round an all-Russia newspaper, through the common work for the common newspaper. Only such organisation will ensure the ''flexibility'' required of a militant Social-Democratic organisation, viz., the ability to adapt itself immediately to the most diverse and rapidly changing conditions of struggle, the ability, "on the one hand, to avoid an open battle against an overwhelming enemy, when the enemy has concentrated all his forces at one spot and yet, on the other, to take advantage of his unwieldiness and to attack him when and where he least expects it".<ref group="Lenin">''Iskra'', No. 4, “Where To Begin”. “Revolutionary culturists, who do not accept the eve-of-the-revolution point of view, are not in the least perturbed by the prospect of working for a long period of time,” writes Nadezhdin (p. 62). This brings us to observe: Unless we are able to devise political tactics and an organisational plan for ''work over a very long period'', while ensuring, in ''the very process of this work'', our Party’s readiness to be at its post and fulfil its duty in every contingency whenever the march of events is accelerated — unless we succeed in doing this, we shall prove to he but miserable political adventurers. Only Nadezhdin, who began but yesterday to describe himself as a Social-Democrat, can forget that the aim of Social-Democracy is to transform radically the conditions of life of the whole of mankind and that for this reason it is not permissible for a Social-Democrat to be “perturbed” by the question of the duration of the work.</ref> It would be a grievous error indeed to build the Party organisation in anticipation only of outbreaks and street fighting, or only upon the "forward march of the drab everyday struggle". We must ''always'' conduct our everyday work and always be prepared for every situation, because very frequently it is almost impossible to foresee when a period of outbreak will give way to a period of calm. In the instances, however, when it is possible to do so, we could not turn this foresight to account for the purpose of reconstructing our organisation; for in an autocratic country these changes take place with astonishing rapidity, being sometimes connected with a single night raid by the tsarist janizaries.<ref group="note">''Janizaries''—privileged Turkish infantry, abolished in 1826. The janizaries plundered the population and were known for their unusual brutality. Lenin called the tsarist police “janizaries”.</ref> And the revolution itself must not by any means be regarded as a single act (as the Nadezhdins apparently imagine), but as a series of more or less powerful outbreaks rapidly alternating with periods of more or less complete calm. For that reason, the principal content of the activity of our Party organisation, the focus of this activity, should be work that is both possible and essential in the period of a most powerful outbreak as well as in the period of complete calm, namely, work of political agitation, connected throughout Russia, illuminating all aspects of life, and conducted among the broadest possible strata of the masses. But this work ''is unthinkable'' in present-day Russia without an all-Russia newspaper, issued very frequently. The organisation, which will form round this newspaper, the organisation of its ''collaborators'' (in the broad sense of the word, i.e., all those working for it), will be ready ''for'' ''everything'', from upholding the honour, the prestige, and the continuity of the Party in periods of acute revolutionary "depression" to preparing for, appointing the time for, and carrying out the ''nation-wide armed uprising.''

Indeed, picture to yourselves a very ordinary occurrence in Russia-the total round-up of our comrades in one or several localities. In the absence of a ''single'', common, regular activity that combines all the local organisations, such round-ups frequently result in the interruption of the work for many months. if, however, all the local organisations had one common activity, then, even in the event of a very serious round-up, two or three energetic persons could in the course of a few weeks establish contact between the common centre and new youth circles, which, as we know, spring up very quickly even now. And when the common activity, hampered by the arrests, is apparent to all, new circles will be able to come into being and make connections with the centre even more rapidly.

On the other hand, picture to yourselves a popular uprising. Probably everyone will now agree that we must think of this and prepare for it. But how? Surely the Central Committee cannot appoint agents to all localities for the purpose of preparing the uprising. Even if we had a Central Committee, it could achieve absolutely nothing by such appointments under present-day Russian conditions. But a network of agents<ref group="Lenin">Alas, alas! Again I have let slip that awful word “agents”, which jars so much on the democratic cars of the Martynovs! I wonder why this word did not offend the heroes of the seventies and yet off ends the amateurs of the nineties? I like the word, because it clearly and trenchantly indicates ''the common cause'' to which all the agents bend their thoughts and actions, and if I had to replace this word by another, the only word I might select would be the word “collaborator”, if it did not suggest a certain bookishness and vagueness. The thing we need is a military organisation of agents. However, the numerous Martynovs (particularly abroad), whose favourite pastime is “mutual grants of generalships to one another”, may instead of saying “passport agent” prefer to say, “Chief of the Special Department for Supplying Revolutionaries with Passports”. etc.</ref> that would form in the course of establishing and distributing the common newspaper would not have to "sit about and wait" for the call for an uprising, but could carry on the regular activity that would guarantee the highest probability of success in the event of an uprising. Such activity would strengthen our contacts with the broadest strata of the working masses and with all social strata that are discontented with the autocracy, which is of such importance for an uprising. Precisely such activity would serve to cultivate the ability to estimate correctly the general political situation and, consequently, the ability to select the proper moment for an uprising. Precisely such activity would train all local organisations to respond simultaneously to the same political questions, incidents, and events that agitate the whole of Russia and to react to such "incidents" in the most vigorous, uniform, and expedient manner possible; for an uprising is in essence the most vigorous, most uniform, and most expedient "answer" of the entire people to the government. Lastly, it is precisely such activity that would train all revolutionary organisations throughout Russia to maintain the most continuous, and at the same time the most secret, contacts with one another, thus creating ''real'' Party unity; for without such contacts it will be impossible collectively to discuss’ the plan for the uprising and to take the necessary preparatory measures on the eve, measures that must be kept in the strictest secrecy.

In a word, the "plan for an all-Russia political newspaper", far from representing the fruits of the labour of armchair workers, infected with dogmatism and bookishness (as it seemed to those who gave but little thought to it), is the most practical plan for immediate and all-round preparation of the uprising, with, at the same time, no loss of sight for a moment of the pressing day-to-day work.

==Conclusion==
The history of Russian Social-Democracy can be distinctly divided into three periods:

The first period embraces about ten years, approximately from 1884 to 1894. This was the period of the rise and consolidation of the theory and programme of Social-Democracy. The adherents of the new trend in Russia were very few in number. Social-Democracy existed without a working-class movement, and as a political party it was at the embryonic stage of development.

The second period embraces three or four years—1894-98, In this period Social-Democracy appeared on the scene as a social movement, as the upsurge of the masses of the people, as a political party. This is the period of its childhood and adolescence. The intelligentsia was fired with a vast and general zeal for struggle against Narodism and for going among the workers; the workers displayed a general enthusiasm for strike action. The movement made enormous strides. The majority of the leaders were young people who had not reached "the age of thirty-five" which to Mr. N. Mikhailovsky appeared to be a sort of natural border-line. Owing to their youth, they proved to be untrained for practical work and they left the scene with astonishing rapidity. But in the majority of cases the scope of their activity was very wide. Many of them had begun their revolutionary thinking as adherents of Narodnaya Volya. Nearly all had in their early youth enthusiastically worshipped the terrorist heroes. It required a struggle to abandon the captivating impressions of those heroic traditions, and the struggle was accompanied by the breaking off of personal relations with people who were determined to remain loyal to the Narodnaya Volya and for whom the young Social-Democrats had profound respect. The struggle compelled the youthful leaders to educate themselves to read illegal literature of every trend, and to study closely the questions of legal Narodism. Trained in this struggle, Social-Democrats went into the working-class movement without "for a moment" forgetting either the theory of Marxism, which brightly illumined their path, or the task of overthrowing the autocracy. The formation of the Party in the spring of 1898 was the most striking and at the same time the last act of the Social-Democrats of this period.

The third period, as we have seen, was prepared in 1897 and it definitely cut off the second period in 1898 (1898-?). This was a period of disunity, dissolution, and vacillation. During adolescence a youth’s voice breaks. And so, in this period, the voice of Russian Social-Democracy began to break, to strike a false note — on the one hand, in the writings of Messrs. Struve and Prokopovich, of Bulgakov and Berdyaev, and on the other, in those of V. l-n and R. M., of B. Krichevsky and Martynov. But it was only the leaders who wandered about separately and drew back; the movement itself continued to grow, and it advanced with enormous strides. The proletarian struggle spread to new strata of the workers and extended to the whole of Russia, at the same time indirectly stimulating the revival of the democratic spirit among the students and among other sections of the population. The political consciousness of the leaders, however, capitulated before the breadth and power of the spontaneous upsurge; among the Social-Democrats, another type had become dominant — the type of functionaries, trained almost exclusively on "legal Marxist" literature, which proved to be all the more inadequate the more the spontaneity of the masses demanded political consciousness on the part of the leaders. The leaders not only lagged behind in regard to theory ("freedom of criticism") and practice ("primitiveness"), but they sought to justify their backwardness by all manner of high-flown arguments. Social-Democracy was degraded to the level of trade-unionism by the Brentano adherents in legal literature, and by the tail-enders in illegal literature. The ''Credo'' programme began to be put into operation, especially when the "primitive methods" of the Social-Democrats caused a revival of revolutionary non-Social-Democratic tendencies.

If the reader should feel critical that I have dealt at too great length with a certain ''Rabocheye Dyelo'', ''I'' can say only that ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' acquired "historical" significance because it most notably reflected the "spirit" of this third period.<ref group="Lenin">I could also reply with the German proverb: ''Den Sack schlägt man, den Esel meint man'' (you beat the sack, but you mean the donkey). Not ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' alone, but also ''the broad mass of'' practical workers ''and theoreticians'' was carried away by the “criticism” ''a la mode'', becoming confused in regard to the question of spontaneity and lapsing from the Social-Democratic to the trade-unionist conception of our political and organisational tasks.</ref> It was not the consistent R. M., but the weathercock Krichevskys and Martynovs who were able properly to express the disunity and vacillation, the readiness to make concessions to "criticism" to "Economism", and to terrorism. Not the lofty contempt for practical work displayed by some worshipper of the "absolute" is characteristic of this period, but the combination of pettifogging practice and utter disregard for theory. It was not so much in the direct rejection of "grandiose phrases" that the heroes of this period engaged as in their vulgarisation. Scientific socialism ceased to be an integral revolutionary theory and became a hodgepodge "freely" diluted with the content of every new German textbook that appeared; the slogan "class struggle" did not impel to broader and more energetic activity but served as a balm, since "the economic struggle is inseparably linked with the political struggle"; the idea of a party did not serve as a call for the creation of a militant organisation of revolutionaries, but was used to justify some sort of "revolutionary bureaucracy" and infantile playing at "democratic" forms.

When the third period will come to an end and the fourth (now heralded by many portents) will begin we do not know. We are passing from the sphere of history to the sphere of the present and, partly, of the future. But we firmly believe that the fourth period will lead to the consolidation of militant Marxism, that Russian Social-Democracy will emerge from the crisis in the full flower of manhood, that the opportunist rearguard will be "replaced" by the genuine vanguard of the most revolutionary class.

In the sense of calling for such a "replacement" and by way of summing up what has been expounded above, we may meet the question, What is to be done? with the brief reply:

Put an End to the Third Period.

==Lenin's notes ==
<references group="Lenin" />

==Notes==
<references group="note">
<ref name="lasseisen">''Lassalleans'' and ''Eisenachers'' — two parties in the German working-class movement in the sixties and early seventies of the nineteenth century.''Lassalleans'' — supporters of Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864) and adherents of his theories; Lassalle was a German petty-bourgeois socialist who played an active part in organising (in 1863) the General Association of German Workers, a political organisation that existed up to 1875. The programmatic demands of the Association were formulated by Lassalle in a number of articles and speeches. Lassalle regarded the state as a supra-class organisation and, in conformity with that philosophically idealist view, believed that the Prussian state could be utilised to solve the social problem through the setting up of producers’ co-operatives with its aid. Marx said that Lassalle advocated a “Royal-Prussian state socialism”. Lassalle directed the workers towards peaceful, parliamentary forms of struggle, believing that the introduction of universal suffrage would make Prussia a “free people’s state”. To obtain universal suffrage he promised Bismarck the support of his Association against the liberal opposition and also in the implementation of Bismarck’s plan to reunite Germany “from above” under the hegemony of Prussia. Lassalle repudiated the revolutionary class struggle, denied the importance of trade unions and of strike action, ignored the international tasks of the working class, and infected the German workers with nationalist ideas. His contemptuous attitude towards the peasantry, which he regarded as a reactionary force, did much damage to the German working-class movement. Marx and Engels fought his harmful utopian dogmatism and his reformist views. Their criticism helped free the German workers from the influence of Lassallean opportunism.''Eisenachers'' — members of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany, founded in 1869 at the Eisenach Congress. The leaders of the Eisenachers were August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, who were under the ideological influence of Marx and Engels. The Eisenach programme stated that the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany considered itself “a section of the International Working Men’s Association and shared its aspirations”. Thanks to the regular advice and criticism of Marx and Engels, the Eisenachers pursued a more consistent revolutionary policy than did Lassalle’s General Association of German Workers; in particular, on the question of German reunification, they followed “the democratic and proletarian road, struggling against the slightest concession to Prussianism, Bismarckism, and nationalism”. Under the influence of the growing working-class movement and of increased government repressions, the two parties united at the Gotha Congress in 1875 to form the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany, of which the Lassalleans formed the opportunist wing.</ref>
<ref name="guesbilist">''Guesdists and Possibilists'' — two trends in the French socialist movement arising out of the split in the French Workers’ Party in 1882.''Guesdists'' — followers of Jules Guesde, constituted the Marxist wing of the movement and advocated an independent revolutionary policy of the proletariat. In 1901 they formed the Socialist Party of France.''Possibilists'' — a petty-bourgeois, reformist trend that sought to divert the proletariat from revolutionary methods of struggle. The Possibilists advocated the restriction of working-class activity to what is “possible” under capitalism. In 1902, in conjunction with other reformist groups, the Possibilists organised the French Socialist Party. In 1905 the Socialist Party of France and the French Socialist Party united to form a single party. During the imperialist war of 1944–18, Jules Guesde, together with the entire leadership of the French Socialist Party, went over to the camp of social-chauvinism.</ref>
<ref name="cadets">''Cadets'' — the Constitutional-Democratic Party, the principal bourgeois party in Russia, representing the liberal-monarchist bourgeoisie. It was formed in October 1905. Parading as democrats and calling themselves the party of “people’s freedom”, the Cadets tried to win the following of the peasantry. Their aim was to preserve tsarism in the form of a constitutional monarchy. After the victory of the October Socialist Revolution, the Cadets organised counter-revolutionary conspiracies and revolts against the Soviet Republic.</ref>
<ref name="bezzaglavtsi">''Bezzaglavtsi'' — from the title of the journal Bes Zaglaviya (Without a Title)—were organisers of, and contributors to, the journal published in St. Petersburg in 1906 by S. N. Prokopovich, Y. D. Kuskova, V. Y. Bogucharsky, and others. The journal openly advocated revisionism, supported the Mensheviks and liberals, and opposed an independent proletarian policy. Lenin called the group “pro-Menshevik Cadets or pro-Cadet Mensheviks”.</ref>
<ref name="stuttcong">''The Stuttgart Congress of the German Social-Democratic Party'' held on September 21–26 (October 3–8), 1898, was the first congress to discuss the question of revisionism in the German Social-Democratic Party. A statement from Bernstein (who did not attend) was read to the Congress; it amplified and defended the opportunist views he had previously set forth in a number of articles. There was, however, no unity among his opponents at the Congress. Some (Bebel, Kautsky, and others) called for an ideological struggle and a criticism of Bernstein’s errors, but opposed the adoption of organisational measures toward him. The others, led by Rosa Luxemburg—the minority—urged a more vigorous struggle against Bernsteinism.</ref>
<ref name="VVs">''V. V.'' — pseudonym of V. P. Vorontsov, an ideologist of liberal Narodism in the eighties and nineties of the nineteenth century. By the “V. V.’s of Russian Social-Democracy” Lenin understands the “Economists” who represented the opportunist trend in the Russian Social-Democratic movement.</ref>
<ref name="secret-facts">Lenin added this footnote for purposes of secrecy. The facts are enumerated in the order in which they actually took place.</ref>
<ref name="league">The reference is to the League of Russian Revolutionary Social-Democracy Abroad.</ref>
<ref name="yuzhny"> ''Yuzhny Rabochy'' (The Southern Worker) — a Social-Democratic newspaper, illegally published from January 1900 to April 1903 by a group of that name; twelve issues appeared.</ref>
<ref name="paris-congress"> The reference is to the pamphlet ''Report on the Russian Social-Democratic Movement to International Socialist Congress in Paris'', 1900. The Report was submitted to the Congress by the Editorial Board of ''Rabocheye Dyelo'' on behalf of the Union of Russian Social-Democrats Abroad and was published as a separate pamphlet in Geneva in 1901; the pamphlet also contained the report of the Bund (“The History of the Jewish Working-Class Movement in Russia and Poland”).</ref>
</references>
[[Category:Library works by Vladimir Lenin]]
[[Category:Basic Marxism–Leninism study plan by r/communism]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:What is to be done?}}

Israel Defense Forces

2026-07-26T16:50:43Z

The Phantom Bull: I added quotation marks around the word "defense", for obvious reasons.

[[File:IDF logo.png|thumb|Emblem]]
The "'''Israel" "Defense" Forces''' ('''IDF'''), more accurately referred to as the '''"Israel" Offensive Forces''' or the '''"Israel" Occupation Forces''' ('''IOF'''), is a [[Settler colonialism|settler-colonial]] terrorist organization. Along with its predecessor, the [[Haganah]], it is responsible for the ongoing [[Colonialism|colonization]] and [[Palestinian genocide|genocide of Palestinians]]. Military service is mandatory in the [[State of Israel|Zionist Entity]], and people who refuse to join the IOF may spend months in prison.<ref>{{Web citation|author=Lee Camp|newspaper=[[MintPress News]]|title=The One Thing the Israeli Military Is Terrified of|date=2022-09-28|url=https://www.mintpressnews.com/israel-military-terrified-of-conscientious-objectors/282062/|retrieved=2022-10-01}}</ref> The IOF's current Chief of Staff is [[Herzi Halevi]].<ref name=":0">{{Web citation|author=Miko Peled|newspaper=[[MintPress News]]|title=Despite What Media Claim, New IDF Chief of Staff Is a Particularly Gruesome War Criminal|date=2022-09-20|url=https://www.mintpressnews.com/new-idf-chief-herzi-halevi-particularly-gruesome-war-criminal/281965/}}</ref>

== War crimes ==
<blockquote>See also: [[Palestinian genocide]]</blockquote>In 2008, the IOF killed close to 1,500 unarmed civilians in [[Gaza Strip|Gaza]] during Operation Cast Lead. During an assault on Gaza in 2019, the IOF killed more than twenty people, including several children.<ref name=":0" />

Over 30084 Palestinians have been martyred – including 10000 children, 7000 women, 326 medical staff and 112 journalists – by the IOF since the launch of [[Operation Flood of Al-Aqsa]].<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Palestinian Information Centre|title=Gaza Government Media calls on the World to Intervene to stop the Humanitarian Catastrophe in Gaza|date=2024-01-08|url=https://palinfo.com/news/2024/01/08/871113/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240228010707/https://palinfo.com/news/2024/01/08/871113/|archive-date=2024-02-28|retrieved=2024-03-02|quote=قال المكتب الإعلامي الحكومي في غزة، اليوم الإثنين، إنّه ومع مرور (94) يوماً على حرب الإبادة الجماعية، فقد ارتكب خلالها جيش الاحتلال (1,932) مجزرة، راح ضحيتها (30,084) شهيداً ومفقوداً، بينهم (23,084) شهيداً ممن وصلوا إلى المستشفيات، منهم (10,000) شهيد من الأطفال، و(7,000) شهيدة من النساء، و(326) شهداء من الطواقم الطبية، و(45) شهيداً من الدفاع المدني، و(112) شهداء من الصحفيين، مناشدًا العالم التدخل لوقف العدوان وفتح المعابر لإدخال المساعدات الطبية والغذائية وتوفير الوحدات السكنية لأهل غزة.}}</ref> After the IDF withdrew from Gaza on April 7, 2024,<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Al Jazeera|title=Israel ‘pulls out troops’ from southern Gaza as attacks enter seventh month|date=2024-04-07|url=https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/7/israel-pulls-out-troops-from-southern-gaza-as-attacks-enter-seventh-month|retrieved=2024-06-09}}</ref> almost 400 bodies were discovered in mass graves at Nasser hospital. Many of these bodies had signs of torture, some Palestinian civilians had been buried alive, and others executed.<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Al Jazeera|title=Evidence of torture as nearly 400 bodies found in Gaza mass graves|date=2024-04-25|url=https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/25/signs-of-torture-as-nearly-400-bodies-found-at-gaza-hospitals-mass-graves|retrieved=2024-06-09}}</ref>

== References ==
[[Category:Imperialist organizations]]
[[Category:Zionism]]

Climate change

2026-07-25T22:42:02Z

The Phantom Bull: I rephrased the first sentence to remove the reference to human activity in general, because climate change is far too often blamed on "human nature" rather than just capitalism.

[[File:Global warming map.png|thumb|Change in average surface temperatures from 1956–1976 to 2011–2021]]
'''Climate change''' is the rise in global temperatures and resulting changes in weather caused by the productive forces as utilized under [[capitalism]]. Greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O) increase temperatures. Average temperatures have already increased by 1.3 ºC since the [[Industrial Revolution]],<ref name=":2">{{Web citation|author=Moira Cassidy|newspaper=[[Liberation News]]|title=The evil twins: Climate change and ocean acidification|date=2019-09-15|url=https://www.liberationnews.org/the-evil-twins-climate-change-and-ocean-acidification/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210506055618/https://www.liberationnews.org/the-evil-twins-climate-change-and-ocean-acidification/|archive-date=2021-05-06|retrieved=2022-10-02}}</ref> and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 280 to 400 parts per million. In addition to rising temperatures, higher levels of carbon dioxide make the oceans more acidic, destroying coral reefs and killing marine animals.<ref name=":0">{{Web citation|author=Jon Britton|newspaper=[[Liberation School]]|title=The UN Climate Summit—words versus deeds|date=2014-10-04|url=https://www.liberationschool.org/un-climate-summit-words-versus-deeds/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220124202746/https://www.liberationschool.org/un-climate-summit-words-versus-deeds/|archive-date=2022-01-24|retrieved=2022-10-02}}</ref>

In late 2023, the average global temperature temporarily exceeded 2 ºC of warming compared to the preindustrial level, providing an alarming indication of the speed of global warming and the extreme conditions that accompany it.<ref>{{Web citation|author=Andrew Freedman|newspaper=AXIOS|title=Earth likely briefly passed critical warming threshold on Friday and Saturday|date=2023-11-21|url=https://www.axios.com/2023/11/20/earth-2c-warming-threshold-passed-report|retrieved=2023-12-2}}</ref>

Technology already exists to replace fossil fuels with renewable or nuclear energy, but the transition would not be profitable under a short-sighted capitalist [[market economy]],<ref name=":1">{{Web citation|author=Collin L. Chambers|newspaper=[[Liberation School]]|title=How to really avoid a climate disaster: A response to Bill Gates’ deceptive climate book|date=2021-04-14|url=https://www.liberationschool.org/how-to-really-avoid-a-climate-disaster/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220124191553/https://www.liberationschool.org/how-to-really-avoid-a-climate-disaster/|archive-date=2022-01-24|retrieved=2022-10-02}}</ref> thus rendering the odds of capitalist states adopting these technologies remote.

== Sources of greenhouse gases ==
Burning hydrocarbons, including fossil fuels, releases carbon dioxide. Agriculture releases methane through meat production and nitrous oxide through overuse of fertilizers. Rising temperatures are melting permafrost in the Arctic, releasing methane trapped in the ice and causing more warming.<ref name=":0" />

100 companies cause 70% of total world greenhouse gas emissions.<ref name=":2" /> Electricity generation causes 27% of greenhouse gas emissions and steel production causes an additional 7–9%. The [[United States Department of Defense|U.S. Department of Defense]] is one of the largest polluters in the world.<ref name=":1" />

=== By country ===
Per capita, China emits less than half as much greenhouse gases as the [[United States of America|United States]], and its current emission levels are similar to Western countries in 1885. The USA releases eight times as much greenhouse gases as [[Republic of India|India]] per capita.<ref>{{Web citation|author=Hezri A. Adnan, Jomo Kwame Sundaram|newspaper=JOMO|title=Rich nations doubly responsible for greenhouse gas emissions|date=2022-12-07|url=https://www.ksjomo.org/post/rich-nations-doubly-responsible-for-greenhouse-gas-emissions|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221206121748/https://www.ksjomo.org/post/rich-nations-doubly-responsible-for-greenhouse-gas-emissions|archive-date=2022-12-06|retrieved=2022-12-07}}</ref>

== Global warming by degree ==

* At 1.5 ºC of warming, all coral reefs on Earth would die.
* At 2 ºC, polar ice would melt enough to flood many major cities and droughts would affect 400 million people.
* At 3 ºC, wildfires would increase by six times in the United States and damage from river flooding would increase at least 30 times.
* At 4 ºC, sea levels would rise by 30 meters, global grain harvest would decrease by 50%, and millions of people would contract Dengue Fever in [[Latin America]] every year.<ref name=":2" />

== See also ==

* [[Ecofascism]], the reactionary "response"
* [[Ecosocialism]], the revolutionary response
* [[Green capitalism]], capitalist propaganda alleging that capitalism can be ecologically sustainable
* [[Climate change denial]]

== References ==
[[Category:Climate change]]
[[Category:Environment]]

Library:The Colonizer's Model of the World

2026-07-15T19:05:02Z

The Phantom Bull: I added a correction to an incorrect claim about the big bang.

{{Library work|title=The Colonizer's Model of the World|author=J. M. Blaut|published_date=1993|source=https://annas-archive.gl/md5/ac90d2ead54c271679c5e9bef00192f3}}

== Acknowledgments ==

Many people contributed in many important ways to the writing of this book. Peter Taylor and Wilbur Zelinsky gave me great encouragement and wise counsel (not always heeded) during the years that I have been struggling with the issues and ideas discussed here. Among many others who contributed immensely to the book, and are happily given credit for many of the ideas it contains (the good ideas, not the errors), I wish particularly to mention Abdul Alkalimat, Samir Amin, William Denevan, Loida Figueroa, Andre Gunder Frank, William Loren Katz, José López, Kent Mathewson, Antonio Ríos-Bustamante, América Sorrentini de Blaut, and Ben Wisner. Over the years many other people have set me to thinking about the problems discussed in the book and have shown me the answers to some of these problems. Among these friends, teachers, and students, I would like to mention Chao-li Chi, Ghazi Falah, Fred Hardy, Fred Kniffen, Juan Mari Brás, Francis Mark, Sidney Mintz, Ng Hong, Doris Pizarro, Randolph Rawlins, Anselme Rémy, Waldo Rodríguez, Digna Sánchez, Howard Stanton, David Stea, and Lakshman Yapa. Peter Wissoker and Anna Brackett edited the book with patience and skill. A number of paragraphs in Chapters 3 and 4 and one in Chapter 2 are taken from an article in ''Political Geography'' (Blaut 1992b), and are reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher of that journal, Butterworth-Heinemann.

= CHAPTER 1: History Inside Out =

== The Argument ==

The purpose of this book is to undermine one of the most powerful beliefs of our time concerning world history and world geography. This belief is the notion that European civilization—"The West"—has had some unique historical advantage, some special quality of race or culture or environment or mind or spirit, which gives this human community a permanent superiority over all other communities, at all times in history and down to the present.

The belief is both historical and geographical. Europeans are seen as the "makers of history." Europe eternally advances, progresses, modernizes. The rest of the world advances more sluggishly, or stagnates: it is "traditional society." Therefore, the world has a permanent geographical center and a permanent periphery: an Inside and an Outside. Inside leads, Outside lags. Inside innovates, Outside imitates.

This belief is diffusionism, or more precisely Eurocentric diffusionism. It is a theory about the way cultural processes tend to move over the surface of the world as a whole. They tend to flow out of the European sector and toward the non-European sector. This is the natural, normal, logical, and ethical flow of culture, of innovation, of human causality. Europe, eternally, is Inside. Non-Europe is Outside. Europe is the source of most diffusions; non-Europe is the recipient.<ref>In this book the word "Europe" refers to the continent of Europe and to regions dominated by European culture elsewhere, regions like the United States and Canada.</ref>

Diffusionism lies at the very root of historical and geographical scholarship. Some parts of the belief have been questioned in recent years, but its most fundamental tenets remain unchallenged, and so the belief as a whole has not been uprooted or very much weakened by modern scholarship.

The most important tenet of diffusionism is the theory of "the autonomous rise of Europe," sometimes (rather more grandly) called the idea of "the European Miracle." It is the idea that Europe was more advanced and more progressive than all other regions prior to 1492, prior, that is, to the beginning of the period of colonialism, the period in which Europe and non-Europe came into intense interaction. If one believes this to be the case—and most modern scholars seem to believe it to be the case—then it must follow that the economic and social modernization of Europe is fundamentally a result of Europe's internal qualities, not of interaction with the societies of Africa, Asia, and America after 1492. Therefore: the main building blocks of modernity must be European. Therefore: colonialism cannot have been really important for Europe's modernization. Therefore: colonialism must mean, for the Africans, Asians, and Americans, not spoliation and cultural destruction but, rather, the receipt-by-diffusion of European civilization: modernization.

This book will analyze and criticize Eurocentric diffusionism as a general body of ideas, and will try to undermine the more concrete theory of the autonomous rise of Europe. The first chapter of the book discusses the nature and history of diffusionism. Chapter 2 analyzes the theory of the autonomous rise of Europe as a body of propositions about European superiority (and "the European miracle"), then tries to disprove these propositions, one after the other. Chapter 3 discusses world history and historical geography prior to 1492, attempting to show that Europe was not superior to other civilizations and regions in those times. Chapter 4 argues that colonialism was the basic process after 1492, which led to the selective rise of Europe, the modernization or development of Europe (and outlying Europeanized culture areas like the United States), and the underdevelopment of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Chapter 4 also argues that the conquest of America and thereafter the expansion of European colonialism is not to be explained in terms of any internal characteristics of Europe, but instead reflects the mundane realities of location. The chain of argument in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, as a whole, therefore, is an attempt to show that Europe did not have historical priority—historical superiority—over what we now call the Third World.

This may seem to be too ambitious a project for one small book. I am really making just one claim. I am asserting that a fundamental and rather explicit error has been made in our conventional past thinking about geography and history, and this error has distorted many fields of thought and action. I am going to present enough evidence to show that the belief in Eurocentric diffusionism and Europe's historical superiority or priority is not convincing: not well grounded in the facts of history and geography, although firmly grounded in Western culture. It is in a sense folklore.

== The Tunnel of Time ==

If you had gone to school in Europe or Anglo-America 150 years ago, around the middle of the nineteenth century, you would have been taught a very curious kind of history. You would have learned, for one thing, that every important thing that ever happened to humanity happened in one part of the world, the region we will call "Greater Europe," meaning the geographical continent of Europe itself, plus (for ancient times only) an enlargement of it to the southeast, the "Bible Lands"—from North Africa to Mesopotamia—plus (for modern times only) the countries of European settlement overseas. You would have been taught that God created Man in this region: the Garden of Eden was mentioned as the starting point of human history in typical world history textbooks of the period, and these textbooks placed Eden at various points between the shores of the Mediterranean Sea and the mountains of Inner Asia.

Some of your teachers would have also claimed that only the people of this region are really human: God created the people of other places as a different, nonhuman, or rather infrahuman, species. And all of your teachers of science as well as history would have agreed that non-Europeans are not as intelligent, not as honorable, and (for the most part) not as courageous as Europeans: God made them inferior. If you had asked your teachers why Europeans are more human and more intelligent than everyone else you would perhaps have been chastised for asking such a question. You would have been told that a Christian God created and now manages the world, and it would be both silly and blasphemous to suggest that He might show the same favor to non-Europeans, non-Christians, that He does to those people who worship the True God and moreover worship Him with the proper sacrament.

If you had been studying geography as well as history back in the middle of the nineteenth century, you would indeed have learned something about the non-European world. The people living in Africa and Asia would have been depicted not only as inferior but as in some sense evil. They are the people who refused to accept God's grace and so have fallen from His favor. Africans are thus cruel savages, for whom the best possible fate is to be put to useful work, and Christianized. Chinese and Indians for some unknown reason managed to build barbaric civilizations of their own, but because they are not Europeans and not Christians, their civilizations long ago began to stagnate and regress. And, for all their splendor, these never were real civilizations: they are cruel "Oriental despotisms." Only Europeans know true freedom.

Ideas of course change, and if you had gone to school some 50 years later, around the turn of the century, you would have been taught a much more secular form of history, and it would have had a strongly evolutionary (though not yet Darwinian) flavor. You would have learned that the earth is very old, that life is old, and that our species itself has been around for a long time. But everything important still happened in Europe (that is, in Greater Europe). The first true man, Cro-Magnon, lived in Europe. Agriculture was invented in Greater Europe (perhaps in the continent, perhaps in the Bible Lands, Europe's self-proclaimed cultural hearth). You would have been told in world history class that the first barbaric beginnings of civilization occurred in the Bible Lands. There in the Bible Lands emerged the two Caucasian peoples who make all of history. The Semites invented cities and empires, and gave us monotheism and Christianity, but stopped at that point and then sank back into Oriental decadence. The Aryans or Indo-Europeans, freedom-loving though backward folk, built on these foundations, migrating from southeastern Europe or western Asia into and through geographical Europe, and creating the first genuinely civilized society, that of ancient Greece. Then the Romans raised civilization to its next level, and thereafter world history marched inexorably northwestward. If your school was in England you would have been told that History marched from "the Orient" (the Bible Lands) to Athens, to Rome, to feudal France, and finally to modern England—a kind of westbound Orient Express.

By now a secular picture of the geography of non-Europe had begun to be taught in European schools. Africans continued to be described as savages and Oriental societies as decadent and despotic. But important changes had taken place in the relations between Europe and non-Europe during the course of the nineteenth century, and by 1900 a particular theory about this relationship had become fixed in popular discourse and was now taught in schools as standard world geography. This was the theory (described later in this chapter) according to which non-Europeans can and do rise to a civilizational level, if not equal to that of Europeans at least near that level, under European tutelage, that is, under European colonial control.

Suppose we move forward another half century, to the history and geography taught around the end of World War II. Not much change. The first True Man is still the Cro-Magnon of Europe. Agriculture was invented in the Bible Lands; so too was barbaric civilization. True civilization still marches from Athens to Rome to Paris to London, and perhaps sets sail then for New York. Non-Europeans do not contribute much to world history, although they begin to do so as a result of European influence. (Colonial peoples learn from their tutors; Japanese imitate successfully, and so on.) Europeans are still brighter, better, and bolder than everyone else.<ref>This quick survey of 150 years or so of world history textbooks is, of course, very schematic and impressionistic. Some further comments may be of use. In textbooks of the first period, around 1850 (plus or minus a decade or so), the original home of Man is often stated to be the Garden of Eden, which is located by different textbook writers in different parts of western Asia. For instance: somewhere east of Canaan and near Mesopotamia (Robbins, ''The World Displayed in its History and Geography'', 1832, p. 13); somewhere in the "healthful" mountains between the Caspian Sea and Kashmir or Tibet (Müller, ''The History of the World to 1783'', 1842, pp. 27, 43-44); perhaps near the borders of the Mediterranean Sea (Tytler, ''Universal history, From the Creation to the beginning of the Eighteenth Century'', vol. 1, 1844, p. 17); in the Vale of Kashmir (Willard, ''Universal History in Perspective'', 1845, p. 34); somewhere between the Caucasus Mountains and the Himalayas (Keightley, ''Outlines of History'', 1849); in the Himalayas (Weber, ''Outlines of Universal History'', 1853, p. 6); in Armenia (Collier, ''Outlines of General History'', 1868). There seems to be a kind of median location of Eden near the Caucasus Mountains, which was also, by no coincidence, the supposed place of origin of the "Caucasian race." Noah, of course, began postdeluvian history on Mt. Ararat, in Armenia (also roughly in the region of the Caucasus). Noah is supposed to have migrated then to Europe (Whelpley, ''A Compound of History, From the Earliest Times'', vol. 1, 1844, p. 10), or Mesopotamia (Robbins, 1832, p. 20), or Palestine, or some other part of the Bible Lands. Noah's three sons are supposed, then, to have dispersed and to have founded the branches of mankind—the first great diffusion process. In most textbooks of this period history tends to move west; some textbooks present the Hegelian notion that history proceeds inexorably westward, following the sun, with the implication that the United States, farther west still, will replace Europe as the next center of world civilization.

It was widely believed in this period that nonwhites were not truly and fully human. One version of this theory, the notion of "polygenesis," claimed that God had created true humans in the Garden of Eden and other races—or at least the "black race"—in other places and times. This theory questioned the standard interpretation of the Old Testament (that everyone is descended from Adam and Eve), so, not surprisingly, it was not stated as truth in the textbooks I consulted. (I have not, however, looked at textbooks used in the antebellum South, and the theory of polygenesis was most popular in slaveholding regions, as an ideological grounding for the treatment of blacks as things rather than people.) Yet polygenesis was important enough to be mentioned and then rejected—in favor of the view that all humans are descendants of Adam and Eve—in some textbooks, down to the end of the century (see, for example, Dew, ''A Digest of the Laws, Customs, Manners, and Institutions of the Ancient and Modern Nations'', 1853; Fisher, ''Outlines of Universal History'', 1885; Duruy and Grosvenor, ''A General History of the World'', 1901). But polygenesis was not needed; the belief that nonwhites are inferior to whites is asserted in one way or another in all the textbooks I examined. The theory of "degeneration" served just as well as polygenesis. It was the notion that the descendants of Ham, and perhaps other biblical peoples, migrated away from the Bible Lands, eastward and southward, and degenerated from civilization toward savagery, or even lower, as they did so, because they had not accepted Christ, or because they migrated into inferior environments, or for some other reason. (See, for instance, Keightley, 1849, 5-6: "the savage is a degeneration from the civilized life," and Africans are near the apes.) Degeneration was asserted in some textbooks, but in most the simple fact of white superiority was stated and left unexplained. The history of the world is, in general, the history of the white race, or the Semitic and Aryan peoples (see below). For times later than the Roman era, non-Europe is scarcely discussed, except as a backdrop for discussions of the Crusades, the building of colonial empires, and the like. (See Harris, ''The Rise of Anthropological Theory'', 1968, for an excellent discussion of polygenesis and degeneration.)

Nearly all textbooks of the period around 1900 (give or take a few years) accepted the newer scientific theories about the age of the earth and the fact of biological evolution (though not the Darwinian theory of evolution). The biblical account of human history, however, was retained in many books, although fewer of them accepted the formerly standard Old Testament chronologies (for instance, that things began in 4004 B.C.). Books of this period tended to present the so-called "Aryan theory," a theory derived from philology but expanded into a theory of culture history. Earlier philologists had identified an "Aryan" or "Indo-European" language family, and also a "Semitic" family (which many authorities, including textbook writers, identified with Noah's sons Japheth and Shem, respectively). The white race consists of these two peoples. One branch of the Aryans supposedly migrated west into Europe (from the supposed "Aryan hearth," somewhere southwest or northwest of the Caucasus). These were progressive, energetic people, who founded European civilization mainly after they had acquired Christianity from the Semites, who invented the first barbaric civilizations and monotheism but then stagnated into a dreamy, decadent, unambitious culture and thereafter ceased to advance civilization. No other culture, apart from these two, had much to do with history. (According to Freeman, ''General Sketch of History'', 1872, p. 2, history "in the highest and truest sense is the history of the Aryan nations of Europe"; see also Collier, 1868; Swinton, ''Outlines of the World's History'', 1874; Gilman, ''First Steps in General History'', 1874; Anderson, ''New Manual of General History'', 1882; Steele and Steele, ''A Brief History of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Peoples'', 1883; Fisher, 1896; Quackenbos, ''Illustrated School History of the World'', 1889; Thalheimer, ''Outline of General History for the Use of Schools'', 1883; Sanderson, ''History of the World from the Earliest Time to the Year 1898''; Duruy and Grosvenor, 1901. Ploetz and Tillinghast presented this theory in ''Epitome of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern History'', first published in 1883, in its many editions down to 1925 when, in an edition edited by H. E. Barnes, the theory was finally eliminated.) See Bernal's ''Black Athena'' (1987, 1991) for an insightful discussion of the Aryan theory and related topics in the history of European thought.

Because the Old Testament spoke of agriculture—Cain knew farming and Abraham herded domesticated animals—the history textbooks tended not to address the problem of where agriculture was invented until very late in the nineteenth century, the period when science was beginning to deal with this problem. Some scientists and some textbook writers then began to speculate that, just possibly, agriculture was as old in continental Europe as it was in western Asia and Egypt. (From the point of view of science, see Joly, ''Man Before Metals'', 1897.) But the idea that agriculture originated in the Bible Lands remained dominant although now it was viewed (by most) as an invention, not an artifact of original creation. The ethnographic fact that some tribal peoples (for instance, in Australia) did not practice agriculture was commonly explained, in the textbooks of the earlier nineteenth century, in terms of the theory of degeneration: their ancestors had somehow lost the art. Later in the century it became more common to use the diffusionist conception that agriculture had been invented by west Asian or (conceivably) European peoples, then diffused outward over the rest of the world, and cultures that did not practice it in modern times simply had not yet acquired it, either because of their isolation or because they were too stupid to take it up.

The Orient Express was a famous train that ran between western Europe and western Asia. Although various routes were used in different eras, the basic line ran from Constantinople (Istanbul) through Greece to northern Italy or Austria, then on to France, and (via Ostend) England. Most of the history textbooks write about world history as though it marched northwesterward, rather like the westbound Orient Express, with stations (so to speak) in Athens, Rome, Paris, and London. (See Chapter 2 for further discussion of the Orient Express model.)</ref>

We can sum all of this up with an image that will prove quite useful in this book. This is the idea that the world has an Inside and an Outside. World history thus far has been, basically, the history of Inside. Outside has been, basically, irrelevant. History and historical geography as it was taught, written, and thought by Europeans down to the time of World War II, and still (as we will see) in most respects today, lies, as it were, in a tunnel of time. The walls of this tunnel are, figuratively, the spatial boundaries of Greater Europe. History is a matter of looking back or down in this European tunnel of time and trying to decide what happened where, when, and why. "Why" of course calls for connections among historical events, but only among the events that lie in the European tunnel. Outside its walls everything seems to be rockbound, timeless, changeless tradition. I will call this way of thinking "historical tunnel vision," or simply "tunnel history."

The older form of tunnel history simply ignored the non-European world: typical textbooks and historical atlases devoted very few pages to areas outside of Greater Europe (that is, Europe and countries of European settlement overseas plus, for ancient history and the Crusades, the Near East), until one came to the year 1492. Non-Europe (Africa, Asia east of the Bible Lands, Latin America, Oceania) received significant notice only as the venue of European colonial activities, and most of what was said about this region was essentially the history of empire.<ref>In nineteenth-century world history textbooks, Turkey was given some attention because of its political involvement with European affairs. World geography, in contrast to world history, always covered the entire world, and textbooks as well as the great multivolume descriptive geographies (like Reclus's classic 19-volume ''Nouvelle Géographie Universelle'', published between 1876 and 1894) gave considerable attention to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This should not mislead us, however. One of the primary functions of geography throughout this entire period was to teach European children what they needed to know about non-Europe in order to participate in their countries' imperial and commercial activities in these regions. See Hudson, "The New Geography and the New Imperialism: 1870-1918" (1977) and McKay, "Colonialism in the French Geographical Movement" (1943), on the close relation between geography and colonial activities.</ref> Not only was the great bulk of attention devoted to Greater Europe in these older textbooks and historical atlases, but world history was described as flowing steadily westward with the passage of time, from the Bible Lands to eastern Mediterranean Europe, to northwestern Europe. This pattern is readily discernible if we notice the salience of places mentioned in these sources, that is, the frequency of place-name mentions for different regions at different periods. For the earliest period, place-name mentions cluster in the Bible Lands and the extreme eastern Mediterranean. For successively later periods, place-name mentions cluster farther and farther to the west and northwest, finally clustering in northwestern Europe for the period after about A.D. 1000: this is the "Orient Express" pattern to which we referred previously.

After World War II, however, history textbooks began to exhibit another, more subtle, form of tunnel history. The non-European world was now beginning to insert itself very firmly in European consciousness, in the aftermath of the war with Japan and in the midst of the intensified decolonization struggles, the Civil Rights movement in the United States, and the like. Most newer textbooks enlarged the discussion of non-European history, and said something about the historical achievements of non-European cultures. Most textbooks gave a flavor of historicity, of evolutionary progress, to non-European history, thus departing from the older pattern, which dismissed these societies as stagnant and nonevolving. Asian societies were now described as having had an evolutionary motion, though a motion slower than that of Europe. Africa was still described as stagnant, history-less, prior to the colonial era. More salience was given to Asia. However, Africa and the Western Hemisphere still received little mention for eras prior to 1492. The pattern of place-name mentions in most (not all) texts and historical atlases still suggested a flow to the west and northwest, from the Near East to western Europe. And tunnel history dominated most textbooks in the most important matter of all, the question of "why," of explanation. Historical progress still came about because Europeans invented or initiated most of the crucial innovations, which only later spread out to the rest of the world. So the textbooks depicted a world in which historical causes were to be found basically inside the European tunnel of time, although historical effects were to be seen basically everywhere.<ref>The character of this newer approach can be seen if we look at two well-known modern university-level texts, one written by W. H. McNeill of the University of Chicago (''A World History'', 3rd ed., 1979), the other by J. M. Roberts of Oxford University (''The Hutchinson History of the World'', 2d ed., 1987; published in the United States as ''The Penguin History of the World''). For pre-Christian-era world history, more than three-quarters of the place-name mentions in both books are places in Europe and the Middle East (including North Africa); less than one-quarter of the place-name mentions are places in other parts of the world and only about 1% are in Africa. For the Christian era to A.D. 1491 there is significant divergence between the two books. In Roberts's text, European and Middle Eastern places constitute about 85% of place-name mentions. In McNeill's text, European and Middle Eastern places constitute only 60% of the place names mentioned, a significant departure from the older tradition although still well out of proportion to this region's size in area and population. (Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for only 2% of mentions for the period A.D. 1-1491.) In both books, therefore, the region I have been calling "Greater Europe" has considerably lower salience for pre-1492 history than was typically the case in older world history textbooks. As to explanation, however, both books retain much of the traditional perspective. Roberts gives almost no causal role to the cultures and regions of the world other than Europe and the Middle East (including North Africa) for any period prior to 1492. McNeill gives considerable weight to East Asia and some to South Asia for certain historical periods, but almost all of the world history-making forces emanate from Europe, western Asia, and North Africa for the period before 1492. (An exception is the Black Death, which, according to McNeill, swept westward into these regions from farther Asia. On this matter, see also McNeill's ''Plagues and Peoples'', 1976.) Examples of the Eurocentric explanations offered by both authors will be given in Chapter 2 of the present book.

It is, however, insufficient to look only at those present-day textbooks that are clearly identified as "world history" textbooks. Quite frequently university courses covering the subject of world history use history textbooks that carry titles like "The History of Western Civilization." (See, for instance, Lerner, et al., ''Western Civilizations: Their History and Their Culture'', 1988; Kagan, et al., ''The Western Heritage'', 1987; Chambers, et al., ''The Western Experience'', 1987.) If such a textbook neglects the non-Western world, there can be no complaint that it is misleading: the title clearly specifies "West" not "World." But if the course is designated as "world history" and the textbook is designated as "Western history," then we have a problem. The worst scenario would be one in which world-history teaching continues to be Eurocentric history in disguise. I do not know of any research which tests the following hypotheses: (1) Given that, today, historians are sensitive to the need to avoid Eurocentric bias in the teaching of world history, do some of them simply change the title to "Western" so that Eurocentrism becomes, then, licit? And (2) is it possible that there is a trend away from the teaching of "World" history and toward "Western" (etc.) history and that this trend reflects a reaction (or adjustment) to present-day demands for nontechnocentrism and "fairness?"</ref>

Textbooks are an important window into a culture; more than just books, they are semiofficial statements of exactly what the opinion-forming elite of the culture want the educated youth of that culture to believe to be true about the past and present world.<ref>A school textbook is truly a key social document, a kind of modern stele. In the typical case, a book becomes accepted as a high school (or lower-level) textbook only after it has been reviewed very carefully by the publisher, school boards, and administrators, all of whom are intensely sensitive to the need to print acceptable doctrine; they are concerned to make it certain that children will read only those facts in their textbook which are considered to be acceptable as facts by the opinion-forming elite of the culture. The resulting textbook is, therefore, less an ordinary authored book than a vetted social statement of what is considered valid and acceptable for entry into the mind of the child. For this reason, research on textbooks (including college textbooks, in which the same process is at work, though more subtly) is, in fact, ethnographic research. It tells us about the belief system of the opinion-forming elite of the culture as a whole. Therefore, geography texts in the United States are really ethnogeography documents. Likewise, history texts are really ethnohistory documents. They are probably as useful as cultural artifacts as any old potsherd or inscription. See the final section of this chapter.</ref> As we have seen, European and Anglo-American history textbooks assert that most of the causes of historical progress occur, or originate, in the European sector of the world. Textbooks of the early and middle nineteenth century tended to give a rather openly religious grounding for this Eurocentric tunnel history. In later textbooks the Bible is no longer considered a source of historical fact, but causality seems to be rooted in an implicit theory that combines a belief that Christian peoples make history with a belief that white peoples make history, the whole becoming a theory that it is natural for Europeans to innovate and progress and for non-Europeans to remain stagnant and unchanging ("traditional"), until, like Sleeping Beauty, they are awakened by the Prince. This view still, in the main, prevails, although racism has been discarded and non-Europe is no longer considered to have been absolutely stagnant and traditional.

Schools are always a little behind the time when it comes to the teaching of newer topics and ideas. I wish I could report that the old notions about Inside and Outside are today just artifacts, still taught in some schools because of the usual lag between research and pedagogy, but which have been discarded by Real Scholars, those who pursue historical research and write the important and influential books on world history. But this is not the case. In the matter that concerns us most, that of explaining the larger flows of world history, the views put forward by historical scholars today tend to be quite consonant with the theories projected in textbooks. We can set aside the fact that many of the most widely used textbooks, today as in the past, are written by prominent historical scholars. There are many complex cultural reasons why historical scholarship remains committed to Eurocentric explanations for most of the crucial developments in world history: we will discuss some of these reasons later in the present chapter and return to the question at various points throughout the book. Suffice it at this point to notice a very peculiar paradox. Historians have amassed a fine record of meticulous scholarship, and rarely indeed do we encounter prejudice or deliberate distortion in their work. Moreover, their judgments about historical causation are constrained by the same methodological rigor as we find in any other field of scholarship. It is only when we come to the larger issues of causation, matters of explaining historical progress over long periods and for larger regions, and matters of explaining profound revolutions in history, that Eurocentrism exerts an important influence on discourse, and often—as we will see—leads to the acceptance of poor theories in spite of a lack of supporting evidence.

Most European historians still maintain that most of the really crucial historical events, those that "changed history," happened in Europe, or happened because of some causal impetus from Europe. ("Europe" continues to mean "Greater Europe.") To illustrate this fact, I will list now, in historical order, a series of crucial Europe-centered propositions. All of them are accepted as true by the majority, in some cases the great majority, of European historical scholars. Some of them indeed are true, but that is beside the present point, which is to show that historical reasoning still focuses on Greater Europe as the perpetual fountainhead of history.

1. The Neolithic Revolution—the invention of agriculture and the beginnings of a settled way of life for humanity—occurred in the Middle East (or the Bible Lands). This view was unopposed before about 1930, and is still the majority view.

2. The second major step in cultural evolution toward modern civilization, the emergence of the earliest states, cities, organized religions, writing systems, division of labor, and the like, was taken in the Middle East.

3. The Age of Metals began in the Middle East. Ironworking was invented in the Middle East or eastern Europe and the "Iron Age" first appeared in Europe.

4. Monotheism appeared first in the Middle East.

5. Democracy was invented in Europe (in ancient Greece).

6. Likewise most of pure science, mathematics, philosophy, history, and geography.

7. Class society and class struggle emerged first in the Greco-Roman era and region.<ref>This argument is given much weight by Eurocentric Marxists, since class struggle, for Marxists, is the central force in historical evolution.</ref>

8. The Roman Empire was the first great imperial state. Romans invented bureaucracy, law, and so on.

9. The next great stage in social evolution, feudalism, was developed in Europe, with Frenchmen taking the lead.<ref>A form of political feudalism is sometimes conceded to have been developed earlier by the Chinese, but the great majority of European scholars, including most Marxists, believe that European feudalism was unique in representing a form of society that was a crucial, essential, stepping stone to modernity. See Chapter 3.</ref>

10. Europeans invented a host of technological traits in the Middle Ages which gave them superiority over non-Europeans. (On this matter there are considerable differences of opinion.)

11. Europeans invented the modern state.

12. Europeans invented capitalism.

13. Europeans, uniquely "venturesome," were the great explorers, "discoverers," etc.

14. Europeans invented industry and created the Industrial Revolution.

... and so on down to the present.

All of the propositions in this list are widely accepted tenets of European historical scholarship today, although (as we will see) there is scholarly dispute about some of the propositions. All of this means that you and I learned these things, perhaps in elementary school, perhaps in university, perhaps in books and newspapers. We learned that all of this is the truth. But is it? Clearly, some of these propositions are true. Some others are true with qualifications. But some, as I will argue in this book, are not true at all: they are artifacts of the old tunnel history, in which Outside plays no crucial role and Inside is credited with everything important and everything efficacious.

== Eurocentric Diffusionism ==

=== Eurocentrism ===

What we are talking about here is generally called, these days, "Eurocentrism."<ref>See Samir Amin's ''Eurocentrism'' (1988) for an excellent discussion of this notion. The word "Eurocentrism" apparently was coined quite recently, to assemble "European ethnocentrism" into one word. However, I (like Amin) do not think of Eurocentrism as merely a species of ethnocentrism, as the following paragraphs will make clear.</ref> This word is a label for all the beliefs that postulate past or present superiority of Europeans over non-Europeans (and over minority people of non-European descent). A strong critique of Eurocentrism is underway in all fields of social thought, and this book is certainly part of that critique.

There is, however, a problem with the word "Eurocentrism." In most discourse it is thought of as a sort of prejudice, an "attitude," and therefore something that can be eliminated from modern enlightened thought in the same way we eliminate other relic attitudes such as racism, sexism, and religious bigotry. But the really crucial part of Eurocentrism is not a matter of attitudes in the sense of values and prejudices, but rather a matter of science, and scholarship, and informed and expert opinion. To be precise, Eurocentrism includes a set of beliefs that are statements about empirical reality, statements educated and usually unprejudiced Europeans accept as true, as propositions supported by "the facts." Consider, for instance, the 14 propositions about Europe's priority in historical innovation which we listed above. Historians who accept these propositions as true would be most indignant if we described the propositions as "Eurocentric beliefs." Every historian in this category would deny emphatically that he or she holds any Eurocentric prejudices, and very few of them actually do hold such prejudices. If they assert that Europeans invented democracy, science, feudalism, capitalism, the modern nation-state, and so on, they make these assertions because they think that all of this is fact.

Eurocentrism, therefore, is a very complex thing. We can banish all the value meanings of this word, all the prejudices, and we still have Eurocentrism as a set of empirical beliefs.

This, in a way, is the central problem for this book. We confront statements of presumed historical and scientific fact, not prejudices and biases, and we try to show, with history and science, that the presumptions are wrong: these statements are false.

How is it that Eurocentric historical statements which are not valid—that is, not confirmed by evidence and sometimes contradicted by evidence—are able to gain acceptance in European historical thought, and thereafter survive as accepted beliefs, hardly ever questioned, for generations and even centuries? This is a crucial problem for historiography and the history of ideas. To deal with it satisfactorily would take us well beyond the scope of this book, the main concern of which is empirical history and geography. Yet the problem cannot be avoided here. Libraries are full of scholarly studies that support the Eurocentric historical positions we are rejecting and refuting in this book. The sheer quantity of this work, and the respect that is properly owed to the scholars who assembled it, makes it certain that one cannot convincingly refute these positions with the factual arguments that can be presented in one book. No matter how persuasive these arguments may be, they cannot be placed, so to speak, on one arm of a balance and be expected to outweigh all of the accumulated writings of generations of European scholars, textbook writers, journalists, publicists, and the rest, heaped up on the other arm of the balance.

So, in this book, we must make a sort of two-level argument. The main level is the empirical one: What did happen inside and outside of Europe in the medieval and early modern centuries, and what connections did take place between the two sectors in that period? At the second level, we will look at some pertinent aspects of the history of Eurocentric ideas and the social context surrounding these ideas. This will be done mainly in the present chapter, which analyzes the nature and history of diffusionist ideas and concludes with a discussion of the process of social licensing by which these ideas gain currency and hegemony, and in Chapter 2, which rather systematically examines the most important arguments for European superiority prior to 1492 and to an extent discusses their historical genealogies.

Scholars today are aware, as most were not a few decades ago, that the empirical, factual beliefs of history, geography, and social science very often gain acceptance for reasons that have little to do with evidence. Scholarly beliefs are embedded in culture, and are shaped by culture. This helps to explain the paradox that Eurocentric historical beliefs are so strangely persistent; that old myths continue to be believed in long after the rationale for their acceptance has been forgotten or rejected (as in the arguments grounded in belief in the Old Testament as literal history); that newer candidate beliefs gain acceptance without supporting evidence if they are properly Eurocentric; and that, most generally, the Eurocentric body of beliefs as a whole retains its persuasiveness and power. But there is more to the matter than this. Eurocentrism is, as I will argue at great length in this book, a unique set of beliefs, and uniquely powerful, because it is the intellectual and scholarly rationale for one of the most powerful social interests of the European elite. I will argue not only that European colonialism initiated the development of Europe (and the underdevelopment of non-Europe) in 1492, but that since then the wealth obtained from non-Europe, through colonialism in its many forms, including neocolonial forms, has been a necessary and very important basis for the continued development of Europe and the continued power of Europe's elite. For this reason, the development of a body of Eurocentric beliefs, justifying and assisting Europe's colonial activities, has been, and still is, of very great importance. Eurocentrism is quite simply the colonizer's model of the world.

Eurocentrism is the colonizer's model of the world in a very literal sense: it is not merely a set of beliefs, a bundle of beliefs. It has evolved, through time, into a very finely sculpted model, a structured whole; in fact a single theory; in fact a super theory, a general framework for many smaller theories, historical, geographical, psychological, sociological, and philosophical. This supertheory is diffusionism.

=== Diffusionism ===

When culture change takes place in a human community, that change can be the result of an invention that occurred within this community. Or it can be the result of a process in which the idea or its material effect (such as a tool, an art style, etc.) came into the community, having originated in some other community, in some other part of the landscape. The first sort of event is called "independent invention." The second is called "diffusion." Both processes occur everywhere. So far so good. But some scholars believe that independent invention is rather uncommon, and therefore not very important in culture change in the short run and cultural evolution in the long run. These scholars believe that most humans are imitators, not inventors. Therefore diffusion, in their view, is the main mechanism for change.

The scholars who hold this view are called "diffusionists." Whenever they encounter a cultural innovation in a particular region, they are inclined to look diligently for a process of diffusion into that region from somewhere else, somewhere the trait is already in use. For instance, the fact that the blow-gun is traditionally used among some Native American peoples as well as some Old World peoples is explained by diffusionists as being the result of the diffusion of this trait from the Old World to the New: the New World people, they believe, probably did not invent the trait for themselves. Why? Because they probably were not inventive enough to do so. A larger form of this same diffusionist argument claims that the great pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas must be, ultimately, the result of transpacific or transatlantic diffusions, because these civilizing traits (agriculture, temple architecture, writing, and so on) were found much earlier in the Old World than the New, and Native Americans probably were not inventive enough to think up these things on their own. Some scholars, those who have been traditionally described as "extreme diffusionists," believe that all civilization diffused from one original place on earth: some of them think that this original source of civilization was ancient Egypt, others place it somewhere in Central Asia (for instance, the Caucasus region—which scholars used to think was the original home of the "white" or "Caucasian" race).<ref>See, for instance, Eliot Smith, ''The Diffusion of Culture'' (1933), Perry, ''The Primordial Ocean'' (1935), and Taylor, ''Environment and Nation'' (1945). Eliot Smith flatly asserts that the ancient diffusion process radiating mainly from Egypt and Phoenicia "continued for many centuries to play upon the Pacific littoral of America, where it is responsible for ... the remarkable Pre-Columbian civilizations" (quoted in Zwernemann, ''Culture History and African Anthropology'', 1983, p. 15).</ref>

The debates between diffusionists and their opponents have been going on for more than a century in anthropology, geography, history, and all fields concerned about long-term, large-scale cultural evolution.<ref>On these matters, see Harris, ''The Rise of Anthropological Theory'' (1968) and Steward, ''Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution'' (1955).</ref> There are two basic criticisms of diffusionism.

1. Diffusionists hold much too sour a view of human ingenuity: people are in fact quite inventive and innovative, so the possibility that new culture traits will appear as a result of independent invention is actually vastly greater than diffusionists admit. So investigators should consider the possibility of independent invention in any given case, rather than assuming a priori that a diffusion process explains the situation at which one is looking.

2. Diffusionists are elitists. Every diffusion must start somewhere. An invention must take place in some one community before it begins to spread (diffuse) to others. If we accept the quite fundamental assumption that all human groups are truly human in their thinking apparatuses, and therefore broadly similar in their ability to invent and innovate—this assumption is known as "the psychic unity of mankind," a nineteenth-century label that is quaint but still in use—we would expect inventions to occur everywhere across the human landscape.<ref>See Koepping, ''Adolf Bastian and the Psychic Unity of Mankind'' (1983), Stocking ''Race, Culture, and Evolution'' (1968), and Harris, ''The Rise of Anthropological Theory'' (1968).</ref> But most diffusionists claim that only certain select communities are inventive. In other words, most communities change only as a result of receiving new traits by diffusion, but some places are uniquely inventive and are the original sources of the new traits. The people of these communities are more inventive than are people elsewhere. The psychic unity of mankind is denied: some people, or cultures, are simply smarter than others. They are permanent centers of invention and innovation.

This is spatial elitism. If we make a map of this landscape, we find that it has a permanent center and a permanent periphery. For the "extreme diffusionists" the entire world was mapped out this way, at least for the pre-Christian era: the permanent center of invention and innovation was thought to be Egypt, or the "Ancient Aryan Homeland" (a mythical place located somewhere in western Asia or southeastern Europe), or the Caucasus, or some other supposed navel of the ancient world. But the charge was leveled more broadly: diffusionists as a group tended to imagine that some few places, or some one place, was the primary source from which culture spread to all the other places.

It should be evident that diffusionism is very nicely suited to the idea that the world has an Inside and an Outside. In fact, diffusionism was the most fully developed scientific (or pseudoscientific) rationale for the idea of Inside and Outside. That idea, as we saw, postulates one permanent world center for new ideas; cultural evolution everywhere else results, broadly, from the diffusion of new ideas from this permanent center. This is simply the diffusionists' map on a world scale.

We come now to a fascinating anomaly. The critics of diffusionism, in the nineteenth century and even in the twentieth century, failed entirely to grasp the full implications of their critique. None of them denied that the world has an Inside and an Outside. While criticizing the diffusionists for their rejection of the principle of the psychic unity of mankind, the antidiffusionists nonetheless believed that cultural evolution has been centered in Europe, and they therefore accepted the idea—explicitly or implicitly—that Europeans are more inventive, more innovative than everyone else.<ref>Often the antidiffusionist camp was labeled the "cultural evolutionist" camp, and the debate as a whole was labeled "diffusionism versus evolutionism." But, as I argue here, evolutionists were to some extent diffusionists and diffusionists were to some extent evolutionists. Moreover, I want to use the term "cultural evolution" in this book in a much broader and much less controversial sense, as indicating merely the search for explanation in larger questions of historical and cultural change. A problem that is "historical" becomes a problem of "cultural evolution" when we ask, broadly, "why?" Some scholars, of course, are not comfortable with this usage of the phrase "cultural evolution." For some it carries baggage of economic determinism or environmental determinism or technological determinism, or it signifies the notion of an invariant sequence of cultural stages through which all human groups must pass—but I mean none of that. Most cultural geographers use the phrase "cultural evolution" just about as I use it here.</ref> This is made explicit when they write about recent centuries, and particularly when they discuss the modernizing, missionarizing effect of European colonialism. It is also implicit in their writings about ancient times. These anthropologists, archaeologists, geographers, and historians of the second half of the nineteenth century and the present century do not focus on the Bible Lands, and their scholarly writings do not display any acceptance of religious assumptions. Yet Inside and Outside are explicit. They write about the Near Eastern origins of agriculture, of urbanization, and so forth. They then move smoothly to arguments about European origins of most of the rest of civilization.

My basic argument is this: all scholarship is diffusionist insofar as it axiomatically accepts the Inside-Outside model, the notion that the world as a whole has one permanent center from which culture-changing ideas tend to originate, and a vast periphery that changes as a result (mainly) of diffusion from that single center. I do not argue that the formal theory of diffusionism, as it was advanced and defended by scholars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, explains the Inside-Outside model, the mythology of Europe's permanent geographical superiority and priority. Rather, the theory developed as a result of broad social forces in Europe, and entered the world of scholarship from outside of that world—from European society. Diffusionist scholars were, in essence, elaborating and codifying this theory in the realms of scholarship within which they worked: realms like archaeology, world history, and so on.

Before we proceed further I must post a warning: the word "diffusionist" has some ambiguities, and these should not be allowed to bring confusion into the present discussion. In any given debate as to whether a novel trait in a certain place was invented by the people of that place or was received from elsewhere by diffusion, those scholars who take the latter view are supporters of a "diffusionist" position, that is, they favor the specific hypothesis of diffusion as against that of independent invention. This does not necessarily mean that they have a general propensity to favor diffusion as a causal formula. Sometimes the specific issue can be a very major problem. For instance, some scholars argue that important West African culture traits diffused across the Atlantic to America before 1492. Whether they are right or wrong in this matter, they are not arguing any sort of Eurocentric diffusionism, nor do they necessarily favor diffusion over independent invention in other contexts. But most scholars who are consistent diffusionists are also Eurocentric diffusionists.

Now I will describe Eurocentric diffusionism in somewhat formal terms as a scientific theory. That theory has changed through time, but its basic structure has remained essentially unchanged. I will describe what can be called the classical (essentially nineteenth-century) form of the theory, leaving until a later section of this chapter a discussion of the not very dissimilar modern form.

Diffusionism is grounded, as we saw, in two axioms: (1) Most human communities are uninventive. (2) A few human communities (or places, or cultures) are inventive and thus remain the permanent centers of culture change, of progress. At the global scale, this gives us a model of a world with a single center—roughly, Greater Europe—and a single periphery; an Inside and an Outside. There are a number of variants of this two-sector model. Sometimes the two sectors are treated as sharply distinct, with a definite boundary between them. (This form of the model is the familiar one. It is sometimes called the "Center-Periphery Model of the World.") Another form sees the world in a slightly different way: there is a clear and definite center, but outside of it there is gradual change, gradual decline in degree of civilization or progressiveness or innovativeness, as one moves outward into the periphery. Another variant depicts the world as divided into zones, each representing a level of modernity or civilization or development.<ref>Both forms are sometimes combined; for instance, in the nineteenth century northwestern Europe was considered (by northwestern Europeans) to be absolutely civilized, Africa absolutely uncivilized, and all other areas (of the Eastern Hemisphere) somewhere in between. These matters are discussed later in this book.</ref> The classical division was one with three great bands: "civilization," "barbarism," and "savagery."

The basic model of diffusionism in its classical form depicts a world divided into the prime two sectors, one of which (Greater Europe, Inside) invents and progresses, the other of which (non-Europe, Outside) receives progressive innovations by diffusion from Inside. From this base, diffusionism asserts seven fundamental arguments about the two sectors and the interactions between them:

1. Europe naturally progresses and modernizes. That is, the natural state of affairs in the European sector (Inside) is to invent, innovate, change things for the better. Europe changes; Europe is "historical."

2. Non-Europe (Outside) naturally remains stagnant, unchanging, traditional, and backward. Invention, innovation, and change are not the natural state of affairs, and not to be expected, in non-European countries. Non-Europe does not change; non-Europe is "ahistorical."

Propositions 3 and 4 explain the difference between the two sectors:

3. The basic cause of European progress is some intellectual or spiritual factor, something characteristic of the "European mind," the "European spirit," "Western Man," etc., something that leads to creativity, imagination, invention, innovation, rationality, and a sense of honor or ethics: "European values."

4. The reason for non-Europe's nonprogress is a lack of this same intellectual or spiritual factor. This proposition asserts, in essence, that the landscape of the non-European world is empty, or partly so, of "rationality," that is, of ideas and proper spiritual values. There are a number of variations of this proposition in classical (mainly late-nineteenth-century) diffusionism. Two are quite important:

a. For much of the non-European world, this proposition asserts an emptiness also of basic cultural institutions, and even an emptiness of people. This can be called the diffusionist myth of emptiness, and it has particular connection to settler colonialism (the physical movement of Europeans into non-European regions, displacing or eliminating the native inhabitants). This proposition of emptiness makes a series of claims, each layered upon the others: (i) A non-European region is empty or nearly empty of people (hence settlement by Europeans does not displace any native peoples). (ii) The region is empty of settled population: the inhabitants are mobile, nomadic, wanderers (hence European settlement violates no political sovereignty, since wanderers make no claim to territory). (iii) The cultures of this region do not possess an understanding of private property—that is, the region is empty of property rights and claims (hence colonial occupiers can freely give land to settlers since no one owns it). The final layer, applied to all of the Outside sector, is an emptiness of intellectual creativity and spiritual values, sometimes described by Europeans (as, for instance, by Max Weber) as an absence of "rationality."<ref>Max Weber's notion of "European rationality" is discussed in Chapter 2.</ref>

b. Some non-European regions, in some historical epochs, are assumed to have been "rational" in some ways and to some degree. Thus, for instance, the Middle East during biblical times was rational. China was somewhat rational for a certain period in its history.<ref>The varying conceptions of China, and also India, as semirational or intermittently rational or rational in some ways but not in others are discussed in Chapters 2 and 3.</ref> Other regions, always including Africa, are unqualifiedly lacking in rationality.

5. The normal, natural way that the non-European part of the world progresses, changes for the better, modernizes, and so on, is by the diffusion (or spread) of innovative, progressive ideas from Europe, which flow into it as air flows into a vacuum. This diffusion may take the form of the spread of European ideas as such, or the spread of new products in which the European ideas are concretized, or the spread (migration, settlement) of Europeans themselves, bearers of these new and innovative ideas.

Proposition 5, you will observe, is a simple justification for European colonialism. It asserts that colonialism, including settler colonialism, brings civilization to non-Europe; is in fact the natural way that the non-European world advances out of its stagnation, backwardness, traditionalism.

But under colonialism, wealth is drawn out of the non-European colonies and enriches the European colonizers. In Eurocentric diffusionism this too is seen as a normal relationship between Inside and Outside:

6. Compensating in part for the diffusion of civilizing ideas from Europe to non-Europe, is a counterdiffusion of material wealth from non-Europe to Europe, consisting of plantation products, minerals, art objects, labor, and so on. Nothing can fully compensate the Europeans for their gift of civilization to the colonies, so the exploitation of colonies and colonial peoples is morally justified. (Colonialism gives more than it receives.)

And there is still another form of interaction between Inside and Outside. It is the opposite of the diffusion of civilizing ideas from Europe to non-Europe (proposition 5):

7. Since Europe is advanced and non-Europe is backward, any ideas that diffuse into Europe must be ancient, savage, atavistic, uncivilized, evil—black magic, vampires, plagues, "the bogeyman," and the like.<ref>The "bogeyman" refers to the Buginese, a Malay people who fought fiercely against the Europeans and so were stigmatized in this way. The most famous fictional vampire, Count Dracula, came to England from Outside (a barbarous mountain region on the frontier of the Turkish empire).</ref> Associated with this conception is the diffusionist myth which has been called "the theory of our contemporary ancestors." It asserts that, as we move farther and farther away from civilized Europe, we encounter people who, successively, reflect earlier and earlier epochs of history and culture. Thus the so-called "stone-age people" of the Antipodes are likened to the Paleolithic Europeans. The argument here is that diffusion works in successive waves, spreading outward, such that the farther outward we go the farther backward we go in terms of cultural evolution. But conversely, there is the possibility that these ancient, atavistic, etc., traits will counterdiffuse back into the civilized core, in the form of ancient, magical, evil things like black magic, Dracula, etc.

The main oppositions between the two sectors can be shown in tabular form. The following contrast-sets are quite typical in nineteenth-century diffusionist thought:

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Characteristic of Core !! Characteristic of Periphery
|-
| Inventiveness || Imitativeness
|-
| Rationality, intellect || Irrationality, emotion, instinct
|-
| Abstract thought || Concrete thought
|-
| Theoretical reasoning || Empirical, practical reasoning
|-
| Mind || Body, matter
|-
| Discipline || Spontaneity
|-
| Adulthood || Childhood
|-
| Sanity || Insanity
|-
| Science || Sorcery
|-
| Progress || Stagnation
|}

What I have described thus far is, of course, a highly simplified version of the diffusionist world model. We will add qualifications and modifications as we proceed, and in particular we will see that there are significant differences between the classical form of diffusionism and the modern form of the model.

So much for what diffusionism is. What does it do? In this book I will show in some detail how diffusionism has shaped our views of history, both European and non-European. Later in the present chapter and in Chapter 2 I will show some of the concrete influences of diffusionism on theories outside of history, some in psychology, some in geography, some in economics, some in sociology.

But this discussion will be more meaningful after a different question has been addressed. This is the question of how and why diffusionism became such a foundation theory in Western thought. To this question we now turn.

== The Colonizer's Model ==

Perhaps all civilizations have a somewhat ethnocentric view of themselves in relation to their neighbors, believing themselves better, brighter, and bolder than every other human community and constructing empirical theories to explain why this is the case, and to explain away embarrassments. Perhaps we would find the seeds of diffusionism in all these beliefs: the idea that progress is natural and calls for no explanation in "our" society but is unnatural or at any rate, less impressive in "their" societies; the idea that "they" progress by borrowing from "us" and imitating "our" ideas; and so on. But this does not add up to the theory of diffusionism, nor is it very important for an understanding of diffusionism. Diffusionism as I have been discussing it is a product of modern European colonialism. It is the colonizer's model of the world.

=== Origins ===

Diffusionism became a fully formed scientific theory during the nineteenth century. The origins of the theory, however, go back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Western Europe, where a belief system was being constructed to give some coherence to the new reality of change within Europe and colonial expansion outside Europe. The conception of a two-sector world, the diffusionist distinction between Inside and Outside, emerged from a very old conception of Christendom and the Roman imperial legacy (which meant, for most of western and southern Europe, a common source of legitimacy for the political and landholding elites). But it is certainly not true that medieval Europeans saw Christendom as a sharply defined space, naturally in conflict with surrounding societies. Nor did medieval European thinkers have many illusions about the relative power, wealth, and technological prowess of Christendom as compared with Islamic and Oriental civilizations. But certainly they had some idea, not of a collective identity, but of a distinction between the lands inhabited by Christians, given divine guidance and protection for this reason, and the lands of non-Christians. Nevertheless, it was only after 1492 that Inside acquired a sharp geographical definition, less as a result of medieval ideas than of colonialism in the early modern period.

European ideas about European progressiveness, Europe's somehow inevitable progress, are also essentially postmedieval. Obviously, these ideas were being discussed during the Middle Ages, and certainly there was hope, prayer, and struggle for betterment, but medieval folk tended rather to see their society as being in a relative state of equilibrium; their religion spoke of the Fall, and of the need to accept existing conditions (and rules), while the reality of medieval life (particularly fourteenth- and fifteenth-century life) was not one of perceptible forward progress for the mass of people. But European thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were coming to conceive of history—their own history—as a progressive process. Real progress (or at any rate accelerating change) indeed was taking place in the communities occupied by these thinkers, and the climate of ideas was changing in a complex but close association with the rise of capitalism, the expansion of opportunity for individuals in many regions, and the like.

One of the main problems confronted by these early modern thinkers, both secular and religious, was the need to establish a belief system, an ideology, that would convince conservative sectors of the European community to accept the idea that progress is inevitable, natural, and desirable, and thus to accept changes in the legal system which would permit more rapid and widespread capital accumulation, to persuade the landowning classes to treat land as a commodity and invest their real holdings in risk enterprises, to introduce laws and practices to mobilize labor for emerging capitalist activities at home and abroad, to persuade Europeans in general to accept the painful changes being imposed on them, and so on. Equally important was the need to explain progress in ways that accorded with religion. This was done by seeing God's guidance of (European) history, and by conceptualizing progressive innovations as being products of the European mind or spirit and thus ultimately products of the Christian soul. (We will go into these matters later in this book.)

Thus emerged the conception of Inside as being naturally progressive (diffusionist proposition 1), and as being progressive because of the workings of an intellectual or spiritual force, "European rationality" (diffusionist proposition 3). By the eighteenth century it had become the practice in secular writings to discuss causality in history and philosophy without referencing God and Scriptures, but the basic model of European progress as natural, as rational, remained unchanged in its essence; became, indeed, much fortified.<ref>On the history of the idea of progress in European thought, see, for instance, G. H. Mead, ''Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century'' (1936), Toulmin and Goodfield, ''The Discovery of Time'' (1965), Nisbet, ''History of the Idea of Progress'' (1980), and Bowler, ''The Invention of Progress'' (1989). It is true that the idea of progress as the normal condition was doubted by some thinkers during the nineteenth century (and especially in opposition to the idea of biological evolution), but this was a minor and intermittent countercurrent. See Stocking, ''Race, Culture, and Evolution'' (1987) and Bowler, ''The Invention of Progress'' (1989).</ref> In none of this thought was there any real suspicion that non-European civilizations might have had much to do with the earlier, medieval progress of Christian Europe, or much to do with its modern (sixteenth- to eighteenth-century) progress except in the purely passive role of provider of labor, commodities, and land for settlement, and, marginally, in some traits of technology and art. Nor was there very much awareness that colonialism and its windfalls—inflow of capital, intensification of intra- as well as extra-European trade, increase in employment opportunities in mercantile centers and in the colonial world, and much more—was an important cause of European progress. Then, as later, the European conception of its own dynamic society attributed dynamism not to external causes but to internal causes, and to God. This relatively constant blindness to the importance of colonialism, historically and even today, will claim our attention at various points in this book.

The development of a conception of Outside proceeded in a more complicated way. The sixteenth-century Spanish debates about the nature of New World Indians—Are they human? Can they receive the True Religion and, if so, can they be made slaves?—was a crucial part of the early formulation of diffusionism, because it entailed an attempt to conceptualize European expansion and explain why it was, somehow, natural, desirable, and profitable, and to conceptualize the societies that were being conquered and exploited, explaining why it was, again, natural for them to succumb and to provide Europeans with labor, land, and products.<ref>See Huddleston, ''Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492-1729'' (1967), Williams, ''The American Indian in Western Legal Thought'' (1990); Hulme, ''Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797'' (1992); Gossett, ''Race: The History of an Idea in America'' (1963).</ref> European views of New World peoples were formed rather quickly because in that region the basic pattern of colonialism emerged quickly. The enterprise was immensely profitable from the very beginning, from the first great shipments of gold in the early sixteenth century (see Chapter 4). Resistance was rapidly overcome in Spanish colonies and surviving Americans were rather quickly forced to submit to colonial exploitation. (I refer here to the major centers of early colonialism, such as central Mexico, the Greater Antilles, and the Andes.) In the next century the profitability of slave plantations in Brazil and the Antilles, and the fact that African slaves could, in spite of their resistance, be forced to work and produce profit for Europeans, added further to the conception of Outside: these people were naturally inferior to Europeans, naturally less brave, less freedom loving, less rational, and so on, and progress for them depended on acceptance of European domination, hence diffusion. In sum, the New World experience, with Native Americans, Africans, mestizos, and mulattos, in areas of mining, large-scale estate agriculture, commercial plantations, and so forth, produced the kernel of the diffusionist propositions (2, 4, and 5), which assert that non-Europe naturally depends on Europe for progress and this is due to a lack of the intellectual and spiritual qualities that Europeans possessed. It also produced the diffusionist proposition (6) that European expansion is natural and leads naturally to the transfer of wealth from non-Europe to Europe.

But these activities were taking place only in the New World and the slave-trading coasts of Africa. The civilizations of Sudanic, southern, and eastern Africa were not conquered by Europeans until (in most cases) the nineteenth century; the Ottoman Empire was not only formidable throughout this period, but was indeed expanding its territorial control in southeastern Europe at the same time that Iberians were conquering the New World. And the other great empires did not begin to succumb to colonialism before the mid-eighteenth century: European activities in nearly all parts of Asia and Africa were mainly matters of trade, with dominance of long-distance maritime trade, small territorial footholds here and there on certain coasts, and the like (see Chapter 4). Thus, in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, the diffusionist model of Outside which had been applied to Americans and to the groups of Africans transported to America as slaves could not be applied to the civilizations of the Old World.

For these Eastern Hemisphere civilizations a limited and somewhat tentative form of the diffusionist model was accepted during this period. These civilizations were indisputably rich and technically advanced. Rationality in the sense of inventiveness was clearly present, or at least had been present in the past, when the great and impressive innovations (technology, architecture, banking, and so on) had occurred. What these civilizations lacked was the moral component of rationality, because, fundamentally, they were not Christians. These were "Oriental despotisms," societies in which there was, naturally, cruelty, lack of freedom, lack of a decent life for the common people (while the elite wallowed in decadence and sin), etc. (We discuss this concept at some length in Chapter 2.) The moral failing necessarily led to an inability of these societies to progress in the present, the era when Europe is naturally progressing, although Europeans could not deny, even though they found it most puzzling, that these despotic civilizations had, indisputably, progressed in the past. (At times the puzzle was resolved by declaring that they had progressed in pre-Christian times, and had lost the Grace of God through having refused to accept Christianity.<ref>At times the notion was advanced that these civilizations had somehow evolved in antediluvian times and had not been wiped out in the Flood (see, for example, Keightley, ''Outlines of History'', 1849). Haskel (''Chronology and Universal History'', 1848, p. 9) speculates that Noah migrated to China where he or his descendants founded the Chinese monarchy. "The early improvement and populousness of the east, seems to favor this idea."</ref>) Only in the nineteenth century, with the rapid colonization of India, Southeast Asia, interior Africa, and (as a kind of collective colony) China, did the diffusionist propositions about Outside, and about the natural relations between Inside and Outside, become generalized to all of non-Europe. It was in this late period, I think, that the final diffusionist proposition, the notion of counterdiffusion of evil and savagery and disease from Outside to Inside, become fully developed. The bogeyman (from the Malay Buginese people) came from Outside. So too did Dracula, whose homeland lay on the edge of Asia.<ref>From the mid-nineteenth century or perhaps earlier, the literature on the occult, on ghosts and monsters, and the like, tended to focus on extra-European origins or homes or sources of the witches, monsters, demons, zombies, walking mummies, evil spells ("black magic"), artifacts with supernatural powers, and so on, all of which have a tendency to diffuse into Europe as a kind of counterdiffusion, an undertow beneath European expansionism. See Brantlinger, ''Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism'' (1988).</ref>

=== Classical Diffusionism ===

The nineteenth century was the classical era for colonialism, and the era when Eurocentric diffusionism assumed what I will call its classical form. After the Napoleonic Wars colonialism expanded and intensified with remarkable rapidity. Between 1810 and 1860 or thereabouts Europeans subdued most of Asia, settled most of North America, and began the penetration of Africa. Between 1860 and the start of World War I, the rest of Asia and Africa was occupied and the profits from colonialism, the value of capital accumulated in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, along with the riches flowing from newly settled areas of European settlement, expanded enormously. In the latter part of the century the rate of growth in colonial agricultural enterprise exceeded that of industrial development on a world scale, and other forms of development, such as the mining of nonprecious metals, were becoming important for the first time.<ref>See W. A. Lewis, ed., ''Tropical development, 1880-1913'' (1970).</ref> There is profound disagreement as to how important all of this was for European social and intellectual evolution in this period. I will enter this debate in Chapter 4, but for the present it is sufficient to assert that the overall effect of European expansion, through colonialism in the narrow sense, through settlement, and through semicolonial economic dominance, was profound enough to create a very large intellectual model, the classical form of diffusionism.

By 1870 or thereabouts there was broad agreement among European thinkers about the basic nature and dynamics of the world. Few doubted that biological and social evolution—that is, progress—were fundamental truths, although evolutionary processes were more often explained in religious or metaphysical ways than in naturalistic ways, as in Darwin's theory.<ref>See Bowler, ''The Invention of Progress'' (1989), Stocking, ''Victorian Anthropology'' (1987), Mandelbaum, ''History, Man and Reason'' (1971).</ref> It seemed clear that Europeans were naturally to experience permanent social evolution, that this had been God's or Nature's plan throughout history. Some historical thinkers described the general process in holistic terms, as the evolution of society or the state; others treated it in reductionist (in a sense, psychological) terms as an intellectual ascent, a matter of the steady advance of human reason, with capitalism, industry, and so on, treated as products of mind; but many thinkers (among them Herbert Spencer) saw no opposition between the social and intellectual models, treating progress as a kind of flowing stream, which carried with it an evolution both of society and of mind.<ref>Spencer, ''The Man Versus the State'' (1969). The complex interplay between individualistic and holistic theories of historical progress during the nineteenth century is discussed in G. H. Mead, ''Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century'' (1936) and Mandelbaum, ''History, Man and Reason'' (1971). I try to show in Blaut, ''The National Question: Decolonizing the Theory of Nationalism'' (1987b) how most theories of nationality and national evolution emerge from one or the other of these intellectual streams, one essentially Kantian and psychologistic, the other essentially Romantic and Hegelian.</ref> Thus by the 1870s at the latest the central diffusionist proposition, the notion of natural, continuous, internally generated progress in the European (or west European) core, was very firmly in place. Its truth was no longer really questioned by mainstream thinkers.

There was, at the same time, a convergence of views about the nature and historical dynamics of the non-European world. By the middle of the nineteenth century the biblical time scale had been rather definitively rejected (though not yet in all history textbooks), and it was no longer necessary to argue that differences between Europeans and all other cultures had to have evolved in the space of a few thousand years unless they had been there from the start, unless, that is, polygenists were right and some human groups had been created separately from, and perhaps much earlier than, Adam and Eve. This gave room for wide-ranging theorization about the way cultural differences had evolved. Paralleling this change was a general rejection of the literal biblical beliefs about the original nature of human society. Culture was now (after midcentury) quite generally seen as a product of evolution from very primitive beginnings, exemplified in the notion of a primordial "stone age." (According to the Old Testament, humans had possessed advanced technology, including agriculture and the use of metals, in the days of Genesis.)

The reasons for the rapid crystallization of beliefs about non-Europeans are complex, but the most important underlying reason was the progress of colonialism. This produced two effects in particular. One was a flood of information about non-European people and places, such that, for the first time, a coherent—though highly distorted—description could be given in the European literature about non-Europeans, both civilized and "savage." The second reason was a practical, political and economic interest in proving certain things to be true, and other things untrue, about the extra-European world and its people. The two processes were tightly interconnected.

Colonialism in its various forms, direct and indirect, was an immensely profitable business and considerable sums of money were invested in efforts to learn as much as possible about the people and resources of the regions to be conquered, dominated, and perhaps settled, and to learn as much as possible about the regions already conquered in order to facilitate the administration and economic exploitation of these regions. The nineteenth century was the age of scientific exploration—Darwin in the Beagle, Livingstone in Africa, Powell in the Rockies, and so on—but the sources of support for these efforts tended to be institutions with very practical interest in the regions being studied. Paralleling all of this was the great surge of missionary activity that supported some exploration (including Livingstone's) but most crucially led to the gathering of important, detailed, information about ethnography, languages, and geography by hundreds of dedicated missionaries throughout the non-European world. Also of great importance were the detailed reports that colonial administrators everywhere were required to submit, reports providing information about native legal systems, land tenure rules, production, and much more.

Most of what was learned about non-Europeans came from these sources. It is not necessary for me to dwell on the fact that the people who supplied the information were Europeans with very definite points of view, cultural, political, and religious lenses that forced them to see "natives" in ways that were highly distorted. A missionary might have great love and respect for the people among whom he or she worked but could not be expected to believe that the culture and mind of these non-Christians was on a par with that of Christian Europeans. A colonial administrator not only had cultural distortions but usually worked with economic interests and classes (European planters, mining corporations, zamindars, and so on) and consciously or unconsciously put forward views about common people, and about resources, that reflected the biases and concrete interests of these elite groups. Strictly speaking, missionaries and colonial administrators were in the business of diffusing Europe to non-Europe. Thus the entire corpus of information about non-Europeans that was gathered in this process has certain quite definite distortions. It was immensely valuable in spite of this fact, but the plain fact is that theories constructed from this information—and this includes the great bulk of nineteenth-century anthropological, geographic, and politicoeconomic theories about non-Europeans—are systematically distorted. The distortions are, broadly, those of diffusionism.

But colonial interest added an additional kind of distortion, a matter of shaping knowledge into theories that would prove useful for colonialism. Scientific and legal theories were constructed in general by policymakers and by intellectuals who were either themselves policymakers or were close to policy. (In England, for instance, an extraordinary percentage of the influential historians, social theorists, even novelists and poets, had direct connections with the East India Company, the Colonial Office, and other private and public agencies of empire.<ref>Among them: Malthus, J. S. Mill, T. Macauley, and Thackeray. See Brantlinger, ''Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914'' (1987). Also see Williams, ''British Historians and the West Indies'' (1966) and Said, ''Orientalism'' (1979).</ref>) I include under the label "theory" a wide range of general arguments, including the larger constructs of history.

At the most general level, intellectuals were shaping theories of social evolution which were in essence demonstrations that the postulates of diffusionism are natural law. As we noticed previously, the nineteenth-century debates between those called "evolutionists" and those called "diffusionists" were essentially debates between two versions of diffusionism. A great range of theories in both camps were constructs aimed to assist in colonial activity, and to develop and strengthen the doctrine that European colonialism is scientifically natural, a matter of the inevitable working out of social laws of human progress (development of the family, law, the state, etc.). Also at the very general level, seminal works of the middle and later nineteenth century on ancient and modern history presented various sophisticated diffusionist ideas, mainly about the reasons for and the facts of Europe's natural and persistent progress compared with other peoples, those now being colonized. These historical constructs were important in building support for colonial activities among European populations; and later, as colonial educational systems appeared, for convincing the natives that colonialism was natural, inevitable, and progressive.

In Chapter 2 I will discuss a number of these diffusionist theories which emerged, or became concrete, in the nineteenth century in the complex association of scholarship and colonialism, focusing on those theories that today underlie the myth of Europe's historical and cultural superiority. Here I need only show how classical diffusionism arose in tandem with classical colonialism, and for this purpose a pair of representative theories can be singled out by way of illustration.

One such theory was the postulate that non-Europeans have not developed concepts of private property in important material resources such as land. The theory asserted that private property emerged from ancient European roots, notably Roman land law and various putative Germanic traits relating to individualism; that other civilizations, lacking this history (and, by implication, lacking the mental and cultural qualities associated with this history), remained in a stage of evolution in which true individual ownership could not be fully conceptualized. These people, therefore, needed to have capitalism imposed on them. In fact, the theory was developed mainly by lawyers and administrators in the European colonial corporations and colonial offices, and had one very concrete purpose: to establish the legal basis for expropriating land from colonized peoples, on the fiction that the colonized had no property rights to this land because they had no concept of property rights in land.<ref>See Thapar, ''Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations'' (1978) and "Ideology and the Interpretation of Early Indian History" (1982), and B. Chandra, "Karl Marx, His Theories of Asian Societies, and Colonial Rule" (1981). We return to this issue in Chapter 2.</ref> Yet the theory became essentially an axiom in nineteenth-century intellectual thought. Even Karl Marx accepted it, and doing so produced a large theory about the evolution of private property—a major part of his theory about the origins of capitalism—in which it was argued (or rather assumed) that this evolution was peculiarly a European phenomenon, and that colonialism, for all its horrors, did at least bring about the diffusion of capitalism to the non-European world, a necessary though painful process for the non-Europeans. Thus even Marxism, perhaps the most antisystemic doctrine to come out of nineteenth-century Europe, was strongly shaped by diffusionism.<ref>See in particular Marx's article, "The British Rule in India" (1979). In later work, Marx and Engels adopted a much more negative opinion about colonialism, developing to some extent the idea of colonial underdevelopment: see Blaut, ''The National Question: Decolonizing the Theory of Nationalism'' (1987b) for a discussion.</ref>

A larger form of this doctrine, the more general "myth of emptiness," the diffusionist idea that a colonized or colonizable territory was empty of population, or was populated only by wandering nomads, people with no fixed abode and therefore no claim to territory, or lacked people with a concept of political sovereignty or economic property, had similar colonialist functions, and arose in a similar way. The same is true of a closely related doctrine, the theory of "Oriental despotism" (older in point of origin, but developed fully in nineteenth-century diffusionist thought), according to which non-Europeans lack the concept of freedom, hence suffer despotic governments that stifle all progress—until Europeans bring freedom to them in the form of colonialism (which ironically is the purest negation of freedom). These and other theories that arose from classical diffusionism are still employed today to reinforce the myth of Europe's historical and cultural superiority; we will discuss them in Chapter 2, which seeks to refute this myth.

The era of classical diffusionism was the era of classical colonialism, the era when European expansion was so swift and so profitable that European superiority seemed almost to be a law of nature. Diffusionism, in its essence, codified this apparent fact into a general theory about European historical, cultural, and psychological superiority, non-European inferiority, and the inevitability and absolute righteousness of the process by which Europe and its traits diffused to non-Europe. Diffusionism then ramified the general theory into innumerable empirical beliefs in all the human sciences, in philosophy, in the arts.<ref>See Chapter 2.</ref> And it applied these beliefs in particular cases, explaining and justifying the individual acts of conquest, of repression, of exploitation. All of it was right, rational, and natural.

=== Modern Diffusionism ===

The nineteenth century, or more precisely the interval between the defeat of Napoleon and the beginning of World War I, was a time of relative peace and relative progress for Europeans. Colonialism fueled this process with resources, markets, cheap labor, and lands for settlement by Europeans, and colonialism resolved many of Europe's internal contradictions in the process. The idea that progress in European civilization and expansion of that civilization in space were different dimensions of the same historical force was the dominant idea of the time, and this was, of course, the central notion of diffusionism.

But all of this changed early in the twentieth century. The world is finite in size, so spatial expansion had to come to an end, and by 1900 all of the non-European world had been carved up into colonies, semicolonial spheres of control, and territories of settlement. This change of conditions produced a change in thought: the essential problem now was exploitation and the maintenance of control in the face of native resistance. Thus it became a question not of expansion but of equilibrium. At the same time tensions among European powers—some of the tensions were connected to conflicts over colonies—boiled over into general war among the European powers. Soon after World War I came the Great Depression. Then, immediately, World War II. Between 1914 and 1945, then, the minds of European intellectuals were focused not on the idea of progress and expansion, but on the question of how to prevent disaster: how to maintain, or return to, peace and prosperity. The code word was "normalcy."

The central notion of diffusionism did not fit this intellectual mood. The prevailing doctrines of this period were theories of stasis, of equilibrium, not theories of expansion. Economics dwelled on Keynesian ideas of equilibrium. In geography, the doctrine known as "regionalism" prevailed, the idea that the various parts of the world are stable, coherent, well-demarcated regions and tend to remain that way. Anthropology was emphasizing two equilibrium theories: "functionalism," a model of social systems (and cultures) as stable and self-correcting systems, and "cultural relativism," a doctrine that declared in essence that each culture has intrinsic worth. Anthropologists of course worked primarily among colonized peoples, and these two theories were closely integrated with colonial policy, mainly as a basis for policies designed to prevent native unrest while allowing European exploitation of land, minerals, and labor.<ref>See Asad, ''Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter'' (1975), and Temu and Swai, ''Historians and Africanist History'' (1981).</ref> Thus equilibrium doctrines were very widespread, probably dominant, in European thought throughout most of the first half of the twentieth century.

Diffusionism, in this period, seems to have gone into a partial eclipse. History and geography textbooks were still sublimely diffusionist, in an essentially nineteenth-century mood, emphasizing the beneficial spread of civilization to Africa, Asia, and Latin America ("where our bananas come from"), the teleological rise of "the West," and so on. In social thought, the doctrines of "extreme diffusionism" (discussed earlier) were still being advanced, and still debated.<ref>Important examples are Eliot Smith ''The Diffusion of Culture'' (1933), Perry, ''The Primordial Ocean'' (1935), Schmidt, ''The Culture Historical Method of Ethnology'' (1939), Griffith Taylor, ''Environment and Nation'' (1945). See critiques in Radin, ''The Method and Theory of Ethnology'' (1965), Lowie, ''The History of Ethnological Theory'' (1937), and Harris ''The Rise of Anthropological Theory'' (1968).</ref> And it should not be thought that the decline of diffusionism as a doctrine of cultural dynamics implied a decline in prejudice. The notion that non-Europeans are less rational, less innovative, and so on, was as intense as ever: perhaps even more intense since this was the period of Nazism and like doctrines, and since genetic racism seemed, in this era, to be science, not prejudice. We return to this matter in Chapter 2.

A new and modern form of diffusionism gained prominence after the end of World War II, in the period of collapsing colonial empires and an emerging "Third World" of underdeveloped but legally sovereign countries. This doctrine, generally known today by the title "modernization," or "the diffusion of modernization," arose in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Immediately after the Japanese surrender in 1945 it became clear that a number of colonies would gain independence immediately: liberation forces were now very strong and, in the wake of the world war, all of the colonial powers except the United States were now quite weak. All of them wanted to hold on to their colonies, the sources of great profit in the past and presumably also in the future. Each of the colonial powers maneuvered in its own way to hold on to its colonies, sometimes resorting to forcible efforts to suppress independence movements, sometimes conceding political independence grudgingly but peacefully where continued colonial control seemed patently impossible.<ref>Here I am of course rejecting the view, common among European scholars, that colonies were relinquished voluntarily. This view has been rejected almost universally by scholars in the formerly colonial world. It may conceivably have been true for a few small islands from which profits no longer flowed to the colonizing power, but even such cases are debatable. It is worth noting that the United States has not given independence to any of the colonies it held at the close of World War II; has not even formally conceded the right of full self-determination (including independence) to Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, the Marianas, etc. The other colonial powers would presumably have taken the same position, had they had the power to do so in the face of colonial pro-independence forces; in such cases as the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, Kenya, Angola, Mozambique, and so on, the colonizers tried to hold on to their possession by force of arms and failed. My view is set forth in Blaut, ''The National Question'' (1987b), chap. 4, and Blaut and Figueroa, ''Aspectos de la cuestion nacional en Puerto Rico'' (1988).</ref>

All colonies had been saturated during the classical colonial era with the ideological message that economic and social progress for the colonial people had to come through the diffusion of "modernization" from the colonizing power. "Modernization" meant the diffusion of a modern economy (with major corporations owned by the colonizer), a modern public administration (the colonial political structure), a modern technical infrastructure (bridges, dams, and the like, built by the colonizer), and so on. I call this an ideological message, but it was in fact believed in profoundly by the colonizers, who felt that their mission was, indeed, to diffuse their own civilization to the peoples who were under their "colonial tutelage," and the fact that this mission produced wealth for their own country seemed only logical (recall diffusionist proposition 6). In the new situation the colonizers had to persuade the colonized that the "modernization" message was still valid. Doing so, they might convince the colonized to voluntarily relinquish the ideal of political independence in favor of the more pragmatic ideal of economic and social development under a wise and benevolent colonial rule. Or, if independence was insisted upon, this ideology would convince the people of the country now acquiring freedom that the only way to develop that country economically and socially was to retain the colonial economy, that is, to allow the colonizer's corporations and banks to continue their (profitable) work under the new regime: a system everyone today describes as "neocolonialism."

Now all colonial powers began a major campaign to intensify the process of colonial economic development.<ref>Representative examples include "Operation Bootstrap" in Puerto Rico, the Colonial Development and Welfare programs in parts of the British Empire, the increased funding for colonial agriculture and health departments, the establishment of colonial universities, and so on. These programs, regardless of their underlying political purposes (often hidden from the technical personnel involved) were, overall, very impressive.</ref> This should not be thought of as cynical or hypocritical: remember that diffusionism defined the colonial process as beneficial for the colonized as well as the colonizer, and the technical and other personnel involved in the new colonial development activities were utterly convinced that they were working for the advancement of the colonized people. At the same time, a parallel campaign was developed to further the same form of economic development in the independent countries, partly through agencies of the United Nations, partly through bilateral aid agreements.<ref>Often this work was a direct continuation of colonial technical work, often with the same personnel, now "foreign advisor" or "United Nations expert" rather than "colonial technical officer."</ref> The United States, now the leading economic power, began to establish its own aid programs in countries throughout the underdeveloped world. Again, this should not be dismissed as cynical and political: there was, in this period, a tremendously euphoric ideology that saw the end of the world war as the beginning of an Age of Development, a time when the advanced nations would work to bring—that is, diffuse—prosperity and advancement to the poor nations.

Decolonization spread, and many liberation movements and newly independent countries refused to accept the neocolonial option, either ejecting foreign corporations (as did Indonesia) or opting for a specifically socialist society. This added a new impetus to the diffusion-of-modernization project. Efforts to bring about development through diffusion were intensified in hopes that their success would lead countries to reject the anticapitalist and antifeign options. But the choice of either of these two options seemed to imply a political alignment with the Soviet Union and China, so the diffusion-of-modernization project now became important as a matter of foreign policy in the Cold War. In 1959 the Cuban revolutionary victory gave the project very high priority for the United States, which now treated modernization and economic development, particularly in Latin America, as a matter of the highest priority, calling for very large investment.<ref>Thus the Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps, the elevated funding of technical and financial agencies of the Organization of American States, and the like.</ref>

Modern diffusionism is the body of ideas which underlay, and still underlies, this new set of conditions in the Third World. The diffusion of modernization, as it is carried out by public policy makers and private corporations and theorized by intellectuals (at least in the metropolitan, formerly colonizing, countries), is considered to be essentially the process by which Third World countries gain prosperity by accepting the continuous and increasing diffusion of economic and technological plums from the formerly colonial countries, a process that now, as in the past, is supremely profitable for the latter. In the diffusionist belief system, it is profitable for everybody, and also is right, rational, and natural, just as it had been a century earlier.

The ideas of 1993 are of course very different from the ideas of 1893, so it would be wrong to think that modern diffusionism is the same as classical diffusionism. Biological racism is no longer part of the model (as we will see in Chapter 2), and few modern European thinkers believe that non-Europeans simply do not have the potential to develop eventually to the level of Europeans. Religious undertones are largely absent, and the notion that a Christian god began things with the putative ancestors of Europeans, in the Bible Lands, and thereafter guided Europeans, Christians, to persistent superiority over all others, is no longer very popular. The historical greatness of some non-European civilizations is now fully conceded. (But with one vital qualification: less rationality, less innovativeness, than European civilization. We deal with this in Chapter 2.)

After about a quarter-century of blind faith that the diffusion of modernization would bring about economic development everywhere, European experts and scholars now qualify their belief in this model, and in particular draw back from their former naive faith that the diffusion of modern technology, particularly in agriculture, is the key to economic development, the key to what used to be called "the take-off into sustained growth."

But, all of this notwithstanding, the basic propositions of diffusionism remain in place. Europeans still believe that Inside has one fundamental cultural nature and Outside another, now admitting Japan into the Inside sector. It is still believed that Europe in the past displayed a progressiveness not found in any other civilizations, except in one or two places, at one or two moments of history. Although European scholars no longer insist that this fundamental difference between a progressive Inside and a stagnant or slow-moving Outside will persist into the indefinite future, most of them write and speak about the present and future as though this fundamental dynamic will continue (again qualifying the picture to admit Japan, and perhaps a few small East Asian societies, into the dynamic of Inside). But today, as we will see in the next chapter, there is a growing, though still small, group of European scholars, mainly responding to the newer ideas that now emanate from non-European scholarship in postcolonial societies, who question the overall diffusionist model, and who deny its historical conceptions about the superiority of Inside over Outside.

== World Models and Worldly Interests ==

Diffusionism is a poor theory. Diffusionism, as I argue in this book, is not good geography and not good history. Yet it exerts a tremendous influence on scholarship, and has done so for a very long time. How do we account for the fact that a bad theory can be so widely believed to be true, and for such a long time? We should briefly consider this question before we shift from the discussion of the nature and evolution of diffusionism as a theory to the discussion of empirical history, the topic of later chapters. It is important to understand how this (and every) theory interlocks with other ideas and responds to social interests.

=== The Ethnography of Beliefs ===

In this discussion we will look at ideas as cultural facts: we will look at them ethnographically, as beliefs held by human beings who belong to specific sorts of communities and categories. We will see that a study of ideas-as-beliefs is quite different from an inquiry into the validity or truth of ideas, and that the study of ideas-as-beliefs is in some cases the more important and more basic of the two sorts of inquiry. We will see, in addition, that scientific beliefs arrange themselves in larger structures, belief systems, and that belief systems (like diffusionism) have certain crucial relationships of compatibility to one another and conformality to the values or interests of the groups of people who hold them to be valid. Pursuing this ethnographic exploration of the character of ideas-as-beliefs we will, I think, discover why the theory of diffusionism has had a life history that is more clearly explained by the life history of European society, and more particularly European colonialism, than it is by any intellectual or social process within the scientific community.

Scientific ideas, and empirical ideas in general, can be examined in two ways. One is comfortable and traditional. It considers ideas in terms of their communicated meaning. Are they logical; that is, do they reflect an internally consistent argument? Are they valid in the sense that what they assert about the real world seems to have evidential support? This combination of logic, or structure of argument, and evidential basis is the kind of thing we look for whenever we evaluate scientific ideas—indeed all ideas that concern empirical reality. The second way of looking at ideas inquires about the people who believe a given idea, who communicate it to others as a belief, and about the people who listen and in turn accept the idea as a belief. The question whether a person believes in the validity of an idea is not at all the same as the question whether the idea is in fact a valid one. Questions about belief status are matters of ethnography: of finding out why beliefs are held by given people; how beliefs come to be accepted and rejected by these people; how given beliefs are connected in the minds of these people with other beliefs held by them; how new candidate beliefs are weighed and accepted or rejected; and how beliefs as such are connected to other parts of culture, including values, social organization, class organization, politics, and so on. What makes this kind of inquiry threatening is the fact that it can provide independent and reliable evidence that a given group of people holds a given idea to be true for reasons that have little to do with logic and evidence, for reasons grounded in culture.

Interestingly, we experience no discomfort and sense no threat when we read an account written by some anthropologist or cultural geographer about the beliefs, values, myths, and so on, of some small and obscure society in some far corner of the earth. Indeed, we expect an anthropologist to tell us more about the social or cultural reason why the "natives" hold to these ideas than about the validity of the ideas. In this kind of context it is quite normal to have a description of ideas that distinguishes between the matter of their logical and evidential basis and the matter of their cultural binding. But when this ethnographic approach is applied to what are called "Western" ideas, in the realms of science, history, and the like, the results are disturbing and the enterprise itself seems somehow improper.

Ideas are, so to speak, surrounded by culture, and we can examine the surroundings and the way ideas are embedded in their surroundings. This is the ethnographic study of ideas. Now it happens to be a terminological convention in the field of anthropology to attach the prefix ''ethno-'' to a word designating a particular field of knowledge, such as medicine, botany, geography, and the like, when our purpose is to study that body of knowledge ethnographically. The study of "medicine," for instance, is different from the study of "ethnomedicine." The latter is an ethnographic field, asking what the medical beliefs are in a given culture, how these beliefs relate to the rest of that culture, and how to generalize cross-culturally about medical beliefs in all (or some set) of cultures. When we put together along with ethnomedicine all the other scientific fields prefixed by "ethno-," we get, naturally enough, ethnoscience, meaning the ethnographic study of all sciences; more broadly, all fields of empirical belief. Ethnohistory is part of that corpus.<ref>On ethnoscience, see, for example, Conklin, "Lexicographical Treatment of Folk Taxonomies" (1969), Frake, "The Ethnographic Study of Cognitive Systems" (1969), Blaut, "Some Principles of Ethnogeography" (1978), and Spradley and McCurdy, ''Anthropology: A Cultural Perspective'' (1975). In my view, the categories "history" and "science" cannot be distinguished ontologically, although historiography is hardly an exact science.</ref> So, too, is ethnogeography.

The subject matter of ethnoscience is belief. Ordinarily we look at beliefs as they are enshrined in empirical statements, generally sentences that assert some predicate to be true about some subject. The fundamental, though not the smallest, unit of study in ethnoscience is the statement of belief and the person or group who makes—and holds to—this belief statement. For every empirical statement in social science there is an ethnoscientific question about its belief status and there is a profoundly different question about its truth status. The two questions do not forever remain separate, but they come together only at the conclusion of a long analysis. That analysis explains in the end why so many diffusionist statements in which historians and geographers firmly believe are really false.

The study of beliefs is also the study of belief-holding groups. Two very important points have to be made about belief-holding groups. A belief-holding group can be a group of any type. However, among the various types of belief-holding groups, the most fundamentally important are cultures, classes, and combinations that can be thought of as ethnoclasses. None of these types is an abstraction, except in the matter of defining units and boundaries. Cultures are highly variable from place to place and person to person, but the analytical unit itself is real and concrete. Its individual members also have concrete reality. There is no philosophical conundrum about the cultural whole "versus" its individual (human) parts in the matters we are discussing now. Thus there is an ethnoscience of each individual human being and also an ethnoscience of groups as collectives. Classes are a bit more problematic. However, most people accept the broad idea that there is a basic division between two class communities, one, the working class, the other an elite class, deploying political power and generally accumulating wealth. I will simply take it as given here that a rough class bifurcation exists in most societies of this and the preceding century, while conceding that it is not always possible to tell whether a given group in a given society belongs to the working (producing) class or to the elite class or to some ambiguous or uncertain grouping that does not fit comfortably in either of the two. One such problematic grouping that relates closely to the issues discussed in this book includes professors and others engaged in studying and writing about society and the environment. They are not members of the accumulating class, the elite, but scholars and writers are in most cases (not all) strongly bound to that class, and for all their intellectual penetration, discipline, and honesty, they tend to think, say, and write down ideas that are useful to the elite. This is true most pointedly for ideas of the sort related to diffusionism.

Culture and class intersect in ethnoclass communities. There is a crucial use in this book for the concept of an ethnoclass community. I will argue strongly that the elite groupings of European countries together, in spite of their cultural (and national) differences, are a basic and permanent belief-holding group, and that their beliefs form, to a large extent, a single ethnogeography and ethnoscience. This reflects the fact that, for the period with which we are mainly concerned, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these elites have had a common set of interests in relation to the working classes of their own countries and of the non-European world, and they have together underwritten the production of a coherent belief system about the European world, the non-European world, and the interactions between the two. The most important proposition in this book, in fact, is the assertion that diffusionist ideas are at the core of the single belief system generated under the influence of, and for the interests of, the European elite. Although it should not be thought that the science and history produced under the stimulus of this ethnoclass is "biased," nevertheless we will see that the entire body of ideas concerning geography, history, and social science are strongly influenced by their ethnoclass patronage. Overall, and through the two-century-long flow of ideas, the product is a body of diffusionist beliefs which persist, and continue to influence social practice, although they are quite unscientific.

Beliefs assemble themselves into belief systems. The difference is not exactly a matter of relative complexity. Most simple beliefs are just those ideas that can be expressed in simple declarative sentences (although some call for a poem or a painting), and which people do express as assertions, with more or less confidence as to their veracity. We are interested in three things about these belief sentences and the acts in which they are expressed. They are empirical (not purely logical or purely evaluative). They are expressed as true, or possibly true. And they are thought of by the belief holders as cognitively whole or discriminable, as, putting it crudely, "concept," "ideas." What makes such a hard-to-be-precise-about unit important is the fact that individual humans do not simply think up such ideas or concepts out of thin air or immediate perceptual experience. These unit beliefs tend to retain their character as beliefs through long intervals of time, often generations, and among large numbers of people. Still more structure is to be found in a belief system that consists of chains of statements connected together by implication ("because..."). This kind of belief system I will call, unoriginally, an argument. It simply needs to be noted that the chain of statements in an argument may or may not proceed from simple to complex. A tighter structure is to be found in those systems called theories. Simple beliefs, then, are aggregated in various ways into belief structures, belief systems. Each belief system, in turn, is assembled (psychologically) into various sorts of higher order systems.

The highest level, comprehending all of the empirical beliefs held by a given belief-holding unit—including some beliefs that contradict one another—is the group's (or individual's) ethnoscience as a whole. Included here are all of the beliefs held to be true, or possibly true, about the external world, natural and social; beliefs about the self or person; and beliefs about technique—the self's capability to manipulate and influence the world. The ethnoscience, in a way, is an encyclopedia.

How does it happen that a new belief is admitted into a belief system? The question is not where new ideas come from but how they become validated, that is, given a kind of social license that admits them to the status of a belief, a belief that is at least accepted as a tenable hypothesis, a "reasonable idea," and at most accepted as fact. Three quite distinct judgments—I think also distinct procedures—are involved in this licensing process. One is a judgment of compatibility. The second is a judgment of verifiability (the matter of empirical verification). The third is a judgment of conformity (or value conformality). Scholarly conceits to the contrary notwithstanding, verification is the least important of the three.

All the belief systems held by a given group are in one way or another interrelated. Some are tightly connected: one theory may seem to follow directly from another, for example. Normally the relationship is much looser. But all belief systems have one basic and common relationship with all other belief systems held by a group. They are compatible. This means that they can coexist peacefully in the same ethnoscience: they are not cognitively or culturally dissonant. Although beliefs may occasionally contradict one another, total lack of relationship is not in principle possible: directly or indirectly, all beliefs held by a given belief-holding group (or individual) are somehow linked together, and some judgment of their compatibility will be made more or less often. Typically, belief systems reinforce one another: "If P is true, it is reasonable to suppose that Q is true." Or "If P is true, it follows necessarily that Q is true." What counts here, because this is an ethnographic scenario, is the fact that the belief systems are judged to be compatible. The judgment of compatibility is not simply a definition, an assertion to the effect that when the group holds two or more beliefs at the same time they are merely labeled "compatible." Compatibility is the outcome of an important social process. The process is most transparent when new candidate beliefs are introduced: when some new hypothesis is proposed within a belief-holding group and must, as it were, apply for a license. One of the most crucial tests it must pass is that of compatibility with existing beliefs.

Compatibility is the loosest of all relations among theories and other beliefs within an ethnoscience. Compatibility is, in a sense, a bridge that must be built over gaps in the overall body of thought. One sort of gap is obvious: it is the incompleteness of knowledge. The other sort, less obvious, is highly significant for the argument of this book. Here, the gap among theories (and other beliefs) is actually filled, but not by argument. In ordinary language, "it seems reasonable" to suppose that one theory lends support to another, or one historical belief is explained by another. This matter of "reasonableness" bears very close examination, because "reasonableness" is that form of the relation of compatibility which allows the most absurdly unreasonable ideas to pass for well-founded scientific argument.

Broadly speaking, there are two important ways in which gaps are bridged with "reasonableness" in place of—and disguising the lack of—an explicit, defensible argument. One way calls for an insertion of value statements in place of belief statements; we will explore this device in the next section. The other device lies within the belief system itself. It substitutes, for an explicit argument, an implicit one. To understand how it works we have to distinguish between explicit and implicit beliefs.

Implicit beliefs are usually matters "too obvious to mention," "beneath notice," "obviously true," "taken for granted." They are ordinary beliefs (and theories) which tend not to surface in discourse. There is nothing mysterious about most implicit beliefs; they are not somehow buried in the unconscious, or deliberately hidden from view. Some beliefs simply tend to be more often thought about consciously and verbalized than others, for a variety of unsurprising reasons. Those readily verbalized are explicit beliefs, those not, are implicit beliefs. There is no hard line of demarcation in a case of this sort, involving informal communication of belief.

But the demarcation is quite sharp in the case of formal, written and published, expositions of belief. The implicit beliefs are simply not written about. If they emerge in print at all, it is in the form of explicitly stated assumptions, or "axioms." Here, the conclusion that terminates an implicit argument is exposed to view, but not the argument itself. Rarely is there any attempt to deceive or obfuscate. The writer merely takes it for granted that the reader holds the same set of implicit beliefs and is willing to accept the "reasonableness" of unsupported assumptions. Both share the same ethnoscience and the same value system.

Implicit beliefs, as we will see, are the weakest link in the diffusionist world model. Throughout this book we will encounter diffusionist theories that simply hang in the air, unsupported by argument and evidence. In fact we will find, for large chunks of the diffusionist world model, that most of the propositions which would be needed to make these areas of belief coherent and sound are simply missing. In other words, relatively few of the beliefs are explicit and grounded. And these few are not connected together, so the fabric as a whole is incomplete. It seems complete only to those who are prepared to take a great deal for granted, who fill in the gaps with implicit beliefs.

Verification is the matter of testing a candidate belief to see whether it fits the facts. There are various kinds of test and various controversies about the nature of verification, but such questions need not detain us. The normal sort of verification involves a search for evidence that would seem to support or contradict the new hypothesis, the candidate belief. The process is never complete: everyone, of every culture and community, has to be satisfied with partial confirmation (and disconfirmation) of empirical beliefs. For us the important point about verification is this: verification is never sufficient grounds for converting a hypothesis into an accepted belief. Nor is it even necessary.

The judgment of compatibility is more crucial than that of verifiability, and this holds true among social scientists as it does among all other groups of natives. Part of verification is itself a matter of judging compatibility. The words and procedures used in verification, the criteria on which a test is deemed adequate, and much more besides, are drawn from the stock of existing beliefs, and the test of a candidate belief is therefore only partly a matter of direct confrontation with new evidence. But this is not the main point. In any belief-holding group, a new idea, a candidate belief, tends to be judged more on the basis of the way it fits into the existing belief system than on the basis of its directly apprehended meaning.

The same thing happens in self-conscious scholarship. It has long been a truism that existing scientific beliefs tend to be defended in the face of new hypotheses that question them, and the defense is often fierce, bitter, and dogmatic. (Whitehead once called scientists "the leading dogmatists. Advance in detail is admitted: fundamental novelty is barred."<ref>Whitehead, ''Science and Philosophy'' (1948), p. 129.</ref>) The truism was popularized by Thomas Kuhn in a dramatic scenario that he called a theory of scientific revolutions: in essence, crucial scientific beliefs gain a position of suzeriegnity, their supporters gain positions of academic power, and so the beliefs become entrenched and hold sway for long periods of time, even after evidence against these beliefs has massively accumulated. Eventually there is a historic break: a "scientific revolution" which overthrows the existing ruling theory or paradigm and installs another one, which, in turn, holds sway for a period of time.<ref>Kuhn, ''The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'' (1970). More relevant is Fleck's ''Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact'' (1979).</ref> But Kuhn's frame of reference (in his ''Structure of Scientific Revolutions'') was physical science, and we are told very little about the historic process by which beliefs gain, and retain, hegemony in social science, including history and cultural geography. In these fields the process is fundamentally different. For one thing, influential beliefs hold sway for reasons that reflect much more directly the interests of elite groups outside of the scholarly field itself, and the replacement of one theory by another reflects mainly these external interests, not a Kuhn-like intellectual revolution within the community of scholars itself. Secondly, in these fields it is much less easy to attack old theories with new evidence, in part because scientific methods here are usually very inexact and in part because the collecting of evidence itself is guided and sometimes determined by existing beliefs. Thus it is that large belief structures, like diffusionism, persist for generations, untroubled by "scientific revolutions."

People have a tendency, sometimes slight, sometimes strong, to believe what they want to believe. Another way of putting this is to say that beliefs are influenced by values, or that cognition interacts with valuation to produce what Tolman elegantly called the "belief-value matrix."<ref>Tolman, "A Psychological Model" (1951).</ref> The most straightforward (or at least modest) notion of "values" finds them to be judgments of preference, assertions of what is good and bad, right and wrong, liked and disliked, by individuals and groups. Values, like beliefs, are aggregated into systems. But value systems are very different from empirical belief systems. The latter, broadly put, assert things to be true (or untrue) about the world; the former assert things to be preferable (or not), hence they call for action upon the things uncovered by belief, and John Dewey was right in describing such assertions as "agendas."<ref>Dewey, "The Logic of Judgements of Practice," in his ''Essays in Experimental Logic'' (1916).</ref> Viewed in this way, the realm of value is not autonomous and opaque. It is mainly a transition zone between belief and practice. Values are interests.

Values interact with beliefs in a belief-value matrix. A belief system and a value system tend to maintain some degree of consistency with each other during limited periods (except in times of very rapid social change). This somewhat regular relation between the two systems I will call conformality, and it works both ways. Statements do not ordinarily become validated beliefs if they do not conform to the values, and therefore the interests, of the group. But value judgments indicate preferences for future action, and a given judgment is likely to be rejected by a group, sooner or later, if the future action it calls for is flagrantly impractical: if the action clearly cannot succeed given the nature of the real world as depicted in the belief system. Obviously, matters are more complex than this and also less predictable. In any case, the dominant belief system for a group must in the long run conform to the value system, and when the two fall out of conformality, one or the other will be forced to change. Since values are the expression of concrete worldly interests, the belief system will tend, in ordinary times, to bend more readily to the value system, and to worldly interests, than vice versa.

The judgment of value conformality is a crucial part of the binding of belief to culture. The notion that beliefs are culture-bound is of course a familiar one, but the idea that this proposition applies fully to the belief systems of scholars is not really accepted except in the most general and abstract way and therefore in a way that does not usually permit an analysis of the manner in which a particular scholar's values (or interests) affect his or her empirical statements. The stronger proposition, that all new ideas in social science are vetted for their conformality to values, and more precisely to the value system of the elite of the society—which is not necessarily the value system of the scholars themselves—and that this process of validation normally and frequently leads to the acceptance and persistence of really unscientific ideas, is hardly even considered, even though it is normal doctrine in ethnoscience (normal, at least, when applied to natives other than ourselves).

But there is an even stronger proposition that I will defend in this book with concrete arguments and evidence: the proposition that our world-scale models, and many of our specific theories and factual truisms, are accepted mainly—and in some cases only—because of their conformality to the values of the European elites; that this has been the case since the beginning of the nineteenth century, and is true today. Many of these demonstrably false beliefs are built into the world model of diffusionism, and this is so because diffusionism is the central intellectual doctrine that explains and rationalizes the actions and interests of European colonialism and neocolonialism.

Conformality is really the crucial part of validation. This is not ordinarily a matter of the "establishment" suppressing free speech (although this happens quite frequently). The judgment of conformality is a complex binding process. At all times the dominant group (a class or ethnoclass) has a fairly definite set of concrete worldly interests. Some of these conflict with others, but all tend toward the maintenance of the elite group's power and position. Because of its power to reward, punish, and control, this group succeeds in convincing most people, including most scholars, that its interests are the interests of everyone. These interests are social, economic, and political agendas, and it is a simple transformation to insert the word "ought" and turn them into values. Viewed statically, the interests are always clear, and the values derived from them cohere into a dominant value system that more or less mirrors these interests. Hence we have at all times a kind of environment of values, surrounding and influencing the ongoing validation process in scholarship.

The way this influence is exerted is very complex in our society today, but it was quite simple and transparent in the last century, when the main lineaments of diffusionism and other beliefs related to colonialism were being sketched in. In those days, not only was it true, as Marx said, that the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class, but it was also true that almost nobody but the ruling class, and its subalterns, had the opportunity to render those ideas effective, in the form of publication, lecturing at influential schools and universities, and participating in policy formation and execution. Conformality, in those times and places, was accomplished largely through the social vetting process by which only those people who adhered to the dominant value system were in a good position to tender hypotheses as candidate beliefs. I do not believe that the process is altogether different today, but it would take us far afield to discuss it here at length. We can simply take note of the background of most professors (very few of whom are the offspring of poor or minority families), the reward structure in universities and consultantships, and other elements that jointly produce this result: few professional social scientists want to propose candidate beliefs which do not conform. This explains why, in spite of the most rigorous adherence to scientific method and scholarly canons, our theories remain, to a large degree, conformal.

In sum, validation proceeds by subjecting any candidate belief to three tests: compatibility, verifiability, and value conformality. Of these three, perhaps only conformality is essential (and then only in relatively tranquil times). Verification can be waived on occasion, provided that the hypothesis is both conformal to interests and nicely compatible with existing beliefs, be they explicit theories or implicit beliefs emerging as stated or unstated assumptions. Strong verification is, in any case, pretty hard to come by in the social sciences (a methodological fact that is often mistaken for an epistemological verity). In these fields, a judgment of compatibility is always rendered—if not on the candidate belief then on the person who proposes it—and it is most unusual for a new hypothesis or theory to become accepted as a belief if it contradicts the corpus of accepted beliefs in its field. But it is always the case that society and its elite need to be supplied with answers to pressing problems confronting them. So there is an important countercurrent. New hypotheses that display a touch of the novel and hold some possibility of solving an already recognized problem are encouraged, indeed rewarded. They must be compatible but not completely so.

There is simply no way that a scholar, once installed in the profession, can prevent conformal values from creeping into his or her work. This in spite of the fact that nearly all are honest, careful, and competent. The reason why my argument seems, incorrectly, to be an attack on scholarship is because the problem is almost always seen in connection with explicit beliefs, and with consciously held attitudes. The fields that study human society are a weak infusion of explicit theory within a body of belief that is largely implicit. Scientific method prevents us from accepting the arguments of an explicit theory merely because we want to do so. But the main grounding for each such theory is its compatibility with other beliefs in the system, expressed as a matter of "reasonableness." It is "reasonable" to accept certain assumptions (reflecting certain implicit beliefs) and not others. One theory seems "reasonable," or plausible, because it is compatible with another, accepted theory, although no explicit chain of connection exists: most links in the chain are buried in the realm of implicit belief. Finally, it seems "reasonable" to seek verification for a hypothesis with certain observations and not with others.

It should be added that the disciplined work of social scientists usually prevents them from unwittingly validating a hypothesis on grounds of value conformality. The problem, and it is a severe one, is that, thinking that our explicit beliefs are not validated by value conformality, we let value conformality control our implicit beliefs. These then provide a bridge across gaps between explicit theories, rendering them compatible, or serve up the assumptions which provide the starting point for new explicit theories, formal and informal. Scientific and scholarly method demands rigor only for the explicit theories.

=== Diffusionism as a Belief System ===

The discussion thus far has been designed to lay the foundation for an understanding of three aspects of the diffusionist belief system: its structure, its binding to certain groups in certain societies, and its evolution, this last aspect including the important questions of why diffusionism became prominent and why it has persisted. It would not be much of an oversimplification to say that diffusionism developed as the belief system appropriate to one powerful and permanent European interest: colonialism. From 1492 to the present the wealth drawn into Europe—meaning, as in all of this discussion, Greater Europe—from the non-European world has been a vital nutriment for the elite classes of Europe: for their maintenance of status within their societies, and for their progress. Whether this statement can be generalized to include all classes within European society, whether, that is, colonialism was an interest of the nonelite classes of Europe in most times and places, is a contentious issue which I do not need to address. I am merely asserting that (1) Europe's elite depended on colonialism; (2) Europe's elite was tremendously influential in the evolution of European ideas and more specifically European scholarship; and (3) Europe's elite held a permanent social interest in the creation and development of a conformal belief system, a body of thought that would rationalize, justify, and, most importantly, assist the colonial enterprise. As that enterprise evolved and changed, so too did the body of ideas constituting diffusionism.

Most of this book is devoted to a delineation and critique of diffusionist beliefs, so I do not need to review the nature of the belief system here. Suffice it to say, the doctrine ranges over all scales of fact, from world geography and world history to ideas about the qualities of individual human beings, European and non-European, and descriptions and explanations of particular local events. The scope of the diffusionist belief structure encompasses a fair share of European ethnoscience. That is, a fair share of the licensed belief statements in European ethnoscience are used within the diffusionist belief structure, although they are also used in other structures. (Some examples to be discussed in Chapter 2 are: beliefs about demographic behavior, about intelligence, about the origins of civilization, about the fertility of tropical soils.) These statements range from modest assertions of evidential fact to complex and elaborate theories, both formal and informal. They enter the diffusionist canon through all of the licensing procedures for belief acceptance discussed above. Over time, all of them go through the screening process of conformality with the value or interest of colonialism, or go through the indirect screening process that accords them the status of being compatible with other beliefs which are themselves conformal. Over time, the belief system accretes new diffusionist beliefs and discards those that contradict the canon or that have lost their relevance in a changing world. Since colonialism, in various newer forms such as neocolonialism, remains an interest of the elite, and since implicit beliefs go unnoticed and uncriticized, the process of adding, subtracting, and modifying diffusionist beliefs continues in the present. Were this not the case, the multitude of beliefs about Eurocentric history which claim our attention in this book would long since have been discarded.

Diffusionist beliefs at the space-time scale that embraces the whole world and the whole of history, tend to form a rather tightly structured theory, as we saw earlier in this chapter. The theory, in brief, describes the essential processes that take place in an "inner," essentially European, core sector of the world, describes those that take place in an "outer," essentially non-European sector, and describes the modes of interaction between the two sectors, the most important of which is the inner-to-outer diffusion of innovative ideas, people, and commodities.

We can describe this world-scale space-time theory as the "diffusionist world model." It is the colonizer's model of the world.

The obvious question arises: what would we conceive to be a nondiffusionist world model? This would be a world in which the processes at work in any one sector are expected also to be at work in the other sectors. In essence, this model is driven by a concept of equal capability of human beings—psychological unity—in all cultures and regions, and from this argument it demands that any spatial inequalities in matters relating to cultural evolution, and more specifically economic development, be explained. Stated differently: equality is the normal condition and inequalities need to be explained. Diffusionism, in contrast, expects basic inequality between the Inner and the Outer sectors of the world—and of humanity. The uniformitarian principle is not one of uniformity; it is the principle of human equality.

At space-time scales smaller than the world, the diffusionist belief system is very diffuse, parts of it hanging together as formally elegant theories, parts of it floating around as compatible but weakly connected belief statements. It would take us far beyond the scope of this book to attempt a description of all of the parts, levels, and subsystems in the diffusionist model as a whole, ranging upward and downward from the world model to the level of particular space-time event descriptions. But we can make a start.

== Notes ==

1. In this book the word "Europe" refers to the continent of Europe and to regions dominated by European culture elsewhere, regions like the United States and Canada.

2. This quick survey of 150 years or so of world history textbooks is, of course, very schematic and impressionistic. Some further comments may be of use. In textbooks of the first period, around 1850 (plus or minus a decade or so), the original home of Man is often stated to be the Garden of Eden, which is located by different textbook writers in different parts of western Asia. For instance: somewhere east of Canaan and near Mesopotamia (Robbins, ''The World Displayed in its History and Geography'', 1832, p. 13); somewhere in the "healthful" mountains between the Caspian Sea and Kashmir or Tibet (Müller, ''The History of the World to 1783'', 1842, pp. 27, 43-44); perhaps near the borders of the Mediterranean Sea (Tytler, ''Universal history, From the Creation to the beginning of the Eighteenth Century'', vol. 1, 1844, p. 17); in the Vale of Kashmir (Willard, ''Universal History in Perspective'', 1845, p. 34); somewhere between the Caucasus Mountains and the Himalayas (Keightley, ''Outlines of History'', 1849); in the Himalayas (Weber, ''Outlines of Universal History'', 1853, p. 6); in Armenia (Collier, ''Outlines of General History'', 1868). There seems to be a kind of median location of Eden near the Caucasus Mountains, which was also, by no coincidence, the supposed place of origin of the "Caucasian race." Noah, of course, began postdeluvian history on Mt. Ararat, in Armenia (also roughly in the region of the Caucasus). Noah is supposed to have migrated then to Europe (Whelpley, ''A Compound of History, From the Earliest Times'', vol. 1, 1844, p. 10), or Mesopotamia (Robbins, 1832, p. 20), or Palestine, or some other part of the Bible Lands. Noah's three sons are supposed, then, to have dispersed and to have founded the branches of mankind—the first great diffusion process. In most textbooks of this period history tends to move west; some textbooks present the Hegelian notion that history proceeds inexorably westward, following the sun, with the implication that the United States, farther west still, will replace Europe as the next center of world civilization.

It was widely believed in this period that nonwhites were not truly and fully human. One version of this theory, the notion of "polygenesis," claimed that God had created true humans in the Garden of Eden and other races—or at least the "black race"—in other places and times. This theory questioned the standard interpretation of the Old Testament (that everyone is descended from Adam and Eve), so, not surprisingly, it was not stated as truth in the textbooks I consulted. (I have not, however, looked at textbooks used in the antebellum South, and the theory of polygenesis was most popular in slaveholding regions, as an ideological grounding for the treatment of blacks as things rather than people.) Yet polygenesis was important enough to be mentioned and then rejected—in favor of the view that all humans are descendants of Adam and Eve—in some textbooks, down to the end of the century (see, for example, Dew, ''A Digest of the Laws, Customs, Manners, and Institutions of the Ancient and Modern Nations'', 1853; Fisher, ''Outlines of Universal History'', 1885; Duruy and Grosvenor, ''A General History of the World'', 1901). But polygenesis was not needed; the belief that nonwhites are inferior to whites is asserted in one way or another in all the textbooks I examined. The theory of "degeneration" served just as well as polygenesis. It was the notion that the descendants of Ham, and perhaps other biblical peoples, migrated away from the Bible Lands, eastward and southward, and degenerated from civilization toward savagery, or even lower, as they did so, because they had not accepted Christ, or because they migrated into inferior environments, or for some other reason. (See, for instance, Keightley, 1849, 5-6: "the savage is a degeneration from the civilized life," and Africans are near the apes.) Degeneration was asserted in some textbooks, but in most the simple fact of white superiority was stated and left unexplained. The history of the world is, in general, the history of the white race, or the Semitic and Aryan peoples (see below). For times later than the Roman era, non-Europe is scarcely discussed, except as a backdrop for discussions of the Crusades, the building of colonial empires, and the like. (See Harris, ''The Rise of Anthropological Theory'', 1968, for an excellent discussion of polygenesis and degeneration.)

Nearly all textbooks of the period around 1900 (give or take a few years) accepted the newer scientific theories about the age of the earth and the fact of biological evolution (though not the Darwinian theory of evolution). The biblical account of human history, however, was retained in many books, although fewer of them accepted the formerly standard Old Testament chronologies (for instance, that things began in 4004 B.C.). Books of this period tended to present the so-called "Aryan theory," a theory derived from philology but expanded into a theory of culture history. Earlier philologists had identified an "Aryan" or "Indo-European" language family, and also a "Semitic" family (which many authorities, including textbook writers, identified with Noah's sons Japheth and Shem, respectively). The white race consists of these two peoples. One branch of the Aryans supposedly migrated west into Europe (from the supposed "Aryan hearth," somewhere southwest or northwest of the Caucasus). These were progressive, energetic people, who founded European civilization mainly after they had acquired Christianity from the Semites, who invented the first barbaric civilizations and monotheism but then stagnated into a dreamy, decadent, unambitious culture and thereafter ceased to advance civilization. No other culture, apart from these two, had much to do with history. (According to Freeman, ''General Sketch of History'', 1872, p. 2, history "in the highest and truest sense is the history of the Aryan nations of Europe"; see also Collier, 1868; Swinton, ''Outlines of the World's History'', 1874; Gilman, ''First Steps in General History'', 1874; Anderson, ''New Manual of General History'', 1882; Steele and Steele, ''A Brief History of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Peoples'', 1883; Fisher, 1896; Quackenbos, ''Illustrated School History of the World'', 1889; Thalheimer, ''Outline of General History for the Use of Schools'', 1883; Sanderson, ''History of the World from the Earliest Time to the Year 1898''; Duruy and Grosvenor, 1901. Ploetz and Tillinghast presented this theory in ''Epitome of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern History'', first published in 1883, in its many editions down to 1925 when, in an edition edited by H. E. Barnes, the theory was finally eliminated.) See Bernal's ''Black Athena'' (1987, 1991) for an insightful discussion of the Aryan theory and related topics in the history of European thought.

Because the Old Testament spoke of agriculture—Cain knew farming and Abraham herded domesticated animals—the history textbooks tended not to address the problem of where agriculture was invented until very late in the nineteenth century, the period when science was beginning to deal with this problem. Some scientists and some textbook writers then began to speculate that, just possibly, agriculture was as old in continental Europe as it was in western Asia and Egypt. (From the point of view of science, see Joly, ''Man Before Metals'', 1897.) But the idea that agriculture originated in the Bible Lands remained dominant although now it was viewed (by most) as an invention, not an artifact of original creation. The ethnographic fact that some tribal peoples (for instance, in Australia) did not practice agriculture was commonly explained, in the textbooks of the earlier nineteenth century, in terms of the theory of degeneration: their ancestors had somehow lost the art. Later in the century it became more common to use the diffusionist conception that agriculture had been invented by west Asian or (conceivably) European peoples, then diffused outward over the rest of the world, and cultures that did not practice it in modern times simply had not yet acquired it, either because of their isolation or because they were too stupid to take it up.

The Orient Express was a famous train that ran between western Europe and western Asia. Although various routes were used in different eras, the basic line ran from Constantinople (Istanbul) through Greece to northern Italy or Austria, then on to France, and (via Ostend) England. Most of the history textbooks write about world history as though it marched northwesterward, rather like the westbound Orient Express, with stations (so to speak) in Athens, Rome, Paris, and London. (See Chapter 2 for further discussion of the Orient Express model.)

3. In nineteenth-century world history textbooks, Turkey was given some attention because of its political involvement with European affairs. World geography, in contrast to world history, always covered the entire world, and textbooks as well as the great multivolume descriptive geographies (like Reclus's classic 19-volume ''Nouvelle Géographie Universelle'', published between 1876 and 1894) gave considerable attention to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This should not mislead us, however. One of the primary functions of geography throughout this entire period was to teach European children what they needed to know about non-Europe in order to participate in their countries' imperial and commercial activities in these regions. See Hudson, "The New Geography and the New Imperialism: 1870-1918" (1977) and McKay, "Colonialism in the French Geographical Movement" (1943), on the close relation between geography and colonial activities.

4. The character of this newer approach can be seen if we look at two well-known modern university-level texts, one written by W. H. McNeill of the University of Chicago (''A World History'', 3rd ed., 1979), the other by J. M. Roberts of Oxford University (''The Hutchinson History of the World'', 2d ed., 1987; published in the United States as ''The Penguin History of the World''). For pre-Christian-era world history, more than three-quarters of the place-name mentions in both books are places in Europe and the Middle East (including North Africa); less than one-quarter of the place-name mentions are places in other parts of the world and only about 1% are in Africa. For the Christian era to A.D. 1491 there is significant divergence between the two books. In Roberts's text, European and Middle Eastern places constitute about 85% of place-name mentions. In McNeill's text, European and Middle Eastern places constitute only 60% of the place names mentioned, a significant departure from the older tradition although still well out of proportion to this region's size in area and population. (Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for only 2% of mentions for the period A.D. 1-1491.) In both books, therefore, the region I have been calling "Greater Europe" has considerably lower salience for pre-1492 history than was typically the case in older world history textbooks. As to explanation, however, both books retain much of the traditional perspective. Roberts gives almost no causal role to the cultures and regions of the world other than Europe and the Middle East (including North Africa) for any period prior to 1492. McNeill gives considerable weight to East Asia and some to South Asia for certain historical periods, but almost all of the world history-making forces emanate from Europe, western Asia, and North Africa for the period before 1492. (An exception is the Black Death, which, according to McNeill, swept westward into these regions from farther Asia. On this matter, see also McNeill's ''Plagues and Peoples'', 1976.) Examples of the Eurocentric explanations offered by both authors will be given in Chapter 2 of the present book.

It is, however, insufficient to look only at those present-day textbooks that are clearly identified as "world history" textbooks. Quite frequently university courses covering the subject of world history use history textbooks that carry titles like "The History of Western Civilization." (See, for instance, Lerner, et al., ''Western Civilizations: Their History and Their Culture'', 1988; Kagan, et al., ''The Western Heritage'', 1987; Chambers, et al., ''The Western Experience'', 1987.) If such a textbook neglects the non-Western world, there can be no complaint that it is misleading: the title clearly specifies "West" not "World." But if the course is designated as "world history" and the textbook is designated as "Western history," then we have a problem. The worst scenario would be one in which world-history teaching continues to be Eurocentric history in disguise. I do not know of any research which tests the following hypotheses: (1) Given that, today, historians are sensitive to the need to avoid Eurocentric bias in the teaching of world history, do some of them simply change the title to "Western" so that Eurocentrism becomes, then, licit? And (2) is it possible that there is a trend away from the teaching of "World" history and toward "Western" (etc.) history and that this trend reflects a reaction (or adjustment) to present-day demands for nontechnocentrism and "fairness?"

5. A school textbook is truly a key social document, a kind of modern stele. In the typical case, a book becomes accepted as a high school (or lower-level) textbook only after it has been reviewed very carefully by the publisher, school boards, and administrators, all of whom are intensely sensitive to the need to print acceptable doctrine; they are concerned to make it certain that children will read only those facts in their textbook which are considered to be acceptable as facts by the opinion-forming elite of the culture. The resulting textbook is, therefore, less an ordinary authored book than a vetted social statement of what is considered valid and acceptable for entry into the mind of the child. For this reason, research on textbooks (including college textbooks, in which the same process is at work, though more subtly) is, in fact, ethnographic research. It tells us about the belief system of the opinion-forming elite of the culture as a whole. Therefore, geography texts in the United States are really ethnogeography documents. Likewise, history texts are really ethnohistory documents. They are probably as useful as cultural artifacts as any old potsherd or inscription. See the final section of this chapter.

6. This argument is given much weight by Eurocentric Marxists, since class struggle, for Marxists, is the central force in historical evolution.

7. A form of political feudalism is sometimes conceded to have been developed earlier by the Chinese, but the great majority of European scholars, including most Marxists, believe that European feudalism was unique in representing a form of society that was a crucial, essential, stepping stone to modernity. See Chapter 3.

8. See Samir Amin's ''Eurocentrism'' (1988) for an excellent discussion of this notion. The word "Eurocentrism" apparently was coined quite recently, to assemble "European ethnocentrism" into one word. However, I (like Amin) do not think of Eurocentrism as merely a species of ethnocentrism, as the following paragraphs will make clear.

9. I use the word "community" to refer to any social unit, of any size. In this discussion, for the sake of simplicity, the "communities" will be thought of as villages distributed across a rural landscape. I neglect here the cases in which culture change results from the combination of an independent invention and a diffusion event. See my "Two Views of Diffusion" (1977) and "Diffusionism: A Uniformitarian Critique" (1987a).

10. See Jett, "Further Information on the Geography of the Blowgun and Its Implications for Transoceanic Contact" (1991); also see Carter, ''Man and the Land'' (1968), and Edmonson, "Neolithic Diffusion Rates" (1961).

11. See, for instance, Eliot Smith, ''The Diffusion of Culture'' (1933), Perry, ''The Primordial Ocean'' (1935), and Taylor, ''Environment and Nation'' (1945). Eliot Smith flatly asserts that the ancient diffusion process radiating mainly from Egypt and Phoenicia "continued for many centuries to play upon the Pacific littoral of America, where it is responsible for ... the remarkable Pre-Columbian civilizations" (quoted in Zwernemann, ''Culture History and African Anthropology'', 1983, p. 15).

12. On these matters, see Harris, ''The Rise of Anthropological Theory'' (1968) and Steward, ''Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution'' (1955).

13. See Koepping, ''Adolf Bastian and the Psychic Unity of Mankind'' (1983), Stocking ''Race, Culture, and Evolution'' (1968), and Harris, ''The Rise of Anthropological Theory'' (1968).

14. Often the antidiffusionist camp was labeled the "cultural evolutionist" camp, and the debate as a whole was labeled "diffusionism versus evolutionism." But, as I argue here, evolutionists were to some extent diffusionists and diffusionists were to some extent evolutionists. Moreover, I want to use the term "cultural evolution" in this book in a much broader and much less controversial sense, as indicating merely the search for explanation in larger questions of historical and cultural change. A problem that is "historical" becomes a problem of "cultural evolution" when we ask, broadly, "why?" Some scholars, of course, are not comfortable with this usage of the phrase "cultural evolution." For some it carries baggage of economic determinism or environmental determinism or technological determinism, or it signifies the notion of an invariant sequence of cultural stages through which all human groups must pass—but I mean none of that. Most cultural geographers use the phrase "cultural evolution" just about as I use it here.

15. Both forms are sometimes combined; for instance, in the nineteenth century northwestern Europe was considered (by northwestern Europeans) to be absolutely civilized, Africa absolutely uncivilized, and all other areas (of the Eastern Hemisphere) somewhere in between. These matters are discussed later in this book.

16. Max Weber's notion of "European rationality" is discussed in Chapter 2.

17. The varying conceptions of China, and also India, as semirational or intermittently rational or rational in some ways but not in others are discussed in Chapters 2 and 3.

18. The "bogeyman" refers to the Buginese, a Malay people who fought fiercely against the Europeans and so were stigmatized in this way. The most famous fictional vampire, Count Dracula, came to England from Outside (a barbarous mountain region on the frontier of the Turkish empire).

19. On the history of the idea of progress in European thought, see, for instance, G. H. Mead, ''Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century'' (1936), Toulmin and Goodfield, ''The Discovery of Time'' (1965), Nisbet, ''History of the Idea of Progress'' (1980), and Bowler, ''The Invention of Progress'' (1989). It is true that the idea of progress as the normal condition was doubted by some thinkers during the nineteenth century (and especially in opposition to the idea of biological evolution), but this was a minor and intermittent countercurrent. See Stocking, ''Race, Culture, and Evolution'' (1987) and Bowler, ''The Invention of Progress'' (1989).

20. See Huddleston, ''Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492-1729'' (1967), Williams, ''The American Indian in Western Legal Thought'' (1990); Hulme, ''Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797'' (1992); Gossett, ''Race: The History of an Idea in America'' (1963).

21. At times the notion was advanced that these civilizations had somehow evolved in antediluvian times and had not been wiped out in the Flood (see, for example, Keightley, ''Outlines of History'', 1849). Haskel (''Chronology and Universal History'', 1848, p. 9) speculates that Noah migrated to China where he or his descendants founded the Chinese monarchy. "The early improvement and populousness of the east, seems to favor this idea."

22. From the mid-nineteenth century or perhaps earlier, the literature on the occult, on ghosts and monsters, and the like, tended to focus on extra-European origins or homes or sources of the witches, monsters, demons, zombies, walking mummies, evil spells ("black magic"), artifacts with supernatural powers, and so on, all of which have a tendency to diffuse into Europe as a kind of counterdiffusion, an undertow beneath European expansionism. See Brantlinger, ''Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism'' (1988).

23. See W. A. Lewis, ed., ''Tropical development, 1880-1913'' (1970).

24. See Bowler, ''The Invention of Progress'' (1989), Stocking, ''Victorian Anthropology'' (1987), Mandelbaum, ''History, Man and Reason'' (1971).

25. Spencer, ''The Man Versus the State'' (1969). The complex interplay between individualistic and holistic theories of historical progress during the nineteenth century is discussed in G. H. Mead, ''Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century'' (1936) and Mandelbaum, ''History, Man and Reason'' (1971). I try to show in Blaut, ''The National Question: Decolonizing the Theory of Nationalism'' (1987b) how most theories of nationality and national evolution emerge from one or the other of these intellectual streams, one essentially Kantian and psychologistic, the other essentially Romantic and Hegelian.

26. Among them: Malthus, J. S. Mill, T. Macauley, and Thackeray. See Brantlinger, ''Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914'' (1987). Also see Williams, ''British Historians and the West Indies'' (1966) and Said, ''Orientalism'' (1979).

27. See Thapar, ''Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations'' (1978) and "Ideology and the Interpretation of Early Indian History" (1982), and B. Chandra, "Karl Marx, His Theories of Asian Societies, and Colonial Rule" (1981). We return to this issue in Chapter 2.

28. See in particular Marx's article, "The British Rule in India" (1979). In later work, Marx and Engels adopted a much more negative opinion about colonialism, developing to some extent the idea of colonial underdevelopment: see Blaut, ''The National Question: Decolonizing the Theory of Nationalism'' (1987b) for a discussion.

29. See Chapter 2.

30. See Asad, ''Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter'' (1975), and Temu and Swai, ''Historians and Africanist History'' (1981).

31. Important examples are Eliot Smith ''The Diffusion of Culture'' (1933), Perry, ''The Primordial Ocean'' (1935), Schmidt, ''The Culture Historical Method of Ethnology'' (1939), Griffith Taylor, ''Environment and Nation'' (1945). See critiques in Radin, ''The Method and Theory of Ethnology'' (1965), Lowie, ''The History of Ethnological Theory'' (1937), and Harris ''The Rise of Anthropological Theory'' (1968).

32. Here I am of course rejecting the view, common among European scholars, that colonies were relinquished voluntarily. This view has been rejected almost universally by scholars in the formerly colonial world. It may conceivably have been true for a few small islands from which profits no longer flowed to the colonizing power, but even such cases are debatable. It is worth noting that the United States has not given independence to any of the colonies it held at the close of World War II; has not even formally conceded the right of full self-determination (including independence) to Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, the Marianas, etc. The other colonial powers would presumably have taken the same position, had they had the power to do so in the face of colonial pro-independence forces; in such cases as the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, Kenya, Angola, Mozambique, and so on, the colonizers tried to hold on to their possession by force of arms and failed. My view is set forth in Blaut, ''The National Question'' (1987b), chap. 4, and Blaut and Figueroa, ''Aspectos de la cuestion nacional en Puerto Rico'' (1988).

33. Representative examples include "Operation Bootstrap" in Puerto Rico, the Colonial Development and Welfare programs in parts of the British Empire, the increased funding for colonial agriculture and health departments, the establishment of colonial universities, and so on. These programs, regardless of their underlying political purposes (often hidden from the technical personnel involved) were, overall, very impressive.

34. Often this work was a direct continuation of colonial technical work, often with the same personnel, now "foreign advisor" or "United Nations expert" rather than "colonial technical officer."

35. Thus the Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps, the elevated funding of technical and financial agencies of the Organization of American States, and the like.

36. On ethnoscience, see, for example, Conklin, "Lexicographical Treatment of Folk Taxonomies" (1969), Frake, "The Ethnographic Study of Cognitive Systems" (1969), Blaut, "Some Principles of Ethnogeography" (1978), and Spradley and McCurdy, ''Anthropology: A Cultural Perspective'' (1975). In my view, the categories "history" and "science" cannot be distinguished ontologically, although historiography is hardly an exact science.

37. Whitehead, ''Science and Philosophy'' (1948), p. 129.

38. Kuhn, ''The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'' (1970). More relevant is Fleck's ''Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact'' (1979).

39. Tolman, "A Psychological Model" (1951).

40. Dewey, "The Logic of Judgements of Practice," in his ''Essays in Experimental Logic'' (1916).

= CHAPTER 2: The Myth of the European Miracle =

Most European historians believe in some form of the theory of "the European miracle." This is the argument that Europe forged ahead of all other civilizations far back in history—in prehistoric or ancient or medieval times—and that this internally generated historical superiority or priority explains world history and geography after 1492: the modernization of Europe, the rise of capitalism, the conquest of the world. Most historians do not see anything miraculous in this process, but the phrase "the European miracle" became in the 1980s a very popular label for the whole family of theories about the supposedly unique rise of Europe before 1492. The phrase acquired its new popularity mainly from a book by Eric L. Jones which appeared in 1981, a book simply entitled ''The European Miracle''.<ref>Although Eric L. Jones's 1981 book ''The European Miracle'' popularized the phrase "the European miracle," it had been in use for a long time with the same essential meaning: the unique rise of Europe before or during the Middle Ages. Not every historian would describe this as a "miracle," but the term has wide acceptance, as evidence the fact that an international symposium entitled "The European Miracle" was held at Cambridge University in 1985.</ref>

The historians do not agree among themselves on the question why the miracle occurred: why Europe forged ahead in this perhaps miraculous way. Is it because Europeans are genetically superior? are culturally superior? live in a superior environment? Is it because one special, wonderful thing happened in Europe, or happened to Europeans at a special moment in history, giving Europeans a decisive advantage over other societies?

Nor do the historians agree about when the miracle occurred or began. Did it occur back in the prehistoric age in what some still call the "Aryan" or "Indo-European" culture? in the late-prehistoric "European 'Iron Age'?" Did it begin with the Greeks? with the Romans? in the early Middle Ages? in the late Middle Ages? Did it happen continuously throughout history—a series of miracles—each pushing the Europeans farther and farther ahead of the rest of humanity?

The historians debate these matters, the questions "why" and "when," but not the question "whether"—whether a miracle happened at all. Or, to be more precise, they do not even consider the possibility that the rise of Europe above other civilizations did not begin until 1492, that it resulted not from any European superiority of mind, culture, or environment, but rather from the riches and spoils obtained in the conquest and colonial exploitation of America and, later, Africa and Asia. This possibility is not debated at all, nor is it even discussed, although a very few historians (notably Janet Abu-Lughod, Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein) have come close to doing so in very recent years.<ref>Apparently my 1976 article, "Where Was Capitalism Born?" was the first publication to reject the "miracle" theory absolutely, that is, without qualification. In 1990 Samir Amin, commenting on a later paper of mine, indicated his basic agreement with this rejectionist position. (Amin, "Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism: A Comment," 1990; Blaut, "Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism," 1989; also see Blaut, "Fourteen Ninety-Two," 1992; and Amin, "On Jim Blaut's 'Fourteen Ninety-Two,'" 1992.) A few other historians have taken positions approaching this one; their views are discussed later in this chapter.</ref>

My task in this chapter and in Chapter 3 ("Before 1492") is to show that Europeans indeed had no superiority over non-Europeans at any time prior to 1492: they were not more advanced, not more modern, not more progressive. Then in Chapter 4 ("After 1492") I will show how colonial riches brought about the rise of Europe and led to Europe's ultimate hegemony over the world, showing also that Europe's internal characteristics do not explain 1492—do not, that is, explain the origins of colonialism.

There seem to be two basic ways to argue that the myth of the European miracle is wrong, that Europe did not surpass other world civilizations before 1492. The best way by far is to look at the facts of history, and demonstrate that the evolutionary processes that were going on in Europe during and before the Middle Ages were essentially like the processes taking place elsewhere in the world in terms of rate and direction of development. I will try to demonstrate precisely this in Chapter 3, which compares the medieval landscapes of Europe, Africa, and Asia, and shows how a transition from feudalism and toward capitalism was occurring in many parts of the Eastern Hemisphere just prior to 1492.

But the myth of Europe's unique "rise," its "miracle," is so deeply embedded in European historical thought that an ordinary argument from the facts probably would not be persuasive. As we saw in Chapter 1, the dominant theory has been defended by generations of historians, with practically no dissenting argument; it is supported as well by many other ideas which are accepted as unquestioned truth in European culture; and it fits in with and supports the interests of European countries (and corporations) in their dealings with the non-European world. For these reasons, I have decided to use another kind of argument—to demonstrate the fallacies in the dominant theory—as a sort of ground-laying for the empirical argument.

In the present chapter I will examine the most common arguments used by historians today to support the theory of the European miracle, and will try to show that they are unconvincing. This task is rendered somewhat complicated, for a small book like the present one, by the sheer number of different arguments currently in circulation and the number of historians who are writing books and articles on the subject of, and in support of, the theory of the European miracle. How, then, to proceed? I will advance by stages. First I will present a brief discussion of the ways in which historians have tended to argue the myth of the European miracle in recent decades, and I will show how a critical, revisionist point of view has begun to appear. Next I will lay out, in a kind of menu or classification or checklist, the most important arguments in support of this myth that are being put forward today, and I will try to show, for each argument in turn, how unconvincing it really is. In the third stage, I will summarize the empirical argument against the "miracle" position in two parts (the topics of Chapters 3 and 4, respectively): the evidence that Europe was not ahead of Africa and Asia (at a continental scale of attention) prior to 1492, and the evidence that colonialism after 1492 accounts for the selective rise of Europe.

== Mythmakers and Critics ==

The idea that Europe was more advanced and more progressive than all other civilizations prior to 1492 was the central idea of classical Eurocentric diffusionism, as we saw in Chapter 1. Therefore we do not have to consider the origins of the European miracle theory: it is our inheritance from earlier times. However, after World War II the doctrine assumed a distinctly modern form. First of all, the racist arguments had been decisively rejected: no longer was it argued that non-Europeans are genetically inferior to Europeans and that it is this inferiority that explains why they lagged behind in history. Historians now generally accepted the idea that European historical advantages reflected facts and happenings of much earlier times. European superiority was a matter of prior arrival by Europeans at a stage of development that all other people could aspire to reach in the future: a matter, therefore, of priority, not innate superiority. Second, there was a rapid increase in historical scholarship concerning the non-European world after 1945, grounded in rather pragmatic political and economic interests, and emanating in part from government- and foundation-sponsored "foreign area studies programs," but this scholarship nonetheless added greatly to the knowledge available in Western countries concerning non-Western history. The new knowledge was fairly quickly put to rather limited use: some of the wilder fables were discarded but the basic ideas about the non-Western world did not significantly change. Third, and most importantly, the postwar world came to embrace the crucial new theory of "modernization," the theory that the diffusion of European ideas, things, and influence would bring about the economic development of the non-Western world in the coming Age of Development. This theory had important effects on history writing.

=== Modernization as History ===

The theory of modernization addressed the present and the future but it was fundamentally historical. Its basic principle was the notion that whatever had led in the past to European superiority could now be diffused out into the non-European world and assist that world to more or less catch up. As we saw in the last chapter, this new doctrine went through two phases of development, the first in the post-World War II period of decolonization, the second—an intensification of the diffusion effort—after the rise of socialist countries in the Third World, and particularly after the Cuban revolutionary victory in 1959.

A number of historical works appeared in the 1960s as part of this intellectual process. Their central purpose was to show that the European pattern of development, including most particularly the development of capitalism, had been somehow the one, the natural course of human progress, and many of these volumes quite explicitly drew the ideological conclusion that the proper, natural course of future development in the Third World would be to follow this natural European pattern (but not, of course, slavishly). The most influential of these works was Rostow's 1960 volume, ''The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto''. This book was a plain assertion that Europe's past formula for development, up to and including capitalism, was the only workable formula for non-Europe's future development. Rostow married world history to world development in a single diffusionist argument.<ref>Another seminal work was Cyril Black's ''The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History'' (1966). Other such works in various fields will be discussed later in this chapter.</ref>

But there was a problem. Precisely what had caused the unique rise of Europe? Now we must return for a moment to the classical diffusionist period. European historians of the prior century were unanimous (I think) in their acceptance of the fundamental idea that Europe has been naturally and uniquely progressive. For most of them the basic force underlying the process was unquestioned: some drew on their religious faith, others built on metaphysical ideas (like Hegel's evolving "spirit"), others appealed to a Smithian or Utilitarian idea of individual human activity and purpose, and still others invoked the natural environment, or demographic behavior, or class struggle, or something else, but I think it likely that all of them held a common conception of an underlying force of Progress, a basic directional force like the Solar Wind, in relation to which partial facts (economic, psychological, environmental, and so on) were epiphenomenal or merely symptomatic. After World War II, however, a profoundly different set of basic beliefs became the norm. Now the problem of explaining the rise of Europe was seen as a total problem. That is, all of the phenomenon, including its most fundamental dynamics, required explanation, or, stated differently, had to be put into an explicit model in which explicit variables or "factors" were identified. There were, doubtless, many reasons for this new—or rather newly popular—approach, among them the maturation of the discipline of history itself, the loss of faith (in this age of chaos) in the idea of inevitable progress, the general secularization of European thought, and the development of social science disciplines. But whatever the overall explanation, what emerged was a set of historical models, some new, others (like Weberianism) refurbished, that explicitly tried to explain the "European miracle" in terms of specific causal factors. This was the signature of the modern form of diffusionist history. The effect of the modernization perspective was not, by any means, dominant in all of historical scholarship, but it was so in writings that sought to explain the larger transformations of European history, and particularly the problem of explaining the medieval changes that brought about the rise of capitalism and modernity—the "European miracle." We will review many of these explanatory propositions later in the present chapter.<ref>Perhaps one reason was the maturation of the discipline of history itself. Another was the influence, not entirely salutary, of positivistic scientific method on history, which led to an attempt to specify variables and "factors," and, if possible, quantify each of them. Another reason was the loss of faith in the nineteenth-century idea of inevitable progress: after nearly a half century of chaos and war, progress definitely did not appear to be something natural and inevitable; it had to be explained and also produced. Still a third reason was the general secularization of European thought, including history, such that human events could not be assumed to reflect guidance of a higher power. Another reason, possibly a very important one, was the general development of academic disciplines, and their involvement in (and nutrition from) international and domestic policy. This implied that each discipline, seeing the world with some degree of bias in favor of its own subject-as-factor (for economists, the market factor; for psychologists, the motivation factor; for sociologists, the demographic factor and the social-structural factor; for geographers, the resource factor; etc.) tended to argue in favor of historical models that treated our factor as crucial and those of others as secondary. Since many social scientists wrote history in this process, this led to some special pleading.</ref>

=== The Critique ===

The modernization approach was quickly challenged because it gave no real role to non-Europe, past and present, save as an essentially passive recipient of diffusions from Europe. For the period before 1492, it claimed that the significant evolutionary processes took place in Greater Europe. For the period from 1492 to World War II, it claimed that evolutionary processes continued to effloresce mainly in Europe and that colonialism brought the fruits of this progress to non-Europe. For the present and the future, progress for non-Europe (the Third World) would consist of the continued spread of innovations, mainly through mechanisms basically inherited from the colonial era. These propositions were distinctly unpopular among intellectuals of the Third World, and the rapid development of Third World scholarship in this postcolonial period led rather quickly to the emergence of a critical, even rejectionist, body of thought, including a new historiography.

The basic thinking went about as follows: For the precolonial era, it was necessary to resurrect one's own history and find out how it had contributed to the history of the world. (Colonialist history dismissed precolonial history for some colonies and distorted it for others. Therefore, as Amilcar Cabral said with deep irony, when the colonies gain their independence, they re-enter history.<ref>Cabral, ''Unity and Struggle'' (1979).</ref>) For the colonial era, the belief that colonialism itself the was source of all progress was patently untrue and colonial history had to be rewritten to show how it had led to poverty rather than to progress. On a world scale, new models had to be developed to show that colonialism, far from diffusing modernization to non-European societies, had diffused a mixture of good and bad innovations, which, for much of the world, had been a process not of development but of underdevelopment.<ref>As to the present and future, Third World intellectuals tended to make two arguments. Those who supported the idea of a capitalist form of development argued that economic development must consist of the defense of native capital against the corrosive diffusion into one's country of the economic and political dominance of European countries and corporations. For socialists, influence and dominance by international capitalism quite obviously had to be rejected. Both groups tended to adopt "dependency theory" or "underdevelopment theory," which was a theory both of history and of modern social processes and development. A relatively small minority of Third World intellectuals, usually reflecting the thinking and interests of the very wealthy and very right-wing sectors, welcomed the idea of economic domination by foreign capitalist interests. Since the wealthy social sectors dominated most Third World societies, this minority point of view often determined policy. Also, it received much more prominence than it deserved in the journals of the First World.</ref> This body of thought came to be known as "underdevelopment theory" in Africa and Asia and as "dependency theory" in Latin America. Out of it came the first serious critique of Eurocentric historiography.

One can trace the origins of this critique to earlier writings by a small number of historians, most of them colonial subjects, often writing in exile. Their main theme was a documentation of the negative effects of colonialism on a particular place and people. Some of the writers—among them W. E. B. DuBois, R. Palme Dutt, K. M. Panikkar, M. N. Roy, J. C. Van Leur, C. L. R. James, George Padmore, and Eric Williams—developed arguments on colonial processes at a world scale, and on the role of colonialism in the postmedieval and modern rise of capitalism and Europe. James showed that Caribbean slaves had played a role in the development of capitalism not fundamentally different from that of the working class in Europe. Williams's work ultimately had the strongest impact on Eurocentric history. He showed that the wealth from slavery and the slave plantation had been the crucial factor in the amassing of capital for the Industrial Revolution in England. This argument was the first major demonstration that non-Europe had played a central role in modernization itself, and a sizeable literature has grown up among European historians arguing about, and generally trying to counter, what is now generally called "the Williams thesis."<ref>See James, ''A History of Pan-African Revolt'' (1938), ''The Black Jacobins'' (1938), "The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery" (1970); Williams, ''Capitalism and Slavery'' (1944). We discuss these matters in Chapter 4.</ref> During and after the period of decolonization this critical historical literature expanded greatly, and a large number of scholars began a direct attack on the diffusionist history of the colonial period.

Much of this work will be discussed in later chapters. Here I want to make several concrete points about the critique. First of all, a number of historians from the European world (Bernal, Frank, Wallerstein, and others) joined Third World historians as central figures in the movement. Second, while the critique focused a good deal of attention on the pre-1492 period, showing that development had taken place in non-Europe—for instance, Sharma and Habib documented the development of feudal and postfeudal society in medieval India—for a long time very little scholarly attention, within this critical tradition, was focused on pre-1492 Europe; the first major work that dealt with this problematic from a non-Eurocentric point of view, that is—was Amin's 1974 volume ''Accumulation on a World Scale''.<ref>Amin, ''Accumulation on a World Scale'' (1974) and later works. My articles "Geographic Models of Imperialism" (1970) and "Where Was Capitalism Born?" (1976) laid out the skeleton of a general theory.</ref> This is perhaps understandable since most of the critical historians were themselves from the Third World, not from Europe, and European history was not often a major interest. Yet it was anomalous nonetheless. The core of the modernization doctrine in history was, after all, the argument that Europe had begun to modernize before other regions and before it established colonial control of other regions. Thus, to refute the basic thesis one would have to show (as I try to now in this book) that pre-1492 Europe was not uniquely progressive. Of course, part of this argument consists of demonstrations that other regions were progressive. But part of it must consist of refutations of the various "miracle" propositions, those that claim to find in ancient or medieval Europe some special quality of progressiveness.

There is another, quite curious anomaly in the relative lack of attention to pre-1492 Europe by historians in this critical tradition, the tradition associated with underdevelopment or dependency theory and the critique of colonialism. This has to do with the curious relation between Third World scholarship, much of which is Marxist, and the Marxist scholarship of the European world. European Marxists were among the main critics of colonialism and among the main contributors to dependency-underdevelopment theory. Marxist theory also inherited from former times a strong anticolonial flavor and a profound skepticism regarding the theories propounded by nineteenth-century mainstream European historians.<ref>I deal with this matter in ''The National Question'' (1987b).</ref> Yet, oddly, most European Marxist historians writing about pre-1492 Europe have tended to argue in favor of the uniqueness-of-Europe doctrine.

Mainstream European historians have also contributed to the critique of the central Eurocentric doctrine. This is not an anomaly. Scholars try to pursue the truth and accept it whether or not it accords with their ideological or cultural preferences. To some extent they succeed. Thus a number of European scholars specializing in non-Europe have uncovered some of the most important evidence against the Eurocentric model of pre-1492 world history. The work of the Dutch historian J. C. Van Leur in the 1930s, concerning the economic history of South and Southeast Asia is a classic example of this antisystemic scholarship.<ref>See Van Leur's 1934 essay "On Early Indonesian trade," reprinted in his ''Indonesian Trade and Society'' (1955).</ref> Another example relates to Chinese history. Half a century ago Duyvendak uncovered truly crucial facts about China's long-range voyaging in medieval times. Later, Needham and his associates produced a series of studies about the history of Chinese science and technology that had a profound impact on the Eurocentric model and (as we will see) forced Eurocentric historians to abandon a large piece of their argument concerning the supposed uniqueness of medieval European technology. Other Western scholars, like Wheatley and Elvin, delving into the empirical history of China with indifference to ideological questions, have produced other sorts of evidence about China's progressiveness in ancient and medieval times. All of this damages the miracle theory, although, as we will see later in this chapter, Eurocentric historians have found ways to repair most of the damage.<ref>Duyvendak, ''Ma Huan Re-examined'' (1933); Needham and collaborators, ''Science and Civilization in China'', published in 6 volumes between 1965 and 1984; Wheatley, ''The Golden Khersonese'' (1961) and ''The Pivot of the Four Quarters'' (1971); Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1973).</ref>

The critique of Eurocentric history is a very large subject, and our concern in this volume is with just one part of it: the critique of European miracle theories about the world before 1492, and related theories which treat early modern world history as though non-Europe, and colonialism, were merely marginal to evolutionary processes. On these issues the critique has not progressed very far. I will give a few examples of important recent contributions, and others will be cited throughout this book. Janet Abu-Lughod's recent (1989) book, ''Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350'', is a seminal study that demonstrates (I think conclusively) that Europe was not more progressive and not more advanced than other civilizations in A.D. 1350. Having made this demonstration, she offers only a tentative and partial explanation for the selective rise of Europe, and decline of the Orient, after 1350. She suggests that the divergence took place in the period between 1350 and 1492. (I argue in this book that the divergence occurred only after 1492, with the beginnings of massive accumulation in the Western Hemisphere, a windfall that did not accrue to non-European civilizations of the Eastern Hemisphere, and so gave Europeans their first and decisive advantage over these other civilizations. See Chapter 4 below.) Samir Amin has argued in various recent works that Europe was not more advanced than Africa and Asia at the end of the Middle Ages, but rather was more unstable: because of its marginal location at the edge of the hemispheric zone of civilization, medieval class society was less fully seated, less stable, less indurated in Europe than elsewhere, and so Europe changed toward capitalism more readily. This argument, although it does not grant any "miracle" to pre-1492 Europe, nonetheless allows one of the old beliefs to stand: that Europe was more dynamic than non-Europe during the Middle Ages.<ref>Amin, ''Unequal Development'' (1976), ''Eurocentrism'' (1988), "Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism: A Comment" (1990).</ref> Martin Bernal's new book ''Black Athena'' appears to have little connection to the subject of the present volume, yet his arguments are very closely connected indeed. Bernal shows that European historians have created a myth about ancient Europe according to which African and Asian origins and innovations are written out of history: the goddess Athena was African. Bernal's work undercuts the still very popular theories about ancient Europe's supposed uniqueness, and also exposes the ethnocentric and ideological roots of much of the European scholarship that underlies the classical diffusionist model.<ref>Bernal, ''Black Athena'', vol. 1 (1987) and vol. 2 (1991).</ref> Edward Said's 1979 volume, ''Orientalism'', a seminal critique of this process by which Eurocentrism and conservative ideology has dominated European scholarly writing about the Near East and Asia, is also important and quite relevant to our argument here. Other such works will be referred to as we proceed.<ref>Mention should also be made of Eric Wolf's 1982 book ''Europe and the Peoples Without History'' which provides a useful and important survey of the history of both European and non-European civilizations and shows how unconvincing is the theory that non-European civilizations, historically, were stagnant and unprogressive (that they were "peoples without history"). Wolf, however, stops short of questioning the truly crucial Eurocentric belief that Europeans were more progressive than non-Europeans in several ways that are crucial to the "European miracle" theory, and so he does not directly confront that theory. (It should be noted that most mainstream historians no longer argue that non-European civilizations are, or were, totally unprogressive, totally "unhistorical," arguing instead about slow rates of change, "blockages" inhibiting change, and the like—a difference of phrasing which, as we will see, is not always a difference of argument.)</ref>

=== The Countercritique ===

In recent years there has been an outpouring of writings that strongly defend the traditional Eurocentric view, upholding the European miracle theory in some of its various forms: we discuss many of these writings in this chapter. In the same stream of writings there are counterattacks against the more specific theories that question the traditional European views about slavery, colonialism, and the like (see Chapter 4), views that treat these processes and events as marginal in social evolution. And new theories (or modified forms of old theories) about the precise reason for the uniqueness of Europe are being put forward and discussed. I have a hunch that this is a scholarly movement that resonates with the new political attitudes concerning the Third World. In any event, the decade of the 1980s saw a number of writings of this sort and they appear to embody a rather conscious counterattack against the critical history discussed above.<ref>It is always risky to try to explain broad changes of fashion in scholarship, especially when the changes are still underway, so this interpretation cannot be more than a hunch, or hypothesis. Scholarly attitudes toward the Third World were very positive in the period of anticolonial and civil rights struggles. After the late 1960s the mood changed. Not only did more conservative views come to dominate the Western world, but rather unexpected difficulties emerged in the Third World itself: national conflicts, failure of development programs, and more. Western scholarship had never really abandoned the traditional view of Europe and its relations to non-Europe, including the diffusionist view of colonialism, and it appears that this older paradigm, never abandoned, simply became, once again, thoroughly dominant. Certainly the attention that had been paid previously to dependency theory and related views fell away among mainstream scholars. Among Marxists the process was even more dramatic, because it was less expected. In brief, Eurocentric Marxists who dismissed the role of the Third World both historically and in the present now became virtually the only Marxists within the academic world to pronounce upon issues related to the Third World. It became quite fashionable to insist, once again, that only the working class of the advanced capitalist countries can bring about socialism because each stage of history commences in this part of the world (Inside) before it spreads to the rest of the world (Outside). In the conservative camp, not only did Eurocentric views regain their hegemony, but one began, now, to hear whispers of views not far distant from racism: views about Third World peoples not having the potential to develop.</ref>

Some of the writers in this new literature are very self-consciously engaged in such a counterattack. A number of them are Marxists and are insisting that the true, the original, the correct Marxist doctrine recognizes the priority, past and present, of Europe. Robert Brenner, for example, boldly argues that capitalism was invented by northwestern Europeans, with no help from others, and therefore (600 years later) we must acknowledge the continued priority of Europe. A number of other Marxists, like Perry Anderson and Bill Warren, argue similar positions.<ref>See Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism" (1977), "Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe" (1985), "The Agrarian roots of European capitalism" (1985b); Anderson, ''Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism'' (1974), ''Lineages of the Absolute State'' (1974); Warren, ''Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism'' (1980).</ref> Among mainstream historians the most dramatic event was the appearance in 1981 of Eric L. Jones's ''The European Miracle''. This book is a remarkable recital of a goodly share of the colonial-era ideas about the precocity of Europe and the backwardness and irrationality of non-Europe. More remarkable still is the positive reception this book has received among many scholars, as though most of these old doctrines had not long since been disproved.

Another movement at present is an attempt to find qualities present in ancient and medieval European culture, and absent in other cultures, which were the reasons for European development: qualities in the European family, the European political system, the European mind, and so forth. This movement is actively resurrecting the turn-of-the-century views of Max Weber about Europe's supposed "rationality" and the like; indeed, most (not all) of these scholars can be thought of as Weberians and many of them define themselves in that way. I will discuss Weber's views later in this chapter, along with the views of some modern Weberian scholars, among them Michael Mann and John A. Hall.

In the next section of this chapter I will try to extract the most important of these newer views proclaiming Europe's pre-1492 "miracle," and I will try to show that these views are mistaken.

== The Myth ==

The myth of the European miracle is the doctrine that the rise of Europe resulted, essentially, from historical forces generated within Europe itself; that Europe's rise above other civilizations, in terms of level of development or rate of development or both, began before the dawn of the modern era, before 1492; that the post-1492 modernization of Europe came about essentially because of the working out of these older internal forces, not because of the inflowing of wealth and innovations from non-Europe; and that the post-1492 history of the non-European (colonial) world was essentially an outflowing of modernization from Europe. The core of the myth is the set of arguments about ancient and medieval Europe that allow the claim to be made, as truth, that Europe in 1492 was more modernized, or was modernizing more rapidly, than the rest of the world.

This is a myth in the classical sense of the word: a story about the rise of a culture that is believed widely by the members of that culture. It is also a myth in the sense of the word that implies something not true. In the following discussion I will unravel the fabric of this myth and show that the strands of belief that compose it are very feeble.<ref>I will discuss only the more important beliefs, perhaps neglecting a few of these. And I will give just enough evidence to show that these beliefs are not self-evidently true. Much fuller evidence is given, to dispute some of the beliefs, in Chapters 3 and 4.</ref>

The number of distinguishable belief statements that make up this myth are, I am sure, uncountable. One of the many reasons the myth is so durable is the fact that the basic generalization, the doctrine of the miracle, is supported by such a great variety of individual beliefs that historians of a given era can disprove some subset of these beliefs and yet the supporters of the myth can merely shift to other beliefs as grounding for the myth.

A more fundamental problem has to do with the way beliefs are licensed. Beliefs tend to gain acceptance if they support the myth, and are either rejected or denied attention if they do not do so. One part of this problem of belief licensing (and relicensing, delicensing, etc.) poses a particularly, perhaps uniquely, serious difficulty for efforts to critique the miracle theory. Many of the beliefs that support this theory are implicit, not explicit; that is, they do not enter into the scholarly discourse of historians, and sometimes they do not enter even into conscious discourse in general. (Recall the discussion of implicit beliefs in Chapter 1.) Many of these beliefs we learn as children. Others seem self-evidently "reasonable" because they accord with deep values of the culture, or with other, accepted beliefs (historical, practical, religious, and so on). Thus, the conviction that ancient and medieval Europe was more progressive than other civilizations is supported by explicit beliefs, but these lie in a matrix of implicit beliefs—unquestioned and usually unnoticed—about the progressive Europeans who "were our ancestors." By contrast, the matrix of implicit beliefs about historical non-Europe includes ideas of alienness, savagery, cruelty, cannibalism, deceitfulness, stupidity, cupidity, immodesty, dirtiness, disease, and so on—a matrix firmly supporting the general belief that non-Europe cannot have been progressive. Examples of these sorts of implicit beliefs, both positive and negative, will appear as we proceed.

One kind of explicit belief about European superiority will not be discussed here in detail. This is the openly religious statement, grounded in faith, that a Christian god will naturally raise His people higher than all others. Although we will refer to this view in various contexts, it is not the kind of argument that can be analyzed or criticized, because it is grounded in a faith that cannot be tested empirically; some believe it to be true and others do not, and that is as far as the matter can be taken. Suffice it to say at this point: the religious argument was so nearly universally accepted down to the nineteenth century that other arguments were not seen as necessary to many European intellectuals. Why, indeed, ask for the reasons that Christian Europeans are superior when we know that unbelievers will not go to heaven and, in this world, will not enjoy the grace of God? Unbelievers will naturally be rendered less intelligent, less fortunate, and so on. So long as scholars and educated people believed that religion underlies all things, including science, and that God intervenes to control human affairs, then it could simply be assumed that Europeans were superior because that was God's will. It is what you would expect a Christian god to do for Christians, particularly for those Christians who worship Him in the right way. By the middle of the nineteenth century, when Eurocentric diffusionism was at its height, when Europeans hardly ever doubted their superiority over everyone else, although the explicitly religious arguments were disappearing from scholarly discourse, they were still there implicitly, as implicit beliefs. I rather suspect that the great majority of arguments for the superiority of Europeans were finally grounded in a religious faith: if the European environment is superior, that is because God made it so; if the white race is superior, that is because God made it so; if Europeans are more rational than everyone else and this has no explicit explanation, one can infer that it is the work of God; and so on. I do not know to what extent this kind of implicit appeal to the Deity is still present but unnoticed in the thinking of contemporary Eurocentric scholars, but I am certain that it quite often is so. We will from time to time discuss the ideas of scholars (like Lynn White, Jr. and K. F. Werner) who explicitly connect their views about history with their religious beliefs; in such thinkers the directionality of the causal arguments will be noted but not in any sense condemned. Sometimes a scholar makes such arguments unconsciously and implicitly. The only really disturbing cases are those that exhibit conscious hypocrisy.

=== Biology ===

Basically two sorts of argument have been used to explain the uniqueness, the superiority, of Europe and Europeans. One sort appeals to some noncultural force or factor as prime cause; the other finds the prime cause within culture itself. Setting aside the doctrine of divine intervention (which one would generally think of as a cause external to human culture, although the point is theologically rather complicated), two kinds of noncultural, external causation are common. One appeals to human biology, the other to the natural environment.

=== Race ===

Biological arguments assert, in general, that Europeans are superior, biologically, to non-Europeans. The classical and typical form of this argument was biological racism, the idea that Europeans had superior heredity, and so were born with abilities greater than those displayed by non-Europeans. Europeans were brighter, better, and bolder than non-Europeans because of their heredity. Generally the descriptive category used was not "Europeans" but rather "members of the white race," but the distinction was not usually very important. Non-Europeans who were classified as members of the white (so-called) race were nonetheless believed to be inferior because they belonged to inferior subraces. Sometimes Europeans themselves were divided into superior and inferior subraces. Early in the nineteenth century it was widely, though not dominantly, believed that white people were not even of the same biological species as people of other races. This theory, "polygenesis," claimed to have both biblical and scientific support.<ref>See Chapter 1, note 2.</ref> Its primary importance was its use as a rationalization for slavery: if Africans were not truly human, why, enslaving them could not be an evil act. This theory melted away during the course of the nineteenth century, mainly because it was offensive to liberal, modern, antislavery thought; what replaced it, however, was not much of an improvement. This was the doctrine we call classical racism, the belief that different human races have different endowments, just as different breeds of domestic animals have such differences—differences of intelligence, aggressiveness, courage, and the rest—and these different endowments are matters of biological inheritance. It was then argued, for instance, that Africans were endowed with lower intelligence than Europeans, so it was both natural and moral for Europeans to colonize Africa and make all decisions on behalf of the Africans who, themselves, either did not have the innate ability to make these decisions, to govern themselves, or were just sufficiently less intelligent than the Europeans that a period of European control and tutelage was necessary while these slow-thinking Africans learned how to govern themselves. Racism, in a word, had as its main function the justification of colonialism and all other forms of oppression visited upon non-Europeans, including minority peoples in countries such as the United States.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century racism acquired a pseudoscientific aura of apparent truth. Scientists claimed to have proof of the differences among races, particularly as to intelligence. Now, also, they were armed with Mendelian genetics, so it seemed eminently reasonable for scientists who were, themselves, racists, now to assert that they had proof of the truth of the racist theories in which they already believed. These so-called proofs were unmasked as pseudoscience in a slow process that continued down to World War II: indeed, even today there are more than a few so-called "scientific racists." What we need to notice about scientific racism is that it merely provided a new way of justifying something that was already almost universally believed to be true among Europeans. This meant, on the one hand, that it did not do much to intensify racism—which was in fact reaching a crescendo of intellectual and scholarly importance around the turn of the century for social reasons, having to do mainly with the growing importance of colonialism—and, on the other hand, that the disproving of scientific racism did not have much to do with the decline of racism's popularity in the present century. Racism emerged from prescientific roots and survived so long as it was useful, science or no science.

This is not to deny that scientific racism gave strong impetus to racist beliefs in society; in a time when science was acquiring great prestige and influence, scientific arguments were indeed important.<ref>Bowler, ''The Invention of Progress'' (1989); Harris, ''The Rise of Anthropological Theory'' (1968); Gossett, ''Race: The History of an Idea in America'' (1963); Jackson, ''Race and Racism: Essays in Social Geography'' (1987); Stocking, ''Race, Culture, and Evolution'' (1968); Trigger, ''A History of Archeological Thought'' (1989).</ref> And scientific racism helped in some special ways. One important example here has to do with supposed differences in endowment among the supposed subraces within the so-called white race. Anti-Semitism, along with anti-Muslim attitudes relating to colonialism in the Middle East, led to a proliferation of theories about the inferiority of the so-called "Semitic" subrace. ("Semite," of course, should refer only to someone who speaks a Semitic language, such as Hebrew or Arabic.) This racist underpinning for anti-Semitism, then, became extremely useful for the general argument about the superiority of Europeans in history over all non-Europeans.<ref>See Bernal, ''Black Athena'', vol. 1 (1987).</ref> Semitic peoples were acknowledged to belong to the white race. Now it could be argued that only Europeans belonged to the really superior subrace of whites. Semites were inferior. So were the non-Semitic peoples of western Asia (Persians, Turks, and so forth). Indeed, in certain situations it was even argued that scientific racism proved the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans: the northern, British and Germanic stock was truly superior to Italians, Slavs, and the rest. One famous instance of this sort of argument was the series of pseudoscientific testimonials given before the U.S. Congress at the time it was debating the first important immigration legislation in the 1920s. Scientists solemnly assured the Congress that southern Europeans were inferior people, and so should be excluded from free immigration to the United States in order to maintain the high racial quality of American stock.<ref>See Gossett, ''Race'' (1963).</ref>

Today very few educated Europeans believe that there are genetic, inherited differences among the races as to intelligence or any other quality that might favor or inhibit social progress. Although a few people believe in the doctrine of classical racism, most of them are careful to keep their views to themselves, because today the doctrine is so thoroughly rejected, and viewed with such repugnance. If this were a book dealing with the history of ideas, we could go into the explanation for this transformation—the decline and fall of classical racism over a period of no more than two scholarly generations. During the 1920s the belief in the influence, major or minor, of inherited or racial differences was very widespread. After 1945 the theory was very rarely defended. Probably the key factor was Nazism. The Nazis grounded their ideology in this belief, claiming that the so-called Nordics were a Master Race, that inferior kinds of Europeans, inferior (so-called) subraces of whites—like the so-called Semitic race—and all other races as a whole deserved to be ruled by the Master Race. The Master Race, moreover, had the right to eliminate inferior subraces by genocide. Racism therefore was seen, and still is seen, as a component of the horrible ideology of Nazism. It is true that a small and fanatic group still preaches classical racism, and that a very small number of academics still proclaim its validity. The need to fight against the doctrine has not entirely ended. But this no longer is the important issue when we talk about Eurocentric prejudices, because another doctrine has largely replaced classical racism and performs much the same function, rooting its argument not in genetics but in culture. This doctrine can be thought of as cultural racism.<ref>Blaut, "The Theory of Cultural Racism" (1992).</ref>

Classical racism was so pervasive, down through the 1920s, that it probably figured as an explicit or implicit foundation for most arguments about the superiority of Europeans in history. It is as though the scholars who asked why Europe had risen and other societies had not done so had part of their answer at the outset: Europeans began with a genetic advantage, large or small, and then, throughout later history, they were always to a greater or lesser extent favored by the influence of their genetic superiority in matters intellectual, giving them superior decision-making ability, inventive ability, and so on. Here was an important reason why it did not, in those times, seem crucial to ask the question, "Why?" At root, the answer was considered self-evident. Even moderate racists, such as Max Weber (whose views we examine below), could therefore assume that European superiority was carried along by a kind of subtle undertow of genetics, that this made Europeans at all times slightly more "rational" (Weber's favorite word), and, therefore, slightly more progressive. It is very interesting that modern scholars retain the notion of the superiority of European "rationality," a notion derived from Weber and through him from all of nineteenth-century social thought, yet they vigorously deny that the source of this "rationality" is racial superiority. The intellectual contortions they have to go through to retain the one without the other will claim our interest when we discuss this matter.

Among the historians whose theories about the "European miracle" are at present widely supported, only Max Weber uses classical racist argument in a clear and overt way. But Weber was writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when classical racism was accepted by the majority of European scholars. Weber's arguments are a rather mild form of racism. He did indeed write of the "hereditary . . . hysteria of the Indian," a basis for his argument that Indian religion prevented Indian development.<ref>"Hereditary neuralgia of the presumably strong tendency toward hysteria and autohypnosis of the Indian..." Max Weber, ''The Religion of India'' (1967), p. 387. This postulate is basic to Weber's analysis of Brahminism as prime cause for India's lack of development.</ref> He considered Africans to be genetically incapable of factory work.<ref>"[The] ... negroes long ago showed themselves unsuitable for factory work and the operation of machines; they have not seldom sunk into a cataleptic sleep. Here is one case in economic history where tangible racial distinctions are present" Weber, ''General Economic History'' (1981), p. 379. Although Weber says here that this is merely "one case" of racial influences, note that the case is crucial for Weber's analysis both of "rationality" and of modernization; the "racial distinctions" here separate out Africans in a fundamental way: a clear case of moderate yet crucial racism. In the same vein, "it was found that the American Indians were entirely unsuitable for plantation labor" (p. 299).</ref> Chinese have a "slowness in reacting to unusual [intellectual] stimuli," a "credulity" or "docility" that Weber thinks are wholly or partly hereditary traits.<ref>Weber, ''The Religion of China'' (1951), pp. 231-232. Weber considers these to be "racial qualities of the Chinese" (p. 230) although cultural factors may be involved.</ref> And Europe's greater "rationality" has a definite hereditary basis.<ref>Weber, ''The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism'' (1958), p. 30. Weber says here that "it would be natural to suspect that the most important reason" for the rationality of the Occident lies in "differences of heredity," and "the importance of biological heredity," he thinks, is "very great" (p. 30). But we do not yet know how to measure its influence, so our attention should focus mainly on the cultural factors (pp. 30-31). This was typical moderate racism (as I call it) for the time the work was published (1904-1905).</ref> But the fact remains that Weber gave much greater weight to nonracial factors. And Weber, for his time, was only a moderate racist.

Moderate racism is, today, a more serious problem in the world of scholars than is classical racism, because it is mainly an implicit theory. We noted that Weber believed in the significance of racial differences, but he referred to the matter very rarely; yet it must have been an unstated, perhaps implicit, part of many of his arguments about social evolution in general and the comparative evolution of Europe and non-Europe in particular. This was fairly typical of early twentieth-century scholarship, hence the racism in that scholarship often is too difficult to identify, and the arguments presented by scholars seem not to be racist when they do not explicitly mention race as a factor. But more serious still is the surviving influence of what I call very moderate racism. A great number, perhaps the majority, of mainstream scholars, in the period, say, of the 1920s, believed that racial differences were very slight and that the individual human being's capabilities and potentialities would not be predictable from his or her race, that race differences only appeared influential on a statistical basis for large groups: for instance, a slightly higher average "intelligence quotient" for whites as against blacks. This belief was consistent with militant opposition to racial discrimination. But it was not much better than classical racism when applied to questions of social evolution and comparison between European and non-European history. This is so because the historical arguments did not need to postulate large racial differences. If whites, on the average, held a tiny advantage over non-whites in, let us say, inventiveness, that tiny advantage, working out its influence over the centuries and millennia, would produce the result that whites built high civilization and nonwhites did not. In a sense, this very moderate racism was a more serious problem than ordinary racism, because it allowed scholars to take liberal positions in opposition to overt racial discrimination yet continue to believe that whites are superior genetically to nonwhites within the subject matter of their own fields—anthropology, geography, history, and so on. It did reduce the significance of race to that of one "factor" among many, but it did not eliminate racial explanations in the matter of Europe's supposed superiority.<ref>I have not discussed the question whether biological racism remains important today as a genuinely implicit theory, that is, one still accepted but not consciously so. I suspect that it does. Some Eurocentric historians hold to positions regarding individual differences between Europeans and non-Europeans that are so extreme, and so bigoted, that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that at least a few of them may hold to an implicitly racist infratheory, perhaps unconsciously believing, that is, that the inferiority of non-Europeans is genetically determined.</ref>

Probably it is unnecessary to say here that there is no credible evidence in support of the idea that races differ in genetic inheritance except in trivial matters like skin color. Even the idea of race is a vague abstraction and not really useful. For our purposes, the generalization that counts is this: racial differences explain nothing about culture or cultural evolution.<ref>Among many sources on the racism fallacy, see Franz Boas' classic book, ''Race, Language, and Culture'' (1948); also Blum, ''Pseudoscience and Mental Ability'' (1978); Gossett, ''Race'' (1965); Haller, ''Outcasts from Evolution'' (1971); Jackson, ''Race and Racism'' (1987); Magubane, ''The Ties that Bind: African-American Consciousness and Africa'' (1987); Gill and Levidow, ''Anti-Racist Science Teaching'' (1987).</ref>

=== Demography ===

Demographic behavior is usually considered the second important biological factor in explanations for the European miracle. Causality here is very murky. The specific form of theory with which I am concerned claims that Europeans, historically, controlled their population growth, whereas other peoples did not, so that Europe tended not to suffer overpopulation, and did not encounter what many historians call the "Malthusian disasters" that supposedly prevented forward progress in non-European societies. Malthusianism postulates, in its essence, that ordinary people do not control their sexual urges and so have more offspring than can be fed; a disaster of some sort ensues, with famine, pestilence, or war now reducing the population; and then people again breed more children than they should, and the cycle renews. Malthus considered this uncontrollable sexual urge to be general in the human species, although the educated classes could control themselves to some degree. Modern explanations for the "European miracle" modify this theory in a key respect: they assert that Europeans, historically, have had a cultural pattern of limiting the number of offspring whereas non-Europeans lacked this pattern; as a result, European population was maintained, throughout history, in rough long-term proportion to resources, in spite of periodic Malthusian crises, crises which were important in explaining various facts of European history but were vastly less significant than the supposed permanent grip of Malthusian forces—lack of demographic control and perennial overpopulation and misery—in non-European societies. Moreover, according to these historians, whenever technological advance or some other fortunate circumstance led to a rise in living standards, Europeans, unlike non-Europeans, did not allow their population to rise and thus eliminate the fruits of progress. We need to notice that this argument does not really center on the biology of reproduction but, again, on rationality: it is claimed or assumed that Europeans think about the problem of population and others do not. So demographic arguments for the superiority of Europe in history always return either to culture or to race: Europeans are more rational either because they have superior heredity or because they have superior culture. If non-Europeans have uncontrollable sexual urges, if they behave like the beasts in the field, this is either a sign of genetic inferiority or a cultural quirk. In the arguments most frequently encountered today, either culture is invoked or the matter is left ambiguous. Yet there is a paradox. Many historians believe that demography is an independent causal force in history. This belief is generally grounded in a quasi-biological argument: ordinary people have only partial success in controlling their sexual urges, and only partial success (or none at all) in controlling and spacing the birth of children.<ref>The idea that demographic behavior is not fully under social control, is a primordial biological fact or factor, seems to underlie the thinking of most Eurocentric historians (conspicuously Eric L. Jones, Michael Mann, and John Hall). The basic proposition seems to be that population will necessarily grow beyond the rational limits, and so overpopulation must result unless societies find nondemographic solutions, notably by increasing food supply to feed the inexorably increasing population. See, for instance, Michael Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'', vol. 1 (1986): If agricultural yields had not increased in medieval Europe, "the continent would ... have experienced a similar Malthusian cycle every century or so—and would not have generated capitalism" (p. 402). This view is even encountered, occasionally, in the radical and feminist movements. Note the following view put forward by a Marxist-feminist: "(We) assume (given the ubiquity of the sex drive ...) that the total number of conceptions in a population will tend to exceed those desired within a given incentive structure, and this unintended surplus will be greater, the more imperfect are the means at hand. ... A given fertility pattern then is taken to be 'rational' ... except for a small but variable excess (of births)," Seccombe, "Marxism and Demography," (1983), p. 31. The context is a discussion of European medieval social evolution, but the argument is given mainly in support of Brenner's theory about the strictly European rise of capitalism. Most radicals and feminists reject Malthusianism and would reject Seccombe's view as Malthusian.</ref> Many supporters of the miracle myth simply argue, then, that Europeans have greater, though still partial, success in controlling their behavior than do non-Europeans. For instance, Eric L. Jones claims that this is what he calls "the quality of Europeanness":

Europe did not spend the gifts of its environment as rapidly as it got them in a mere insensate multiplication of the common life.<ref>Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 3. Part of the passage is a quotation.</ref>

In other words, Europeans do not simply reproduce thoughtlessly, as non-Europeans do. Jones makes the same point in many different ways; for instance, he says of Chinese peasants that they preferred "breeding new people" to improving their economic and political circumstances.<ref>Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 219.</ref> John A. Hall makes a similar point:

The expansion of the European economy did not occur [through expansion of cultivated acreage], as in late traditional China, because improvements in output were not eaten up by a massive growth in population. The ratio between population and [cultivated] acreage in Europe remained favourable ultimately because of the relative continence of the European family.<ref>Hall, ''Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West'' (1985), p. 131. Italics added.</ref>

Europeans are sexually "continent." Europeans, therefore, do not suffer overpopulation.

Another point worthy of notice: the historians have no difficulty invoking population growth as a positive factor in European history, as an indication of progress—for instance, the growth of Europe's population in the eleventh century and thereafter is seen as proof that medieval Europe was healthily advancing—whereas population growth in non-European societies is seen as negative, as the working out of Malthusian laws of "overpopulation." We will encounter examples of this very one-sided form of argument as we proceed.

There is now abundant evidence that all societies practice population control.<ref>As F. Hassan points out, "Among human populations the practice of population control in one form or another is universal." ("Demographic Archeology," 1978, p. 71.)</ref> They seem to do so very effectively at the aggregate level: although individual family groups may or may not succeed in controlling the incidence of conception—because the methods of birth control are often rather hit or miss—the society as a whole seems able to encourage population growth or discourage it quite successfully.<ref>Some families will of course have more conceptions than desired, and others fewer, because birth control techniques are imperfect, but the average for the larger group will be broadly in line with the group's values and population targets. The techniques run the gamut from variable age of marriage and variable dowry or bride price, to complexity of marriage rules (defining who, in a kin system, is eligible to be one's spouse), to timing of sexual relations, to the use of antiterility and abortive devices, to infanticide, and other practices.</ref> It is most unlikely that population growth takes place when the society would, in the long run, suffer as a consequence; or, to put the matter more precisely, the members of a society change their demographic behavior in the space of a couple of generations when it becomes clear to them, as they observe changes around them in the probability of infants surviving to adulthood, and so on, that such change is desirable. The knowledge that all of this is indeed the case has only appeared recently.<ref>Much of the scholarship comes from India, where colonial ideology used to claim that poverty is a result of people having too many children. Now demographers and other social scientists have disproven this myth. See, for instance, Mamdani, ''The Myth of Population Control'' (1972), and Nag, "How Modernization Can Also Increase Fertility" (1980). For Africa, see, for example, Kitching, "Proto-Industrialization and Demographic Change" (1983); Swindell, "Domestic Production, Labor Mobility, and Population Change in West Africa, 1900-1980" (1981); Cordell and Gregory, the introduction to ''African Population and Capitalism'' (1987).</ref> But this accumulating evidence really cuts the ground from under all Malthusian theories, historical and contemporary, European and non-European. The argument that population growth is an automatic, biological process, which occurs whether or not there is food enough to feed additional mouths, is simply wrong.<ref>See, for instance, numerous studies showing the plasticity of birthrates, including Nag "How Modernization Can Also Increase Fertility" (1980), Collyer, ''Birth Rates in Latin America'' (1965), and Harewood, "Population Growth in Grenada" (1966).</ref>

When the evidence began to accumulate that historic European populations did indeed practice population control, some scholars decided, appropriately, that the old Malthusian models do not make sense in Europe: family size was kept small, births were controlled, and so forth, back in the Middle Ages. This called for rejection of one traditional theory, the idea that there is a general pattern for all so-called preindustrial societies (or "traditional societies," or "peasant societies"), involving high and uncontrolled birth rates, large families, etc., and thus, inevitably, a Malthusian trend toward overpopulation. Most historians today seem still to be wedded to the Malthusian theory, and still believe that medieval social change in Europe was mainly, or at least partly, produced by Malthusian cycles of overpopulation.<ref>See Aston and Philipn, eds., ''The Brenner Debate'' (1985), especially the introduction by R. Hilton.</ref> But some historians now reject this perspective: population, in essence, is viewed by them as a dependent variable, not an independent variable.

But only in Europe. This newer, essentially anti-Malthusian, theory was rapidly shaped into a new explanation for the European "miracle." It was simply asserted that European people, historically, controlled their population, and so, when they accumulated surpluses of food and commodities and wealth, these were not subsequently dissipated as population grew out of control and stole away the savings. This pattern, said these historians, was uniquely European and it was one important reason why Europeans were able to accumulate wealth and eventually rise into modernity and capitalism. Non-Europeans, by contrast, continued in their unmoden, traditional pattern, with overpopulation wiping out all benefits of forward progress. These Eurocentric historians, in a manner characteristic of tunnel history, did not notice that new scholarship on demography, some of it on historical demography—in various non-European parts of the world, from India to Barbados—was tending to overturn Malthusian notions as they apply to non-Europe just as readily as had been the case a decade earlier in European scholarship.<ref>Perhaps more readily, because the Malthusian explanation for poverty in Third World countries has been a rather troublesome issue for scholars and planners in these countries, and it has been important to show that poverty in their countries is not somehow caused by the demographic misbehavior of ordinary people.</ref>

We will take up a related matter, theories about the uniqueness of the European family, at a later point in this chapter. For now, it is enough to say, simply, that the demographic arguments in support of the European miracle are utterly unconvincing. This holds true both for the theories grounded in the belief in baleful Malthusian forces and for those which assert that Europeans, uniquely, know how to avoid those forces.

=== Environment ===

Environmental determinism, the theory that the natural environment strongly influences human affairs and human history, is no longer a popular doctrine, but it is still used quite regularly in explanations for the European "miracle." The point should, however, be qualified: Environmental determinism, in the form it is used in these arguments today, is a "determinism" in a limited sense only. It does not claim that the environment explains everything, or that the environment is the most important explanatory factor. It is deterministic in the sense that it treats the environment as a separate, simple cause or "factor" not mediated by culture: something external to culture and influencing it from the outside. One finds each Eurocentric historian adding one or a number of environmentalistic arguments or factors to the mix, which, as a whole, explains the superiority of Europe. Even the historians who want to build their case mainly on social or political or intellectual foundations nonetheless manage (I know of very few exceptions) to throw one or more environmentalistic arguments into the stewpot, to give it body or flavor.

Environmentalistic arguments can be stacked into two piles. One consists of the set of claims about the superior qualities of Europe's environment and how they help to explain the rise of Europe. The other pile consists of arguments as to why the nasty environments of other places have blocked development there. The two sorts of argument are—perhaps surprisingly—very different in form. Let us begin with the latter.

Two classical environmentalistic theories have been used over and over again, and still remain in use, to explain the (supposed) nondevelopment of Africa and Asia. The first theory argues that tropical regions are innately inferior to cooler regions. This theory is used, for the most part, to dispose of Africa. The second theory argues that peoples in arid regions are held back from development because aridity necessitates irrigation, and irrigation along with related features of irrigated river-valley life leads, again necessarily, to the kind of civilization that is historically stagnant. This theory disposes of Asian civilizations, along with Egypt. (Most of Asia is not, in fact, arid.) I will discuss both of these theories, and more briefly a few other environmentalistic explanations for the backwardness of Africa and Asia.

=== Nasty-Tropical Africa ===

The idea that tropical climates are nasty, and inhibit the forward march of civilization, is a very old one in European thought.<ref>For instance Montesquieu, in ''The Spirit of the Laws'' ((1748) 1949) "People are ... more vigorous in cold climates" (pt. xiv.2). "There are countries where the excess of heat enervates the body, and renders men ... slothful and dispirited" (pt. xv.7).</ref> During the nineteenth century this notion was widely used to show why Africans have (supposedly) remained uncivilized, and must naturally accept European colonial control; it was one of the core theories of classical diffusionism.<ref>"Africa" almost always refers to "Africa south of the Sahara" in the discourse I am criticizing, so I will use "Africa" in the same sense in the present discussion.</ref> It was routinely built in to theories about the uniqueness of Europe, the European miracle, although I must add that historians did not usually consider the reasons for Africa's nonrise worth bothering about: the matter was considered self-explanatory, and labors were devoted to the seemingly more important question why Asia (and North Africa) did not rise. And the tropical-nastiness theory is still quite regularly employed in historians' arguments. It is, for instance, crucial to Jones's argument in ''The European Miracle''. It is also significant in a special arena: the debates among historians about African slavery, the slave trade, and the slave plantation system. By contrast, geographers, who in general know something about the natural environment and have long grappled with the theories of environmental determinism, do not, today, take the nasty-tropics theory very seriously.<ref>Blaut, "The Ecology of Tropical Farming Systems" (1963).</ref>

The tropical-nastiness doctrine consists mainly of three distinct theories. The first concerns itself with the supposed negative effect of a hot, humid climate on the human mind and body; the second, with the supposed inferiority of tropical climates for food production; the third, with the supposed prevalence of disease in tropical regions. Down to the 1940s, or thereabouts, there was some ambivalence among Europeans as to the thesis that humans cannot labor as effectively in the humid tropics as in other climates. The majority opinion had been that Africans can labor under the hot sun—a convenient rationalization for plantation slavery—but that Europeans cannot do so, although some diffusionist arguments were built on the idea that tropical conditions induce sloth, indolence, etc., in everyone, and thus the need for control-at-a-distance from temperate-climate civilizations. Eventually it became clear, from many sources of evidence including physiological studies, that human bodies of all sorts can labor as effectively in the tropics as elsewhere if the bodies in question have had time to adjust to tropical conditions.<ref>See, for example, Collins and Roberts, eds., ''Capacity for Work in the Tropics'' (1988), which fails to find convincing evidence suggesting negative tropical effects.</ref> Although the claim that people in humid tropical regions cannot think as well as people in temperate regions—the tropical sun "boils the brain"—was almost universally accepted by Europeans in the last century and was incorporated into some well-known theories about European civilizational superiority put forward (for instance by Huntington and Markham) in the first half of the present century, this theory, never grounded in evidence, is now rejected across the board. Eric L. Jones is one of the few present-day European historians who is unaware that this theory of "climatic energy" (as it was called in the old days) has been exploded. Not only does Jones accept it as valid but he gives it some considerable significance:

Civilizations had long been rising and falling in warm latitudes, although they appear to have been springing up farther and farther north. Such explanation as the literature offers for this shift is essentially climatic (Gilfillan 1920; Lambert 1971). On the one hand it correlates mean temperature and the output of human energy, and on the other it claims that in warm regions man was subject to the build-up of endoparasitic infestation which caused each society there to reach a plateau of attainment and then stagnate.<ref>The two citations (Gilfillan, "The Coldward Course of Progress," 1920, and Lambert, "The Role of Climate in the Economic Development of Nations," 1971) are hardly indicative of modern scholarly literature.</ref>

It should be noted that "the literature" does not support any of this. The scholarly literature roundly rejects the theory of "climatic energy," which has not in fact been seriously defended since the 1950s. Climatic determinism as a whole is almost a dead letter. There has been no northward "shift" of civilization (ancient civilizations were located from the equator to 45° latitude). The notion that tropical regions are so parasite-infested that cultures stagnate is false (it will briefly claim our attention later). Jones's general belief that hot climates are "debilitating" has little if any scholarly support, and does not in turn support the idea that Europe's climate led to a European miracle.<ref>India's "debilitating climate" is one reason why India fell behind Europe, according to Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 198.</ref> There simply is no basis for arguing that midlatitude climates are superior to tropical climates in terms of psychological or physical effects on human beings.

The fruitfulness of tropical environments was much debated by nineteenth-century European scholars. Some argued that tropical regions are lush and bountiful, but used this proposition not as a basis for asserting high development potential but rather the contrary: tropical environments are too bountiful to offer what Arnold Toynbee might have called a sufficient challenge to humanity, and so progress did not take place except under colonial guidance. We deal with this thesis later in the chapter. Our concern now is with the exact opposite thesis, which asserts, quite simply, that tropical environments are miserably poor in their potential for agriculture and it is this that prevents tropical regions from developing. (The term "tropics," or more properly "humid tropics," refers to regions with no cold season and with moderate to high rainfall: roughly 750 mm. of rain or more per year. Most of sub-Saharan Africa falls within the humid tropics, as does most of southern and southeastern Asia and most of Middle and South America.) According to this thesis, little food can be produced on a given piece of land in the humid tropics.

Now this thesis—low agricultural productivity of tropical land—is hard to defend on the evidence, since population densities in the humid tropics range from very low (in parts of the Amazon Basin, for instance) to extraordinarily high (in Java, Bangladesh, El Salvador, Barbados, Rwanda, and many other regions). The argument is grounded, rather, in a theory about the nature of tropical soils. To put matters in perspective, the scientific study of tropical soils is a very young field; few contributions of any consequence can be dated earlier than World War II if we exclude highly particular studies about the soils used for plantation crops like sugar-cane.<ref>Among the pioneer works which have importance for peasant agriculture, we may mention Fred Hardy's "Some Aspects of Tropical Soils" (1936) and various of his articles in ''Tropical Agriculture'', and the work of Robert Pendleton (especially Pendleton, "Land Use in North-Eastern Thailand," 1943, and Prescott and Pendleton, ''Laterites and Lateritic Soils'', 1952), and G. Milne "A Soil Reconnaissance Journey Through Parts of Tanganyika Territory" (1947). The first comprehensive textbook on tropical soils embodying modern knowledge is Mohr and van Baren, ''Tropical Soils'' (1954).</ref> The really crucial information, relevant to the proof or disproof of the traditional theories, was obtained in research carried out in a number of experimental centers in the late 1940s and thereafter, and then slowly disseminated to the world scholarly community. The result is that some historians (including some current writers about the "miracle") can still, today, make use of quite fantastic theories about the supposedly evil nature of tropical soils. Some of these theories were refuted quite recently; others are now, today, very close to refutation; a few others, hardly defensible, nonetheless still lie around in the scholarly literature, unrefuted. A brief, only slightly technical, comment on these theories is necessary at this point of the discussion.

The old standard theory about tropical soils runs about as follows: Because of the high heat and abundant rainfall in the humid tropics, these soils cannot accumulate organic topsoil, since organic matter decomposes rapidly and is quickly leached out as rainwater seeps downward in the soil. Tropical soils, therefore, are low in plant nutrients. Also, they are subject to severe erosion, partly because tropical landforms tend to have high average slopes, partly because high rainfall means high runoff and therefore much surface erosion.

These two basic physical propositions, about infertility of the soil and erosion respectively, were then married to a cultural proposition, in the following argument. Because of the low fertility and erodibility of tropical soils, farmers must practice what is called "shifting agriculture." (This is a farming system in which a field is prepared by clearing a piece of forest with the use of fire, and then, after one or more years of cultivation, is abandoned, another field being then cleared in turn and in its turn abandoned, in a continuous process of shifting fields.) The standard theory (as it was argued before the 1950s or thereabouts) then makes a series of sweeping generalizations about the combined effects of infertile, erodible tropical soils and shifting agriculture. It was claimed that farmers cannot return to the original piece of land after it has been abandoned and left fallow for some time, since the soils are too poor to regenerate and since burning the piece of land permanently damages the soil. Even where the environment is lush enough so that farmers can return and re-use each field, the production from each field will be less and less as the cycles of use and abandonment continue, and the soil will become more and more infertile until finally it is unusable. All of this implied that peasant communities would be unable to remain in any one region permanently; that the villages themselves would have to be moved as large expanses of forest land were used and then abandoned and the people needed to move elsewhere to find fresh, cultivable lands. The result would be grave indeed: a very sparse and highly mobile population with little or no chance of developing large-scale trade, cities, and stable states.

The entire argument was inserted at this point into world history and world geography. Most of sub-Saharan Africa is tropical. Therefore, shifting agriculture must be used there and no civilization can develop there. Or if civilization manages somehow to evolve to one extent or another, it must sooner or later collapse. (The decline of the classical lowland Mayan civilization was regularly used as the type example of this historical outcome; it is still so used by a few scholars.)

This traditional model of tropical soils and shifting agriculture was gradually softened as more information became available to students of tropical soils and tropical agriculture. By the 1960s it was generally known to the specialist community (though not yet to the majority of historians and social scientists) that shifting agriculture does not damage the soil under normal—that is, typical and widespread—circumstances.<ref>See Nye and Greenland, ''The Soil Under Shifting Cultivation'' (1960); Blaut, "The Nature and Effects of Shifting Agriculture" (1962); Ahn, ''West African Soils'' (1970).</ref> Almost never do shifting cultivators move their villages because of soil exhaustion. (It became known, also, that shifting cultivation had been widespread for many centuries in Europe, and there it had not apparently done any damage to the environment.) From this emerged a softer cultural model: if population densities are low, so that farmers can leave each abandoned field for the many years required for soil and vegetation regeneration, then shifting agriculture will remain an equilibrium farming system, and there will be no long-term deterioration of the environment.

But even this modification would not much alter the historical judgment about Africa and some other tropical regions: historians might still believe that any civilization arising in such a tropical area cannot be very complex under ordinary circumstances, because a low population density of food producers would not seem to provide the basis for a substantial complex of urban centers, religious centers, states, and the like. (As to the lowland Mayan civilization, some scholars continued to claim that shifting agriculture had destroyed the subsistence base of that civilization, while others claimed that the decline and abandonment of cultural centers like Tikal had been due to other sorts of processes.) In any event, the prevailingly Malthusian view of peasants led to the general assumption that population would grow out of control and regions of tropical shifting agriculture would never rise very high in places like tropical Africa, anyway.

The model in this form is still current among historians. It is common in the European miracle literature, as the primary environmental basis for claiming that Africa could not have "risen" in the same way that Europe did. It is explicit in the work of some non-African Africanist historians.<ref>See Miller, ''Way of Death'' (1988); Curtin, ''The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex'' (1990). The view is echoed in many world history textbooks, for example, Roberts, ''The Hutchinson History of The World'' (1987), pp. 54-56; McNeill, ''A World History'' (1967), pp. 273-278.</ref>

Evidence is now available to reject this entire theory, the notion that tropical soils are bad for agriculture and therefore somehow inhibit human history. First of all, we now know that tropical soils are not inferior. They are different. Because of the higher rate of chemical and physical weathering under humid-tropical conditions, soil production from the underlying rock is much more rapid than is the case in cooler climates. Therefore, soils maintain their fertility in considerable degree from the dissolution of minerals, and much less from the accumulation of organic matter. Erosion tends to be more serious, but regeneration tends to be more rapid. Tropical soils that have developed on rocks that are rich in plant-nutrient minerals are exceptionally fertile. Those developed on rocks that are not nutrient-rich are exceptionally infertile. There is no basis for comparing tropical and temperate "averages": neither is better; they are different.

Evidence is also available now to reject the old view of shifting agriculture. Farmers practice it on poor soils, being careful not to let fires get out of control. They use a great number of techniques to assist the natural vegetation to regenerate, and to increase soil fertility in the cultivated fields, including green and animal manuring. When there is a land shortage, the shifting rotation is shortened, by the use of various techniques of intensification such as mounding or terracing, increased labor applied to such matters as weeding, adoption of different crops and different varieties, and many more.<ref>See Wilken, ''Good Farmers: Traditional Agricultural Resource Management in Mexico and Central America'' (1987); also Nye and Greenland, ''The Soil Under Shifting Agriculture'' (1960); Blaut, "The Ecology of Tropical Farming Systems" (1963).</ref> The correlation between shifting agriculture and low population density is a function of history, not ecology. In the Americas it reflects in part the post-Columbian depopulation. (The Amazon Basin, which today may have a farming population of perhaps one million, probably had seven times that number in 1492.<ref>Denevan, ''The Native Population of the Americas in 1492'' (1976).</ref>) In part also it reflects the often unnoticed fact that in most regions of the American tropics giant cattle ranches have pushed farmers off the better land, giving a statistical appearance of low population density: cattle have replaced people.<ref>Cockburn and Hecht, ''The Fate of the Forest'' (1989).</ref> The same process occurred in white-settled regions of southern Africa. Elsewhere in tropical Africa, most farmers practice forms of agriculture that should not be described as shifting agriculture except in marginal regions, like mountainsides and semi-arid wastes.<ref>These marginal areas often are regions in which agriculture is practiced, in preference to some less intensive system of land use, because human communities have been pushed off better land by historical forces, notably colonialism.</ref> Typically, they are sedentary or semisedentary farming systems, involving such things as semipermanent yam mounds and tree-crop farming, or irrigated farming, or mixed farming, or they are systems in which the period of cultivation exceeds the period of fallow, and fertility is maintained by many different cultural practices including the use of green and animal manure. But the most important generalization is this simple one: where there is soil degradation, and hunger, and poor farming, it reflects cultural causes from recent history or colonial history. It does not reflect inherent limitations of tropical agriculture and it does not reflect technological ignorance on the part of farmers.

A few variant theories about the low food production potential of the humid-tropical in general and Africa in particular are invoked by some historians. Some claim that Africans were unable even to farm in Africa's humid-tropical regions until new technology, invented by non-Africans, diffused into the continent. One form of this argument claims that ironworking was brought into Africa a little over 2,000 years ago, perhaps by the Romans, and only then were Africans able to tackle the tropical forests.<ref>For a typical instance, the Oxford historian J. M. Roberts, in his popular world history textbook, ''The Hutchinson History of the World'' (1987), makes the following quite ignorant statement: "Probably the greatest importance of (the) spread of iron-working (in tropical Africa) was the difference it made to agriculture. It made possible a new penetration of the forests, new tilling of the soil (which may be connected with the arrival of new food-crops from Asia ... This suggests once again the important limiting factor of the African environment. Most of the continent's history is the story of response to influences from the outside (including iron-working and new crops)" (pp. 511-512). African farmers, like farmers in Europe and many other regions, practiced agriculture with stone tools before iron arrived, and continued to do so afterward whenever and wherever iron was hard to obtain. On the age of ironworking in tropical Africa, see, for example, Wai-Andah, "West Africa Before the Seventh Century" (1981) and Sinclair, "Archeology in Eastern Africa" (1991).</ref> Since shifting agriculture was practiced with stone implements in ancient Europe, and since ironworking appeared in Africa—possibly after independent invention—around 800 B.C. or earlier, this theory is invalid.

An even more outlandish theory builds on the fact that some Southeast Asian crops diffused into East Africa two millennia ago. Some historians blandly assert that Africans could not farm in the tropical forests until these tropical crops, domesticated by non-Africans, became available for planting in the African forests.<ref>See, for example, Roberts (note 53 above); also Irwin, "Sub-Saharan Africa," in Garraty and Gay, eds. ''The Columbia History of the World'' (1981), p. 299.</ref> It has, in fact, been well known for a long time that Africans domesticated a great number of crops for humid-tropical regions, notably many varieties of the yam (''Dioscorea'' spp.) the prime staple food there.<ref>See for instance Irvine's classical work, ''A Textbook of West African Agriculture'' (1934); Coursey, ''Yams'' (1967).</ref> Both of these diffusionist myths seem to be connected to an important colonialist belief—now important as an excuse for apartheid in South Africa. The belief is that advanced African cultures, with agriculture, trade, and states, expanded southward through the continent only very late in history, mainly because of the forbidding nature of the tropical part of the continent which held back their southward movement. According to this myth of emptiness (see Chapter 1), they had not arrived in (most of) South Africa when the Europeans took over that region, and supporters of white supremacy in South Africa claim, on this basis, that whites, having arrived first, have political and economic rights to own the land of South Africa.<ref>According to Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), "the Negroid peoples ... were still pushing east and south into the territories of the pygmies and the bushmen when the Boers undertook the Great Trek north from the Cape in the 1830s," (p. 155). Also see Roberts ''The Hutchinson History of the World'' (1987), p. 178.</ref> In fact, the expansion of agricultural peoples in Africa occurred thousands of years ago; recent archaeology has shown that rain forest regions were settled by farmers at least 3,000 years ago, and whites did not arrive first in South Africa.

Another variant of the myth of tropical nastiness as applied to Africa is the notion that rainfall variability in tropical Africa is uniquely and devastatingly high, such that agriculture could not, in precolonial times, be dependably practiced and famines were frequent and widespread. This then leads into various arguments about African backwardness. For some historians (among them Philip Curtin) there was a basic tendency toward mobility of populations and internal slave trading; for others (notoriously Joseph Miller), there was savagery and cannibalism.<ref>Curtin, ''Economic Change in Pre-Colonial Africa'' (1975); Curtin, ''The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex'' (1990); Miller, ''Way of Death'' (1988).</ref> These historians belong to what I will call the "absolutionist" school of Eurocentric Africanist history, which absolves Europeans of most of the responsibility for slavery and the problems of modern Africa by finding explanations for such matters within Africa itself, often in the African environment. The European miracle historians make regular use of these arguments for purposes of comparison. It happens to be the case that rainfall variability is a serious problem in all semi-arid regions, including the Sahel zone south of the Sahara in Africa and also the Great Plains in the central United States, the steppes of Russia, and so on. Africa is not unique. The more humid parts of this continent do not have a peculiar problem of climatic uncertainty: this is a historians' myth, partly traditional, partly resurrected after the recent Sahelian-Sudanic famines. The latter did not reflect drought-proneness of the region. They reflected human problems, mostly inherited from the colonial period, which became disasters when ordinary rainfall cycles went through their dry phases.<ref>See Wisner and Mbithi, "Drought in Eastern Kenya" (1974); Wisner, ''Power and Need in Africa'' (1989); O'Keefe and Wisner, "African Drought: The State of the Game" (1975).</ref>

Much the same sort of argument applies to other parts of the tropics. In southern and southeastern Asia we tend, broadly, to find permanent, that is, sedentary, agriculture on lands with relatively high fertility, and shifting agriculture or tree crops on lands with low fertility. The experience of colonialism during the past two centuries or so has muddled that picture somewhat, since there have been major population movements and large population increases in some areas—with consequent distortions of farming systems in reaction to land shortage and other nonenvironmental pressures. Yet the generalization still holds in regard to the environment: tropical conditions do not carry the implication of poor agricultural potential.<ref>The same arguments apply, with no need for qualification, in Western Hemisphere agriculture. In relatively limited parts of the South American rain forest the ecosystem is so fragile, as a result of local geological conditions (rocks forming infertile kaolinitic clay soils in some areas, almost pure sands in other areas), that cropping systems must employ shifting agriculture (or tree crops). But such areas are the exception within the present-day distribution of rain forest environments. In general, the great sweep of Amazonian and Guianan rain forest is a zone of non-sedentary agriculture because of cultural-historical factors, notably depopulation and the massive increase in cattle ranching. It is in fact cattle ranching, and not shifting agriculture, that leads to agriculturally caused long-term environmental degradation in the rainforest region, because (1) ranchers burn forest to the maximum extent possible and without control, in order to expand the area of pasture, and (2) the resulting pasture leads to steady soil degradation because coarse pasture grasses do not maintain the soil ecosystem as does the original forest. Shifting cultivators, by contrast, burn only under controlled conditions, burn small areas only, and carefully encourage the regrowth of forest. If the forest disappears, their livelihood disappears. Shifting agriculturists should not be blamed for deforestation anywhere in the humid tropics. See Hecht and Cockburn, ''The Fate of the Forest'' (1989); Blaut, "The Nature and Effects of Shifting Agriculture" (1963).</ref>

What of the opposing theory, that the tropics are lush and bountiful? Down through the middle of the nineteenth century this theory was very widely accepted, and also this corollary: Since the fruits of the earth are so easily obtained in tropical climes, humans do not have to exert themselves to make a living. And so they do not progress. The argument was then woven into many different theories. Buckle put forward one such theory.<ref>Buckle, ''The History of Civilization in England'', 2nd ed., (1913), chap. 2. Also see Bowler, ''The Invention of Progress'' (1989), pp. 28-29.</ref> Marx put forward another, rather tersely, in a footnote in Volume 1 of ''Capital'', asserting without discussion that tropical regions do not develop toward capitalism because here "Nature is too lavish . . . She does not impose upon [man] any necessity to develop himself."<ref>Marx, ''Capital'', vol. 1 (1976), p. 513n.</ref> This brief comment seems to be the only occasion on which Marx raised the question why humid-tropical regions, including Africa, did not develop as Europe did.

The bountiful-tropics theory is still used today in some theories that try to explain the uniqueness of Europe's rise. I suppose that every European child of our own time has seen some version of the cartoon showing the native sitting under the coconut tree, waiting patiently for his food to drop into his hands. This is not merely a relic of oldtime thought or an implicit theory. Eric L. Jones uses the bountiful-tropics theory in ''The European Miracle''. (In West Africa "living was easy."<ref>Jones in fact manages to use both of the opposing theories toward the same end. In wetter regions of Africa "living was easy." In drier areas "agriculture was not productive." Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 154. Also see Jones, ''Growth Recuring: Economic Change in World History'' (1988).</ref>) John A. Hall uses it.<ref>"In Africa the bountifulness and extent of the land makes for a mobile peasantry, necessarily therefore poor material on which to build states. Something like this is probably true of all slash-and-burn agriculture," John Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 27. ("Slash-and-burn agriculture" is shifting agriculture.)</ref> Occasionally it is used by Marxists, faithful to the letter of Marx's comment quoted above.<ref>Laibman, "Modes of Production and Theories of Transition" (1984), p. 284. However, Laibman's overall argument is not at all Eurocentric.</ref> Probably there is no need to explain why these bountiful-tropics theories are unacceptable, since this—as we have seen—is done time and again by scholars who insist that tropical regions are not bountiful; rather, they are barren and nasty. Neither the one view nor the other makes sense. And note that both are used toward the same end: to show that tropical regions have inferior potential in history.

Finally, we come to the theory that tropical environments are so disease-ridden that historical progress there is slowed, stopped, or prevented. Some historians develop this argument specifically with reference to Africa. Some others apply it sweepingly to all tropical regions: for Eric L. Jones it is a major reason why both Asia and Africa remained backward by comparison to Europe. Like the tropical-nastiness theories discussed previously, this one is traditional in European thought, and this fact is critically important for an understanding of the survival of the theory down to the present and its use in the European miracle paradigm.

One of the axioms of classical diffusionism, as we have seen in Chapter 1, is the idea that diseases and other evil things naturally counterdiffuse into Europe from non-Europe. It was therefore assumed by many scholars (including, for instance, Buckle) that non-Europe is both the source and the natural home of many—and the worst—maladies.<ref>Buckle, ''History of Civilization in England'', vol. 1, 2nd ed. (1913), p. 93: "(The) great plagues by which Europe has at different periods been scourged, have, for the most part, proceeded from the East, which is their natural birthplace, and where they are most fatal. Indeed, of those cruel diseases now existing in Europe, scarcely one is indigenous; and the worst of them were imported from tropical countries in and after the first century of the Christian era."</ref> That axiomatic belief is still with us: plagues from the Black Death to AIDS are still assumed—for it is always an assumption, whether or not reinforced by evidence—to come from the non-European world.<ref>The theory that the HIV virus which causes AIDS in humans is another one of these African plagues descending upon the Western World may very well be just the newest myth in this old diffusionist tradition. Whether or not this virus originated in Africa, which has not been proven, the myth has already taken on ugly overtones, as in the completely unfounded (yet classical) belief that AIDS was transmitted from monkeys to humans because of some strange sexual practices in some obscure African tribes. (This myth is naively reported in Shannon and Pyle, "The Origin and Diffusion of AIDS," 1989. See the critique of this paper by Watts and Okello, "Medical Geography and AIDS," 1990. Also see R. C. and R. J. Chirimuuta, ''AIDS, Africa and racism'', 2nd ed., 1989.)</ref>

This foundation belief was reinforced during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the reports of upper-class European travelers about the, to them, dirty, disgusting, diseased communities they found outside of Europe. This was both a class phenomenon and a cultural one: alien lifeways necessarily seemed to be unhealthy. But the belief gained powerful reinforcement during the nineteenth century, when the growing wealth and modernization of (much of) Europe led to a dramatic improvement in health conditions, grounded in general improvement in living conditions, improved sanitation, and, finally, progress in medicine. Europe, therefore, seemed to be somehow healthy, non-Europe, somehow unhealthy. This error is still very widespread. Underdeveloped countries are poor. With poverty comes ill health. But the ill health is thought, incorrectly, to somehow stem from the natural environments of these regions or from the cultures of their inhabitants, not from poverty. However disease-ridden India, Africa, China, etc., may have been in this period, Europe itself had been just as disease-ridden a century or so earlier (a fact known in part from the demographic facts about life expectancy of ordinary Europeans down to the eighteenth century).

In this same period European colonial territories were expanding, and it became evident that Europeans living in colonies tended to fall prey to various kinds of exotic diseases. The most extreme case apparently was West Africa, which was called in those times "the white man's grave." Here the insecurity of the quite small coastal settlements—colonial territories in sub-Saharan Africa did not really expand until very late in the nineteenth century—combined with the massive effects of the movement of slaves (many of whom died in these settlements) produced peculiarly unhealthy conditions, though the Europeans thought the source of the problem was the innate unhealthfulness of Africa itself.

Most of the important diseases of humans and their domesticated animals are not peculiarly tropical. Smallpox, typhoid, pneumonia, diphtheria, measles, bubonic plague, anthrax, and many other diseases are found across many physical environments, and their severity from place to place tends to reflect, more than anything else, conditions of human poverty, crowding, and the like. To some extent this is true even of the supposedly "tropical diseases," such as malaria (which, in fact, used to plague extratropical areas, including New York). Some forms of malaria tend to be associated with stagnant water, and thus with irrigated agriculture, in a wide range of climates. Other forms, including some of the most serious ones, are associated with tropical forest conditions, the mosquito vector often breeding in bromeliad growths on the trees themselves. It is true that these forms of malaria are especially associated with shifting cultivation in the humid tropics. But farmers spend relatively little time in the forest, if indeed there is forest. And they develop immunities such that malaria does not ravage their communities (as it does ravage communities of foreigners in their midst: traders, colonial military personnel, and so on).

The question is: after all such matters have been taken into consideration, is there, then, a remainder that can be called "the innate unhealthiness of the tropics?" Probably the answer is no.

Although this generalization is now widely accepted, some historians cling tenaciously to the idea that Africa is and always has been a uniquely disease-ridden place. This is given as one reason for Africa's (supposed) marginal role in world history, at least in modern world history. (According to William McNeill, disease "more than anything else, is why Africa remained backward in the development of civilization when compared to temperate lands."<ref>McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976), p. 43.</ref>) In the view of some of the absolutonist historians, notably Curtin, the disease-ridden character of West and Central Africa in and after the sixteenth century is a key part of the explanation for the complementary facts that this region became the source of slaves for the Atlantic plantation economy and that this region, instead of "rising" with the growth of the Atlantic economy, instead remained undeveloped. It is important to put this theory into perspective in terms of the confrontation mentioned at the beginning of this chapter between traditional European historians and the Third-Worldist, revisionist school. Traditional scholars (at least those of the absolutonist school) claim that Africa in the sixteenth century had a rather small and mobile population, with little development of complex civilization and state organization, and with slave raiding and slave trading as important features of its society. Africa had not risen above this very low level of civilization mainly because of the prevalence of human and animal diseases—with other environmental factors of the sort previously discussed being added on as additional factors. Africa thus quite naturally became the prime source of plantation slaves; and, also naturally, the slave trade did not fundamentally alter the reality of African life.

Third World historians tend to dispute all of this. Africa was densely populated before the slave trade, and the slave trade utterly devastated the continent, destroying states and civilizations, depopulating vast regions, and leading, overall, to disastrous underdevelopment. The slave trade mainly reflected Europe's power relative to coastal African societies in the seventeenth century and thereafter, in consequence of the immensely profitable American plantations and—as we discuss in Chapter 4—the fact that militarily and commercially powerful West African states were mostly located some distance from the coast. Disease increased in intensity because of the devastation caused by the slave trade: depopulation, the abandonment of large areas formerly cultivated and grazed (now turned to forest and scrub), wars, economic decline, and so on. One crucial example of this devastation has to do with the tsetse fly and trypanosomiasis or African sleeping sickness. Traditional scholars claim that tsetse fly infestation prevented Africans from developing extensive cattle herding in earlier times and in many other ways contributed to historical stagnation. The response is that trypanosomiasis, like anthrax, is a disease with many mammalian hosts. Depopulation led to the massive expansion of wastelands, and of wild animal host populations, and thus to the spread of conditions in which the tsetse fly could flourish. This in turn changed trypanosomiasis from an endemic disease to which both humans and cattle had some immunity and exposure, which was kept in check by the relatively full occupation of lands, into a devastating disease that, since the end of the last century, has indeed prevented the development of animal husbandry in some areas of Africa. There is considerable evidence that the expansion of bushland led to the expansion of tsetse-fly-infested areas and thus to economic and social misery.<ref>See, for instance, Giblin, "Trypanosomiasis Control in African History: An Evaded Issue?" (1990); Turshen, "Population Growth and the Deterioration of Health: Mainland Tanzania, 1920-1960" (1987).</ref> Beyond this, there is little solid evidence either way about the history of health conditions in Africa and among Africans (not colonial visitors), and there are many reasons to doubt the inherited diffusionist assumptions and prejudices on this matter. In any event, one cannot make a case that disease was an independent force that "blocked" development in sub-Saharan Africa.

=== Arid, Despotic Asia ===

Asia is a large place and contains a large variety of environments. There is, understandably, a very long and varied list of traditional environmentalistic arguments, most of them particular to some one part of Asia and inapplicable to other parts. Back in the early nineteenth century, a pious form of environmental determinism prevailed in geography, and it seemed sensible to invoke a single explanation for all of this variety: God had placed different natural obstacles in the paths of different Asian peoples—heat in one place, cold in another, drought in a third. Today it is more common to find, among historians writing about the "European miracle," not a list of Asia's environmental infirmities but rather a set of separate comparative judgments, each centered on Europe, and each referring to a specific period in European history. Europe, or some part of Europe, at some particular time, was superior to all of Asia in environmental qualities X and Y and Z. Or, more typically, the comparison will invoke environmental obstacles for one Asian region, political obstacles for another, religious obstacles for a third, and so on, in a very eclectic sort of argument.

For these reasons I will not review all the environmentalistic theories as to why Asia supposedly remained backward in comparison to Europe. I will deal with the comparative judgments about climate, landforms, and so on, one by one, in the following section of this chapter ("Temperate Europe").

There is, however, one very large and coherent theory that is used today, much as it was in the last century, to deal with Asia as a whole in one grand and sweeping judgment of inferiority. This theory has a number of variants which are known by various names, among them "the Asiatic mode of production," "hydraulic society," and "Oriental despotism." The theory is not usually thought of as an example of environmental determinism, since it seems to start its argument with technology, claiming that irrigation-based ("hydraulic") societies have certain highly distinctive characteristics that inhibit historical development. But one of the roots of this argument is environmental. It is the claim that aridity in Asia made irrigation necessary. One can properly ask how a theory of this sort can be applied to parts of Asia that are not at all arid. (It has even been invoked as an explanation for Stalinism in wet, cold Russia.<ref>Wittfogel, ''Oriental Despotism'' (1957).</ref>) To understand this contradiction, and to understand accordingly why this theory is untenable in all its forms and variants, we must look briefly at the history of the doctrine.

European writers of the past half-millennium have tended to view Asia as a place where people are inherently unfree and society is inherently unchanging. It would take us far afield to go into the evolution of this belief, but by the eighteenth century it had become a significant part of the emerging doctrine of diffusionism.<ref>See Venturi "The History of the Concept of 'Oriental Despotism' in Europe" (1963); P. Anderson, ''Lineages of the Absolute State'' (1974); B. Chandra, "Karl Marx, His Theories of Asian Societies, and Colonial Rule" (1981).</ref> It was accepted as an axiomatic truth, rarely questioned, but efforts were made to explain this inherent "Oriental despotism" (as it came to be called) in terms of everything from theology to race to environment. The belief seems to have been applied mainly to the Ottoman Empire, which was in that period a political and military threat to some European societies and a commercial threat to others, until the late eighteenth-century expansion of direct European colonialism in India and Southeast Asia gave the theory new functions. Not only was the notion of Oriental despotism useful as a justification and rationalization for colonial expansion, but it became the basis for colonial legal doctrines that were being fashioned at that time. In Asia, it was decided, there is no private property in land because the ruler, despotically, owns everything. Therefore, when we Europeans depose the ruler, we own everything. And if we take over a despotic state, we acquire the rights of despotic rule over a people who were unfree to begin with. (But European rule, however despotic—colonies had no democracy—was described as bestowing "freedom.")

The modern form of Oriental despotism was often connected back to the biblical "Orient." When modern Asian societies were described as "stagnant," it seemed fair to assert that they basically retained the character described for them in the Old Testament. (The Old Testament, we recall, spoke of the existence of great cities, empires, agriculture, etc.) While it was necessary to explain modern wonders like the Taj Mahal and great modern Asian states, it was not difficult to view these as relatively minor advances over the original biblical civilization, and to find secondary explanations for the evident fact that Asian civilizations had advanced somewhat—but long ago they had ceased to advance, and so remained essentially biblical and essentially stagnant.<ref>Similar judgments are still commonly made by theoreticians of the European miracle. For instance, John Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 12: "Chinese society was stuck in the same stage for over two thousand years, while Europe, in comparison, progressed like a champion hurdler."</ref>

I think it likely that the geographical connection between aridity and "Orient" comes partly from this source, that is, from the biblical images of arid regions like Mesopotamia and Egypt. Partly, no doubt, it comes from the fact that early modern Europe, down through the mid-eighteenth century, thought mainly of the dry western Asian regions, the Ottoman realm and the Persian-Inner-Asian region, as "the Orient," because the farther Orient, from India to Japan, was still somewhat remote from European attention. In any event, early nineteenth-century geographers like the great Karl Ritter were describing one special type of geographical-cultural system, the type associated with Asian civilizations of the great river valleys of arid Asia and northeastern Africa, notably the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Indus, and smaller valleys of similar character, and ascribing the traditional Asiatic traits of despotism to regions of this type. They seem to have extended this model somehow to comprehend the river valleys of wetter parts of Asia, through a logical leap from the idea of irrigated river-valley civilizations in arid regions to irrigated river-valley civilizations in Asia as a whole.

The general association of Oriental despotism with river-valley civilizations, from Egypt to China, was commonplace in the nineteenth century.<ref>And also earlier. It is discussed for instance by Montesquieu, Bernier, Adam Smith, and Hegel (see, for instance, "Introduction," and "The Oriental World" in Hegel's ''Philosophy of History'', 1956). Also see the historical reviews in Venturi, "The History of the Concept of 'Oriental Despotism' in Europe" (1963); P. Anderson, ''Lineages of the Absolute State'' (1974); and B. Chandra, "Karl Marx, his Theories of Asian Societies, and Colonial Review" (1981).</ref> Marx and Engels, however, took the idea a definitive step forward by advancing a theory that derived Oriental despotism from propositions about aridity and irrigation.<ref>This idea, too, had its forerunners. Possibly Marx got the idea from Karl Ritter, his professor of geography at Berlin.</ref> In the 1850s Marx and Engels were, for the first time, seriously confronting the question of how their essential theory of historical evolution could be applied on a world scale. It needs to be said first that they were probably the most skeptical European thinkers of their time as regards all of the traditional and (as they insisted) elitist social theories then in vogue. But their skepticism had inevitable limits, since they were products of an elitist German education and since they knew almost nothing about the world outside of Europe apart from what they learned in the press, and in books and official papers presenting the colonial point of view with all its prejudices. Accordingly, Marx and Engels did not seriously question the prevailing doctrine that the Orient is in some sense despotic and to some degree historically stagnant and unprogressive. But their skepticism about European social theory, with its elitist foundations, immunized them from the usual explanations for Asian despotism and stagnation. Asians were no less rational than Europeans, and no less willing to struggle against economic exploitation. This reasoning led Marx and Engels to speculate that the cause of Asiatic despotism and unprogressiveness lay, not in human society, but in the natural environment. In Asia, it appeared, social evolution had not led to private property ownership: the ruler, despotically, owned the land, except where it remained as original communal property. Hence this speculation from Engels:

The absence of property in land is indeed the key to the whole of the East. Herein lies its political and religious history. But how does it come about that the Orientals did not arrive at landed property, even in its feudal form? I think it is mainly due to the climate, taken in connection with the nature of the soil, especially with the great stretches of desert which extend from the Sahara straight across Arabia, Persia, India and Tartary up to the highest Asian plateau. Artificial irrigation is here the first condition of agriculture. ... An Oriental government never had more than three departments: finance (plunder at home), war (plunder at home and abroad), and public works.<ref>Marx and Engels, ''Selected Correspondence'' (1975).</ref>

This theory was advanced very tentatively by Marx and Engels, and was modified in later writings; it appears that Engels rejected it altogether in his late writings.<ref>Marx and Engels considered other factors as well, and it is fair to say that their analysis remained speculative. I believe that Engels withdrew from the idea of "Oriental despotism" in late life. See the discussion of this topic in P. Anderson, ''Lineages of the Absolute State'' (1974); Blaut, "Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism" (1989); and B. Chandra, "Karl Marx, His Theories of Asian Societies, and Colonial Rule" (1981).</ref> Our interest lies in the fact that the environmentalistic component remains influential today, even though it is now obvious that Marx and Engels were mistaken in the notion that Asia is arid. The theory nonetheless has had an effect on recent Marxist discussions about the European rise of capitalism and the (supposed) nonrise of capitalism in Asia.<ref>See Laibman, "Modes of Production and Theories of Transition" (1984), and Bailey and Llobera, ''The Asiatic Mode of Production'' (1981).</ref> More crucially, it has been woven into the mainstream European miracle literature in an interesting intellectual sea change.

Max Weber, early in the present century, and Karl Wittfogel, at midcentury, are probably the key figures in the transformation of this rather archaic doctrine into a modern environmentalistic argument for the European miracle. Weber had little to say about the natural environment per se. Drawing on various scholarly ideas which were in circulation in turn-of-the-century Europe, including Marxian ideas, he argued that the development of private property in Europe's Antiquity and Middle Ages was indeed one of the primary features of social evolution toward capitalism. He stressed what he saw as a fundamental difference between the rise of feudal (seigneurial) property, which was close to, and moving toward, full private property, and a contrasting form that he associated with the Asian river-valley civilizations (and ancient Egypt). He saw that social form as being associated closely with the need to irrigate in such environments, hence associated, inferentially, with the environment. These latter societies were, he said, despotic and land was not, in general, passed fully into the hands of officials, but rather lent to them on temporary tenure, on condition of service, as a means of providing them with rental income, men for military levies, and so on. Irrigation required collective labor appropriation under despotic rule, for maintenance of canals and waterworks. In forested lands of Europe, such despotic rule over peasants had not been needed.<ref>Weber, ''The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations'' (1976), pp. 84, 131, 157, ''The Religion of China'' (1951), pp. 16, 21, 25, and "The Origin of Seigneurial Proprietorship," part 1, chap. 3, esp. pp. 56-57 in ''General Economic History'' (1981). Also see McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976), pp. 93, 207, 259.</ref> Thus in Greece and elsewhere in Europe yeoman farmers, individualists, became the signature of rural society. Cities, instead of being mainly the seat of despotic power, became truly urban. Thus, in general, there was a peculiarly western trajectory, toward modern urban and capitalist society.

The crucial factor which made Near Eastern development so different (from Greek development) was the need for irrigation systems, as a result of which the cities were closely connected with building canals and constant regulation of waters and rivers, all of which demanded the existence of a unified bureaucracy. There was an irreversible character to this development, and with it went subjugation of the individual. ... On the other hand in Greece ... the position of the monarchs declined ... and so began a development which ended ... with an army recruited from yeoman farmers who provided their own arms. Political power necessarily passed to this class, and therewith started to emerge that purely secular civilization which characterized Greek society and caused capitalist development in Greece to differ from that in the Near East.<ref>Weber, ''The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations'' (1976), pp. 157-158. Also, on p. 84: "The basis of the economy (in Egypt) was irrigation, for this was the crucial factor in all exploitation of land resources. Every new settlement demanded construction of a canal ... Now canal construction is necessarily a large-scale operation, demanding some sort of collective social organization; it is very different from the relatively individualistic activity of clearing virgin forest. Here then is the fundamental economic cause for the overwhelmingly dominant position of the monarchy in Mesopotamia (and) Egypt.</ref>

Weber's formulation of the difference between Oriental societies and Western societies has become one of the fundamental arguments of the miracle theory as it is put forward in our own time. But Weber did not put firmly in place one important part of the edifice. This is the matter of showing why irrigation societies acquired the special characteristics assigned to them: despotism and stagnation, and, beyond that, lack of private property, lack of full urban development, and so on. This essential technical and environmental elaboration of the theory was introduced in 1955 by Karl Wittfogel, in his book ''Oriental Despotism''.

Wittfogel, an ex-Marxist who started his argument with the Marxian proposition which we have discussed, tried to show that societies grounded in irrigation, "hydraulic societies" as he called them, are necessarily despotic and must necessarily have the kinds of social and political properties that earlier writers had associated with Oriental despotism. The same is true of societies that somehow acquire-at-a-distance the characteristics of hydraulic societies, by diffusion. (Hence, according to Wittfogel, nonhydraulic Soviet Russia became despotic.) Wittfogel's reasoning was environmentalistic, in a manner less ignorant of physical geography than Marx and Weber but nonetheless quite naive. Wittfogel believed that irrigating a tract of land necessarily, deterministically, increases its productivity. Some societies will thus choose to adopt irrigated agriculture, and so the great river valleys of Asia were occupied. But, according to Wittfogel, irrigation requires major public works for the creation and maintenance of canals, and hence requires a command-type political structure—he says this was the origin of the state as a political form—which also functions to control the distribution of water.

Thus hydraulic societies are necessarily despotic. There are a number of fallacies in this argument, as many scholars have pointed out. Three of the fallacies concern the environmental proposition, the idea that irrigation necessarily increases productivity massively, and therefore leads to the development of complex social stratification, the state, and so on. First fallacy: irrigation increases productivity substantially only when the ecologically limiting factor on crop growth is lack of water; but quite often—in Asia as elsewhere—this is not the case. This means that the elaboration of great irrigation systems is not a natural response to the environment. Rather, a small-scale irrigation system in a river-valley can become enlarged into the great system as an effect, not a cause, of political and social inequality: pressure to deliver surplus pushes the process, enlarges the irrigation network, and leads, logically, to ever greater inequality. In other words, the large irrigation systems are preceded by, and explained by, existing despotism or social complexity, not by environmental mandates. (Wittfogel argues in roughly the opposite direction: the need to irrigate in a dry region leads a society to develop coercive command structures to manage the irrigation system, and thence leads to class oppression and the state—and despotic Oriental civilization.) The one ecological generalization that makes undoubted sense is the correlation of land productivity with population size and density, which is basic to the elaboration of social hierarchies and such things as religious ceremonial centers and states. But irrigation does not, magically, make land productive. Some land is highly productive without it. In the classical Mesopotamian and Nile cases we do not know whether the ruling classes forced increases in productivity, and this created the large irrigation systems, or whether the process worked the other way around. The second fallacy is the belief that the irrigation of truly dry river valleys made these valleys immensely productive, overall. Irrigation allowed agriculture to be practiced in lands otherwise desertic, but water was always in short supply and we know very little about crop yields. What we do know is that the really high productivity, and large social entities (in terms of population size as well as density), were found in wetter regions, mainly rice-farming regions, where elaborate irrigation systems usually were unnecessary for agriculture (and sometimes rainwater alone filled the paddies, as on the lower Irrawaddy plain and part of northern Luzon). Third fallacy: There is good reason to believe that some of the oldest civilizations were grounded not in irrigation, but in drainage, an ecological response that does not ordinarily involve large-scale waterworks. Drainage systems seem to have preceded irrigation in the earliest Mesoamerican civilizations. It is quite possible that the earliest Eastern Hemisphere irrigation systems, in such places as the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Indus, the Wei, the Yellow, the Niger, etc., were originally drainage systems, opening up swampy riverine regions and perhaps elaborating polities long before the societies became committed to major engineering works and so became "hydraulic."<ref>See, for instance, Denevan, ''The Aboriginal Cultural Geography of the Llanos de Mojos of Bolivia'' (1966), and "Hydraulic Agriculture in the American Tropics" (1982), on ancient drained-field or raised-field agriculture in the tropics; Golson, "No Room at the Top: Agricultural Intensification in the New Guinea Highlands" (1977), on ancient drainage in highland New Guinea; Doolittle, ''Canal Irrigation in Prehistoric Mexico'' (1990), on drainage and early agriculture in Mexico; Harrison and Turner ''Pre-Hispanic Maya Agriculture'' (1978), on early drainage in the Maya lowlands.</ref>

Wittfogel's environmentalistic argument, bringing down to our own time the old ideas of Marx and Engels about aridity, irrigation, despotism, and stagnation, juxtaposed with Weber's arguments about the difference between Oriental despotism and the rest, is seminal for many present-day European miracle historians, although most of them modify Wittfogel's theory in important ways. The essential concept is the notion of hydraulic society, explicitly or implicitly seen as a natural product of arid Asian river valleys (and the Nile). The way this leads to "miracle" arguments in the writings of such historians as Eric L. Jones, Michael Mann, and John Hall deserves a moment's attention.

Eric L. Jones, in ''The European Miracle'', lays stress on what he conceives to be the fundamental difference between "rainfall-farming" societies of Europe and irrigating societies of Asia. Wittfogel, he says, was essentially right. Irrigating societies suffered the "political consequences of a society with a huge, manipulated peasant mass."

European agricultural society was able to avoid a comparable history of authoritarianism—a kind of political infantilism—by virtue of an open-ended productive environment of forest land and rainfall farming.<ref>Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), pp. 8-9.</ref>

Jones then adds to all of this his theory that farmers who work in warm standing water become diseased—a fallacy, as we saw above, that confuses the consequences of poverty with those of ecological settings.

The fairy tale (for it is that) which associates marvelous social consequences with "rainfall farming" of the European variety will claim our attention shortly. Here it should simply be noted that all of the supposedly dire effects that Jones—like Wittfogel before him—attributes to irrigation societies are, in point of fact, the normal attributes of ancient class society and ancient civilization. That is, when these civilizations emerge, we find, as part of the process, reduction in peasant freedom, recruiting of masses of people for various purposes, and the like. The romantic image of free peasants is an image drawn from preserfdom, prefeudal times. After Franco-Roman colonization European peasants were as unfree as any peasants of the Asian river valleys or anywhere else. And of course rainfall farming, along with forested frontiers, was characteristic of much of Asia.

John A. Hall, in ''Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West'', wants to distance himself from Wittfogel's "fantasy" (as he calls it) about the inherently despotic nature of Oriental society. He then promptly absorbs a good part of Wittfogel's theory into his own formulation of reasons for the European "miracle." Hall, like most miracle theorists, tries to make use of the greatest possible range of traditional arguments for the miracle, then pushes certain arguments forward as supposedly the most important ones. He thinks that political forces and Malthusian demographic forces are the most important, although he sees as a deeper force the Weberian notion of European "rationality." Hall does not accept the formula that leads to the generalization that Oriental states were despotic. No, he says, they were arbitrary, cruel, and unwilling or unable to encourage economic development, and they held Oriental society stagnant (or, much the same thing, going through repetitive cycles). But they were not despotic. By this he means that Oriental states were not truly strong, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. We will see, shortly, how he says that medieval European states had some sort of inner strength, an organic quality, with progressive change somehow teleologically prefigured in their medieval form. So, according to Hall, there was Oriental despotism but the despots were weak.<ref>Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), pp. 12-13, 27-28, 36, 42-3, 53, 59, 99, 102, 137.</ref> Hall then introduces irrigation as another independent factor.

[In Europe] there was no need for irrigation. It is quite likely that this encouraged, or at least allowed for, a decentred agricultural civilization based on individual initiative."<ref>Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 11. Also see pp. 41, 123, 132.</ref>

Thus a "need" for irrigation in Asia, which must have been an environmental need. Thus, the old Wittfogelian equation of irrigation with despotism (as against "individual initiative"). Then Hall moves to other factors on his very long list.

Michael Mann is another contemporary theorist of the "European miracle," and he too has a long laundry list of factors which, he thinks, contributed to the miracle.<ref>Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986). Also see his essay, "European Development: Approaching a Historical Explanation" (1988).</ref> He tends to emphasize the importance of ancient Europe's acquisition of political and especially military power. Mann takes pains to distance himself from Wittfogel, but in the end he incorporates most of Wittfogel's model—perhaps I should call it the Marx-Weber-Wittfogel model—into his own theory. Like Marx, Weber, Wittfogel, Jones, and Hall, he accepts the characterization of ancient Oriental societies (from Egypt to China) as unfree and unprogressive. But he points out that the despotisms did not extend to true large-scale political military power. And the ancient Oriental civilizations, although they were rooted in irrigation agriculture, also made use of other forms of resource use in areas adjoining the river valleys. Mainly for these reasons, Mann claims that Wittfogel "overextended his model."<ref>Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 94.</ref> Ancient irrigating societies were despotic but they were not powerful, and this, for Mann, is what counts. Mann then rephrases the model and puts it, more or less entire, into his own theory. The distinction that counts is indeed, he says, the one between "irrigating" and "rainfall" farming societies. Asian societies are sweepingly categorized as the former, European societies as the latter. According to Mann, the fact that European farmers, starting with the ancient Greeks, used iron plows and farmed unirrigated ("rainfall") land, is the one most fundamental reasons that Europe forged ahead of Asia and North Africa. This was the first great miracle. It put Europe ahead of all other areas, and Europe has remained ahead ever since.

Here, in brief, is Mann's argument. We start with the ancient Near Eastern civilizations, grounded mainly in irrigation. Conceding that irrigation was the innovation that caused these civilizations to rise in the first place, Mann argues that the irrigation base somehow "caged," or confined, the population; this metaphor is meant to convey the idea that these people are unfree, and also in some sense constrained from further social progress. (It is a metaphor and not an argument.) Around 1800 B.C., says Mann, "the Middle Eastern empires of domination were shaken by two immense challenges . . . from the north," from Indo-European invaders—this seems to be a version of the discredited "Aryan migrations" theory—who brought two revolutions with them, based in charioteer warfare and the use of iron tools and particularly iron plows. The "balance of power now shifted northward."<ref>Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 179.</ref> Mann concedes in passing that these northern folk did not actually invent chariot warfare and ironworking (which came perhaps from Anatolia), but he passes without pause (or logic) to the thesis that the northern peoples, Indo-Europeans, acquired dominance in politicomilitary terms and in terms of productive power. From this point forward, Mann contrasts two civilizations, the "irrigating" ones of the Middle East and the iron-plow-using, rainwater-farming peoples of the north—Greece and, broadly, Europe. Mainly because the Europeans were iron-plow-rainfall-farming peoples, they acquired, initially in Greece, modern civilization, including democracy, classes, private (more or less) property, science, and a respect for human reason.<ref>The fact that Mann attributes the ancient European takeoff mainly to chariot warfare and iron-plow rainfall-farming, yet concedes that both innovations were initiated by Middle Easterners themselves, suggests to me that Mann's fundamental causal reasoning centers on the notion of European rationality: regardless of who invented these things, the Europeans put the things to work. That this Weberian notion is indeed basic for Mann will be demonstrated later in this chapter.</ref> Why? The centerpiece of the model is the image of an individual peasant-farming family which is fundamentally independent. It gets its water from the skies, not from a despotically managed irrigation system. Iron, says Mann, is abundant, so the peasant farmer does not depend upon cities and long-distance trade networks to acquire iron for plows and axes. This independent peasant, a true yeoman farmer (as Weber also had said), is the prototypical democratic, civilized, energetic, forward-looking European.

None of this makes sense. To begin with, it is geographically absurd to imagine that the Middle East was a region without plow agriculture, one basically of irrigated river-valley populations. Plows were used in irrigated farming. Rainfall-based farming was dominant, not in Egypt and Mesopotamia, but in most of the Levant, Anatolia, Iran, and of course much of Asia farther east, not to mention Africa. Iron working was not invented by Europeans and was used as much by non-Europeans as by Europeans. The same is true of the iron plow, which was as important in early China, for instance, as in early Europe.<ref>Bray, ''Agriculture'', vol. 6, part 2, of Needham and collaborators, ''Science and Civilization in China'' (1984).</ref> (It is an old myth that Indo-European speakers, Aryans, spread the use of the plow to, and only to, the regions they settled or conquered.) Workable-grade iron ore deposits are not as abundant as Mann thinks they are (except in certain special regions, such as some of the laterite deposits of the humid tropics).

But the silliest part of Mann's thesis is the environmental determinism. We have an image of an arid region fit for nothing but irrigated farming, which is assumed to be a tether on the progress of civilization. We have an image of an open region of good soil, forested, in which iron-using peasant farmers not only produce an unmatched abundance but also acquire from their ecology a democratic, bold, bright, form of society which marches forward then to modernity. Let me add just a word about each of these images.

Irrigation, in the eyes of many miracle theorists, is somehow unproductive. Jones, Mann, and others make the assertion that more food is produced per worker on rain-watered lands. This is not true. In fact, irrigation was developed to increase food production, whether or not the source of the process was the aspirations of village people themselves or the surplus requirements of a political or religious superstructure. When an irrigated district has reached the point where there is serious land shortage, that is, late in its social and geographic evolution (along one possible line of development), the productivity per person declines. This is obvious. It means, first of all, that farm workers spend more time during the year producing and have less time for nonfarming activities, including village cultural life and work on such things as monumental structures. Eventually this situation may lead to the collapse of the farming system, with salinization, and so on, and finally, perhaps, starvation. Contrast this now with nonirrigated agriculture. Normally, there is poorer nutrient status of soil (irrigation brings dissolved nutrients in the water, and alluvial soils tend to have good nutrient status). Normally, there is greater moisture deficit, given the dependence on unpredictable rains. Thus natural fertility tends to be lower on nonirrigated land, all other things being equal (which they often are not). Now it is true that early iron-age farmers, clearing forested land and making new farms, achieved high production on this fresh land, but that phenomenon is transitory, and in any case it did not have much effect in the semi-arid valleys of Greece. Early European farmers tended in fact to settle on alluvial lands and lowland terraces, and quite early they were using irrigation and drainage—because it enhanced labor productivity.

The notion that European agriculture was somehow conducive to independent living in a way contrasted with Asian agriculture is another part of this myth. Early European farmers were not to any great extent, as Mann depicts them, living in isolation from one another, surrounded by forest. In the cases where they did live this way it was, again, a frontier phenomenon, in Asia as well as Europe. Farmers mostly lived in social aggregates, villages, large or small, compact or linear, depending upon many circumstances. There is no reason to doubt that the upland farming communities of Asia were quite similar to those in Europe. We return to this matter later in the chapter when we discuss the myth of the unique European family. For now I will simply categorize as mythic the idea that early European agricultural communities were somehow more individualistic, more independent-minded, more progressive than were communities elsewhere.

The most fundamental error made by the nineteenth-century thinkers and Weber and now mechanically repeated by historians such as Jones, Hall, and Mann, is to believe, or assume, that one type of environment produces a particular type of society and the latter then persists down through history. You simply cannot contrast the very ancient irrigating civilizations of Asia and North Africa with the later nonirrigating farming civilizations of Europe—or indeed of Asia—and then suppose that two contrasting civilizational types have been, thereby, created so as to remain in place down through history. Culture changes. Farmers move from one environment to another. In many places farmers practice both irrigation and nonirrigated agriculture on different soil types when appropriate land is available to them.<ref>Blaut, "Two Views of Diffusion" (1977).</ref> Thus the theory which asserts that arid Asian agricultural civilization produces a stagnant, despotic form of society down through later times, one which will not develop toward modernity, is purely a myth.

=== Temperate Europe ===

We have already seen how historians constructed a mythic model of "rainfall-farming" European society, supposing that rainfall brings benefits not associated with irrigation and that Europeans alone, in their hemisphere, practice "rainfall farming." Historians like Mann, Jones, and Hall carry the argument farther along. Europe's rainfall-based farming, combined with Europe's supposedly fine and fertile soils, produced an environmental basis for agricultural production unmatched elsewhere. Although these historians give a lot of credit to the supposedly uniquely rational, inventive, European mind, they give much of the credit to Europe's natural environment.

For example, Michael Mann draws a picture of a steady northwestward movement of European history—what we described in Chapter 1 as an Orient Express model—which he sees as an essential continuance down into the Middle Ages of the northwestern trajectory of that individualistic, creative, bumptious peasant society which, he thinks, emerged in the Iron Age with the uniquely European marriage of farming, iron, and rain-watered land. His model of the evolution of Europe's society (its "miracle") is much more complex than this, but a key part of that model is the inexorable, steady, historically pregnant geographical movement—what he calls a northwestern "drift," with a permanent northwest "leading edge." Eschewing philosophical determinism, he nonetheless gives the whole process a strongly Hegelian, teleological flavor.<ref>Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), pp. 247, 406, 408, 412, 504-510, 520, 530, 539-540.</ref> One of two main reasons for this northwestern movement is the beckoningly fine environment of northwest Europe. And the main reason why this environment is so fine is its "deeper, wetter, more fertile soils."<ref>Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 509.</ref>

John Hall, similarly, extols the "northern European clay soils,"<ref>Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 99.</ref> northwest Europe's "deep and productive clay soils fed by rainfall" ("There was no need for irrigation").<ref>Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 110.</ref> Eric L. Jones, in ''The European Miracle'', makes much the same claim, if slightly qualified. He writes of Europe's "open-ended productive environment of forest land and rainfall farming,"<ref>Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 10.</ref> of Europe's "High, even rainfall and passable summers."<ref>Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 47.</ref> Jones (unlike Mann and Hall) recognizes the fact that Asian land supports a higher farming population, with the implication that the land is more productive, but he merely notes that Europe's productive land comes in smaller, separated regions, and then he gives us one of the myths of Oriental despotism:

The very impracticability of hydraulic agriculture freed a fraction of European energies for other purposes. The rainfall farmers of Europe might be fewer in number than the farmers of China and India, but the former spent less time on all aspects of farmwork than the latter spent on water control work.<ref>Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 8. Jones makes the common error of assuming that productivity per worker is low in irrigated agriculture in comparison with unirrigated agriculture. This is not the case. Even with draft animals, medieval peasant production per worker was not high. And draft animals are used in irrigated farming, abundantly so in some Asian wet-rice farming systems.</ref>

The implication, of course, is that European peasant farmers didn't have to spend much time at farm work in order to satisfy their needs and their quota of surplus, whereas Asians worked much harder for the same product. This is plainly absurd unless we abandon historical method and try to compare Asian peasants under modern conditions of extreme land shortage with ancient European frontier conditions or modern European capitalist farmers. Stated differently, this makes no sense in terms of actual agricultural technique—irrigation is intended to increase productivity per worker, and usually does so—and in terms of any model of the historical European peasant as poor, oppressed, and overburdened.

The "wet soils" of which these historians speak are usually excessively wet: acidic podzols and gleys that are difficult to work and infertile until heavily manured. The "high, even rainfall and passable summers" are in fact a climate so wet that solar energy is often severely limited, grain crops sometimes cannot do well (recall how important was the post-1492 introduction of the potato), and soils do not dry out until late in spring, if at all. I do not want to caricature the situation. It is merely the case that northwest European soils, across their entire range of variability, are not superior to the soils of many other regions. In ecological terms, the lands of warmer, drier regions that have either good rainfall regimes or possibilities for irrigation or drainage tend to be rather higher in productivity. My point is more limited. There is nothing about Europe's agricultural environment that explains the so-called miracle, or that might lead one to believe (as the authors I have cited believe) that European history throughout its course has been favored over Asian history by the European agricultural environment.

Europe's supposed environmental superiority is by no means limited to farming. I will close our discussion of environmentalism by briefly commenting on four other comparative judgments which are routinely made by present historians of the European "miracle."

First is the classical "capes and bays" argument, familiar to most European and Anglo-American schoolchildren. Supposedly, Europe's configuration of peninsulas and bays, and Europe's possession of navigable rivers, gave this continent a natural basis for communication, trade, and accessibility denied to other continents. This, then, is supposed to have had a lot to do with the rise of markets and eventually capitalism in Europe.<ref>Mann, "European Development" (1988), p. 10, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 406; Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), pp. 90, 227; Crone, ''Pre-Industrial Societies'' (1989), p. 150; McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976), p. 295.</ref> Part of the argument, like the emperor's clothes, is transparently false when looked at directly. For instance, accessibility by sea along the coasts of the Indian Ocean and much of the South China Sea was considerably easier in the Middle Ages than it was in Atlantic Europe. (If monsoonal wind patterns posed a problem in the Indian Ocean, storms posed a greater problem in the North Atlantic.) Trading cities dotted the Indian coast, and trading vessels plied up and down this coast, and on to Indonesia and Arabia, carrying bulk commodities like rice and iron as well as high-value goods, long before Italian galleys inaugurated a regular commodity trade between the Mediterranean and the northwest Atlantic. I do not belittle the great seamanship of the Atlantic fishermen, the Iceland traders, and the Hanseatic League when I note, simply, that other regions were using the sea as effectively as the Europeans were at comparable times.

As to rivers, Europe's endowment of navigable rivers is impressive but not unique. It is not better than India's and China's. Interisland navigation in insular Southeast Asia was much easier than was navigation up and down the Rhine, say, or the Danube. Again it is a matter simply of reducing comparisons to reality. The "capes and bays" errors are normally followed by another error: the idea that Europe had, in early times, an advantage over civilizations that had to transport commodities overland. Many of the "miracle" historians repeat the theory that overland transport necessarily was much more costly than water transport. This is in fact a multiplicity of comparisons. When Mann and others quote the old formulas about draft animals consuming their weight in fodder over a limited distance (some say this takes place within 100-150 km), they ignore the fact that most draft animals graze or browse along the way: hence the great Inner-Asian Silk Road and the Sudanic caravans are easily comprehensible.<ref>Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986, chap. 5). Mann in fact builds a theory of ancient warfare upon the basis of this sort of calculation, here also ignoring the fact that armies then as now provision themselves and their animals on the route of march.</ref> Canals in China were much more effective than circuitous coastal shipping routes in Europe. And water transport—particularly upwind and upriver—may not have had advantages over land transport 1,000 or so years ago.

Eric L. Jones, in ''The European Miracle'', makes the large claim that Asia suffered so much more than Europe from natural disasters of all sorts that Asian development was strongly inhibited by this presumed fact.<ref>Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), chap. 2 and elsewhere. Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 132, makes the same claim, citing Jones.</ref> He carries the argument to the point of claiming that the risk of natural disaster was so high as to frighten ordinary people into unusual demographic behavior, to close off trade possibilities, and more. Setting aside the fact that we have very little historical data on this subject, the main error is a simple matter of scale. Jones's "Europe" is really West and Central Europe. This region is roughly the size of the Indian subcontinent and perhaps one-fourth the size of the settled portion of Asia. So it might well have one-fourth as many natural disasters, ceteris paribus. It is true that floods are more serious in regions where people farm river valleys, but populations make adjustments which keep this one risk small enough so that it does not affect long-term development, and I suspect that winter-weather dangers in rural Europe were as great as flood risk in Asia, on a per capita basis. Hurricanes are no worse than the worst North Atlantic winter storms. The theory as a whole is unsupported by evidence and empty of credibility as an argument for the European "miracle."

The miracle historians point repeatedly to Europe's environmental differentiation, claiming that this leads to a unique potential for interregional trade and thus, again, for capitalism.<ref>Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 111; Jones ''The European Miracle'' (1981), pp. 90, 105, 107, 226-227; Mann, "European Development: Approaching a Historical Explanation" (1988), p. 10; Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 406.</ref> One need merely note that Europe does not possess an unusually large range of environments, and natural products, by comparison with other regions of comparable size. China, for instance, has roughly the same range of midlatitude environments plus a tropical south coast.

The last environmentalistic fable to be discussed here is the claim that Europe's topographic differentiation into many small "core regions," separated by mountains and forests, somehow led to a number of supposedly unique features of ancient and medieval European society, including even the development of a unique trading system and a unique system of moderate-sized states and the many benefits supposedly deriving therefrom. Since this issue ties in with the parts of the "miracle" literature that concern Europe's supposed uniqueness in economic and political development, I will postpone discussing the geography of the matter until later in this chapter. Suffice it to say now that this idea of "cores" is partly a myth, and insofar as it is valid the same sorts of "cores" can be found in other continents.

=== Rationality ===

We turn now to the theories about Europe's historical superiority or priority—Europe's "miracle"—which ground themselves, not in biology, not in environment, but in culture. First I will deal with theories which start from a conception of the superior "rationality" of Europeans. "Rationality" in such theories embraces many psychological attributes, always including inventiveness and innovativeness (or progressiveness), usually a capacity for abstract thought, and often a certain ability to make moral or ethical judgments. The issue is not whether such things are or are not fundamental causes in history; the issue is whether Europeans had more rationality, or higher rationality, than every other human community, and whether this was the principal reason, or at any rate one of the principal reasons, for the unique rise of Europe. The plain assertion that Europeans are smarter than everyone else seems to have a certain antique or Victorian ring to it, but this is deceptive: theories about "Western rationality" and the like are just as important today as they were for prior generations of scholars. Sometimes they are difficult to identify as rationality theories because they display other plumage. An explanation may focus on, say, technology, arguing that European technological innovations produced various forward movements in European history; looked at closely, however, the technological explanation usually dissolves into a theory about the inventiveness of Europeans, that is, their rationality. By the same token, an explanation may start with the state, or free markets, or the family, but usually (not always) it derives such structures from the more basic trait, rationality. Sometimes it works the other way around. Classical racist theories were rationality theories: to be white is to be more intelligent. Some (not all) Marxist theories are rationality theories: the defeat of feudalism released creative energies which then led to technological innovation, etc. Another complication is that superior rationality may be posited just for one crucial period and place, a magic key that started the whole process: Periclean Athens, Gutenberg's workshop, etc. I will try to sort these matters out by dealing first with the category "rationality theories" as such, then turning to other sorts of theories, technological and institutional, some of which are also rooted in the idea of European rationality.

=== The Rationality Doctrine ===

At the beginning of this century most European scholars accepted the basic proposition that Europeans are more rational than non-Europeans. This was explained by a great variety of competing theories, biological racism being perhaps the most prominent, but I suspect that most Europeans accepted the proposition as indisputably correct regardless of the explanation. It was simply obvious that European countries had attained a higher level of wealth and civilization than other countries and had done so on their own, mainly through invention, innovation, and creativity. Europeans also now controlled the entire world and this, too, had to reflect some intellectual and probably also moral superiority. This was the heyday of the doctrine of classical diffusionism (discussed in Chapter 1), and few people doubted the doctrine's basic propositions: Europe develops; non-Europe does not develop or does so more slowly; Europe's development is based ultimately in some intellectual or spiritual principle; the normal and natural way for non-Europe to modernize and progress is by receiving the diffusion of rational European ideas, brought by European colonial administrators, settlers, planters, missionaries, and purveyors of commodities.

By this time most European thinkers had come to accept the doctrine of "the psychic unity of mankind," at least to the extent of agreeing that all of humanity shares a common ability to progress toward modernity. This doctrine crystallized into a theory, widely though not universally accepted in the early part of this century, that can be called the dualistic-developmental conception of human rationality. The elementary dualism was a distinction between the mentality of child and that of adult. The human mind has developed from a prehistoric condition which was mental childhood. European history is either to be explained as the fruit of human mental development or has been intimately accompanied by such mental development, in a process that was fundamentally the same as the psychological development from childhood to adulthood. Europeans became more rational as history progressed, just as children acquire rationality in the course of ontogenetic development. Ancient people had been not merely less intelligent but also much more governed by emotions and passions than by intellect, just as is the case with modern children. With some modification, the same was thought to be the case for modern European women, who were less intelligent and more governed by emotion than men, that is, they were less rational than men. But women, too, would experience mental development, and would eventually be rational enough to vote, hold public office, etc.

Non-Europeans, within the same theory, were seen as psychically undeveloped, as more or less childlike. But, given the psychic unity of mankind, non-Europeans could of course be brought to adulthood, to rationality, to modernity, through a set of learning experiences, mainly colonial. (The phrase "colonial tutelage" was a signature of the doctrine, and this conception is encountered in most history and geography textbooks of the time.) It was not simply a case of "the natives are like children." The idea of non-European nonrationality was a definite, putatively scientific principle, widely accepted: non-Europeans think somewhat like children, and will be led toward adulthood by Europeans. Non-Europeans were of course graded. "Savages" were mental children without qualification. Problematic peoples, like the Indians, Ottomans, and Chinese, were thought to be childlike in some respects and not in others. Indeed they were governed by emotion and passion much more than Europeans. (Colonial revolts were obviously irrational—were outbursts of childlike emotion.) As far as scientific and abstract philosophical thinking was concerned, the people of these cultures were clearly not up to full adult standards, but in some respects, notably in arts and crafts, they were perhaps gifted adolescents.

So we have a model which has, as its centerpiece, the Rational Modern Adult European Man. History is his progression to mental adulthood. He is contrasted with ancient European man; with modern European children; with modern European women; with modern non-Europeans. The contrast was often extended, also, to psychotics; in some schools of thought they were explicitly seen as having a developmentally arrested mentality and this was indeed used as a therapeutic principle.<ref>Occasionally "the criminal mind" was seen to reflect another dimension of contrast.</ref> What needs to be emphasized is the fact that this was considered to be a scientific theory. Thus it was valid to exchange principles across these various dimensions of contrast. For our purposes, the most important of these principles was the attribution of mental development to European history and the attribution of mental nondevelopment to non-Europe, past and present; hence Europeans had naturally acquired a unique rationality.

It would be wrong to reduce to caricature the scholarly theories of a few generations back, and the model I have just described looks, on the face of it, like a caricature. Most scholars did not literally believe, say, that the American Indian was a mental child, or that ontogenetic mental development exactly recapitulates the mental development of our species. But the model was a dominant force in European thought in certain precise ways. The equation of child, ancient, and non-European was explicitly accepted in nonscholarly discourse (newspapers, Tarzan novels, and so on). American educational policy toward Indians and other colonials was explicitly grounded in this model, even if it was a smoothed-down version of it. A very large number of writings in history, geography, and all of social science made use of one or another part of the model. And several very widely accepted theories were really forms of the same model. Three examples will be helpful.

Most anthropologists accepted the idea that there are two distinct mental types, one being the so-called "primitive mind," the mind of tribal peoples just about everywhere (some added: peasants everywhere). The "primitive mind" was very explicitly described—the most famous description is found in Lévy-Bruhl's influential book, ''How Natives Think''—as being incapable of higher theoretical and abstract ideas, as being emotion driven, and so on.<ref>Lévy-Bruhl, ''How Natives Think'' (1966).</ref> Some anthropologists opposed this notion (Boas, Radin, and Mead perhaps most notably<ref>See, for example, Boas, ''The Mind of Primitive Man'' (1938); Radin, ''Primitive Man as Philosopher'' (1927); M. Mead, ''Growing Up in New Guinea'' (1930).</ref>); most anthropologists accepted it with some qualifications; some accepted it literally. Lévy-Bruhl's rather stark form of the theory had great influence on psychologists and all of social science. Closely connected to this theory was the notion that there are "primitive languages," languages incapable of expressing higher theoretical and abstract thought. This old notion (which had been used in one form by William von Humboldt) was joined to the proposition that people cannot think beyond the limitations of their natural language, and so a primitive language entails a primitive mind.<ref>Stocking, ''Victorian Anthropology'' (1987), p. 59; Bowler, ''The Invention of Progress'' (1989), p. 66; Whitman "From Philology to Anthropology in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Germany" (1984); Bernal, ''Black Athena'', vol. 1 (1987); Said, ''Orientalism'' (1978). A recent expression of this theory came in a Soviet debate about "Oriental despotism" (Lelekov, "Round-Table: State and Law in the Ancient Orient," 1978). L. Lelekov, a historian, claimed that words meaning "freedom" and "right" were basic in the original Indo-European language or languages but not in Near Eastern languages, and asserted that this must have affected "social thinking" (p. 190). This contention was refuted by the philologist V. Ivanov (p. 193).</ref> Beyond that, the old philological theory about the innate superiority of Indo-European languages still had many adherents, and this theory extended the notion of primitive language to most of the non-European languages of the world. The third example is a broad family of theories in psychology that made use of the idea that mental development in the individual is homologous to mental development in the species, and that modern primitive peoples have the mentality of children and ancients, sometimes extending the concept to the putative psychological makeup (and limitations) of non-European peoples in general. In the twentieth century this theory received its most influential expression in the psychoanalytic viewpoint of Carl Jung and his followers. Jung swept broadly across non-Western cultures (Arabs, Indians, Africans, African-Americans, and others) declaring, basically, that only modern European man has fully developed an individual consciousness, an ego, an ability to think, even an ability to conceive of himself as an individual separate from the external world. Only European man is rational.<ref>See Dalal, "The Racism of Jung" (1988). In Jung's work, see in particular ''Psychological Types'' (1971) (for instance: "(If) we go right back to primitive psychology, we find absolutely no trace of the concept of the individual," p. 10); ''Memories, Dreams, Reflections'' (1963), and "The Dreamlike World of India," in ''Civilization in Transition'' (1927). See also the 1954 work by Jung's disciple Erich Neumann, ''The Origins and History of Consciousness'' (for instance: "The evolution of consciousness as a form of creative evolution is the peculiar achievement of Western man ... The creative character of consciousness is a central feature of the cultural canon of the West ... In stationary cultures, or in primitive societies where the original features of human culture are still preserved, the earliest stages of man's psychology predominate," pp. xviii-xxix).</ref>

The doctrine went through some important changes as it became absorbed into the "modernization" paradigm, the body of ideas which, as we have seen, came to dominate European social thought in the 1950s and still does so to some extent today. "Colonial tutelage" gave way to "diffusion of modernizing innovations." Non-Europeans no longer were "natives," and no longer were described as "childlike." In place of the notions of "primitive mind" and "primitive language" came the notion of traditional mentality. Non-Europeans are "traditional" in two senses: they lack "modern cognitive abilities," that is, the ability to think theoretically and scientifically, and they lack "modern attitudes" of the sort that push a person to achieve higher things, to reject the old, and so on.

This appears still to be the primitive mind, but there is an important difference. "Traditional minds" are simply waiting to be awakened, to be modernized. The larger picture was one of a vast landscape of traditional societies, containing people with traditional mentalities, and modernization would set the drama into motion. Mentalities would change. Social structure would change. New ideas and technology would diffuse into the modernizing societies from the already-modernized European societies, and so on. Recall that the modernization doctrine is not only a concept of the spatial spread of European ideas, attitudes, and the like, in the present-day postcolonial world. It is also a historical concept: modernization as history. "Traditional society" and "traditional mentality" came to be used to describe early Europe, the rise of Europe was now seen as a modernization process, and the start of that process was a much debated matter of deciding when Europe began its "takeoff"—its rise from the level of traditionalism and toward modernity. History is appealed to for the basic causal principle: Europe modernized, and now non-Europe will follow—though not slavishly—in its path. We will come back to this point in a moment. First I want to comment on the main causal principles that are thought to lead in the other direction. I will show that schools have arisen in psychology, sociology, and other disciplines that claim to provide scientific demonstrations as to what, exactly, is the nature of the "traditional mind," and the output from these scholars tends, then, to seep back into history, where it finds its way into the newer writings about the European miracle.

In psychology, the important figure is Jean Piaget. His basic theory of mental development postulated an invariant series of "stages" of development through which all children must progress. Piaget was influenced by Lévy-Bruhl and the primitive mind doctrine, and as late as 1971 he thought that

it is quite possible, and this is the impression we have from known ethnographical work, that in many societies, adult thought does not go beyond the level of "concrete" operations, and therefore does not reach that of propositional operations which develop between the ages of twelve and fifteen in our milieus.<ref>Piaget, ''Psychology and Epistemology'' (1971), p. 61.</ref>

"Propositional operations" means, roughly, logic. "Concrete" is childish prelogical thought, unable to deal with the abstract and the theoretical. Now Piaget was a great psychologist, but he did not have, or claim to have, direct knowledge of non-European psychology. He was arguing from the traditional dualistic-developmental model that equates the child and the primitive. (And he was about 30 years out of date as to ethnography.) But many of his disciples, seeking to connect their theory with the modernization doctrine, took up the theme and began to carry out research to find out whether non-Western people (particularly Africans) do, indeed, have inferior cognitive abilities. It is no oversimplification to say that virtually all of these studies made the same mistake and came up with the same, predictable conclusions. They used the tests of cognitive ability that Piaget had used with European children and, scarcely modifying them, administered these tests to non-European children and adults and found, predictably, that these people do not have full adult cognitive abilities. By now the error has become well known, and most present-day Piagetian psychologists do not seem to assert that non-Europeans are cognitively childlike. Along with the Piagetian studies of the 1960s and 1970s, there appeared, in this era, many studies carried out by psychologists from other schools of thought (like the Heinz Werner school) which took the old primitive-mind doctrine as fact,<ref>See, for example, Werner and Kaplan, ''Symbol Formation'' (1964).</ref> along with studies carried out by white South African psychologists comparing white and black subjects, other Europeans studying other African populations, and a few Israeli psychologists comparing the cognitive abilities of Arabs and Jews. With few exceptions, the European psychologists found the non-European subjects to be deficient in cognitive ability, and so to be "traditional."<ref>See the first 16 volumes (through 1985) of ''The Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology'' for a great many examples of this phenomenon. For this period something like one-tenth of all the empirical articles in this U.S. journal were studies by white Southern Africans purporting to show the cognitive inferiority of black Africans.</ref> In nearly all of these studies the testing was such that the "natives" didn't really stand a chance because the tests were European, administered by Europeans or their native assistants, in Europeanized settings. The error became so well known that the entire field of "cross-cultural psychology" gained a bad name—as an apologia for ethnocentrism—until, in the 1980s, it changed direction. The point is that while most cross-cultural psychologists today, apparently, deny that non-Europeans are less rational than Europeans, they established a body of publications that are still used by others to make the opposite point.

The rationality doctrine was perhaps most influential in those parts of sociology and economics that were closest to the modernization doctrine, particularly among academics who were involved in making and implementing the policies being put into place in the 1950s and 1960s to develop the underdeveloped countries. As we saw in Chapter 1, this sphere of ideas was crucial to the politics of modernization for at least three reasons: First and most basic was the need to validate diffusionism. Second, development of the sort that involved only the spread of new ideas and new techniques was much cheaper, in principle, than development involving massive flows of capital, industrial development, and the like. And third, along the same lines, development at the level of ideas, of research, extension, education, and so on, was not threatening; it would not produce the dangers of revolution and counterrevolution implicit in efforts to change the relation of power groups, to effectuate land reform, and the like. For these reasons, scholars were encouraged, indeed were given lavish grants and were well paid, to produce analyses of modernization that would lead to workable policies for bringing about development mainly through an influence at the level of ideas.

Everett Rogers, a rural sociologist; David McClelland, a social psychologist; and Everett Hagen, an economist, provided highly influential contributions that I will describe briefly and with some caricature. Rogers was one of the leaders in a movement to sort out peasant mentalities into those that are prodevelopment ("cosmopolitan") and those that are noninnovative and "laggard." The crucial notion was the idea of the diffusion of rationality into rural non-European communities. The key to development (with some qualification) was the transmittal of new ideas to innovative "adopters." The fact that most of the ideas were not, themselves, workable (thus were not rational), and that adoption of them would have required of peasants not more knowledge, but more power and landownership, was ignored. McClelland claimed that non-Western peoples in general have not modernized because they lack the proper "need-achievement" motivation. They will modernize when and if they acquire this need to achieve, which had been of crucial importance in earlier European development, from ancient Greece on up. Hagen produced an elaborate theory, based in no evidence whatever, that non-Western peoples, and particularly peasants, have a traditional mentality that resists change of all sorts. The model starts with a mythic peasant unconscious mind that is uncreative, submissive to paternal authority (and therefore oppressive of innovative children), and unwilling to change. All three of these scholars, and dozens of their acolytes, produced a general model of peasant mentality as defective in both cognitive and attitudinal (affective) characteristics, but, of course, not hopelessly so.<ref>Rogers, ''The Diffusion of Innovations'' (1962); Rogers and Shoemaker, ''Communication of Innovations'' (1971), pp. 187-191; McClelland, ''The Achieving Society'' (1961); Hagen, ''On the Theory of Social Change'' (1962) and "A Framework for Analyzing Economic and Political Change," in Brookings Institution, ed., ''Development of the Emerging Countries: An Agenda for Research'' (1962), pp. 1-39. I have cited only the initial statements: much literature emerged from these works.</ref> One of many recent outgrowths of this doctrine is Stephen Marglin's theory of the Western mental "episteme," a marriage of the old "primitive mind" idea and the newer ideas about traditionalism, which argues, in essence, that the Western mind is, and historically has been, scientific, rational, and intellectually hardheaded—the "episteme"—while the non-Western mind is traditionally given to technique and art ("techne") but not to science. Marglin's new twist on this old doctrine is to say that some of the non-Western "techne" should be incorporated in development along with the Western "episteme" because "techne," less intellectual but more feeling, is less likely to destroy the natural environment and causes less psychic damage to non-Western people, a distinction rather like the older duality between scientific thought and emotion-laden concrete thought.<ref>S. Marglin, "Losing Touch: The Cultural Conditions of Worker Accommodation and Resistance," in F. and S. Marglin, eds., ''Dominating knowledge: Development, Culture, and Resistance'' (1990).</ref> Marglin's ideas provide an example of much theorizing in the economic development world (like Hagen, he is a development economist) about non-Western nonrationality.

It would take us far afield to examine the parallel arguments in all the other fields of social thought. The following should suffice: In geography, the diffusion-of-innovative-ideas approach has been important since the 1960s and remains so today. The same old assumptions about peasant and non-Western traditionalism are still dominant. Some geographers claim even that non-Europeans are mentally not capable of using all available means of coping with natural hazards like drought and hurricane. One geographer, Robert Sack, has come up with a classically Eurocentric theory about spatial cognition: most non-Western people (primitives and most peasants) cannot think in spatial terms the way modern Western adults can. Among the authorities he uses—the argument is from authority, not evidence—are Lévy-Bruhl and Piaget.<ref>Sack, ''Conceptions of Space in Social Thought'' (1980). Geographers prominent in the diffusion paradigm discussed here are L. Brown (''The Diffusion of Innovations'', 1981) and P. Gould (''Spatial Diffusion'', 1969). On peasant traditionalism in relation to natural hazards, see G. White, ed., ''Natural Hazards'' (1974), as an example of the abundant literature. I criticize these and other arguments about non-Western nonrationality in Blaut, "Two Views of Diffusion" (1977), "Diffusionism: A Unitarian Critique" (1987a), and "Natural Mapping" (1991).</ref> In the field of education in the United States the newer forms of the dualistic-developmental theory of (Western) rationality are highly influential in many areas, including testing.<ref>In the field of education in the United States the dominant standardized college entrance tests (SAT and ACT) are skewed by culture-specific and sex-specific internal (as well as situational) characteristics, such that women do more poorly than men although they actually perform at higher levels in terms of university grades, while the ACT and SAT test scores of Latinos (African-Americans have not yet been studied in this way), which are very low, have no correlation whatever with their performance in college. Thus the tests effectively minimize female and minority college attendance. Why the tests are almost universally used, even so, is a fascinating question. The same biases are so prominent in IQ testing that such tests have been barred as diagnostic instruments in California schools. The "primitive mind" and "primitive languages" biases sometimes combine, as in U.S. debates about the so-called "English-only" issue and about the question whether non-European literature deserves to be included in the college curriculum along with European literature. In Boston not long ago, 30% of Hispanic children aged six to eight were not attending elementary school because their inability to speak English had been judged to be evidence of mental retardation, and Boston claimed not to have sufficient resources to educate these children in "special schools." Testing in general in U.S. education remains very racist.</ref> In the field of philosophy, there is a strong relationship between the stream of ideas about rationality, discussed above, and the resurgence of mind-body dualism, such as one finds in the Cartesian and Kantian traditions and particularly in the modern neo-Kantians.<ref>Rorty, ''Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature'' (1980), and earlier works by Dewey (for instance ''The Quest for Certainty'', 1929), Whitehead (for instance, ''Modes of Thought'', 1938), and G. H. Mead (for instance, ''Philosophy of the Act'', 1938).</ref>

I do not suggest that the doctrine of non-Western nonrationality is fully hegemonic in modern scholarship, or that the above formulations have not been challenged. In general, however, the doctrine remains somewhat dominant in all fields of thought except, perhaps, anthropology and economics. Anthropology in recent decades has, with some lapses, maintained quite firmly that primitive minds are not primitive.<ref>This is a general assessment. Some anthropologists continue to maintain either the "primitive mind" doctrine or the closely related "traditional mind" doctrine. An example of the latter is George Foster's well-known and influential book ''Traditional Cultures'' (1962), of the former, Hallpike's ''The Foundations of Primitive Thought'' (1979). For a critique, see Schweder, "Cultural Psychology: What Is It?" (1990).</ref> And some schools of economics need the principle of universal economic rationality so badly, as axioms for their theories, that they are willing to concede rationality to everyone.

=== Rationality and the European Miracle ===

The idea of European rationality is often called "Weberian," because Max Weber made important use of the idea in various explanations for European social evolution and various negative judgments about the lesser rationality of other societies. The rationality doctrine was, however, widely held in early twentieth-century Europe when Weber's important writings on this subject were published. But he codified the traditional doctrine and added something of his own to it, so the doctrine can indeed be called Weberian from the present-day perspective. It is also Weberian in another and perhaps more important sense: Weber placed European social evolution in a framework emphasizing the modernization process, and contrasting Europe's modernization with the "traditionalism," as he sometimes called it, of Asian civilizations. When the modernization paradigm locked into place among scholars just after World War II, Max Weber was the most obvious, and most logical, source of basic sociological doctrine for the paradigm. From that time on, scholars who wrote about the rise of Europe and chose to emphasize the individual trait of rationality, or social-level traits and institutions which Weber had treated as primary (and, in the main, as consequences of European rationality), were Weberians to one degree or another (even if they rejected some parts of Weber's model). The importance of Weber for our discussion of present-day theories about the "European miracle," is the fact that the most influential, probably dominant, school of thought concerning the "miracle" today is more or less Weberian. Weber's views about rationality therefore require at least brief discussion.

Weber analyzed Western capitalist society of the late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century epoch in meticulous detail and with great insight, although there were important limits to his insight. He held to the typical conceit of his time and place and class in thinking that contemporary European capitalism is the culmination of a process of social evolution that was, at root, an intellectual progression, an ascent of human "rationality," meaning intellect and ethics, from ancient to modern society. (He had doubts about the likelihood of further ascent in the future.) At each stage of that progression people invented new social forms, such as higher forms of the state, the legal system, the bureaucracy, the economy, the city, and so forth, but these forms were, basically, products of evolving rationality rather than primary causes of progress in their own right. But the march toward ever more rational society took place in Europe, among Europeans. Outside of the European tunnel of time, all societies were in varying degrees traditional and in varying degrees irrational.

Weber said rather little about the question of why Europeans came to display this rationality in the first place, that is, as a basal cause. He invoked several factors, one of which, as we noted previously, was race and another, the natural environment. Others seem to lie deep within culture. Yet Weber rarely discussed causality at this basal level, that is, attempting to explain why Europeans have unique rationality, and have had it since a long time before the Protestant Reformation and modernity.<ref>On the question of Weber's use of "rationality," its basal status in his theorizing, and yet its uncertain definition and provenance, see, for instance: Cohen's introduction to the 1981 ed. of Weber's ''General Economic History'' (1981), pp. xxv-xxvii; Löwith, ''Max Weber and Karl Marx'' (1982), pp. 40-42, 53-54, n. 49; Freund, ''The Sociology of Max Weber'' (1968), pp. 140-149. In Weber, see ''General Economic History'' (1981), chaps. 29, 30, ''The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism'' (1958), pp. 13-31, 59-60, 79, 118-120, 191, n. 19, 265, n. 31, ''The Religion of China'' (1951), chap. 8, ''The Religion of India'' (1967), p. 387, and other works.</ref> One reason seems to lie in his view of social causality, with ideas and values, and the evolution of ideas and values, treated as prime causes of social processes, social structures, and social change. Given this conception, he would not be expected to look for nonideological-level causes for ideas and values. Doubtless there were other reasons.

Whatever Weber considered to have been the basic cause of the differences between rational, progressive European society and irrational, traditional Asian society (Africa and America were scarcely noticed), he delineated these supposed differences very carefully. The most crucial arguments are found in his ''General Economic History'' and ''The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism''. The development of rationality among Europeans—however that had happened—led to a special sort of "economic ethic," a body of values, aspirations, and logical thought processes that emerged primarily in connection with the Reformation (and particularly Puritanism) but which, more fundamentally, produced capitalism. The important point here is that basal rationality produced both the "economic ethic" of capitalism and the Protestant movement: Weber is not (as some think) explaining capitalism and modernity in terms narrowly of religion. He does invoke religion to explain many aspects of the supposed traditionalism of Asians, but here too a primordial irrationality is seen as underlying religion. (He writes, for instance, of the "magical traditionalism" of Indians and Chinese.<ref>Weber, ''General Economic History'' (1981), p. 161. Also see pp. 339, 355-368. Weber makes a large number of comments about the irrationality of Asians.</ref>)

The superior rationality of Europeans produces other major historical differences between Europe and non-Europe. Europeans are basically freedom loving, not ground under by Oriental despotism; this devolves into a form of city that is much freer than the Asian city, the latter being conceived by Weber as (in essence) merely a physical entity wholly controlled by the overarching empire, and the former as a truly new form of society, emerging in the Middle Ages and inaugurating modernity.<ref>Weber, ''Economy and Society'', vol. 2 (1968), pp. 1212-1374.</ref> (As we discuss in Chapter 3, Asian cities were not as Weber described them. Some were free city-states, others were virtually free under a loose imperial umbrella. European cities, on the other hand, were much less independent than Weber thought.) Landholding systems were also different because of differences in rationality: only in Europe, says Weber (here putting forward a purely traditional European view) does the concept of private property truly emerge. The feudal estate is almost genuinely private property. The Asian estate is seen as merely a temporary assignment of land as a source of revenue for dignitaries, a form of salary given for service and ordinarily returned to the state. But European feudal estates were also, legally and actually, granted on service tenure, and in both continents these sorts of estates tended in general to become hereditary and thus eventually private property (see Chapter 3). Of course, Weber talks about other supposed differences between Europe and non-Europe, but the examples given here will suffice to show his overall approach.

Weber did not originate most of these arguments, although he codified them and developed them in a brilliant way. Yet Weber is given credit overall, and "Weberianism" is now the most important form of theory in explaining the European "miracle." The basic form can be summarized very simply. Rationality is the causal root. The effect of differential rationality is, in Europe, permanent progress, modernization, and capitalism. In non-Europe it is stagnation, traditionalism, and various irrational cultural attributes such as superstition. The model here is simple diffusionism: rationality and therefore modernization are permanent in Europe. Non-Europe does not modernize except by the diffusion of these traits from Europe.

The doctrine of "Western rationality" is widely used today in explanations for Europe's unique rise, its "miracle." No longer is the superior rationality of Europeans attributed, even implicitly, to racial superiority, but how the historians manage to assert the one without the other is not an easy question to answer. Generally, causality is consigned to the impenetrable mists of ancient history, with perhaps an occasional speculation about ancient free-living European peasants or the evils of Oriental despotism, or with a ritual citation of Max Weber. For many historians, I suspect, the idea of European rationality is simply axiomatic. Europeans, for whatever reason, are just built that way.

Eric L. Jones dwells very heavily on rationality as an explanation for Europe's historical superiority in ''The European Miracle''. His claim is that there is a fundamental lack of rationality among Asians and Africans. The assertions are laid on so thickly, and with so little attempt to account for this putative irrationality, that it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Jones, perhaps alone among modern "miracle" historians, holds some deep prejudices. Africans are dismissed, in a brief discussion, as having had no significance in history. They are characterized in a way that suggests, not very subtly, that they are closer to the beasts than are other humans.

In Africa man adapted himself to nature. The hunter felt part of the ecosystem, not outside it looking in with wonder, and definitely not above it and superior. After all, there were large carnivores who sought man as a prey. The most evocative symbol of this ecological oneness may be the honey guides ... birds commensal with man. They fly, chattering loudly, ahead of bands of hunters, leading them ... to the tree hives of wild bees and feeding on the wax after the men have broken open the hives. (154)<ref>Numbers in parentheses are page numbers in ''The European Miracle''.</ref>

This is a Tarzan image. Most Africans were farmers, not hunters (we discussed this previously). The scavenging house sparrow is also commensal with humans in the suburbs of London, but Jones speaks of "commensalism" only for Africans. (Ethology, as we will see, is evoked somewhat similarly for Asians.<ref>The ecologists' term "commensalism" refers to a form of tight interspecific cooperation between animal species, but hardly ever is it applied to humans.</ref>)

There was scant incentive or pressure for development or invention. ... Any pressure ... was apparently offset by the use of slaves instead of the improvement of methods. ... Otherwise wealth was spent on luxury items. ... [There was] pervasive insecurity as a result of conflict and slave-raiding. (155-156)

Africans thus were noninventive, were aggressive, were lovers of luxury, were slavers and slaves. And also hunters close to the beasts they hunted. So: it "is not clear what indigenous developments were possible" (156).

Asians do not think logically. There is "relative absence of the empirical enquiry and criticism of the Graeco-Judeo-Christian tradition" (161), and "lack of a crisp tradition of logical debate," which may explain the "failure" of Asian science" (162). "The notion of a consensus in interpreting nature may have seemed absurd" (162)—that is, Asians may not even have had an ability to conceptualize scientific verification, to distinguish empirical truth from falsity. They were uncreative: "Asian institutions suppressed creativity or diverted it into producing voluptuous luxuries" (231).

Asians have attitudes and values that inhibit progress. "Oriental philosophies [emphasize] emotions, values and cosmologies," at the expense of empirical thought (161). Orientals are lazy (163). They (like Africans) have a "love of luxury" (170), and they love to buy things like "kingfisher feathers ... precious stones ... drugs no modern pharmacopeia would own" (164). They have a "servile spirit," their armies lack "tough" petty officers (167). They are, as a rule, introverted, inward looking; they are "increasingly immobile societies undergoing 'curious experiences,'" given to self-imposed "isolation" (170), lacking an urge to explore (168, 177, 203, 231). They are given to senseless warfare (169, 188, 197), do not have a written legal system (164, 188, 197), and do not have a concept of political boundary (167, 194). There is much thievery and piracy (189, 199, 209, 229-30).

In most judgments of this type (of which I have given only a sample), Jones is referring to Asians in general and through all times in their history.<ref>Typical of Jones's method is to find some objectionable feature of very early Asian society, compare it with some pleasing feature of modern, post-industrial-revolution European society, and then treat both features as though they were permanent characteristics of the respective societies, giving a picture of awful primitiveness to Asians and marvelous modernity to Europeans thereby.</ref> Some judgments are more specific. Islamic society was for a time somewhat innovative, borrowing technology from other societies, and preserving ancient Greek sciences. (This is a standard Eurocentric belief: Arabs preserved Greek science during the Dark Ages and then handed it back to Europe for further development, something like an intellectual left-luggage office.) The Ottoman Empire (the single real example of Islamic culture discussed by Jones, with the imputation that it stands as symbol for Islam as a whole and at all times) stamped out original thought. It produced unreason, backwardness, and retrogression, a "mist of obscurantist thought" (183). Ottomans didn't even know "the elementary facts of geography" (184) and couldn't even make decent maps (179). (Jones himself doesn't know much about geography and maps.) Rulers were often "degenerates," "drunkards," "mental defectives," "lechers," ruling with despotism and terror (186-187), their "philosophy" being theft and despoilment, against which there was "no legal shield" (187-189).

Indian society was socially and psychologically "frozen" (192), with values that were deleterious to economic progress. Religion was invoked to sanction all acts, but the advice of religious counsellors was "malicious or random" (195). The Mughal rulers were, like the Ottomans, degenerates, running society for their own benefit, given to "voluptuous selfishness," harems, jewels, menageries, intrigues, treason (196). The state was purely predatory. Technology was "almost stagnant," not even copying from abroad (199). "No written legal code existed," says Jones in a quite bizarre misstatement (197).

China was technologically inventive and innovative until the early Middle Ages, when progress stopped. There was thereafter a "retreat" (203); some skills were even forgotten. Chinese became "inward-looking" (203, 216, 220). China "backed away" from technology, from trade, from exploration. Technological development stopped even in agriculture, and only the cultivation of new land, with irrational cutting of irreplaceable forests, and the fortunate, timely, arrival of New World crops such as maize and sweet potato, saved the Chinese temporarily from disaster, although cutting down these forests was "one of mankind's greatest acts of ecological stupidity," stupidity which led to "soil erosion, gullying, silting and floods" (213). (Apparently the deforestation of Europe and North American was not "stupid.") Peasants were given to "envy and suspicion" (206), were stupid as farmers (212-217), and were stupid also in preferring "maximal reproduction" over "affluence" (218). The state was despotic, a "revenue-pump" for the rulers, providing no services (206). There was (again) a love of luxury, an attitude of "empty cultural superiority" (205), a corrupt, venal, parasitic ruling class. Chinese had "anti-social customs" (7) and were diseased.

Ethology, the science of comparative animal behavior, is invoked repeatedly by Jones in his characterization of Asians and Africans. Oriental courts were given to displays of "the dominance relationship" (109, 209). Multiple wives had "ethological significance," as also, perhaps, did the "amassing" of slaves for "display purposes." "Great attention was paid to submission symbols, kneeling, prostration, the kotow" (209). In India, a "similar calculus ... underlay human demographic behavior and veneration of the cow" (19). Recall the "commensalism" in Africa.

These beliefs about the intellectual and moral inferiority of non-Europeans are old colonial-era prejudices, which Jones merely recites. The fact that ''The European Miracle'' is taken seriously by some historians is partly, I think, a reflection of the degree to which these old prejudices still lurk within our scholarship as implicit beliefs.

Many other historians of the "miracle" try to insert European rationality at or near the base of their explanatory theories. Michael Mann can be taken as a typical representative of the genre. We have already discussed his contrived little theory about the marvelous Iron Age Indo-Europeans of the northern forests, uniquely individualistic, aggressive, freedom loving (all notions from nineteenth-century and earlier scholarship, none grounded in solid evidence for Europe or, comparatively, for non-Europe). Mann moves smoothly to ancient Greece, which he sees as the product of this earlier Indo-European root rationalism. The Greeks invented most things rational, from science to democracy to ethics (a respect for humanity). Other Mediterranean peoples contributed rather little by comparison with the rational Indo-Europeans who swept down from the north. (Even the Roman influence, which subjugated the European peasant, is seen as vaguely "un-European."<ref>"Frankish feudalism, in many ways proto-typical of later feudalism, was ... a mixture of the very, very old, deep-rooted drift of 'European' peasant society and of the brand new the opportunistic, the 'un-European,'" Mann, "European Development" (1988), p. 16.</ref>) History then moves northwestward as northern Europeans clear the forest and move what Mann calls the "leading edge" of European society forward toward what seems to be its foreordained goal, Britain.<ref>Mann, "European Development" (1988), p. 17. Also see his ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), for instance pp. 190, 195, 213, 377, 404, 412, 510. ("At the end of all these processes stood one organic, medium-sized, wet-soil island state, perfectly situated for take-off: Great Britain," p. 510.)</ref> Early in the Middle Ages, around A.D. 800, a newer stage of rationality emerges, combining the old culture and the new Christianity. Europeans now demonstrate their "rational restlessness" and their unique inventiveness, producing a revolutionary agricultural system and much more. The explanation is the ancient rationality, the newer Christian rationality, and the marvelous European environment.<ref>Mann, "European Development" (1988), pp. 8-9, 11-12, 15-18 and ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), pp. 377-378, 397-398, 402-408, 412, 500-510. Also, on Europe's rationality and its historical significance, see McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976), pp. 41, 97, 106-107, 236, 238, 249, 256, 259, 264.</ref> This, for Mann, is the kernel of the European miracle. The only part of this construct that requires further comment is the theory of a medieval technological revolution; this we discuss in the following section.

Lynn White, Jr., contributed a very influential form of the rationality doctrine with his theory about the unique technological inventiveness of medieval Europeans, a theory we discuss in the next section. John Hall contributes another version, much like Mann's except for its emphasis on the invention of rational politics by Europeans and its tendency to follow Eric L. Jones in various negative judgments about Asian history. Space does not permit me to review the way some other present-day historians invoke, and use, the theory of Western rationality as grounding for their theories about the European miracle. I should simply note that some of them are Marxists and near-Marxists. Perry Anderson, for instance, argues from ancient Greek rationality to European medieval progress. So does M. I. Finley. Robert Brenner contributes a very different Marxist rationality theory: there was no rationality until, quite suddenly, capitalism appeared among the English yeoman farmers, who promptly became amazingly inventive and started a technological revolution that has not yet ended.<ref>See P. Anderson, ''Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism'' (1974), part 3; Finley, ''The Use and Abuse of History'' (1975), chap. 6; Aston and Philipn, ''The Brenner Debate'' (1985), pp. 32-33, 42-51, 59, 63n, 214-215, 234-236, 306-316.</ref>

=== Technology ===

Among all of the narrow-minded ways of looking at history, technological determinism is the one most congenial to Eurocentric tunnel vision. It has the appearance, the illusion, of cold-blooded scientific fact. "X was invented here, on this date, and produced these effects." In talking about matters of technology, one can deny that ethnocentrism enters the picture: "this is hard fact, indisputable." And the significance of technology seems equally indisputable: a new tool does produce more food, a new weapon more casualties, whereas a new social form might have historical significance; then again, it might not. But technological determinism gets its greatest strength from the error known as "telescoping history." When we travel, mentally, back to medieval Europe, we pass backward through the eras in which Europeans clearly were technologically superior to everyone else, and so we tend to expect that superiority to have been the state of things at all prior times. But Europe advanced technologically beyond Asia and Africa mainly after the beginning of the industrial revolution. Europe did not even begin to forge ahead of other civilizations in technology or science until the seventeenth century or even later. By telescoping history we imbue the Middle Ages with the marvelous technological attributes of modern Europe. It is then but a small step to the conclusion that, since technology is so obviously a powerful cause in history, and since Europe has always been so technological, here is the root of the European miracle.

But tools do not invent themselves or reproduce themselves. If you invoke technological determinism, you must not only show that the technology appeared and had such-and-such effects, you must also explain why it was invented, and by whom. In nearly all (I think) technologically deterministic arguments made as part of some explanation for Europe's historical progress, technological arguments end up being arguments about the inventors, not the inventions. They end up in some Weberian claim that Europeans are more inventive, innovative, "rational," than non-Europeans. Technological determinism then differs from other kinds of tunnel-historical theories mainly in its claim that rational Europeans moved their society forward by inventing new technology, rather than doing so by inventing new political systems, new forms of social organization, new religions, or whatever.

Claims are made by Eurocentric historians that technology was a prime mover in all epochs from the post-Neolithic on down. Nowadays it would be hard to ignore the evidence that in ancient times the greatest technological innovations, in agriculture, transportation, and other spheres, entered Europe from the south and east, so technological arguments tend to begin with the Middle Ages. There are, however, exceptions. Michael Mann, as we noted previously, has revived the old notion that the invention of iron somehow revolutionized European peasant society in a way it did not do elsewhere, that it produced a wondrously inventive, acquisitive (etc.) type of society, rooted in iron-plowing Indo-European-speaking peasants, and he claims, in parallel, that Oriental despotisms of the ancient Middle East held back technological inventiveness, where peasants were supposedly held in tight control by the political system that irrigation technology necessitated. But this theory is contradicted by a great deal of evidence. So much is known about technological progress in the Middle East during this period (from the late Neolithic to the "Iron Age" and beyond) that the notion of noninventiveness is unreasonable. But iron working was not invented in Europe. Probably it came from the Middle East, but there are hints from farther afield (including West Africa). Plows were used in Middle Eastern agriculture, irrigated and nonirrigated, as well as in European agriculture. Plows may have been used earlier in China than in Europe. So the technological argument put forward by Mann (and others) is unsound and the psychological and social deductions are fallacious.

Many other "miracle" historians are prepared to start with the ancient Greeks and define these folk as the original uniquely inventive Europeans, but the Greeks did not contribute more to technological progress than their neighbors did to the south and east, so arguments of this sort must revert to the abstract idea of "rationality," thus, of potentiality, not actuality, a point we have already discussed. The Romans, in turn, were moderately inventive, but so were their neighbors. In the European Dark Ages, as everyone agrees, technological progress was hardly impressive, and was in fact going on at a healthier pace in parts of Africa and Asia. I suspect that the majority of historians today are not willing to go along with Michael Mann and others who claim to find a unique technological progress in Europe prior to the Middle Ages, although this view was quite widespread until a few decades ago. Most would disagree with Eric L. Jones, in ''The European Miracle'', that Europe has always been "a mutant civilization in its uninterrupted amassing of knowledge about technology" (p. 45), since there is nothing unusual about this process in human society.

It is with the Middle Ages that technological arguments come to prominence. It is here that the notion of a technological "takeoff to modernity" is most frequently encountered among historians of the European "miracle." The common argument form is about as follows: Northern Europeans indeed were rather backward folk until late in the Dark Ages, the early Middle Ages, when a kind of awakening occurred, and northern Europeans now suddenly emerged as the people we know—the most dynamic, most progressive, most innovative, most rapidly rising (etc.) people in the world—and the key to this rise was a set of early medieval technological innovations, based mainly, these historians claim, on European inventions, neglecting non-Europe and thus presenting us with a typical sort of Eurocentric tunnel history.

Lynn White, Jr., is an American historian whose book ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' presents this kind of technologically deterministic tunnel-historical argument in perhaps its purest form. This book, published in 1962, has been highly influential; its arguments are built in to the theories of many "miracle" historians, including Mann, Jones, and Hall (who not only cite the book repeatedly in their writings but rely on it for many technological arguments they invoke in support of their theories). The book is an effort to show that technological invention and innovation was the central cause of the rise of Europe during the Middle Ages. White lists a series of supposedly European inventions, and shows, for each in turn, what marvelous effects it had on European history. Here, for starters, is an example. The early medieval invention of the iron stirrup had a "catalytic ... influence on history." It permitted a new form of mounted warfare, created the phenomenon of the medieval knight, and produced feudalism (knights became manorial lords). And so, "The Man on Horseback, as we have known him during the past millennium, was made possible by the stirrup."<ref>White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 38); also McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976), p. 234.</ref>

But White's crucial arguments concern productive technology, and particularly agricultural technology. He claims that an agricultural revolution occurred in Europe (or rather in northern Europe) in the early Middle Ages, and this quite revolutionized European society and became a large part of the explanation for modernization and the rise of capitalism. He believes that three European inventions were the crux of the matter: the heavy plow, the horse collar (and therefore the use of horsepower), and the three-field rotation.

The heavy plow, pulled by teams of (typically) eight oxen, is assigned, by White, a tentative central European origin in the sixth century; it then diffused quickly throughout northwestern Europe, and "does much to account for the bursting vitality of the Carolingian realm in the eighth century."<ref>White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 54.</ref> White is correct in calling attention, as others before him have done, to the importance of the heavy plow as an agricultural innovation in the wetter and colder parts of Europe. It was highly advantageous in opening the deep, heavy soils of the North European Plain and the deep-working of soil was critical in view of northern Europe's moist weather. It was in fact necessary for the areal spread of farming into some of the wetter soils. Therefore, the heavy plow had much to do with the overall increase in medieval agricultural production. But the heavy plow was not in fact invented in Europe in the Middle Ages. Plows pulled by teams of 24 oxen were used in northern India before the time of Christ.<ref>Kosambi, ''Ancient India'' (1969), p. 89; R. S. Sharma, ''Light on Early Indian Society and Economy'' (1966), p. 57.</ref> Southern Europe used lighter plows, because the soils were generally lighter and drier, but the technology was not significantly different. It seems certain that the heavy plow was either diffused into northern Europe from elsewhere or was a local adaptation of a widely used tool-form. So this is not a European technological revolution. And the effects of the innovation in northern Europe probably should be attributed to the social forces that led to the introduction of the heavy plow, not to the technology itself. We know, for instance, that the growth of feudalism led to massive expansion of cultivation, partly at the incentive of the lords, who wished to increase their wealth and power by expanding their demesnes, partly as a reaction by peasants to the persistently increased demands from the lords for surplus product, increments of demand which could not be met without endangering the subsistence of the peasant family unless the peasants found a way to increase their total production. It appears that whatever historical effects are attributed by White to the plow should rather be attributed to feudalism as a social system. And the effects claimed by him are indeed quite miraculous.

Thanks to the adoption of the heavy plow, says White, there was a tremendous growth in population. Then there was a changeover to the "open field" system of cultivation and this led, according to White, to the invention of "communal patterns" of human cooperation (as though communal life had not been known previously and was unknown elsewhere). This was a social revolution, a "reshaping of peasant society." It was "the essence of the manorial economy," ignoring the fact that the manors were owned by lords, not villagers.<ref>White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 44.</ref> More important still, there came then "a change [in] the northern peasants' attitude towards nature and thus our own" (my emphasis). Why? Because many families had to collaborate to mount one plow team, and so their allotments now were proportional to their social contribution, not to their needs. ("No more fundamental change in the idea of man's relation to the soil can be imagined: once man had been part of nature; now he became her exploiter."<ref>White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 56; McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976), p. 237.</ref>)

But all of this is nonsense. Neither the technical arguments nor the social deductions make any sense. The Domesday Book gives household-to-plow-team ratios of between 2:3 and 3:5.<ref>See C. T. Smith, ''An Historical Geography of Western Europe'' (1967), p. 203; Darby, ''The Domesday Geography of Eastern England'' (1952).</ref> The open-field system seems to be quite old and was widespread in Europe and known in Asia and North Africa in early times.<ref>Orwin and Orwin, ''The Open Fields'' (1967), chap. 3; C. T. Smith, ''An Historical Geography of Western Europe'' (1967), chap. 4.</ref> Northern villages, using big teams and heavy plows, were no more cooperative than southern villages, using light plows. Communal ownership of fields in some societies implied greater cooperation than that found in the European open field system. The manorial economy was a social system, not a technological invention. And so on.

White's second revolutionary advance is labelled "the discovery of horse-power."<ref>White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 57.</ref> Horses had been around for some time, of course. The essential innovation, for White, was the modern horse collar, which he thinks was probably developed in the Occident some time before the ninth century. According to White, the horse collar transformed agriculture and grain transport in northern Europe by permitting horses to replace oxen in pulling plows and wagons. Horses pull about the same weight as oxen but do so about 50% faster. From this fact White draws awesome conclusions. There was, he says, a large increase in agricultural production. Commerce became intensified because transport by horsepower was vastly cheaper than by ox power. Villages became much larger, almost townlike, because now there could be a larger radius of travel from home to field. The enlargement of villages yielded the "virtue of a more 'urban' life," permitting the village to have a church, tavern, school (now boys "could learn their letters").<ref>White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 67.</ref> And now there could be "news from distant parts." A transformation, overall, of profound importance. It "urbanized" the village, giving peasants the "psychological preparation" for "the change in Occidental culture from country to city."<ref>White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 68.</ref> All this and more from one innovation: the horse collar.

But the horse collar was widespread in Eurasia from an early date, and probably was invented for harnessing not horses but camels.<ref>Bray, ''Science and Civilization in China'', vol. 6, part 2, ''Agriculture'' (1984), pp. 304-328.</ref> And the presumption that horses held advantages over oxen in plowing and transport is widely disputed: the horse was more efficient, but more costly in upkeep, and generally required that cropland be devoted to feed crops. In England the horse did not replace the ox. Village size had nothing to do with horsepower. In many parts of the world where horses were not used, villages were much larger than they were in northern Europe. In countries like China, long-distance grain transport was often by canal, much more efficient than horse-drawn wagons. And so, again, neither the technical arguments nor the social deductions make any sense.

Finally, White attributes equally marvelous effects to the introduction of the three-field system. Part of this argument is familiar to every European schoolchild, who learned that the three-field rotation was a great advance over the older two-field system because (mainly) it reduced the proportion of the land in fallow from roughly 1/2 to 1/3. But White adds a cornucopia of additional blessings. Oats could now be planted widely, hence there was greater use of horsepower. In a section of ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'', "The Three-Field Rotation and Improved Nutrition," he claims that the three-field system somehow permitted farmers now to grow legumes, and this vastly improved the European diet, which, in turn, "goes far towards explaining ... the startling expansion of population, the growth and multiplication of cities, the rise of industrial production, the outreach of commerce, and the new exuberance of spirits which enlivened that age." In short, says Lynn White, Jr., "the Middle Ages were full of beans."<ref>White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 76.</ref>

But none of this (least of all the pun) can be taken seriously. There is no basis for White's argument that population was held down by an unbalanced diet (overloaded, he says, with carbohydrates, undersupplied with proteins). Farmers using the two-field system were not protein-starved, because legume cultivation long antedated the three-field system, grains also contained proteins, and fruits, animal products, and so on, were widely consumed. The three-field system was not a technological revolution. First of all, even more intensive rotations, including fallowless systems, were in use in many parts of the world long before the Middle Ages, and I suspect were common in parts of Europe (such as portions of the Po plain) where deep, nutrient-rich soils and good soil-water relations were found. Second, the two-field system was preferred, and was not supplanted, in many ecological situations, and in areas where fallow was needed for grazing. The picture is complex, but the generalization is clear: the three-field system was neither a technical revolution nor a fountainhead for social change. And it had close relatives in other continents, so it cannot be said to have been something uniquely European.

In ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'', White says little about the causes of the revolutionary technology. He does so elsewhere, however, and we find that his basic argument is really quite Weberian.<ref>White, ''Machina Ex Deo'' (1968). See in particular the essay—quite a famous one—called "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis" (chap. 5).</ref> Technological determinism dissolves into an ideological determinism, focused on the inventiveness—the rationality—of Europeans. This White attributes, basically, to religion: in part to "the Judeo-Christian teleology," and in larger part to "Western Christianity." The former underlies the European's unique "faith in perpetual progress," which leads to a faith in the virtues of inventiveness and technology.<ref>White, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis." In White, ''Machina Ex Deo'' (1967), p. 85.</ref> The latter produces "an Occidental, voluntarist realization of the Christian dogma of man's transcendence of, and rightful mastery over, nature"—that is, the separation of Man and Nature. To a Western Christian, nature is inert, valueless. It is blasphemy to "assume spirit in nature."<ref>White, ''Machina Ex Deo'' (1967), p. 90.</ref> This gives the Western Christian a desire and right to manipulate, use, transform nature—to invent new technology. The errors here are glaring. First, there is ignorance of the teachings of religions other than Christianity. Second, White resurrects the ethnocentric myth that ancient pagans and followers of modern non-Christian religions somehow are unable to fully separate Man from Nature and share the primitive view that spirits reside in all things. Actually, medieval Christians did perceive spirit in all things. (It was God's way.) They did not treat humans as absolutely separate from nature. This dualism is a product of modern times, mainly of the commoditization of nature with the rise of capitalism. Dualism is a doctrine of post-Cartesian thought, not something residing deep in "Western Christianity." Medieval Christians believed that the world is one, a plenum, an uninterrupted chain of being. Medieval folk did not, in general, believe, as White claims they did, in "perpetual progress": they believed in the Fall, and they believed, on the whole, that Creation had been perfect and complete. White is simply telescoping history in order to claim that modern European attitudes about technology and technological change are actually basic and ancient attributes of the culture of Europeans, and only Europeans. His central thesis is basic tunnel history: Europeans are uniquely inventive, so they create unique technology, so they progress.

I believe that all of the claims for European technological superiority in the Middle Ages can be countered, and eventually disproven, in much the same way. I think it will become clear that all of the civilizations of the hemisphere were inventing new technology and sharing it around; the "sharing" being the usual mechanisms of diffusion as they operated in two spheres of reality: agricultural techniques passed from farmer to farmer and other techniques (including some of those involved in commercial agriculture) moving through the mainly urban network of trade and transportation, or occasionally (as with some military technology) moving around the map along with conquest. Thus I see a rather even building up of technology in Europe, Africa, and Asia. It was only after 1492, with its utterly revolutionary consequences, that European technology acquired the beginning of an edge over Asian and African. Did medieval technological evolution produce, as cause, the major medieval social changes? I leave the answer to that question to others. My purpose in this book is not to defend any one theory of social change, merely to show that the processes were not uniquely European.

In Chapter 3 I will discuss this matter further, showing how technological and economic surfaces emerged in medieval Europe, Africa, and Asia, and that processes of change in all three continents were—as to technology and economy—quite similar.

Before we leave the subject of technology, something must be said about one fascinating issue: what I will call "the China formula." Since the end of World War II a great deal has become known about the history of technology in China, much of it through the work of Joseph Needham and his associates.<ref>Needham et al., ''Science and Civilization in China'' (1954-1984).</ref> In prior times, the European miracle theorists were prone to ignore Chinese technological achievements. (Weber did so less than most.<ref>Some historians today simply ignore this evidence and repeat the old notions about China's lack of technological prowess. See, for example, Roberts, ''The Hutchinson History of the World'' (1987), pp. 493-495, 502.</ref>) The usual pattern was to admit Chinese priority for some innovations but claim that, overall, the main technological advances took place in Europe and the Mediterranean. Where there were truly notable Chinese inventions, it was often claimed that the Chinese invented these things in a ludic vein whereas the Europeans put these things to work. (The paradigm, of course, is gunpowder, which the Chinese were supposed to have invented merely for fireworks.) One could bundle such propositions into a classical diffusionist model of the Chinese: they had, in prior ages, progressed somewhat, but then they slowed to a stop, starting up again only when Europeans brought new ideas.

As the information about Chinese technology increased, it was necessary to make somewhat more subtle arguments. Today, these arguments fit into a formula with two basic propositions.

1. "If indeed the development of technology in medieval China forces us to ask why China did not, then, have its own miracle, we can at least assert that China was the only civilization outside of Europe about which such questions arise." In other words, European superiority over everybody else is not put into doubt. This is convenient for those, for instance, who want to show that India, Africa, the Middle East, and so on, had no potential for development.

2. "Whatever technological advances took place in medieval China, the important point is that they stopped." In the formula, this argument is expressed in different ways for different spheres of technology, but the central argument is fairly standard: something characteristic of Chinese medieval culture forced it to cease developing and so to stagnate. In other words, what is plugged in here is the old doctrine of Oriental stagnation. Most typically, Weber is used to make this point: just about all of the Weberian claims about the reasons for Chinese lack of progress are regularly paraded at this point. Some historians balk at using Weber's thin argument about the stultifying effect of Confucianism. Others prefer not to notice Weber's ethnocentrism when he describes Chinese personality traits. But Weber's arguments about the city, landowning, bureaucracy, and empire are still quite regularly employed. The Chinese city was not "free" and did not have a real bourgeoisie. Chinese landowning was not close to private property. The Chinese bureaucracy and the Chinese imperial state were not "rational" and so held back the society from progress.

One can respond to this argument in two steps. First, as Purcell has pointed out, the important question really is how and why these Chinese advances happened, not how and why they stopped happening (if indeed they did stop). In other words, historians must explain how China came to be such a technologically innovative society that it outstripped other civilizations in many spheres of technology for many centuries. Weber doesn't help in this process one bit. The whole Weberian scheme is an explanation for stagnation, and what we are talking about is impressive progress, not stagnation.

The second step in the argument requires a focus on the precise period when, according to European miracle historians, the Chinese advance is supposed to have stopped. According to Elvin, broad-spectrum technical advances in China ended after the early fourteenth century. China at this time had perhaps the most advanced and most highly commercialized agriculture in the world. Chinese industrial technology was unexcelled in such fields as textile manufacture. Mechanical clocks were well known.<ref>Needham et al., ''Science and Civilization in China'', vol. 4, part 2 (1965), chap. 27.</ref> Chinese merchant ships were plying throughout Southeast Asia and into the Indian ocean. Chinese guns were unexcelled. Canal technology was impressive. And so on. Broadly, the changes associated with the rise and travails of the Ming dynasty are associated with the slowing of technical advance, although advances continued to take place in some spheres of technology (shipbuilding, cannons, printing with movable metal type—invented circa 1400, probably in Korea<ref>Needham et al., ''Science and Civilization in China'' vol. 4, part 2 (1965), p. 33). Arnold Pacey places the innovation in Korea. See Pacey's ''Technology in World History'' (1990), p. 56.</ref>—and much more). But Europe at this time was not experiencing a major technical advance either. After 1350 Europe stagnated both economically and technically. There is little evidence that European technology was advancing prior to 1492. The Renaissance was not a technological revolution, as historians have long realized.<ref>See, for example, Lopez, "Hard Times and Investment in Culture" (1953), Thorndyke, "Renaissance or Renaissance?" (1943).</ref> After 1492 important European advances began again in some technical spheres (notably shipbuilding). Whether truly revolutionary technological change really began before the eighteenth century is a matter of contention among European historians.

What does this say comparatively about China? It suggests that there is no problem of "stagnation." There was, instead, a slowing of progress during two centuries, in a scenario well known in all human cultures, because uneven progress is the norm. It suggests, rather, a problem that Third World historians focus some attention on but European historians tend to ignore. As a result of the European commercial expansion in the sixteenth century—we argue in this book that the year 1492 was the real birthdate of this process—aggressive European merchant communities began competing and trading with the Chinese in various places, notably Manila and some South China ports. Why did the Chinese merchant community not assert its dominance in this trade? Why did the commercial advantage steadily move in the direction of Europeans, not Chinese (and other Asians)? In other words, there is no stagnation to be explained. There is, rather, a problem as to how and why Europeans gained substantial control of long-distance trade in Asia after about 1600. Anticipating the discussion of later chapters, I will comment simply that this process does not reflect any internal cultural "blockages" in any Asian civilizations. Rather, it reflects the tremendously rapid increase in the profitability, scale, and organization of European enterprise overseas after 1492, which nobody else could really take advantage of, because of the constantly increasing flow of New World bullion into European mercantile coffers (a point we will discuss in some detail in Chapter 4).

During the first half of the fifteenth century, a number of Chinese fleets of combined military, diplomatic, and merchant character were sent into Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. Some of the ships held hundreds of men; some were so large that vegetable gardens were placed on the decks. We will discuss the significance of these great voyages in the next chapter; my point now is to notice the way European miracle historians try to accommodate these facts into their theories about Chinese nonprogress. The standard comment is: "But they stopped." In fact, the last voyage did end around 1440. But the purposes of the voyages had been accomplished. Chinese merchant ships continued to trade in Southeast Asia. Nothing stopped. It is true that the emperors banned Chinese shipping for a time (mainly the early sixteenth century), but such bans were a means of extracting bribes (in effect easements) and they were not, in any case, enforced. For the "miracle" historians, the fact of the imperial ban is proof that China had stopped progressing, and that only Europe contained the potential for the "miracle." This does not accord with the facts.

Chinese may have invented guns; in any case, they were as advanced in firearms technology as any other culture down to the end of the Middle Ages. Typical of the way European miracle historians deal with this sphere of technology (as with others) is Carlo Cipolla's account of the process in his well-known and influential book ''Guns, Sails, and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phase of European Expansion, 1400-1700''. He concedes, to begin with, that "Chinese guns were at least as good as Western guns, if not better, up to the beginning of the fifteenth century."<ref>Cipolla, ''Guns, Sails, Empires'' (1965), p. 106.</ref> But when the Portuguese appeared off Canton and fired off their cannon in salute a century later (1517), the Chinese had, magically, retrogressed:

The roar of European ordnance awoke Chinese ... to the frightening reality of a strange, alien people that unexpectedly had appeared along their coasts under the protection and with the menace of superior, formidable weapons. ... How to deal with the "foreign devils"? To fight them or to ignore them? To copy and adopt their techniques and give up local habits and traditions or to sever all contacts with them and seek refuge in a dream of isolation? To be or not to be? ... a dilemma that was tragically unanswerable.<ref>Cipolla, ''Guns, Sails, Empires'' (1965), pp. 108-109.</ref>

Thus does rhetoric replace fact in the mythology of Asian stagnation and the European miracle.

The "Chinese formula" seems to be losing credence. But I have no doubt that an "Indian formula," an "Islamic formula," an "African formula," and so on, will be contrived to shore up Eurocentric history as we learn more about Indian, Middle-Eastern, and African technological development prior to 1492.

=== Society ===

In Chapter 3 we will take a look at medieval European society and compare it to medieval Asian and African society in terms of those social categories that seem to be important in the process of change toward capitalism and modernity. Among these categories (forms, facts) are class, the state, landholding, trade, and urbanization. Our present task is the more modest one of criticizing theories that claim that one or another social category somehow led Europe to rise above all other civilizations before the end of the Middle Ages, before 1492. For this task we can select a few of the categories that present-day historians of the European miracle claim as favored candidates for this role of historical leadership, of causal motor propelling the so-called "takeoff to modernity." The favored ones seem to be the state, the church, class, and the family. Most frequently these categories are, themselves, explained in terms of supposedly more basic forces: European rationality, European technology, European demographic uniqueness, or European environmental superiority. These have been discussed at sufficient length already. The following discussion, therefore, will be brief.

=== State ===

A typical sort of argument begins with a model of the modern European nation-state, the kind of medium-sized, well-integrated, moderately democratic state that emerged after the rise of capitalism, after modernization, after the French and American revolutions. Nobody denies that this form is unique. But European miracle historians tend to make one of two claims about this state form: either it appeared very early in European history, early enough to play a causal role in modernization, or it was somehow immanent in European culture, a state form that was created, naturally and rationally, by freedom-loving, individualistic, antidyspotic Europeans of medieval or earlier times. Sometimes both claims are made: a reduction to European moral rationality and, at the same time, a holistic argument at the level of the state itself.

Eric L. Jones, for instance, does precisely that in ''The European Miracle''. Europe's medieval political system, says Jones, was near "the heart of the European miracle."<ref>Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 124.</ref> Here the argument combines the traditional prejudice about Europe's innate and unique love of freedom with some very odd environmentalistic arguments. First the latter. Jones takes the familiar argument that Europe in early times had a number of fertile core areas, each of which became the hearth of a regional culture, and he turns it into a curious argument to the effect that Europe's ecological core areas naturally led to a pattern of medium-sized states, unlike, he says, the "imperial" pattern of Asian societies. Empires, in Jones's view, are innately despotic, and innately given to interfering with the development of the economy. Europe's geography saved it from this fate. If a number of Europe's modern states have ecological "core areas," most do not, and rather few of these core areas became states. The model is environmentalistic and invalid. In any case, comparable core areas are found in many other parts of the world. Medium-sized, separate units of productive agricultural environments are, for instance, typical for Southeast Asia, including the rather discrete mainland cores, like the Irrawaddy and the Chao Phraya basins, the middle Mekong, and the Red River, and even more so the insular region, with cores in Sumatra (two or three), Java (three), Bali, Lombok, Sulawesi, Luzon, and so on. India and China too are moderately dissected in this way. Distinctive cores in Africa include the Middle Niger, Chad, and Congo, among others; in western Asia, Mesopotamia, the Iranian Plateau, and so on.<ref>Among the modern states that do not surround such simple ecological core areas: Spain, Italy, Germany, Poland, Greece, Sweden, Russia, etc. Prior to the 20th century, perhaps only parts of Great Britain (southern England) and France (the Paris Basin) came close to fitting this highly abstract model, a model that is useful for some purposes but not for the purpose of explaining the political history of the continent. Some of these core areas are nuclei of states; others are not. In modern Southeast Asia, Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia fit the model as well as any European case.</ref>

Next, Jones builds the image of these natural European Ur-states as somehow naturally forming into what he calls "a states system," a grid of roughly equal-sized independent states. These, in the Middle Ages, acted toward one another as though they were Hegelian individuals, competing yet cooperating, and marching forward, together, as a kind of members' club, toward modernity. Thus Jones discerns deep in the Middle Ages what amounts to the modern nation-state and the League of Nations. Telescoping history, he imbues the medieval European polities with all the virtues of the modern state: they provided public services, they encouraged the free development of the economy, they were incipiently democratic, and so on. All of this because of their environmental basis and because freedom-loving Europeans lived in them. In reality, the kind of state, and state system, that he describes does not appear until roughly the seventeenth century. Jones finds political characteristics of already-modernizing Europe, falsely claims that these were present long before—some, being environmental, were always present—and so claims to have proven that Europe's modern democratic political system was, somehow, always present in Europe (and nowhere else). In fact, medieval Europe was a hodge-podge of semisovereign feudal political units, a map so confused that states as such were not always identifiable, and with few of the modern state characteristics attributed to these polities by Jones.

But to understand the absurdity of this model of political history, we must notice the way Jones talks about the supposedly barbaric, despotic states of non-Europe. In non-Europe, a natural irrationality combines with environmental disadvantages to produce the opposite of the wonderful European state and system of states: the huge Oriental empire. Why did Asia not develop politically as Europe did? The political "infantilism" of Asia is explained by Jones in terms of (1) a psychological deficiency, consisting of irrationality in matters of intellectual vitality and innovativeness and a sort of moral failing in attitudes relating to the desire for progress, resistance to domination, will to forego animal pleasures, and the like, and (2) an inferior natural environment. The effects of these failings (and some lesser ones), and thus the effective reasons for Asia's political nondevelopment and nonprogress, are (1) uncontrolled population growth, and (2) bad government, "Oriental despotism" or, as Jones prefers to label it, empire. Throughout ''The European Miracle'', the main argument supporting the theory about how Europe's system of states favors development is Jones's countertheory about the evil nature of the Asian imperial state. Yet, in the end, the countertheory turns out to be as empty as the theory. Jones does not, in fact, give any credible explanation as to why such large empires exist in Asia and not in Europe. But neither does he give a credible argument as to why large states are worse for progress than medium-sized or small ones. (And he is blind to the very real progress that occurred in Asia, and to the many nonimperial states in Asia.) When we examine Jones's theory about Asian empires, then, we find that it has nothing to do with size or kind of state and everything to do with a conception about the basic nature of politics in non-European societies. This is nothing more than the old idea of "Oriental despotism." Asians, and indeed all non-Europeans, naturally suffer nasty, despotic, capricious, irresponsible, evil governments. Only Europeans understand and thus enjoy freedom.

This is not an atypical theory among historians who wish to argue that European political processes and forms were causal forces leading to a medieval "miracle." The basic form of the theory is traditional. It consists mainly of three propositions: Europeans have an old, deep-seated rationality that impels them toward modern, implicitly democratic, political forms (or, less directly, toward individualistic economic behavior and thus a preference for a minimalistic state); non-Europeans suffer gladly and naturally a despotic, imperial form of state, sometimes powerful but always arbitrary; and Europe's natural environment gives political modernization one or another sort of unique boost (ecological cores, fertile soil, capes-and-bays accessibility, or whatever). Other propositions figure in most arguments, but these three seem to be the most widely used.

They combine with a methodological principle of great significance: whatever causal forces were at work, they were at work early—that is, they set the process of modernization in motion long before the end of the Middle Ages. This, of course, is the crux of the matter. In the present book I argue that modernization (or whatever you want to call it) was indeed going on in medieval Europe, but not only in medieval Europe. Thus the events after 1492 did not start modernization but enabled European changes to increase in magnitude and effect and eventually produce a uniquely "rising" society. Therefore we argue from the uniformitarian hypothesis that Europe had no potential greater than that possessed by non-Europe during the Middle Ages. The fact that there were forces pushing toward democratization and the modern state in medieval Europe tells us nothing about European uniqueness.

John A. Hall uses the basic Jones model, emphasizing what he calls the "blockages" that prevented China, India, and the Islamic Middle East from developing modern state forms. In brief: China suffered under empire. India suffered under caste (and so had no politics whatever).<ref>In this connection, see Dirks, ''The Hollow Crown'' (1987).</ref> Islamic-region politics reflected tribalism. Hall describes very old and not really typical forms for each of these civilizations, assuming them to be frozen and permanent, contrasts these with late postmedieval European forms with the inference that these too have been present at least in embryo for a long time, and then builds an argument that non-Europe always lacked the potential for a "miracle," while Europe always had it.<ref>Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), "States and Societies: The Miracle in Historical Perspective" (1988).</ref>

Michael Mann addresses himself to the abstract entity "power" instead of the more visible "state," but his argument is not fundamentally different. Mann, like a number of other "miracle" historians, tries to interpret the political chaos of early medieval feudalism, with its fragmentation of polities and sovereignties, into an argument for incipient modernity. The smallness of these politicosocial units implies, somehow, that they were more "intensive," more meaningful, more pregnant with development potential, than the supposedly vast imperial polities of non-Europe. Mann's notion of "intensiveness" is basically a notion of value, not of fact.<ref>Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), "European Development" (1988).</ref> In this context we may recall the Magna Carta myth: devolution of power from king to barons is traditionally described as a movement toward democracy, even though the barons in those times were hardly democratic, and poor people preferred to be able to appeal above their heads to the king. (And later the rise of royal power is described as a further step toward democracy, except that you can't have it both ways.<ref>This is not the only example of the way arguments centering on the European state have a way of contradicting one another. The Roman state is said, on the one hand, by Hall among others, to have been a crucial innovation, the source of many political features characteristic of, and only of, Europe. On the other hand, the Roman state is dismissed by others (including Mann) as just another "imperial state," like the despotic Oriental states; Europe supposedly innovated politically by avoiding the imperial form of state and developing instead a kind of smaller and somehow more democratic state.</ref>) Jean Baechler uses roughly the same model—although, unlike Hall and Mann but rather like Jones, he downplays the role of Christianity in political evolution—with one additional argument: Baechler believes that the medieval European aristocracy (originally an Indo-European "warrior aristocracy") was itself the original source of democracy, claiming, in a curious reading of history, that aristocrats not only dealt democratically (respectfully) with one another, but they also respected the rights of their peasants.<ref>Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity: Caste and Feudality (India, Europe and Japan)" (1988).</ref>

Yet there was no democracy in the Middle Ages: European states were as despotic as any found anywhere else. Just as we noted with regard to the ancient Greeks, political forms found in Europe had counterparts elsewhere. If city-states were (perhaps) the closest to democracy—some of them were republican, and were in essence merchant-oligarchies—one need only note that city-states of many sorts lined the coasts of the Indian and Pacific oceans. Nor was the republican form unknown in Asia and Africa.

=== Church ===

Many theories assign one or another causal role to the church as a social institution in the modernization of Europe and the rise of capitalism.<ref>See, for instance, White, ''Machina Ex Deo'' (1968); Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), "European Development" (1988); Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985); Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988); K. F. Werner, "Political and Social Structures of the West" (1988); and Hallam, "The Medieval Social Picture" (1975).</ref> (Many other theories assign such a role to Christianity itself, but I will not comment on these.) Of course, the church did have such a role. The problems lie elsewhere. Most of them concern the question whether the church (or churches) provided Europe, and Europeans, with something that was not provided to non-Europeans by their own religious institutions or by other institutions in their own cultures. For instance, the claim has been made that the Catholic church in the Middle Ages unified Europe in cultural terms, to a degree not found elsewhere. But elsewhere comparable or parallel processes were at work. For instance, the much-maligned empires, such as the Chinese empire, provided unity in many ways, while the Islamic religion provided it in the Muslim world. It has also been argued that the medieval church compensated for the political fragmentation of Europe, allowing pan-European development to take place in spite of the lack of a clear pattern of strong states. True. The question is comparative: did the church thereby give Europe some developmental advantage over other civilizations, in which, quite often, there was political unity throughout most historical epochs? I think the answer must be that the church did not give Europe some special cultural quality, lacking in other civilizations, such that Europe could thereby leap into the forefront of social evolution.

Therefore I see no basis in fact for suggestions that the medieval church led to European historical superiority in a way that other religious institutions, in other civilizations, did not do. John A. Hall, for instance, asserts that "Christianity provided the best shell for the emergence of states."<ref>Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 135.</ref> Michael Mann claims that the medieval church "encouraged a drive for moral and social improvement even against worldly authority"—a statement that one might question not merely as a comparison, but also as a factual assertion about the role played by the church in Europe.<ref>Mann, "European Development" (1988), p. 12.</ref> For H. E. Hallam, "the medieval Latin church was the seed-bed of the early modern idea of capitalism."<ref>Hallam, "The Medieval Social Picture" (1975), p. 49.</ref> K. F. Werner maintains that "the 'European miracle' [took place] ... because of the existence of a Christian world dominated in the west by Catholic doctrines."<ref>K. F. Werner. "Political and Social Structures of the West" (1988), p. 172. This German medievalist argues that the central force underlying the "miracle" was Christianity. He refers here to the Catholic church, to the body of doctrine (Catholic and later also Protestant), to the social and political institutions that were influenced both by church and by doctrine, and to the faith of European people, which, in Werner's opinion, had much to do with their innovativeness, their sense of "restlessness," their rationality. Werner acknowledges that many causal factors were at work in bringing about the rise of Europe, and he does not hesitate to claim a role for the natural environment. But it is clear that his theory is primarily based on religion. And beyond this, one senses that this scholar himself may see the hand of a Christian god in the rise of Christian Europe.

Werner first of all makes a strong case to the effect that European history maintained a continuity of institutions, and of progress, from the time of the Roman Empire down through the Middle Ages, and that the late Empire established both ecclesiastical and lay institutions which continued down through the Middle Ages and gave that era its character. Chief among the institutions is the Catholic church. Werner wishes to depict the church as having a determining influence on history from the time of its founding. He sees the rise of Europe as a process that was guided throughout by the Christian religion, as institution and doctrine. If Werner were simply presenting a theory of history that accords religion a dominant role, I would not be discussing his views in this book. I would agree that its role has been underemphasized by historians, conservative no less than Marxist. The reason I deal with Werner's views is that he makes clear his belief that it is not religion in general but the Christian religion which played the historically efficacious role in the European "miracle." Werner's views are distinctly Eurocentric. Perhaps the key comment is the following:

(If) we had to choose one word that, by itself alone, were capable of expressing an essential factor in what we understand by the "European miracle," we would choose the philosophical term ... "unrest" ... "restlessness" ... Ruhelosigkeit ... Whilst Asia and its wisdom and, in its train, the great religions and philosophies, strive toward the art of ... seeking out the centre of the soul and of the world, and of resting in God, of having arrived, the European of the European miracle is a man who is always ready to take off once more, once he has arrived ... But where must be sought the causa causans of this mentality? The spur to anxiety is to be seen in the pangs of sin ... in the search for pardon and grace. The importance of the deliverance of the soul gave an hitherto unheard-of prominence to the individual, independent of his social rank, the individual who ... (does not abandon himself) to destiny ... (The) sense of responsibility seems to me to be one of the strengths of the Europeans that are to accomplish the "miracle" (p. 185).

Thus: Europe's religion, Christianity, instills a kind of mentality in "European man" which explains the basic source of the "European miracle."

The objection to this is the same one we put forward to all of the notions about Europe's supposedly unique "rationality." Whether that putative trait comes from religion (Werner) or from the post-Neolithic European tribes (Mann) or from any other source, the basic objection is: how can you really justify a statement that makes Europeans brighter, better, bolder than non-Europeans, if you accept the fundamental axiom that all human communities have the same ration of mind as all others? It is one thing, and indeed an unexceptionable thing, to credit the human mind with prime causality in culture change, through the innovation of social, technical, and purely intellectual things. But it is something quite different, and quite suspect, to credit the minds of human beings from some communities—and not others—with all of these qualities of innovativeness, restlessness, sense of responsibility, intellectual eagerness, respect for others, and so on, qualities usually summed up in the word "rationality." Europeans are rational but so too are non-Europeans.</ref> Such statements fail as comparisons with other religions, and other civilizations; but they also fail because the postulated rise of Europe did not take place in the Middle Ages but somewhat later. That Christianity helped in that eventual rise is not at all in question.

It is not necessary to discuss Max Weber's celebrated argument about the role of religion in the rise of Europe, or his celebrated argument about the special role of the Protestant Reformation in the rise of capitalism. Weber of course held the views that I criticized above. But the causal role of religion is not at issue in this book, the concern of which is a uniformitarian view of European and non-European civilizations and their dynamism.

=== Class ===

Three kinds of argument concerning class are relevant to our discussion. The first of these is a two-tiered argument for Europe's ancient and medieval historical superiority that can be summarized as follows: (1) Classless (or "preclass") regions and peoples are simply irrelevant in the matter of explaining Europe's superiority and the world's historical progress, because classless societies are necessarily both unprogressive and primitive. (2) Therefore, the real problems calling for explanation concern the question why some class-stratified societies (the European ones) are progressive while others (principally Asian) are stagnant and backward. Africa below the Sahara is then declared sweepingly to be classless and thus irrelevant to world history. This argument is still widely used, in some analytical works (among them Eric L. Jones's ''The European Miracle''), in some world-history textbooks (as we noted in Chapter 1), and in some (probably most) modern atlases of world history. (Many of these atlases have no maps of Africa for the whole of history from the Upper Paleolithic to 1492!<ref>See, for example, Palmer, ''Atlas of Modern History'' (1957); Bjørklund, Hølmhoe, Røhr, and Lie, ''Historical Atlas of the World'' (1970); and Kinder and Hilgemann, ''The Anchor Atlas of World History'', vol. 1 (1974).</ref>) In place of an extended discussion of this issue I will just offer these comments: Africa was not classless in 1492 (a point to which we return in Chapter 3), classless societies are not stagnant,<ref>I discuss this in ''The National Question'' (1987b).</ref> and the historians who make this sort of argument about classlessness quite regularly contradict themselves by declaring that the classless European peoples of ancient and medieval times—the "barbarian tribes," Germans, Celts, Slavs, etc.—were very progressive: after borrowing the idea of classes and a few other things from the Romans, these primitive but supposedly progressive, innovative, aggressive, inquisitive, achievement-oriented Europeans than surged forward to modernity.

It is customary and quite proper to examine the class structure of a society in history and ask how the different classes acted to favor or resist change, and in which directions. In the absence of such an examination, we usually get an analysis with a bias toward ascribing causality solely to kings and other sorts of elites. Eurocentrism becomes a problem only if the assertion is made that a given class did something historically efficacious in Europe but that this class did not exist in civilizations outside of Europe. This kind of argument is very common in the European miracle literature. Although especially favored among conservative historians, it is also found quite often among those Marxists who cling to the old formulas about the "stages of class society." Fairly representative of the latter is Padgug's argument that a slave mode of production, in its pure form—with slavery dominant in commodity production and with implications for economic progress, the development of private property, and class struggle—existed in ancient times only in Greece and Rome, and that lack of this feature in Asia accounts in part for the tendency of Asian societies to "stagnate."<ref>Padgug, "The Problem of the Theory of Slavery and Slave Society" (1976).</ref> (Roughly the same argument is then used by some Marxists to assert that the slave-plantation system of later times was not properly capitalist because the workers were slaves, not wage-earners. We deal with this point in Chapter 4.) This issue is important, but I will set it aside after one comment: I believe that those scholars who assert that the slave class was more important in the classical Mediterranean than Asia make a very elementary error, perhaps easiest to do if one is not a geographer. It may just be a question of geographical scale. The Athenian empire was perhaps one-hundredth the size of the Ch'in empire. In small, highly developed regions of China, slavery was very likely as important as it was in Attica or in the plantation regions of Roman Italy.

Jean Baechler, a French historical sociologist, has argued that one uniquely European class, the medieval aristocracy, was the central causal force in the European miracle.<ref>Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988).</ref> He dismisses Africa out of hand, then asks why it is that modernity arose in Europe and not in Asia.<ref>Baechler, in "The Origins of Modernity" (1988), p. 39, suggests that we should "juxtapose the barbarous Europe of the Halstatt period (about 600 B.C.) ... and Africa on the verge of colonization in the nineteenth century (A.D.)."</ref> Accepting many of the standard arguments as partial explanations, he argues that the most important reason the miracle occurred was the existence in Europe of a true aristocracy. Baechler describes an ancient Indo-European society characterized by its warrior aristocracy. In India, the aristocracy became corrupted, but not so in Europe.<ref>Baechler finds a true aristocracy also in Japan but believes that Japan failed to emulate Europe for various other reasons.</ref> He carefully defines the medieval aristocracy and its special social quality, "feudality," in such a way as to distinguish it from a mere landlord class, or a class of landlords with added seigneurial powers. The aristocracy was a band of comrades, equals joined by bonds of feudal loyalty, a democracy in its own right. It did not, he says, hold the political power in society, and this was a key to its unique character. Elsewhere, either the aristocracy was ground under by the (imperial, despotic) polity, or it became corrupted into a caste form, as in India; in such cases there was to be no modernization. The European aristocracy had a special sort of private power, one original source of capitalist power. (Baechler contradicts himself here, since in the feudal era the aristocracy was indeed the political power. He simply notes that there was a time of political chaos, and passes on to other matters.<ref>Baechler considers it quite unremarkable that the political chaos of the Dark Ages gave way smoothly to strong states in Europe. "Inevitably" there will be the "reconstitution of larger polities" (Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" 1988, p. 50). But it is equally inevitable for India that the political chaos of 1000 years ago will not be cured and permanently, thereafter, the "polity ... is not a reality in India" (p. 45).</ref>) In sum, the aristocracy invents democracy and incipient capitalist property. The European peasants are also incipient capitalists from early on. Baechler casts aside the idea that Europe's peasantry was an unfree, oppressed community in the Middle Ages and gives it quite remarkable qualities: The peasant village was self-governed, a kind of "republic," with characteristics reminiscent of urban life.<ref>Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988), p. 59.</ref> "A peasant is an entrepreneur in miniature."<ref>Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988), p. 53.</ref> By the fourteenth century this incipiently capitalist peasant is the real peasant of Europe. The peasant village is a little democracy. The peasants are autonomous decision-makers. Baechler simply ignores serfdom, ignores, likewise, the importance of the fact that the lords owned the land, exploited the peasants, and controlled their lives. Feudalism becomes a kind of democratic society in which the aristocrats play a democratic role and the peasants live as free people. Moreover, these peasants, deep in the Middle Ages, had all of the attributes of the capitalist farmer that we associate with the eighteenth century and thereafter: investment, profit orientation, capital accumulation. (And they were smart enough, Baechler says, to avoid the extended family.) All of this is fantasy. It is a simple telescoping of history, pushing the modern world (and particularly the modern capitalist farmer) back into the Middle Ages.

Baechler contrasts all of this with India. His depiction of India is bizarre. India had no aristocracy throughout history, as a result of the caste system, and this is the "deepest cause" for its failure to develop throughout history.<ref>Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988), p. 56.</ref> (India did have a very formidable aristocracy.) Indian society had no political dimension: "The polity ... is not a reality in India." Therefore "the sense of identity in India could never be political"—not to say democratic.<ref>Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988), p. 45.</ref> (Nonsense.) Caste was invented to take the place of the missing polity. (More nonsense.) India didn't have a peasantry, it merely had "agricultural workers."<ref>Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988), p. 53.</ref> How can this be true? Because real peasants were entrepreneurial decisionmakers, something supposedly absent in India (but in reality no more so than in Europe). Baechler thus uses a mythical India as a counterpoint to his basic argument: In Europe, aristocrats and the free society created by them (and their allies the peasants) were the principal source of the "miracle." But Europe's aristocracy and peasantry did not have these romanticized qualities, and, more crucially, comparable classes existed in many other regions in the same period, as we will see in Chapter 3.

In Marxist theory, the concept of class is part of a larger and more consequential notion, that of class struggle. For all class-stratified societies, said Marx and Engels, class struggle is the motor of progress. Most present-day Marxists consider cultural evolution to be very much more complex than this, but they continue to emphasize the idea, and process, of class struggle. Again we must notice that there is nothing inherently Eurocentric about this concept unless one argues that genuine class struggle, or some phase or form of it, occurs only in Europe. But many Marxists argue precisely that way. According to Maurice Godelier, for example, the West displays "the purest forms of class struggle" and "alone has created the conditions for transcending ... class organization."<ref>Godelier, ''Sobre el Modo de Producción Asiático'' (1969), p. 58.</ref> Probably the most influential recent formulation of this sort of argument is Robert Brenner's theory about the rise of capitalism.<ref>Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism" (1977); "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe" (1985, originally published 1976), and "The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism" (1985). After the 1976 article first appeared in the journal, ''Past and Present'', a series of critiques was published in that journal, and Brenner replied in 1982 with the article, "The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism." A volume, ''The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe'', containing the two ''Past and Present'' articles and several critiques, and edited by Aston and Philip, appeared in 1985.</ref> Brenner tries to demonstrate that the rise of capitalism prior to 1492 was a result of class struggle, but class struggle only in Europe. Then he uses this argument as evidence against what he calls "Third-Worldism," the belief that non-Europe has been of great importance historically and is so (politically) in the present. This conclusion has strongly influenced not only Marxist but also conservative thought in history, geography, sociology, and economic-development theory. Certainly the Brenner theory deserves our attention in this book. And it is not at all a complicated theory.

According to Brenner, class struggle between serfs and lords, influenced by depopulation, led to the decline of feudalism in northwestern Europe. (Brenner does not mention non-Europe and scarcely mentions southern Europe.) In most parts of northwestern Europe, the peasants won this class struggle and became in essence petty landowners, now satisfied with their bucolic existence and unwilling to innovate. Only in England did the lords maintain their grip on the land; peasants thus remained tenants. The peasantry then became differentiated, producing a class of landless laborers and a rising class of larger tenant farmers, wealthy enough to rent substantial holdings and forced (because they had to pay rent) to commercialize, innovate technologically, and thus become capitalists. (Brenner thinks that serfs, lords, and landowning peasants did not innovate, and that towns, even English towns, had only a minor role in the rise of capitalism.) English yeoman tenant farmers, therefore, were the founders of capitalism. Stated differently: capitalism arose because English peasants lost the class struggle. In reality, however, peasants were not predominantly landowners in the other countries of the region; capitalism grew more rapidly in and near the towns than in the rural countryside; and the technological innovativeness that Brenner attributes to fourteenth and fifteenth century English farmers really occurred much later, too late to fit into his theory. More importantly, commercial farming and indeed urban protocapitalism were developing during this period in southern Europe and (as I will argue) in other continents. Brenner's theory is simply wrong.<ref>In my opinion the popularity of this thin theory is due principally to two things. First, put forward as a Marxist view, grounded in class struggle, it proves to be, on inspection, a theory that is fairly conventional, if somewhat rural in bias. It seems to follows that class-struggle theories lead to conventional conclusions. And secondly, Brenner uses his theory ("The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism," 1977, pp. 77-92) to attack the unpopular "Third-Worldist" perspectives of dependency theory, underdevelopment theory, and in particular three other neo-Marxists—Sweezy, Frank, and Wallerstein—who argue that European colonialism had much to do with the later rise of capitalism. Brenner is a thoroughgoing Eurocentric tunnel historian: non-Europe had no important role in social evolution at any historical period. Unaware that colonialism involves capitalist relations of production—see Chapter 4 below—he claims that the extra-European world merely had commercial effects on Europe, whereas the rise of capitalism was in no way a product of commerce: it took place in the countryside of England and reflected class struggle, not trade. See critiques of Brenner collected in Aston and Philip (1985) by Hilton, Croot and Parker, Wunder, Leroy, Ladurie, Bois, Cooper, and others. Also see Torras, "Class struggle in Catalonia" (1980) and Hoyle, "Tenure and the land market in early modern England: Or a late contribution to the Brenner debate." (1990).</ref>

=== Family ===

There is nothing new about the belief that the European family is in some fundamental sense more rational and more civilized than the family types found elsewhere. When the modernization doctrine became dominant, this belief seems to have faded into the background; there was now a near-consensus among social scientists that differences in family type should be strung along the continuum from "traditional" to "modern" or, as a variation, from "folk" to "urban." Traditional families, it was argued, have tended to reflect strong kinship ties at a scale larger and wider than the nuclear family; they have tended to form large, extended-family households; and they have tended to be associated with high birthrates. In the absence of much evidence concerning the medieval European family and household, it was rather widely assumed that earlier European families had conformed to the traditional model, which was seen as the "preindustrial" family, contrasted with the modern, post-industrial-revolution nuclear family, forming a small household, with looser kin ties beyond the household, and with fewer children. This transformation was thought to be associated with what was called the "demographic transition," the process of change from a "traditional" demographic pattern, with high birthrate and high deathrate, characteristic of preindustrial conditions, to a "modern," postindustrial demographic pattern, with low birthrate and low deathrate.

In the modernization theory of the family, the non-European world of underdeveloped countries would go through essentially the same transformation as it modernized. Extended family households would be replaced by nuclear family households. This would instill modern prodevelopment attitudes: people would have fewer children (thus combating overpopulation), and they would tend, now, to think more individualistically and thus entrepreneurial.

All of this was a bundle of assumptions. There was no evidence of a causal link between birthrate and size of household (or strength of kin ties beyond the nuclear family); there was merely a correlation within rich, modern societies: both nuclear families and lower birthrates were characteristic of these societies. (One leading demographer pointed out that nuclear families might, in principle, be likely to have more children per couple than extended families.<ref>Taeuber, in Freedman, ''Family and Kinship in Chinese Society'' (1970).</ref>) In addition, the idea that an adult breadwinner would be more entrepreneurial, more prone to accumulate capital, more competitive, and so on, if he (assumed to be male) was working only for his wife and children and not for a large family including his parents, cousins, and other relations, was a tenuous assumption. Large, tightly knit families had proven to be powerful accumulators, for instance, among many immigrant groups engaged in commerce. Why, indeed, should an adult want to work harder only for spouse and children, and not for parents, sisters, and so on? (One can in fact construct an argument to the effect that an extended family with multiple working adults has definite economic advantages in a developing economy.<ref>(1) If only one family member is a wageworker, loss of employment is a disaster. If several are wageworkers, normally some will be earning an income when others are laid off. (2) If we assume an ability to save a certain percentage of income, multiple income earners will provide a larger absolute amount of savings, that is, capital; and the absolute amount of capital can be critical in entrepreneurship. (3) Having kin to borrow from is useful for small-scale entrepreneurship. (4) Kinfolk can supply unpaid labor. These principles are well known in Third World communities.</ref>) As the modernization doctrine itself developed, after about 1960, these ideas began to dissipate. It became clear that various forms of social organization can be equally modern, and that the root causes of change and nonchange do not lie in the family structure.

Rather dramatically, in the mid-1960s, the notion of a peculiarly European family pattern was reinserted into historians' common discourse, partly as a result of an influential paper by John Hajnal.<ref>Hajnal, "European Marriage Patterns in Perspective" (1965), pp. 101-146. This paper is one of the most widely cited publications on the subject of demography in the European miracle literature.</ref> As we noted at an earlier point in this chapter, in the discussion of demographic arguments for the "miracle," historical demography was at that time uncovering evidence that preindustrial Europe (or part of Europe) had a lower birthrate than one would expect of a "traditional society." It seemed that Europeans had been marrying later in life than would be expected in a traditional society with Malthusian controls and therefore maximum birthrate. Instead of scrapping the Malthusian model itself, and arguing instead that all human societies actively control their population dynamics by using such tactics as adjusting the age of marriage, these historians began to assert, simply, the uniqueness of Europe. Other preindustrial societies exhibited the "traditional" pattern, with high and uncontrolled birthrates (and therefore superrapid population growth when mortality declined in the "transition"). Preindustrial Europe, in complete contrast, had a rational family system, with rational population control. It was then argued, without evidence, that preindustrial Europe had a higher level of living and a lower mortality rate than non-Europe, from which it was deduced that Europe kept its birthrate down in proper, rational, adjustment to its lower deathrate, mainly using the mechanism of delayed marriage. Those who put forward this argument simply failed to consider the possibility that families in other societies have acted pretty much the same way. Evidence to this effect was beginning to appear from a number of non-European societies. Some societies had much lower birthrates than would be expected from the classic model. Other societies had demonstrated major shifts in birthrate, either upward or downward, in response to changes in economic and other conditions.<ref>See note 37 above.</ref>

Hajnal began his 1965 essay with this flat statement:

The marriage pattern of most of Europe as it existed for at least two centuries up to 1940 was, as far as we can tell, unique or almost unique in the world. There is no known example of a population of non-European civilization which has had a similar pattern. The distinctive marks of the "European pattern" are (1) a high age of marriage and (2) a high proportion of people who never marry at all.<ref>Hajnal, "European Marriage Patterns in Perspective" (1965), p. 101.</ref>

Hajnal's argument was in some ways very careful and in others very casual. He noted carefully that the evidence for late marriage and (somewhat) low marriage frequency in Europe for periods before the seventeenth century was inconclusive, and that the "fragmentary" evidence for the European Middle Ages suggested a "non-European pattern."<ref>Hajnal, "European Marriage Patterns in Perspective" (1965), p. 134.</ref> He introduced absolutely no historical data for non-European regions, casually comparing historical Europe with twentieth-century non-Europe. The theoretical constraint is very clear: non-European patterns are "traditional" and permanent, hence a comparison of seventeenth-century Europe with mid-twentieth-century Asia or Africa is perfectly acceptable.<ref>Hajnal concedes that he has only contemporary data for non-Europe, but merely suggests that historical data would prove his point even more clearly because modern non-European family patterns, in his view, are changing in the direction of European patterns: are being Europeanized. And when "all the qualifications about the data have been made, there can be no doubt that our original generalization remains" ("European Marriage Patterns in Perspective," 1965, p. 106).</ref>

This proposition about the unique European pattern of later marriages and lower marriage frequencies was widely and quickly incorporated into the broader theory of Europe's historical "miracle." Without much supporting evidence, the proposition was firmly pushed backward into the Middle Ages. According to Lawrence Stone, writing in 1977, "it has now been established beyond any doubt" that over most of northwest Europe the middle and lower classes "married remarkably late, certainly from the fifteenth century onward. ... This custom of delayed marriage is an extraordinary and unique feature of north-west European civilization."<ref>Stone, ''The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800'' (1977), p. 509.</ref> Here one notices particularly the word "remarkably." This is "remarkable" only if there is something to compare it with; yet non-European historical data are not given or even sought. Michael Mann derives the pattern from the Iron Age Indo-European peasant society. Patricia Crone speculates that it is perhaps an ancient Germanic trait. Eric L. Jones thinks that it goes back three or four thousand years. Alan Macfarlane thinks that it has its roots in "a particular amalgam of Christianity and Germanic customs."<ref>Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 408; Crone, ''Pre-Industrial Societies'' (1989), p. 152; Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), pp. 15-16; Macfarlane, ''Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300-1840'' (1986).</ref> And so on. In a word: the pattern is very old in Europe.

The matter of dates, or age, is certainly crucial. Western Europe was undergoing major transformations from the seventeenth century onward, and a delayed and lower marriage rate could well be explained by a number of the newer facts: mobility, loss of holdings due to enclosures, urbanization, and, later, the well-understood demographic and social effects of the industrial revolution. Even the sixteenth century was somewhat chaotic in western Europe. But if the marriage pattern emerged before 1492, a date before these disruptions began, then one can speak of a definite "European pattern," not merely a "preindustrial" or "traditional" pattern. And one can begin to build a general causal theory for the subsequent changes—the "European miracle."

Additional propositions were added. It had long been known that nuclear family households and neolocal residence (the married couple establishes a household well separated from those of the parents) have been characteristic of western Europe during recent centuries, and this is to be expected as a feature of modernization. It fits with standard modernization theory: the process is supposed to lead from extended family to nuclear family. But the European miracle historians now argue that nuclear families and neolocal residence are part of a unique "European familial system" (Laslett).<ref>Laslett, "The European Family and Early Industrialization" (1989).</ref> And again they locate its origin far back in history. And again they sweepingly assert that non-Europeans lack these patterns. In fact, there is good evidence that nuclear-family households were common in many parts of non-Europe. Taeuber, analyzing Buck's data, found that more than 60% of peasant households in China were nuclear in the early twentieth century.<ref>Taeuber, "The Families of Chinese Farmers" (1970), pp. 63-86.</ref> These are not historical data, but the point is that China is supposed, according to modernization theory, to be especially "traditional" as regards family and many other things; indeed, there is common confusion between the notion of the Chinese lineage or "sib"—made famous by Weber—and the idea of the extended family. Larger, extended families are uncommon in Latin America. In India, as well as in China, the notion of an extended family is ambiguous because of the ambiguity of the notion of "neolocal residence" (in a cramped village, house-building space can be a problem), and the association sometimes found between neolocality and available land upon which to begin a small holding. Further confusion is added over the association between extended (and/or joint) family and inheritance rights, power, mobility, and more.<ref>See Freedman, ''Chinese Lineage and Society'' (1966), p. 49.</ref> Meanwhile, back in Europe, the model of a supposedly characteristic nuclear-neolocal pattern is subject to very serious questions for the Middle Ages. (For even earlier times the idea of a unique pattern is speculative, and belongs with other old and suspect ideas—discussed earlier in this chapter—about the ancient Germanic tribes and their unique individualism, progressiveness, and the like.) Medieval marital residence patterns may sometimes have reflected manor rules (such as assignment of holdings) rather than cultural residence rules in circumstances of serfdom and insecure tenancy, and a distinction has to be made between different types of rural regions, such as the areas with off-farm employment (like woolen areas of southeastern England), those with "frontier" characteristics, and so on. There is even reason to question the notion of a persistent west European marriage pattern.<ref>See, for example, Handler "Review of Macfarlane, A., ''Marriage and love in England''" (1989); Hilton, "Individualism and the English Peasantry" (1980); Kertzer, "The Joint Family Household Revisited: Demographic Constraints and Household Complexity in the European Past" (1989); and Berkner, "The Use and Misuse of Census Data for the Historical Analysis of Family Structures" (1975), and "The Stem Family and the Developmental Cycle of the Peasant Household" (1989).</ref> But even granting the generalization about western Europe, there is no basis for considering the European pattern to have been, historically, unique.<ref>For instance, G. Lee, "Comparative Perspectives" (1987), p. 65, points out that "(Many) scholars contend that the majority of families in any society are and always have been nuclear, regardless of the cultural elements favoring extended families."</ref>

Finally, the model is embellished with some rather gaudy ornamentation. It is claimed that the unique European pattern is not merely a matter of neolocality, nuclear households, and age and frequency of marriage. West European marriages were grounded in love. Elsewhere, marriages were arranged. (But arranged marriages seem to have been the rule in premodern Europe, prior to the periods of high mobility and social disruption. The notion, regularly invoked here, that non-European couples are strangers to one another prior to their being shoved into marriage is colonial-era prejudice supported by a few unusual cultural situations. Romantic love in this argument is considered an attribute of European rationality. Non-European couples are certainly as loving as European couples.) It is claimed, next, that the unique European family, because it is nuclear, produces a unique European personality type. The theory is that the small (European) household leads inevitably to individualistic, competitive, acquisitive, yet caring behavior. Mann and Jones, as we saw earlier, put forward the image of an ancient peasant household, a Hansel and Gretel house deep in the forest, as the historical source of this individualistic pattern. Macfarlane, who presents perhaps the most extreme form of this theory (and is chided by some of his colleagues not for his theory but for his claim that it applies mainly to the English), argues that the early medieval English family produced a person with the psychological and behavioral traits of (in essence) Weber's capitalist personality, that the causal chain runs from tribal customs and religion to family, from family to personality, and from personality to the beginnings of capitalism (a point we return to below). This argument is advanced mainly by erecting a model of what Macfarlane considers to be "peasant society," with a peasant family and peasant mentality. Early English rural folk don't fit this model. Therefore they were not peasants, and did not have the traditional traits of peasantry, like a traditional family type and traditional mentality.<ref>Macfarlane, ''The Origins of English Individualism'' (1978), chap. 1 and "The Cradle of Capitalism" (1988), p. 344.</ref> As many have commented, Macfarlane's notion of "peasant" is a straw man, uncharacteristic of modern non-Europe, much less of historical non-Europe, and his view of the medieval English farm folk as nonpeasants is historically invalid.<ref>See, for example, Hilton, "Individualism and the English Peasantry" (1980) and Handler, "Review of Mcfarlane, A., ''Marriage and Love in England''" (1989).</ref>

The theory of the unique European family is an important part of the European miracle theory as it is being propagated today. It is used in two distinct arguments. The first of these combines the family theory with Malthusianism. The argument runs as follows: Humans in general are not rational enough to control their sexual behavior and limit the number of offspring to suit the prevailing conditions of food supply and the like. Therefore, ordinary humans experience permanent, or periodic, crises, in which overpopulation leads to famine and war and pestilence, after which the now-reduced population begins again to overproduce offspring. The root axiom is irrationality. People behave not intelligently, but (as Malthus said 200 years ago) rather like barnyard beasts.<ref>"(It) seems likely that (primitive peoples') patterns of behavior in ... respect (to fertility and mortality) bore a strong resemblance to those which can be observed in many animals," Wrigley, ''Population and History'' (1969), p. 37. Wrigley is writing about present-day hunting-gathering-fishing peoples. A "description of the relationship between animal social conventions and the regulation of animal population numbers" is "a convenient point of departure for the study of primitive man" (p. 37).</ref> The historical result of this process is to prevent development. Any improvement in, for instance, productive technology merely leads to population growth, to crisis, to depopulation, and thus back to the status quo ante—a cycle of stagnation. This is one and perhaps the crucial cause of the nondevelopment of non-European societies in general. Europeans, by contrast, have always (or perhaps for just a millennium or so) exhibited rational behavior in all matters relating to population. This includes decisions about marriage and about childbearing. The unique European late-marrying, nuclear, neolocal, companionate family is the crucial institution in which this rational decision-making process takes place. Thus the European family has permitted Europeans (or west Europeans, or northwest Europeans) to check population growth, and thereby accumulate material wealth that would otherwise be dissipated in the feeding of excess babies. This primordial accumulation underlies the permanent progress of Europe. This theory, in one form or another, is advanced by many of the historians whom we have been discussing, among them Crone, Hall, Jones, Laslett, Macfarlane, and Mann.<ref>Crone, ''Pre-Industrial Societies'' (1989), p. 153; Hall, ''Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West'' (1985), pp. 130-132; Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), pp. 3, 13-15, 217-19, 226-227, 231, and elsewhere; Laslett, "The European Family and Early Industrialization" (1989), pp. 235-240; Macfarlane, "The Cradle of Capitalism" (1988), chap. 14; Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 408.</ref> Hall expresses one form of the theory in the following comment (part of which we quoted earlier):

[The] European family has long been small, late marrying, nuclear and notably sensitive to Malthusian pressure. ... The expansion of the European economy did not occur laterally, as in late traditional China, because improvements in output were not eaten up by a massive growth in population. The ratio between population and acreage in Europe remained favourable ultimately because of the relative continence of the European family.<ref>Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), pp. 130-131.</ref>

The Malthusian theory reduces humans to beasts. But even for those scholars who accept Malthusianism, the notion that the European family staves off the Malthusian disasters is hardly credible.

The second way in which the "unique European family" theory is used in arguments for the European "miracle" is a matter of deducing ways that the European family produces various sorts of uniquely progressive attitudes and actions on the part of Europeans, attitudes and actions that then lead toward the miracle. A very widely used form of this argument is expressed thusly by Laslett:

[The] European familial system may have been responsible for a whole series of features conducive to economic progress, and perhaps innovation. The conditions laid down for marriage and procreation imposed on all individuals ... the necessity of saving, accumulating. ... [The] European familial system fostered the spirit of hoarding and parsimony.<ref>Laslett, "The European Family and Early Industrialization" (1989), p. 237.</ref>

The family thus generates the personality traits of an incipient capitalist, and does so deep in the Middle Ages. This, too, is hardly credible and hardly in accord with the realities of life (and psychology) before 1492. Laslett, like Macfarlane and many others, makes the false assumption that a typical medieval European family does, in fact, have choices permitting saving, hoarding, accumulating, and so on. This argument requires that the peasant family be a substantial landholder, or at least a tenant with firm security, such that capital accumulation can take place and not be bled off by master or landlord. There is much dispute about the degree of landownership in late-medieval western Europe, but it is certain that family behavior of the sort described by Laslett could not have been common under serfdom and, after the decline of serfdom, could not have been common in places where peasants did not own the land. And this seems to have been the rule, not the exception.<ref>See Croot and Parker, "Agrarian Class Structure and the Development of Capitalism: France and England Compared" (1985). This essay, and others in the Aston and Philipin book, ''The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe'' (1985), discuss in detail the low level of landownership in medieval Europe.</ref> It appears that this argument is, again, a telescoping of history. The entrepreneurial yeoman farmer of, say, the eighteenth century, is pushed back into the Middle Ages, and an effect becomes a cause.

Many other European-family-to-European-miracle arguments are common in present-day scholarly discourse, but space permits me to give only one additional example, from Lawrence Stone:

There are several consequences which must have followed from the late marriage pattern. ... [It] is reasonable to assume that for many young men this delay involved considerable sexual denial at a time of optimum male sexual drive. ... If one follows Freudian theory, this could lead to neuroses. ... [It] could help to explain the high level of group aggression, which lay behind the extraordinary expansionist violence of western nation-states at this time. It could also have been a stimulus to capitalist economic enterprise ... stimulating saving in order to marry, and generating activist social and economic dynamism.<ref>Stone, ''The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800'' (1977), pp. 53-54.</ref>

Again:

The sublimation of sex among young male adults may well account for the extraordinary military aggressiveness, the thrift, the passion for hard work, and the entrepreneurial and intellectual enterprise of modern Western man.<ref>Stone, ''The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800'' (1977), p. 652.</ref>

Europeans conquered the world because their young men were sexually frustrated.

Space does not permit us to list and discuss all of the other common or garden-variety explanations for the so-called European miracle. Some additional explanations will be mentioned in various contexts at later points in this book. But I hope that the discussion in this chapter has sufficiently made the point that no characteristic of Europe's environment, Europe's people, or Europe's culture, at any time prior to 1492, can be convincingly shown to have had anything to do with the fact that Europe developed while other civilizations did not do so.

I will try, in the next two chapters, to show that the whole question must be phrased in a different way and answered in a different way. Europe did not rise, relative to the other civilizations, prior to 1492. When Europe did rise, after 1492, this reflected, not some special quality of "Europeanness," but the immense wealth which came into Europe as a result of colonialism in the sixteenth century and thereafter.

== Notes ==

1. Although Eric L. Jones's 1981 book ''The European Miracle'' popularized the phrase "the European miracle," it had been in use for a long time with the same essential meaning: the unique rise of Europe before or during the Middle Ages. Not every historian would describe this as a "miracle," but the term has wide acceptance, as evidence the fact that an international symposium entitled "The European Miracle" was held at Cambridge University in 1985.

2. Apparently my 1976 article, "Where Was Capitalism Born?" was the first publication to reject the "miracle" theory absolutely, that is, without qualification. In 1990 Samir Amin, commenting on a later paper of mine, indicated his basic agreement with this rejectionist position. (Amin, "Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism: A Comment," 1990; Blaut, "Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism," 1989; also see Blaut, "Fourteen Ninety-Two," 1992; and Amin, "On Jim Blaut's 'Fourteen Ninety-Two,'" 1992.) A few other historians have taken positions approaching this one; their views are discussed later in this chapter.

3. Another seminal work was Cyril Black's ''The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History'' (1966). Other such works in various fields will be discussed later in this chapter.

4. Perhaps one reason was the maturation of the discipline of history itself. Another was the influence, not entirely salutary, of positivistic scientific method on history, which led to an attempt to specify variables and "factors," and, if possible, quantify each of them. Another reason was the loss of faith in the nineteenth-century idea of inevitable progress: after nearly a half century of chaos and war, progress definitely did not appear to be something natural and inevitable; it had to be explained and also produced. Still a third reason was the general secularization of European thought, including history, such that human events could not be assumed to reflect guidance of a higher power. Another reason, possibly a very important one, was the general development of academic disciplines, and their involvement in (and nutrition from) international and domestic policy. This implied that each discipline, seeing the world with some degree of bias in favor of its own subject-as-factor (for economists, the market factor; for psychologists, the motivation factor; for sociologists, the demographic factor and the social-structural factor; for geographers, the resource factor; etc.) tended to argue in favor of historical models that treated our factor as crucial and those of others as secondary. Since many social scientists wrote history in this process, this led to some special pleading.

5. I do not mean to imply that all of this was a dominant theory for the discipline of history as a whole. The great majority of historical scholars worked on smaller problems, carefully delving into events and developing limited explanations for those events. The modernization perspective influenced some of the smaller generalizations, for instance proffering explanations in which the factors most supportive of modernizationism were favored—factors like population, technology, and the like. And there were some areas of research where lack of attention to the history of non-Europe was a critical source of error (most notably, as we will see, in studies of the history of European technology). In addition, there were (and are) many different points of view in the vast and diverse field of professional history, so it would be questionable to characterize a particular historiographic period as being dominated by a particular governing theory (or "paradigm"). I suspect that my own concern with the body of literature relating to the "European miracle" problem probably leads me to overemphasize the significance of the modernization view on history as a whole. It should also be noticed that most of the prominent writers about the specific problem of explaining the unique rise of Europe were specialist historians—economic historians, historical sociologists, and so forth—and not historians of the standard breed.

6. Cabral, ''Unity and Struggle'' (1979).

7. As to the present and future, Third World intellectuals tended to make two arguments. Those who supported the idea of a capitalist form of development argued that economic development must consist of the defense of native capital against the corrosive diffusion into one's country of the economic and political dominance of European countries and corporations. For socialists, influence and dominance by international capitalism quite obviously had to be rejected. Both groups tended to adopt "dependency theory" or "underdevelopment theory," which was a theory both of history and of modern social processes and development. A relatively small minority of Third World intellectuals, usually reflecting the thinking and interests of the very wealthy and very right-wing sectors, welcomed the idea of economic domination by foreign capitalist interests. Since the wealthy social sectors dominated most Third World societies, this minority point of view often determined policy. Also, it received much more prominence than it deserved in the journals of the First World.

8. See James, ''A History of Pan-African Revolt'' (1938), ''The Black Jacobins'' (1938), "The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery" (1970); Williams, ''Capitalism and Slavery'' (1944). We discuss these matters in Chapter 4.

9. Amin, ''Accumulation on a World Scale'' (1974) and later works. My articles "Geographic Models of Imperialism" (1970) and "Where Was Capitalism Born?" (1976) laid out the skeleton of a general theory.

10. I deal with this matter in ''The National Question'' (1987b).

11. Duyvendak, ''Ma Huan Re-examined'' (1933); Needham and collaborators, ''Science and Civilization in China'', published in 6 volumes between 1965 and 1984; Wheatley, ''The Golden Khersonese'' (1961) and ''The Pivot of the Four Quarters'' (1971); Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1973).

12. Amin, ''Unequal Development'' (1976), ''Eurocentrism'' (1988), "Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism: A Comment" (1990).

13. Bernal, ''Black Athena'', vol. 1 (1987) and vol. 2 (1991).

14. Mention should also be made of Eric Wolf's 1982 book ''Europe and the Peoples Without History'' which provides a useful and important survey of the history of both European and non-European civilizations and shows how unconvincing is the theory that non-European civilizations, historically, were stagnant and unprogressive (that they were "peoples without history"). Wolf, however, stops short of questioning the truly crucial Eurocentric belief that Europeans were more progressive than non-Europeans in several ways that are crucial to the "European miracle" theory, and so he does not directly confront that theory. (It should be noted that most mainstream historians no longer argue that non-European civilizations are, or were, totally unprogressive, totally "unhistorical," arguing instead about slow rates of change, "blockages" inhibiting change, and the like—a difference of phrasing which, as we will see, is not always a difference of argument.)

15. It is always risky to try to explain broad changes of fashion in scholarship, especially when the changes are still underway, so this interpretation cannot be more than a hunch, or hypothesis. Scholarly attitudes toward the Third World were very positive in the period of anticolonial and civil rights struggles. After the late 1960s the mood changed. Not only did more conservative views come to dominate the Western world, but rather unexpected difficulties emerged in the Third World itself: national conflicts, failure of development programs, and more. Western scholarship had never really abandoned the traditional view of Europe and its relations to non-Europe, including the diffusionist view of colonialism, and it appears that this older paradigm, never abandoned, simply became, once again, thoroughly dominant. Certainly the attention that had been paid previously to dependency theory and related views fell away among mainstream scholars. Among Marxists the process was even more dramatic, because it was less expected. In brief, Eurocentric Marxists who dismissed the role of the Third World both historically and in the present now became virtually the only Marxists within the academic world to pronounce upon issues related to the Third World. It became quite fashionable to insist, once again, that only the working class of the advanced capitalist countries can bring about socialism because each stage of history commences in this part of the world (Inside) before it spreads to the rest of the world (Outside). In the conservative camp, not only did Eurocentric views regain their hegemony, but one began, now, to hear whispers of views not far distant from racism: views about Third World peoples not having the potential to develop.

16. See Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism" (1977), "Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe" (1985), "The Agrarian roots of European capitalism" (1985b); Anderson, ''Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism'' (1974), ''Lineages of the Absolute State'' (1974); Warren, ''Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism'' (1980).

17. I will discuss only the more important beliefs, perhaps neglecting a few of these. And I will give just enough evidence to show that these beliefs are not self-evidently true. Much fuller evidence is given, to dispute some of the beliefs, in Chapters 3 and 4.

18. See Chapter 1, note 2.

19. Bowler, ''The Invention of Progress'' (1989); Harris, ''The Rise of Anthropological Theory'' (1968); Gossett, ''Race: The History of an Idea in America'' (1963); Jackson, ''Race and Racism: Essays in Social Geography'' (1987); Stocking, ''Race, Culture, and Evolution'' (1968); Trigger, ''A History of Archeological Thought'' (1989).

20. See Bernal, ''Black Athena'', vol. 1 (1987).

21. See Gossett, ''Race'' (1963).

22. Blaut, "The Theory of Cultural Racism" (1992).

23. "Hereditary neuralgia of the presumably strong tendency toward hysteria and autohypnosis of the Indian..." Max Weber, ''The Religion of India'' (1967), p. 387. This postulate is basic to Weber's analysis of Brahminism as prime cause for India's lack of development.

24. "(The) ... negroes long ago showed themselves unsuitable for factory work and the operation of machines; they have not seldom sunk into a cataleptic sleep. Here is one case in economic history where tangible racial distinctions are present" Weber, ''General Economic History'' (1981), p. 379. Although Weber says here that this is merely "one case" of racial influences, note that the case is crucial for Weber's analysis both of "rationality" and of modernization; the "racial distinctions" here separate out Africans in a fundamental way: a clear case of moderate yet crucial racism. In the same vein, "it was found that the American Indians were entirely unsuitable for plantation labor" (p. 299).

25. Weber, ''The Religion of China'' (1951), pp. 231-232. Weber considers these to be "racial qualities of the Chinese" (p. 230) although cultural factors may be involved.

26. Weber, ''The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism'' (1958), p. 30. Weber says here that "it would be natural to suspect that the most important reason" for the rationality of the Occident lies in "differences of heredity," and "the importance of biological heredity," he thinks, is "very great" (p. 30). But we do not yet know how to measure its influence, so our attention should focus mainly on the cultural factors (pp. 30-31). This was typical moderate racism (as I call it) for the time the work was published (1904-1905).

27. I have not discussed the question whether biological racism remains important today as a genuinely implicit theory, that is, one still accepted but not consciously so. I suspect that it does. Some Eurocentric historians hold to positions regarding individual differences between Europeans and non-Europeans that are so extreme, and so bigoted, that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that at least a few of them may hold to an implicitly racist infratheory, perhaps unconsciously believing, that is, that the inferiority of non-Europeans is genetically determined.

28. Among many sources on the racism fallacy, see Franz Boas' classic book, ''Race, Language, and Culture'' (1948); also Blum, ''Pseudoscience and Mental Ability'' (1978); Gossett, ''Race'' (1965); Haller, ''Outcasts from Evolution'' (1971); Jackson, ''Race and Racism'' (1987); Magubane, ''The Ties that Bind: African-American Consciousness and Africa'' (1987); Gill and Levidow, ''Anti-Racist Science Teaching'' (1987).

29. The idea that demographic behavior is not fully under social control, is a primordial biological fact or factor, seems to underlie the thinking of most Eurocentric historians (conspicuously Eric L. Jones, Michael Mann, and John Hall). The basic proposition seems to be that population will necessarily grow beyond the rational limits, and so overpopulation must result unless societies find nondemographic solutions, notably by increasing food supply to feed the inexorably increasing population. See, for instance, Michael Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'', vol. 1 (1986): If agricultural yields had not increased in medieval Europe, "the continent would ... have experienced a similar Malthusian cycle every century or so—and would not have generated capitalism" (p. 402). This view is even encountered, occasionally, in the radical and feminist movements. Note the following view put forward by a Marxist-feminist: "(We) assume (given the ubiquity of the sex drive ...) that the total number of conceptions in a population will tend to exceed those desired within a given incentive structure, and this unintended surplus will be greater, the more imperfect are the means at hand. ... A given fertility pattern then is taken to be 'rational' ... except for a small but variable excess (of births)," Seccombe, "Marxism and Demography," (1983), p. 31. The context is a discussion of European medieval social evolution, but the argument is given mainly in support of Brenner's theory about the strictly European rise of capitalism. Most radicals and feminists reject Malthusianism and would reject Seccombe's view as Malthusian.

30. Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 3. Part of the passage is a quotation.

31. Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 219.

32. Hall, ''Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West'' (1985), p. 131. Italics added.

33. As F. Hassan points out, "Among human populations the practice of population control in one form or another is universal." ("Demographic Archeology," 1978, p. 71.)

34. Some families will of course have more conceptions than desired, and others fewer, because birth control techniques are imperfect, but the average for the larger group will be broadly in line with the group's values and population targets. The techniques run the gamut from variable age of marriage and variable dowry or bride price, to complexity of marriage rules (defining who, in a kin system, is eligible to be one's spouse), to timing of sexual relations, to the use of antiterility and abortive devices, to infanticide, and other practices.

35. Much of the scholarship comes from India, where colonial ideology used to claim that poverty is a result of people having too many children. Now demographers and other social scientists have disproven this myth. See, for instance, Mamdani, ''The Myth of Population Control'' (1972), and Nag, "How Modernization Can Also Increase Fertility" (1980). For Africa, see, for example, Kitching, "Proto-Industrialization and Demographic Change" (1983); Swindell, "Domestic Production, Labor Mobility, and Population Change in West Africa, 1900-1980" (1981); Cordell and Gregory, the introduction to ''African Population and Capitalism'' (1987).

36. See, for instance, numerous studies showing the plasticity of birthrates, including Nag "How Modernization Can Also Increase Fertility" (1980), Collyer, ''Birth Rates in Latin America'' (1965), and Harewood, "Population Growth in Grenada" (1966).

37. See Aston and Philipn, eds., ''The Brenner Debate'' (1985), especially the introduction by R. Hilton.

38. Perhaps more readily, because the Malthusian explanation for poverty in Third World countries has been a rather troublesome issue for scholars and planners in these countries, and it has been important to show that poverty in their countries is not somehow caused by the demographic misbehavior of ordinary people.

39. For instance Montesquieu, in ''The Spirit of the Laws'' ((1748) 1949) "People are ... more vigorous in cold climates" (pt. xiv.2). "There are countries where the excess of heat enervates the body, and renders men ... slothful and dispirited" (pt. xv.7).

40. "Africa" almost always refers to "Africa south of the Sahara" in the discourse I am criticizing, so I will use "Africa" in the same sense in the present discussion.

41. Blaut, "The Ecology of Tropical Farming Systems" (1963).

42. See, for example, Collins and Roberts, eds., ''Capacity for Work in the Tropics'' (1988), which fails to find convincing evidence suggesting negative tropical effects.

43. The two citations (Gilfillan, "The Coldward Course of Progress," 1920, and Lambert, "The Role of Climate in the Economic Development of Nations," 1971) are hardly indicative of modern scholarly literature.

44. India's "debilitating climate" is one reason why India fell behind Europe, according to Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 198.

45. Among the pioneer works which have importance for peasant agriculture, we may mention Fred Hardy's "Some Aspects of Tropical Soils" (1936) and various of his articles in ''Tropical Agriculture'', and the work of Robert Pendleton (especially Pendleton, "Land Use in North-Eastern Thailand," 1943, and Prescott and Pendleton, ''Laterites and Lateritic Soils'', 1952), and G. Milne "A Soil Reconnaissance Journey Through Parts of Tanganyika Territory" (1947). The first comprehensive textbook on tropical soils embodying modern knowledge is Mohr and van Baren, ''Tropical Soils'' (1954).

46. See Nye and Greenland, ''The Soil Under Shifting Cultivation'' (1960); Blaut, "The Nature and Effects of Shifting Agriculture" (1962); Ahn, ''West African Soils'' (1970).

47. See Miller, ''Way of Death'' (1988); Curtin, ''The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex'' (1990). The view is echoed in many world history textbooks, for example, Roberts, ''The Hutchinson History of The World'' (1987), pp. 54-56; McNeill, ''A World History'' (1967), pp. 273-278.

48. See Wilken, ''Good Farmers: Traditional Agricultural Resource Management in Mexico and Central America'' (1987); also Nye and Greenland, ''The Soil Under Shifting Agriculture'' (1960); Blaut, "The Ecology of Tropical Farming Systems" (1963).

49. Denevan, ''The Native Population of the Americas in 1492'' (1976).

50. Cockburn and Hecht, ''The Fate of the Forest'' (1989).

51. These marginal areas often are regions in which agriculture is practiced, in preference to some less intensive system of land use, because human communities have been pushed off better land by historical forces, notably colonialism.

52. For a typical instance, the Oxford historian J. M. Roberts, in his popular world history textbook, ''The Hutchinson History of the World'' (1987), makes the following quite ignorant statement: "Probably the greatest importance of (the) spread of iron-working (in tropical Africa) was the difference it made to agriculture. It made possible a new penetration of the forests, new tilling of the soil (which may be connected with the arrival of new food-crops from Asia ... This suggests once again the important limiting factor of the African environment. Most of the continent's history is the story of response to influences from the outside (including iron-working and new crops)" (pp. 511-512). African farmers, like farmers in Europe and many other regions, practiced agriculture with stone tools before iron arrived, and continued to do so afterward whenever and wherever iron was hard to obtain. On the age of ironworking in tropical Africa, see, for example, Wai-Andah, "West Africa Before the Seventh Century" (1981) and Sinclair, "Archeology in Eastern Africa" (1991).

53. See, for example, Roberts (note 53 above); also Irwin, "Sub-Saharan Africa," in Garraty and Gay, eds. ''The Columbia History of the World'' (1981), p. 299.

54. See for instance Irvine's classical work, ''A Textbook of West African Agriculture'' (1934); Coursey, ''Yams'' (1967).

55. According to Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), "the Negroid peoples ... were still pushing east and south into the territories of the pygmies and the bushmen when the Boers undertook the Great Trek north from the Cape in the 1830s," (p. 155). Also see Roberts ''The Hutchinson History of the World'' (1987), p. 178.

56. Curtin, ''Economic Change in Pre-Colonial Africa'' (1975); Curtin, ''The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex'' (1990); Miller, ''Way of Death'' (1988).

57. See Wisner and Mbithi, "Drought in Eastern Kenya" (1974); Wisner, ''Power and Need in Africa'' (1989); O'Keefe and Wisner, "African Drought: The State of the Game" (1975).

58. The same arguments apply, with no need for qualification, in Western Hemisphere agriculture. In relatively limited parts of the South American rain forest the ecosystem is so fragile, as a result of local geological conditions (rocks forming infertile kaolinitic clay soils in some areas, almost pure sands in other areas), that cropping systems must employ shifting agriculture (or tree crops). But such areas are the exception within the present-day distribution of rain forest environments. In general, the great sweep of Amazonian and Guianan rain forest is a zone of non-sedentary agriculture because of cultural-historical factors, notably depopulation and the massive increase in cattle ranching. It is in fact cattle ranching, and not shifting agriculture, that leads to agriculturally caused long-term environmental degradation in the rainforest region, because (1) ranchers burn forest to the maximum extent possible and without control, in order to expand the area of pasture, and (2) the resulting pasture leads to steady soil degradation because coarse pasture grasses do not maintain the soil ecosystem as does the original forest. Shifting cultivators, by contrast, burn only under controlled conditions, burn small areas only, and carefully encourage the regrowth of forest. If the forest disappears, their livelihood disappears. Shifting agriculturists should not be blamed for deforestation anywhere in the humid tropics. See Hecht and Cockburn, ''The Fate of the Forest'' (1989); Blaut, "The Nature and Effects of Shifting Agriculture" (1963).

59. Buckle, ''The History of Civilization in England'', 2nd ed., (1913), chap. 2. Also see Bowler, ''The Invention of Progress'' (1989), pp. 28-29.

60. Marx, ''Capital'', vol. 1 (1976), p. 513n.

61. Jones in fact manages to use both of the opposing theories toward the same end. In wetter regions of Africa "living was easy." In drier areas "agriculture was not productive." Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 154. Also see Jones, ''Growth Recuring: Economic Change in World History'' (1988).

62. "In Africa the bountifulness and extent of the land makes for a mobile peasantry, necessarily therefore poor material on which to build states. Something like this is probably true of all slash-and-burn agriculture," John Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 27. ("Slash-and-burn agriculture" is shifting agriculture.)

63. Laibman, "Modes of Production and Theories of Transition" (1984), p. 284. However, Laibman's overall argument is not at all Eurocentric.

64. Buckle, ''History of Civilization in England'', vol. 1, 2nd ed. (1913), p. 93: "(The) great plagues by which Europe has at different periods been scourged, have, for the most part, proceeded from the East, which is their natural birthplace, and where they are most fatal. Indeed, of those cruel diseases now existing in Europe, scarcely one is indigenous; and the worst of them were imported from tropical countries in and after the first century of the Christian era."

65. The theory that the HIV virus which causes AIDS in humans is another one of these African plagues descending upon the Western World may very well be just the newest myth in this old diffusionist tradition. Whether or not this virus originated in Africa, which has not been proven, the myth has already taken on ugly overtones, as in the completely unfounded (yet classical) belief that AIDS was transmitted from monkeys to humans because of some strange sexual practices in some obscure African tribes. (This myth is naively reported in Shannon and Pyle, "The Origin and Diffusion of AIDS," 1989. See the critique of this paper by Watts and Okello, "Medical Geography and AIDS," 1990. Also see R. C. and R. J. Chirimuuta, ''AIDS, Africa and racism'', 2nd ed., 1989.)

66. McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976), p. 43.

67. See, for instance, Giblin, "Trypanosomiasis Control in African History: An Evaded Issue?" (1990); Turshen, "Population Growth and the Deterioration of Health: Mainland Tanzania, 1920-1960" (1987).

68. See Venturi "The History of the Concept of 'Oriental Despotism' in Europe" (1963); P. Anderson, ''Lineages of the Absolute State'' (1974); B. Chandra, "Karl Marx, His Theories of Asian Societies, and Colonial Rule" (1981).

69. Similar judgments are still commonly made by theoreticians of the European miracle. For instance, John Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 12: "Chinese society was stuck in the same stage for over two thousand years, while Europe, in comparison, progressed like a champion hurdler."

70. And also earlier. It is discussed for instance by Montesquieu, Bernier, Adam Smith, and Hegel (see, for instance, "Introduction," and "The Oriental World" in Hegel's ''Philosophy of History'', 1956). Also see the historical reviews in Venturi, "The History of the Concept of 'Oriental Despotism' in Europe" (1963); P. Anderson, ''Lineages of the Absolute State'' (1974); and B. Chandra, "Karl Marx, his Theories of Asian Societies, and Colonial Review" (1981).

71. This idea, too, had its forerunners. Possibly Marx got the idea from Karl Ritter, his professor of geography at Berlin.

72. Marx and Engels, ''Selected Correspondence'' (1975).

73. Marx and Engels considered other factors as well, and it is fair to say that their analysis remained speculative. I believe that Engels withdrew from the idea of "Oriental despotism" in late life. See the discussion of this topic in P. Anderson, ''Lineages of the Absolute State'' (1974); Blaut, "Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism" (1989); and B. Chandra, "Karl Marx, His Theories of Asian Societies, and Colonial Rule" (1981).

74. See Laibman, "Modes of Production and Theories of Transition" (1984), and Bailey and Llobera, ''The Asiatic Mode of Production'' (1981).

75. Weber, ''The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations'' (1976), pp. 84, 131, 157, ''The Religion of China'' (1951), pp. 16, 21, 25, and "The Origin of Seigneurial Proprietorship," part 1, chap. 3, esp. pp. 56-57 in ''General Economic History'' (1981). Also see McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976), pp. 93, 207, 259.

76. Weber, ''The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations'' (1976), pp. 157-158. Also, on p. 84: "The basis of the economy (in Egypt) was irrigation, for this was the crucial factor in all exploitation of land resources. Every new settlement demanded construction of a canal ... Now canal construction is necessarily a large-scale operation, demanding some sort of collective social organization; it is very different from the relatively individualistic activity of clearing virgin forest. Here then is the fundamental economic cause for the overwhelmingly dominant position of the monarchy in Mesopotamia (and) Egypt."

77. Wittfogel, ''Oriental Despotism'' (1957).

78. See, for instance, Denevan, ''The Aboriginal Cultural Geography of the Llanos de Mojos of Bolivia'' (1966), and "Hydraulic Agriculture in the American Tropics" (1982), on ancient drained-field or raised-field agriculture in the tropics; Golson, "No Room at the Top: Agricultural Intensification in the New Guinea Highlands" (1977), on ancient drainage in highland New Guinea; Doolittle, ''Canal Irrigation in Prehistoric Mexico'' (1990), on drainage and early agriculture in Mexico; Harrison and Turner ''Pre-Hispanic Maya Agriculture'' (1978), on early drainage in the Maya lowlands.

79. Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), pp. 8-9.

80. Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), pp. 12-13, 27-28, 36, 42-3, 53, 59, 99, 102, 137.

81. Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 11. Also see pp. 41, 123, 132.

82. Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986). Also see his essay, "European Development: Approaching a Historical Explanation" (1988).

83. Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 94.

84. Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 179.

85. The fact that Mann attributes the ancient European takeoff mainly to chariot warfare and iron-plow rainfall-farming, yet concedes that both innovations were initiated by Middle Easterners themselves, suggests to me that Mann's fundamental causal reasoning centers on the notion of European rationality: regardless of who invented these things, the Europeans put the things to work. That this Weberian notion is indeed basic for Mann will be demonstrated later in this chapter.

86. Bray, ''Agriculture'', vol. 6, part 2, of Needham and collaborators, ''Science and Civilization in China'' (1984).

87. Blaut, "Two Views of Diffusion" (1977).

88. Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), pp. 247, 406, 408, 412, 504-510, 520, 530, 539-540.

89. Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 509.

90. Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 99.

91. Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 110.

92. Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 10.

93. Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 47.

94. Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 8. Jones makes the common error of assuming that productivity per worker is low in irrigated agriculture in comparison with unirrigated agriculture. This is not the case. Even with draft animals, medieval peasant production per worker was not high. And draft animals are used in irrigated farming, abundantly so in some Asian wet-rice farming systems.

95. Mann, "European Development" (1988), p. 10, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 406; Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), pp. 90, 227; Crone, ''Pre-Industrial Societies'' (1989), p. 150; McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976), p. 295.

96. Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986, chap. 5). Mann in fact builds a theory of ancient warfare upon the basis of this sort of calculation, here also ignoring the fact that armies then as now provision themselves and their animals on the route of march.

97. Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), chap. 2 and elsewhere. Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 132, makes the same claim, citing Jones.

98. Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 111; Jones ''The European Miracle'' (1981), pp. 90, 105, 107, 226-227; Mann, "European Development: Approaching a Historical Explanation" (1988), p. 10; Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 406.

99. Levy-Bruhl, ''How Natives Think'' (1966).

100. See, for example, Boas, ''The Mind of Primitive Man'' (1938); Radin, ''Primitive Man as Philosopher'' (1927); M. Mead, ''Growing Up in New Guinea'' (1930).

101. Stocking, ''Victorian Anthropology'' (1987), p. 59; Bowler, ''The Invention of Progress'' (1989), p. 66; Whitman "From Philology to Anthropology in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Germany" (1984); Bernal, ''Black Athena'', vol. 1 (1987); Said, ''Orientalism'' (1978). A recent expression of this theory came in a Soviet debate about "Oriental despotism" (Lelekov, "Round-Table: State and Law in the Ancient Orient," 1978). L. Lelekov, a historian, claimed that words meaning "freedom" and "right" were basic in the original Indo-European language or languages but not in Near Eastern languages, and asserted that this must have affected "social thinking" (p. 190). This contention was refuted by the philologist V. Ivanov (p. 193).

102. See Dalal, "The Racism of Jung" (1988). In Jung's work, see in particular ''Psychological Types'' (1971) (for instance: "(If) we go right back to primitive psychology, we find absolutely no trace of the concept of the individual," p. 10); ''Memories, Dreams, Reflections'' (1963), and "The Dreamlike World of India," in ''Civilization in Transition'' (1927). See also the 1954 work by Jung's disciple Erich Neumann, ''The Origins and History of Consciousness'' (for instance: "The evolution of consciousness as a form of creative evolution is the peculiar achievement of Western man ... The creative character of consciousness is a central feature of the cultural canon of the West ... In stationary cultures, or in primitive societies where the original features of human culture are still preserved, the earliest stages of man's psychology predominate," pp. xviii-xxix).

103. Piaget, ''Psychology and Epistemology'' (1971), p. 61.

104. See, for example, Werner and Kaplan, ''Symbol Formation'' (1964).

105. See the first 16 volumes (through 1985) of ''The Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology'' for a great many examples of this phenomenon. For this period something like one-tenth of all the empirical articles in this U.S. journal were studies by white Southern Africans purporting to show the cognitive inferiority of black Africans.

106. Rogers, ''The Diffusion of Innovations'' (1962); Rogers and Shoemaker, ''Communication of Innovations'' (1971), pp. 187-191; McClelland, ''The Achieving Society'' (1961); Hagen, ''On the Theory of Social Change'' (1962) and "A Framework for Analyzing Economic and Political Change," in Brookings Institution, ed., ''Development of the Emerging Countries: An Agenda for Research'' (1962), pp. 1-39. I have cited only the initial statements: much literature emerged from these works.

107. S. Marglin, "Losing Touch: The Cultural Conditions of Worker Accommodation and Resistance," in F. and S. Marglin, eds., ''Dominating knowledge: Development, Culture, and Resistance'' (1990).

108. Sack, ''Conceptions of Space in Social Thought'' (1980). Geographers prominent in the diffusion paradigm discussed here are L. Brown (''The Diffusion of Innovations'', 1981) and P. Gould (''Spatial Diffusion'', 1969). On peasant traditionalism in relation to natural hazards, see G. White, ed., ''Natural Hazards'' (1974), as an example of the abundant literature. I criticize these and other arguments about non-Western nonrationality in Blaut, "Two Views of Diffusion" (1977), "Diffusionism: A Unitarian Critique" (1987a), and "Natural Mapping" (1991).

109. In the field of education in the United States the dominant standardized college entrance tests (SAT and ACT) are skewed by culture-specific and sex-specific internal (as well as situational) characteristics, such that women do more poorly than men although they actually perform at higher levels in terms of university grades, while the ACT and SAT test scores of Latinos (African-Americans have not yet been studied in this way), which are very low, have no correlation whatever with their performance in college. Thus the tests effectively minimize female and minority college attendance. Why the tests are almost universally used, even so, is a fascinating question. The same biases are so prominent in IQ testing that such tests have been barred as diagnostic instruments in California schools. The "primitive mind" and "primitive languages" biases sometimes combine, as in U.S. debates about the so-called "English-only" issue and about the question whether non-European literature deserves to be included in the college curriculum along with European literature. In Boston not long ago, 30% of Hispanic children aged six to eight were not attending elementary school because their inability to speak English had been judged to be evidence of mental retardation, and Boston claimed not to have sufficient resources to educate these children in "special schools." Testing in general in U.S. education remains very racist.

110. Rorty, ''Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature'' (1980), and earlier works by Dewey (for instance ''The Quest for Certainty'', 1929), Whitehead (for instance, ''Modes of Thought'', 1938), and G. H. Mead (for instance, ''Philosophy of the Act'', 1938).

111. This is a general assessment. Some anthropologists continue to maintain either the "primitive mind" doctrine or the closely related "traditional mind" doctrine. An example of the latter is George Foster's well-known and influential book ''Traditional Cultures'' (1962), of the former, Hallpike's ''The Foundations of Primitive Thought'' (1979). For a critique, see Schweder, "Cultural Psychology: What Is It?" (1990).

112. On the question of Weber's use of "rationality," its basal status in his theorizing, and yet its uncertain definition and provenance, see, for instance: Cohen's introduction to the 1981 ed. of Weber's ''General Economic History'' (1981), pp. xxv-xxvii; Löwith, ''Max Weber and Karl Marx'' (1982), pp. 40-42, 53-54, n. 49; Freund, ''The Sociology of Max Weber'' (1968), pp. 140-149. In Weber, see ''General Economic History'' (1981), chaps. 29, 30, ''The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism'' (1958), pp. 13-31, 59-60, 79, 118-120, 191, n. 19, 265, n. 31, ''The Religion of China'' (1951), chap. 8, ''The Religion of India'' (1967), p. 387, and other works.

113. Weber, ''General Economic History'' (1981), p. 161. Also see pp. 339, 355-368. Weber makes a large number of comments about the irrationality of Asians.

114. Weber, ''Economy and Society'', vol. 2 (1968), pp. 1212-1374.

115. Typical of Jones's method is to find some objectionable feature of very early Asian society, compare it with some pleasing feature of modern, post-industrial-revolution European society, and then treat both features as though they were permanent characteristics of the respective societies, giving a picture of awful primitiveness to Asians and marvelous modernity to Europeans thereby.

116. "Frankish feudalism, in many ways proto-typical of later feudalism, was ... a mixture of the very, very old, deep-rooted drift of 'European' peasant society and of the brand new the opportunistic, the 'un-European,'" Mann, "European Development" (1988), p. 16.

117. Mann, "European Development" (1988), p. 17. Also see his ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), for instance pp. 190, 195, 213, 377, 404, 412, 510. ("At the end of all these processes stood one organic, medium-sized, wet-soil island state, perfectly situated for take-off: Great Britain," p. 510.)

118. Mann, "European Development" (1988), pp. 8-9, 11-12, 15-18 and ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), pp. 377-378, 397-398, 402-408, 412, 500-510. Also, on Europe's rationality and its historical significance, see McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976), pp. 41, 97, 106-107, 236, 238, 249, 256, 259, 264.

119. See P. Anderson, ''Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism'' (1974), part 3; Finley, ''The Use and Abuse of History'' (1975), chap. 6; Aston and Philipn, ''The Brenner Debate'' (1985), pp. 32-33, 42-51, 59, 63n, 214-215, 234-236, 306-316.

120. White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 38); also McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976), p. 234.

121. White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 54.

122. Kosambi, ''Ancient India'' (1969), p. 89; R. S. Sharma, ''Light on Early Indian Society and Economy'' (1966), p. 57.

123. White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 44.

124. White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 56; McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976), p. 237.

125. See C. T. Smith, ''An Historical Geography of Western Europe'' (1967), p. 203; Darby, ''The Domesday Geography of Eastern England'' (1952).

126. Orwin and Orwin, ''The Open Fields'' (1967), chap. 3; C. T. Smith, ''An Historical Geography of Western Europe'' (1967), chap. 4.

127. White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 57.

128. White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 67.

129. White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 68.

130. Bray, ''Science and Civilization in China'', vol. 6, part 2, ''Agriculture'' (1984), pp. 304-328.

131. White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 76.

132. White, ''Machina Ex Deo'' (1968). See in particular the essay—quite a famous one—called "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis" (chap. 5).

133. White, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis." In White, ''Machina Ex Deo'' (1967), p. 85.

134. White, ''Machina Ex Deo'' (1967), p. 90.

135. Needham et al., ''Science and Civilization in China'' (1954-1984).

136. Some historians today simply ignore this evidence and repeat the old notions about China's lack of technological prowess. See, for example, Roberts, ''The Hutchinson History of the World'' (1987), pp. 493-495, 502.

137. Needham et al., ''Science and Civilization in China'', vol. 4, part 2 (1965), chap. 27.

138. Needham et al., ''Science and Civilization in China'' vol. 4, part 2 (1965), p. 33). Arnold Pacey places the innovation in Korea. See Pacey's ''Technology in World History'' (1990), p. 56.

139. See, for example, Lopez, "Hard Times and Investment in Culture" (1953), Thorndyke, "Renaissance or Renaissance?" (1943).

140. Cipolla, ''Guns, Sails, Empires'' (1965), p. 106.

141. Cipolla, ''Guns, Sails, Empires'' (1965), pp. 108-109.

142. See, for instance, White, ''Machina Ex Deo'' (1968); Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), "European Development" (1988); Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985); Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988); K. F. Werner, "Political and Social Structures of the West" (1988); and Hallam, "The Medieval Social Picture" (1975).

143. Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 135.

144. Mann, "European Development" (1988), p. 12.

145. Hallam, "The Medieval Social Picture" (1975), p. 49.

146. K. F. Werner. "Political and Social Structures of the West" (1988), p. 172. This German medievalist argues that the central force underlying the "miracle" was Christianity. He refers here to the Catholic church, to the body of doctrine (Catholic and later also Protestant), to the social and political institutions that were influenced both by church and by doctrine, and to the faith of European people, which, in Werner's opinion, had much to do with their innovativeness, their sense of "restlessness," their rationality. Werner acknowledges that many causal factors were at work in bringing about the rise of Europe, and he does not hesitate to claim a role for the natural environment. But it is clear that his theory is primarily based on religion. And beyond this, one senses that this scholar himself may see the hand of a Christian god in the rise of Christian Europe.

Werner first of all makes a strong case to the effect that European history maintained a continuity of institutions, and of progress, from the time of the Roman Empire down through the Middle Ages, and that the late Empire established both ecclesiastical and lay institutions which continued down through the Middle Ages and gave that era its character. Chief among the institutions is the Catholic church. Werner wishes to depict the church as having a determining influence on history from the time of its founding. He sees the rise of Europe as a process that was guided throughout by the Christian religion, as institution and doctrine. If Werner were simply presenting a theory of history that accords religion a dominant role, I would not be discussing his views in this book. I would agree that its role has been underemphasized by historians, conservative no less than Marxist. The reason I deal with Werner's views is that he makes clear his belief that it is not religion in general but the Christian religion which played the historically efficacious role in the European "miracle." Werner's views are distinctly Eurocentric. Perhaps the key comment is the following:

(If) we had to choose one word that, by itself alone, were capable of expressing an essential factor in what we understand by the "European miracle," we would choose the philosophical term ... "unrest" ... "restlessness" ... Ruhelosigkeit ... Whilst Asia and its wisdom and, in its train, the great religions and philosophies, strive toward the art of ... seeking out the centre of the soul and of the world, and of resting in God, of having arrived, the European of the European miracle is a man who is always ready to take off once more, once he has arrived ... But where must be sought the causa causans of this mentality? The spur to anxiety is to be seen in the pangs of sin ... in the search for pardon and grace. The importance of the deliverance of the soul gave an hitherto unheard-of prominence to the individual, independent of his social rank, the individual who ... (does not abandon himself) to destiny ... (The) sense of responsibility seems to me to be one of the strengths of the Europeans that are to accomplish the "miracle" (p. 185).

Thus: Europe's religion, Christianity, instills a kind of mentality in "European man" which explains the basic source of the "European miracle."

The objection to this is the same one we put forward to all of the notions about Europe's supposedly unique "rationality." Whether that putative trait comes from religion (Werner) or from the post-Neolithic European tribes (Mann) or from any other source, the basic objection is: how can you really justify a statement that makes Europeans brighter, better, bolder than non-Europeans, if you accept the fundamental axiom that all human communities have the same ration of mind as all others? It is one thing, and indeed an unexceptionable thing, to credit the human mind with prime causality in culture change, through the innovation of social, technical, and purely intellectual things. But it is something quite different, and quite suspect, to credit the minds of human beings from some communities—and not others—with all of these qualities of innovativeness, restlessness, sense of responsibility, intellectual eagerness, respect for others, and so on, qualities usually summed up in the word "rationality." Europeans are rational but so too are non-Europeans.

147. See, for example, Palmer, ''Atlas of Modern History'' (1957); Bjørklund, Hølmhoe, Røhr, and Lie, ''Historical Atlas of the World'' (1970); and Kinder and Hilgemann, ''The Anchor Atlas of World History'', vol. 1 (1974).

148. I discuss this in ''The National Question'' (1987b).

149. Padgug, "The Problem of the Theory of Slavery and Slave Society" (1976).

150. Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988).

151. Baechler, in "The Origins of Modernity" (1988), p. 39, suggests that we should "juxtapose the barbarous Europe of the Halstatt period (about 600 B.C.) ... and Africa on the verge of colonization in the nineteenth century (A.D.)."

152. Baechler finds a true aristocracy also in Japan but believes that Japan failed to emulate Europe for various other reasons.

153. Baechler considers it quite unremarkable that the political chaos of the Dark Ages gave way smoothly to strong states in Europe. "Inevitably" there will be the "reconstitution of larger polities" (Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" 1988, p. 50). But it is equally inevitable for India that the political chaos of 1000 years ago will not be cured and permanently, thereafter, the "polity ... is not a reality in India" (p. 45).

154. Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988), p. 59.

155. Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988), p. 53.

156. Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988), p. 56.

157. Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988), p. 45.

158. Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988), p. 53.

159. Godelier, ''Sobre el Modo de Producción Asiático'' (1969), p. 58.

160. Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism" (1977); "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe" (1985, originally published 1976), and "The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism" (1985). After the 1976 article first appeared in the journal, ''Past and Present'', a series of critiques was published in that journal, and Brenner replied in 1982 with the article, "The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism." A volume, ''The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe'', containing the two ''Past and Present'' articles and several critiques, and edited by Aston and Philip, appeared in 1985.

161. In my opinion the popularity of this thin theory is due principally to two things. First, put forward as a Marxist view, grounded in class struggle, it proves to be, on inspection, a theory that is fairly conventional, if somewhat rural in bias. It seems to follows that class-struggle theories lead to conventional conclusions. And secondly, Brenner uses his theory ("The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism," 1977, pp. 77-92) to attack the unpopular "Third-Worldist" perspectives of dependency theory, underdevelopment theory, and in particular three other neo-Marxists—Sweezy, Frank, and Wallerstein—who argue that European colonialism had much to do with the later rise of capitalism. Brenner is a thoroughgoing Eurocentric tunnel historian: non-Europe had no important role in social evolution at any historical period. Unaware that colonialism involves capitalist relations of production—see Chapter 4 below—he claims that the extra-European world merely had commercial effects on Europe, whereas the rise of capitalism was in no way a product of commerce: it took place in the countryside of England and reflected class struggle, not trade. See critiques of Brenner collected in Aston and Philip (1985) by Hilton, Croot and Parker, Wunder, Leroy, Ladurie, Bois, Cooper, and others. Also see Torras, "Class struggle in Catalonia" (1980) and Hoyle, "Tenure and the land market in early modern England: Or a late contribution to the Brenner debate." (1990).

162. (1) If only one family member is a wageworker, loss of employment is a disaster. If several are wageworkers, normally some will be earning an income when others are laid off. (2) If we assume an ability to save a certain percentage of income, multiple income earners will provide a larger absolute amount of savings, that is, capital; and the absolute amount of capital can be critical in entrepreneurship. (3) Having kin to borrow from is useful for small-scale entrepreneurship. (4) Kinfolk can supply unpaid labor. These principles are well known in Third World communities.

163. Hajnal, "European Marriage Patterns in Perspective" (1965), pp. 101-146. This paper is one of the most widely cited publications on the subject of demography in the European miracle literature.

164. Hajnal, "European Marriage Patterns in Perspective" (1965), p. 101.

165. Hajnal, "European Marriage Patterns in Perspective" (1965), p. 134.

166. Hajnal concedes that he has only contemporary data for non-Europe, but merely suggests that historical data would prove his point even more clearly because modern non-European family patterns, in his view, are changing in the direction of European patterns: are being Europeanized. And when "all the qualifications about the data have been made, there can be no doubt that our original generalization remains" ("European Marriage Patterns in Perspective," 1965, p. 106).

167. Stone, ''The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800'' (1977), p. 509.

168. Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 408; Crone, ''Pre-Industrial Societies'' (1989), p. 152; Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), pp. 15-16; Macfarlane, ''Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300-1840'' (1986).

169. Laslett, "The European Family and Early Industrialization" (1989).

170. Taeuber, "The Families of Chinese Farmers" (1970), pp. 63-86.

171. See Freedman, ''Chinese Lineage and Society'' (1966), p. 49.

172. See, for example, Handler "Review of Macfarlane, A., ''Marriage and love in England''" (1989); Hilton, "Individualism and the English Peasantry" (1980); Kertzer, "The Joint Family Household Revisited: Demographic Constraints and Household Complexity in the European Past" (1989); and Berkner, "The Use and Misuse of Census Data for the Historical Analysis of Family Structures" (1975), and "The Stem Family and the Developmental Cycle of the Peasant Household" (1989).

173. For instance, G. Lee, "Comparative Perspectives" (1987), p. 65, points out that "(Many) scholars contend that the majority of families in any society are and always have been nuclear, regardless of the cultural elements favoring extended families."

174. Macfarlane, ''The Origins of English Individualism'' (1978), chap. 1 and "The Cradle of Capitalism" (1988), p. 344.

175. See, for example, Hilton, "Individualism and the English Peasantry" (1980) and Handler, "Review of Mcfarlane, A., ''Marriage and Love in England''" (1989).

176. "(It) seems likely that (primitive peoples') patterns of behavior in ... respect (to fertility and mortality) bore a strong resemblance to those which can be observed in many animals," Wrigley, ''Population and History'' (1969), p. 37. Wrigley is writing about present-day hunting-gathering-fishing peoples. A "description of the relationship between animal social conventions and the regulation of animal population numbers" is "a convenient point of departure for the study of primitive man" (p. 37).

177. Crone, ''Pre-Industrial Societies'' (1989), p. 153; Hall, ''Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West'' (1985), pp. 130-132; Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), pp. 3, 13-15, 217-19, 226-227, 231, and elsewhere; Laslett, "The European Family and Early Industrialization" (1989), pp. 235-240; Macfarlane, "The Cradle of Capitalism" (1988), chap. 14; Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 408.

178. Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), pp. 130-131.

179. Laslett, "The European Family and Early Industrialization" (1989), p. 237.

180. See Croot and Parker, "Agrarian Class Structure and the Development of Capitalism: France and England Compared" (1985). This essay, and others in the Aston and Philipin book, ''The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe'' (1985), discuss in detail the low level of landownership in medieval Europe.

181. Stone, ''The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800'' (1977), pp. 53-54.

182. Stone, ''The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800'' (1977), p. 652.

= CHAPTER 3: Before 1492 =

In this chapter and the following one I will argue three broad propositions.

1. Prior to 1492, the progress toward modernization and capitalism which was taking place in parts of Europe was also taking place in parts of Asia and Africa. The basic process was hemispheric in scale. It was a process of change out of a precapitalist, agrarian form of class-structured society and toward a primitive form of capitalism. There was nothing teleological about this process; it was not some sort of evolutionary striving toward a foreordained goal, capitalist society. Merely, I argue, whatever happened in Europe also happened in other parts of the Eastern Hemisphere. I will use the word "feudalism" to describe the class-structured agrarian societies of Africa and Asia as well as Europe (and will give my reasons for using this word in this way). The later, emerging formation I will call "protocapitalism." In 1492, it is likely that more than half of each continent in the Eastern Hemisphere was basically dominated by a feudal social formation. Protocapitalist centers were rising in various parts of all three continents, and were interconnected in a single web or network, stretching from western Europe to southern Africa to eastern Asia.

2. This hemisphere-wide system began to break apart shortly after 1492, because of the wealth and power acquired by Europeans in America. America was conquered by Europeans, not by Asians or Africans, because of Europe's location on the globe, not because of any European superiority in level or rate of development or "potential" for development.

3. The massive flow of wealth into Europe from colonial accumulation in America and later in Asia and Africa was the one basic force that explains the fact that Europe became transformed rapidly into a capitalist society, and the complementary fact that Asian and African protocapitalist centers began to decline first in relative and then in absolute importance. Development began in Europe and underdevelopment began elsewhere. Many processes internal to Europe were important causes of change, of development, in that continent, but the one basic process, which ignited and then continuously fueled the transformation, was the wealth from colonialism.

The first proposition is the topic of the present chapter; the second and third are the topics of Chapter 4.

I will not and cannot demonstrate the truth of these propositions. I will simply present a substantial amount of evidence that supports them, and will show that the propositions fit in with other known facts in a coherent theory—a theory that, I suggest, makes sense. That is as far toward "demonstration of truth" as I can go, given the evidence of which I have knowledge and the amount of detailed argumentation that can be squeezed into this chapter. Some parts of this argument (such as the pre-1492 development of Africa) will theorize well beyond the available evidence, because, in my view, the facts needed to confirm or disconfirm these parts of the argument have not yet been obtained, have not yet been sought with sufficient diligence by diffusionist scholarship. For the most part, however, the theorizing will be grounded in strong empirical evidence. In addition to this evidence, there is the weight of evidence presented in the last chapter against various opposing theories, those that deny the importance of non-Europe before and after 1492. This has given us, so to speak, a level playing field for considering the issues to be discussed below.

== Medieval Landscapes ==

Before 1492, the various civilizations of Asia, Africa, and Europe were very different from one another in many ways, but they were very like one another in other ways. I believe that the ways in which they were different did not have significance for cultural evolution. In Chapter 2 I outlined various theories that claim that particular differences between Europe and other civilizations do explain the unique rise of Europe, and I tried to show that these theories are unconvincing. In the following discussion I will deal with some parts of culture that clearly are crucial for cultural evolution, and I will try to show that the patterns found in medieval Europe were not significantly different from the patterns found in other civilizations. I will argue that modes of production, class structures, systems of spatial exchange, and urbanization were broadly similar across many civilizations, were evolving in much the same way, and to some extent were parts of a common hemisphere-wide process.

During the century or so preceding 1492, most of humanity lived in class-stratified agricultural societies. The great majority of people in these societies were peasant farmers, producing their own subsistence and forced to deliver a significant share of their output (or labor, or cash income) to an elite, or ruling class, a class that usually held claim to the land and almost always held both formal and real power over the peasants. What I have described here is a mode of production, that is, a complex of traits including material resources such as land, material culture (tools and the like), labor employed in production and distribution, social rules governing access to material resources and distribution of the output, and some related traits. For medieval Europe this mode of production is called "feudal." It is part of a larger concept, "feudal society." One of the important features of European feudal society was the nature of states and political power. Another was the culture of the landlord class, with its titles, its chivalry, and the rest. A third was the importance, in some regions and epochs, of serfdom. But underlying (or at any rate accompanying) these features was the general fact of feudalism as a mode of production, a landlord-peasant, class-stratified, agricultural society in which the landlord class was fed by surplus extracted (always with some degree of force) from peasant producers. This mode of production, with variations, was also a basic feature of almost all of the other class-stratified agricultural societies of the Eastern Hemisphere.<ref>The discussion in this section of the chapter mainly deals with the Eastern Hemisphere. The Western Hemisphere will be discussed separately in Chapter 4.</ref> I will therefore use the term "feudal mode of production" for all such societies.

Others have used the term in this way but have encountered various important objections. Those scholars who insist that the peculiarly European features are, indeed, the evolutionary engines of change will naturally reject the description of other sorts of society as "feudal." Max Weber, for instance, thought that European feudal estates were unique and were crucial causes (or conditions) of progress. Those Marxists who consider serfdom to be a crucial feature in evolutionary terms would not want to use the term "feudalism" for societies that did not have serfdom (although many outside of Europe did).<ref>Dobbs, ''Studies in the Development of Capitalism'' (1947).</ref> Samir Amin rejects this broad usage of the term "feudalism," on the grounds that it tends to require of us that we use European feudalism as a model against which to measure other similar societies in other continents. Therefore, he prefers the term "tributary" to the term "feudal," arguing, correctly, that the various forms of surplus extraction in this mode of production (tax and rent; cash, labor, and product) can be assimilated to the concept of tribute paying.<ref>Amin, ''Unequal Development'' (1976) and "Modes of Production: History and Unequal Development" (1985).</ref> My view is that Eurocentric historians do not have a copyright on the term "feudalism" and so it is not only valid but also in a sense just to use this term for the mode of production wherever we observe it, in any continent and any social formation. There remain other objections. What of the small urbanized societies found here and there across the map during this period? We will come to this matter in a later section of the chapter. How should we describe societies that are very aberrant from the basic landlord-peasant model? What about class-stratified pastoral societies? What about the class-stratified societies in which there is kinship linkage between producing class and ruling class? These matters of definition are important and I will try to deal with them in the context of the discussion.

There are many unanswered questions about the origins and evolution both of agriculture and of the feudal mode of production. Until recently most scholars believed that agriculture, class stratification, and many other attributes of civilization had originated in the ancient Near and Middle East. (We discussed this in Chapter 1.) Given this set of propositions, combined with explicit and implicit beliefs about the cultural backwardness and unprogressiveness of Asians and Africans, it was almost axiomatic that the agricultural landscapes of feudal Europe must have attained a qualitatively higher level of development—or, alternatively, must have had greater potential for rapid change—than those of many parts, and perhaps all parts, of medieval Asia and Africa. It seemed logical to believe that agriculture as such was still in the process of diffusing outward in some peripheral parts of the hemisphere during that period. For instance, as we noted in Chapter 2, historians tended to believe that most of southern Africa was "preeagricultural" even in early modern times. Scholars speculated, and legitimately so given the basic model, as to the dates when agriculture in general, and each form of domesticated plant and animal in particular, had first reached each peripheral region in the general diffusion process.

This model began to crumble fairly recently. Very early dates for the Agricultural (Neolithic) Revolution began to appear for parts of Southeast Asia, dates of perhaps 9,000 years ago (the generally accepted idea is that agriculture in the Middle East is 10-12,000 years old). Pottery seemed to be just about that old in northeastern Asia and Japan. Soon afterward, very early dates for agriculture emerged for India, New Guinea, and other regions. Today, although the majority view still seems to be that agriculture first arose in the Middle East, very many scholars believe otherwise. Many argue for independent and perhaps simultaneous origins in the Middle East and Southeast Asia; some would add West Africa. But it is also possible that the Agricultural Revolution occurred everywhere more or less at once. By this I mean that the complex of crops, animals, tools, and ideas was being developed in many societies simultaneously (probably over a very long period), and each new trait tended to diffuse rapidly to those other parts of the hemisphere in which such a trait was a useful innovation, in an overall process that I call "criss-cross diffusion." This process gradually built up an agricultural landscape over a vast region of the hemisphere, extending (with unimportant gaps) across the entire swathe of tropical and midlatitude lands possessing moderately favorably climate and soil.<ref>Kabaker, "A Radiocarbon Chronology Relevant to the Origins of Agriculture" (1977); Megaw, ''Hunters, Gatherers and First Farmers Beyond Europe'' (1977); Vishnu-Mittre, "Origin and History of Agriculture in the Indian Subcontinent" (1978). See the review in Blaut, "Diffusionism: A Uniformitarian Critique." (1987a).</ref><ref>Blaut, "Diffusionism" (1987a).</ref>

In any event, it is now generally accepted that the diffusion of agriculture took place fairly long ago and by the Middle Ages agriculture had reached most of those regions in the Eastern Hemisphere in which environmental conditions are favorable for farming. Agriculture was still spreading at this time, but it could no longer be considered the Agricultural Revolution. Farming had been pushed poleward to a point not far short of its present latitudinal limits. In the Western Hemisphere the northern limit of maize in 1492 was not far south of the present limit of grain cultivation in central Canada. In both hemispheres almost all of the crops and livestock types that are important today had already been domesticated, although varietal improvement was still going on. As a generalization, it can be argued that each agricultural region had by this time selected for itself, from the long list of hemispheric domesticates, the combination of crops and stock best suited to its environmental conditions and cultures; most groups of related domesticated crop forms in any one part of the hemisphere were also known in many other parts.

One very dramatic bit of evidence in this matter was the swift spread of Western Hemisphere crops through the Eastern Hemisphere after 1492. This extremely rapid diffusion of maize, cassava, tobacco, sweet potato, white potato, and other crops, and the rapid way in which these domesticates became culturally important, shows how rapidly the diffusion of domesticates would occur when the process was one of the diffusion of previously unknown innovations: we can assume that most Eastern Hemisphere domesticates were no longer diffusing very rapidly. Where agriculture was spreading, it was taking place mainly in peripheral zones such as highlands, some forested regions, and remote islands, as a result mainly of social processes like migration, conquest, and land shortage.<ref>Examples of this process include the eastward movement of the medieval agricultural frontier in the forests of eastern Europe and the reclaiming of swampland in Iraq. Cropland was being expanded in these and other ways in many regions. In addition, it seems certain that some societies that had not previously practiced agriculture were being pushed into smaller or less favorable regions and therefore were turning to agriculture as a means of increasing food production to meet the land shortage.</ref> In the years before 1492, agriculture was practiced, from southern Africa to northern Europe, northern Asia, southeastern Asia, and most regions of the Pacific Ocean, including Hawaii. For the most part, cultures we would describe as "nonagricultural" had chosen not to practice farming; they were not, therefore, "preeagricultural."<ref>See R. Lee, "Art, Science, or Politics? The Crisis in Hunter-Gatherer Studies" (1992).</ref>

Probably the same holds true for the more complex forms of agricultural technology. The knowledge of irrigation, the plow, the use of fertilizers, complex rotations (including fallowless rotations), and other features of intensive agriculture had probably diffused by this time to all those parts of the agricultural landscape where farmers found it desirable to use them, either to increase output, to reduce labor requirements, to meet the demand for surplus delivery, or for any cultural reason whatever.<ref>Water-control systems in farming, including irrigation, drainage, broad-based terracing, raised- or drained-field construction, and natural-levee adaptations are probably as old as agriculture itself, because (1) all farmers everywhere know the problem of moisture control (adding moisture when there is deficit; removing moisture when there is a surplus and a danger of root drowning); (2) all of these procedures are initially small-scale actions taken on an individual farm (recall our discussion in Chapter 2 of the fallacies of the "hydraulic theory"); and (3) there is direct archaeological evidence of very ancient (9,000-year-old) drainage systems in New Guinea (Golson, "No room at the top: Agricultural intensification in the New Guinea Highlands," 1977), and drained- or raised-field systems in tropical America (Denevan, "Hydraulic Agriculture in the American Tropics: Forms, Measures, and Recent Research," 1982). Thus we can infer the primitivity of irrigation and these other water-management systems: probably they are as old as the Neolithic, along with drainage and raised-field systems. All this shows that intensive technology had already diffused insofar as it was going to do so, and nonadoption reflected something other than lack of information. As we noted in Chapter 2, irrigation systems diffuse as a social process, associated with class society. Concerning the myth that the plow was not used in Africa, see Hopkins, ''An Economic History of West Africa'' (1973) and Onimode, ''Imperialism and Underdevelopment in Nigeria'' (1982). Note that plows are used in tropical agriculture very sparingly—mainly for some operations in rice paddies.</ref> I would take the argument even a step farther. Throughout most of this landscape the diffusion of significant innovations had gone so far that the productivity of human labor was hardly ever limited by lack of technical knowledge of a kind available to other farmers in some other part of the hemisphere.<ref>In classless societies, I speculate that the bundle of choices concerning crops, tools, field systems, labor input, and the like, led to roughly a common level of output per person, unaffected by differences in environmental quality over a great range of environments. In some areas very extensive systems like shifting cultivation would be used; in others, intensive systems, like wet-rice cultivation, would be used. But the productivity of labor in terms of product per hour input would tend to be about the same in this model for both intensive and extensive systems. This would hold true if two assumptions are accepted: (1) that rapid and thorough diffusion had taken place, and (2) that population was controlled by farming peoples so as to optimize the situation concerning output and leisure time. None of this would be true in a class society, where the constraints on technology and labor use are influenced profoundly by the demands and power of the ruling class.</ref> But this is speculation.

Agricultural societies are not always class stratified. But there is abundant evidence that most agricultural regions across the hemisphere displayed, in this period, a combination of agriculture and the landlord-peasant system of stratification, thus a mode of production I label "feudal." This point will be contested on two grounds. One of the objections, commonly heard from (some) Marxists, argues that medieval non-European agricultural modes of production were somehow lacking in the potential for change that we associate with the European feudal mode. This argument (the "Asiatic mode of production," "Oriental despotism," etc.) was discussed sufficiently in Chapter 2.

The second difficulty is a matter of the spatial pattern. Where, on the map of the medieval Eastern Hemisphere, do we find class-stratified agricultural societies, and where do we find classless agricultural societies? The answer must be given in two parts. First, we know beyond dispute that the class-stratified mode was dominant in nearly all agricultural regions of Asia, with clear patterns of landlord-peasant conflict. Arguments tend to focus on Africa. But there is little doubt that the landlord-peasant exploitative relation was dominant in much of northeastern Africa (for example, Ethiopia), the Sudanic zone from the Atlantic east beyond Lake Chad, some parts of the Lake Region of East Africa, southeastern Africa around the Zimbabwe imperial zone, and part of coastal East Africa. It is now known, also, that many of the forest-zone and dry-forest-zone states of West and Central Africa (Akan, Yoruba, Congo, and so forth), displayed this mode of production or something very like it, and research on the historical geography of this large region has just, in essence, begun.<ref>See, for example, Kea, ''Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth Century Gold Coast'' (1982); Isichei, ''A History of Nigeria'' (1983); Rodney, ''A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800'' (1970); A. Smith, "The Early States of the Central Sudan" (1971); Usman, ''The Transformation of Katsina (1400-1883)'' (1981).</ref> Therefore the map of the feudal mode of production in Africa is very extensive. Second, I would argue (following Samir Amin) that nearly all state-organized societies were class societies, that the medieval state functioned in a tight relationship to the exploitative process and ruling-class politics. More than half of medieval Africa, in terms of area and population, was state-organized and therefore, I reason, more or less class stratified. I conclude, from this very sketchy examination of the medieval spatial patterns of agriculture, technically complex agriculture, and class, that the feudal mode of production dominated more than half of Africa, Europe, and Asia, and some parts of Oceania, in this period.

The ruling class in feudal societies is, almost everywhere, a landlord class, although the control of land by this class may take any of several legal forms. Some members of this class are bedecked with titles, but the distinction between nobility and gentry is not crucial in evolutionary terms and both forms (as well as others) were widespread across the hemisphere.<ref>See Blaut, "Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism" (1989). It is also true that in all these societies there were parallel high-status groups, clergy, bureaucrats, military people, and so on, but there seems not to have been any case of a large, clearly feudal society—I exclude a few cases of small urbanized power centers in dry, pastoral regions, and a few large cities—in which wealth and status was clearly divorced from land ownership and from the surplus extracted from peasants.</ref> This class is, after all, self-perpetuating, and it may use inherited titles as a signal of class membership or it may use other devices to the same effect, or both. Indeed, membership in the nontitled gentry may, as in China at various times, improve a family's chances of retaining ruling-class status and wealth amid the changing winds of state politics. Nor is the distinction critical, in this context, between higher and lower grades of nobility, and between landlords and government officials (who likewise derive their wealth from land). As we discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, there is no substance to the traditional view that the European medieval landlord class somehow was closer to pure private land ownership than were the landlord classes of other places. Marx was wrong in accepting this traditional view, because he knew little about non-European class structures. Weber, likewise, was wrong in drawing a sharp distinction between the supposedly European pattern of seigneurial tenure, with land held firmly by the landlord under some sort of arrangement with higher-order lords and kings, and the "service tenures" which he thought to be characteristic of most other societies.

The distinction between hereditary and service tenures is very fuzzy. In Europe, service tenure was the typical form in strict terms (with grants conditional upon pledges of fealty, military support, etc.), but grants tended to become hereditary. Broadly, the same held true in other societies. Holders of fiefs or grants on service tenure might move from fief to fief (or hold a changing portfolio of fiefs), but the important point is that class membership permitted one to hold a fief, and to draw one's wealth from it (and its occupants), so long as one retained membership in the ruling class. In a crucial sense, property is private so long as an individual or kin group continues to hold valid control, and this was the case in many regions, in spite of periodic upheavals and replacements. But land can be called private in another sense, that of its value in a land market. But this implies a basically (or nearly) capitalist situation, found only in a few highly commercialized rural regions, European and non-European, before 1492.<ref>Apparently such private (saleable) ownership of agricultural land was found mainly near important urban areas, ports, mining areas, etc. See Rawski, ''Agricultural Change and the Peasant Economy of South China'' (1972); Das Gupta, ''Malabar in Asian Trade: 1740-1800'' (1967); Nicholas, "Town and Countryside: Social and Economic Tensions in 14th Century Flanders" (1967-1968); Kea, ''Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast'' (1982); Rodney, ''A History of the Upper Guinea Coast'' (1970); Usman, ''The Transformation of Katsina'' (1981); Sherif, ''Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar'' (1987).</ref> The Chinese gentry, the Hindu fief-holders, even the Mughal jagirdars who had been granted fiefs on service tenure and quickly farmed them out, or converted them into private, saleable property, were well along the road to private ownership, and had gone at least as far as their European counterparts.<ref>On the importance of hereditary fiefs and landed property in Asia, see, for example, Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1973); Sharma, ''Indian Feudalism, c. 300-1200'' (1965); Fei Hsiao-tung, ''China's Gentry'' (1953); Fu and Li, ''The Sprouts of Capitalistic Factors Within China's Feudal Society'' (1956); Rawski, ''Agricultural Change and the Peasant Economy of South China'' (1972); Tung, ''An Outline History of China'' (1979); Liceria, "Emergence of Brahmans as Landed Intermediaries in Karnataka, c. A.D. 1000-1300 (1974); Mahalingam, ''Economic Life in the Vijayanagar Empire'' (1951); Hasan, "The Position of the Zamindars in the Mughal Empire (1969); Raychaudhuri, "The Agrarian System of Mughal India" (1965); Yadav, "Secular Land Grants of the Post-Gupta Period and Some Aspects of the Growth of the Feudal Complex in Northern India" (1966). For Africa south of the Sahara (for which there is as yet only fragmentary evidence), see, for example, A. Smith, "The Early States of the Central Sudan" (1971); Mabogunji, "The Land and Peoples of West Africa" (1971); Kea, ''Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast'' (1982); Isichei, ''A History of Nigeria'' (1983); Onimode, ''Imperialism and Underdevelopment in Nigeria'' (1982); FRELIMO, ''Historia de Mozambique'' (1971); Rodney, ''A History of the Upper Guinea Coast'' (1970); and Usman, ''The Transformation of Katsina'' (1981).</ref> The European feudal-era landlord class was not more advanced, more ready (as it were) for capitalism and modernity, than the landlord classes in many other regions.

The so-called European manorial system is sometimes said to have been a distinguishing feature of feudalism, a peculiarly European giant step toward private ownership and large-scale labor use, something largely absent from non-European areas and critical in the evolution toward capitalism. Large estates were widespread across the hemisphere, but the special organizational form of demesne farming by unpaid peasant labor was found in fewer areas. The manorial system in the narrow sense of the term, including coordinated demesne farming with corvée labor in gangs as well as peasant holdings, and with some manufacture along with agricultural production on the manor, was found in several areas outside of Europe. It was important in China and in southern India.<ref>On the manorial system of China, see Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1973). For India, see Gopal, "Quasi-Manorial Rights in Ancient India" (1963); Mahalingam, ''Economic Life in the Vijayanagar Empire'' (1951); Yadav, "Secular Land Grants of the Post-Gupta Period" (1966); Yadav, "Immobility and Subjugation of Indian Peasantry in Early Medieval Complex" (1974). Indian historians recognize important differences between the Indian and European forms of the manor, however. In early Indian feudalism manorial labor had some of the characteristics of serfs, some of wage laborers, and some of tenant farmers. Early Indian feudal estates also seem to have been less autarkic and insulated than the stereotypical European manor.</ref> But demesne farming was not dominant throughout Europe (it was uncommon in the Mediterranean zone), bore no resemblance to capitalist agriculture, and in any case had nearly died out in western Europe by the fourteenth century. Hence the relatively stronger development of this trait in Europe than most other regions (such as northern India) cannot account for the transition, much later, to capitalism in one area and not the others.

Related to this question is the old European misdefinition of Indian villages, unfortunately accepted by Marx, as closed, corporate entities (hence, for Marx, as survivals of primitive communal society). The medieval Indian village did indeed have corporate characteristics; it did have communal control of usufruct (though not, apparently, communal ownership); and it did display the tight combination of farming and handicrafts which Marx found to be highly significant and seemed, to him, to explain the cohesiveness of the village, its ability to remain unchanged in the face of external shocks from colonial capitalism, yet, by the same token, to resist social transformation. But European villages also retained certain corporate characteristics, perhaps even more pronounced than those of Hindu villages, where caste communities correlated very poorly with village settlement patterns.<ref>Marx's view is set forth in "The British rule in India" (1979). Irfan Habib, in part following Kosambi (both are Marxists), writes of "the creation of the traditional Indian village, closed and self-sufficient" (my emphasis) between 200 B.C. and 650 A.D., in a process involving "ruralization of crafts" and somewhat planned settlement of landless people in villages: Habib, in "The Social Distribution of Landed Property in Pre-British India" (1965).</ref> In this matter we may be confronting the classic error of telescoping history, perceiving the breakup of the European village after the rise of capitalism, and assuming therefore that these villages had been dissolving as corporate entities many centuries earlier. Furthermore, communal land ownership was relatively unimportant in this period for both India and Europe; the villages normally held only delegated rights (including the right to common land), which could be and sometimes were violated by landlords. The true owners of most of the productive land, holders of hereditary and transferrable estates, were, in both areas, the ruling class. Finally, the combination of agriculture and handicrafts was also present in European villages.<ref>On the unity of agriculture and handicraft industry in medieval European villages, see, for example, Sylvia Thrupp, "Medieval Industry 1000-1500" (1972).</ref> Apparently it dissolved well after 1492 with the rise of capitalism. In sum, although Indian feudalism was in no sense identical to the European variety (or varieties), it bore the same general characteristics as a mode of production and the same potential for evolution toward capitalism. This argument can probably be made also for many regions of Asia and Africa. The medieval European village seems not to have been very unusual among the array of village settlement and social forms across the hemisphere.

The producing class in feudalism consists, usually, of peasants, who farm the landlord's estate in household-scale units and provide labor, produce, or cash as rent. Serfdom is often thought to be the characteristic labor form of feudalism, on the European model.<ref>Dobb, ''Studies in the Development of Capitalism'' (1947).</ref> Serfs of the basically European sort were indeed found here and there in Africa and Asia, although the specific history of enserfment in late-Roman Europe was unique and its legal form was rarely encountered elsewhere. What we find, rather, is a panorama of forms of unfree labor, that is, labor of peasants tied somehow to the landlord's estate, through all three continents.<ref>Serfdom was not characteristic of all parts of medieval Europe. On unfree labor in Asia and Africa, see, for example, Yadava, "Immobility and Subjugation of Indian Peasantry in Early Medieval Complex" (1974); Levitzion, "The Early States of the Western Sudan to 1500" (1972); Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1973).</ref> On the other hand, some scholars (among them Brenner, a Marxist, and Baechler, a conservative) rather idealize the European peasant of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in western Europe and see in that person a freehold farmer, imbued with the entrepreneurial spirit and so forth.<ref>See Brenner and critics in Aston and Philpin, ''The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe'' (1988); Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism." (1977); Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity: Caste and Feudality (India, Europe and Japan)." (1988). See comments on Brenner and Baechler in Chapter 2 above.</ref> This is again a telescoping of history. Those peasants were tenants, still tied to estates in manifold ways; not until later times, well after 1492, was there a strong emergence of an important freehold, capital-accumulating, kulak-style class, ready for rural capitalism. The European peasant was not particularly unusual. Peasants who were forced to give labor service, or product, or cash, as rent or tribute or tax (paid to the landlord), who were not free to move from the landlord's domain, and whose status was inherited by later generations, were found in many parts of medieval Asia and Africa as well as Europe.

There was a measure of interconnectedness among the feudal agricultural societies, enough to suggest that we should think of the whole hemisphere-wide zone of class-based agricultural societies not as separate social entities but as a single feudal landscape with regional variations that sometimes included sharp boundaries and sometimes did not. Clearly there was a great deal of criss-cross diffusion among these regions, as evidence, for instance, the commonality of agricultural techniques over large areas. (The claim made by some European historians,<ref>including Lynn White, Jr. in ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1968); Michael Mann, "European Development: Approaching a Historical Explanation" (1988); Perry Anderson, ''Lineages of the Absolute State'' (1974).</ref> that medieval European agriculture was unique in technological level and thus somehow ignited progress toward capitalism, is invalid, as we discussed in Chapter 2. European agriculture shared most traits with other regions and was not uniquely advanced or peculiarly pregnant with social change.) It seems likely that the evolution of feudalism over much of the hemispheric landscape involved a steady deepening of the oppression on peasants, as more and more surplus was demanded, and the response by peasants included technological development and borrowing (diffusion), as well as migration toward peripheral regions and toward towns. At the same time, the ruling classes, as they exhausted the potential of their own subjects to increase surplus delivery, tried to conquer and exploit other communities of producers, to acquire external as well as internal fields of exploitation, and this also led to further interconnectedness of regions.<ref>Blaut, ''The National Question'' (1987b), chap. 7.</ref> Yet, at the same time, feudal ruling class communities were united in webs of kinship, or bureaucracy, or caste, which sometimes extended over very large areas. We know that the neat parcelling of societies into nation-states did not exist in those times, that language regions were ill-defined and language barriers of little significance, even that religious differences did not set up barriers to the movement of ideas, things, and people. Thus we should think of all (or most) feudal societies as sharing a common space, through which social forces and pressures diffused in all directions, over great distances, easily crossing the boundaries of states. Given this conception, it is not difficult to understand why the general evolution of feudalism as a mode of production was proceeding in about the same way over much of the hemisphere.

In the late Middle Ages there were signs of profound change in many agricultural regions of all three continents. There were indications of two sorts: signs of decay, or even imminent collapse, in the feudal system, and signs of change toward commercialized agriculture and toward rural capitalism. Throughout much of the hemisphere, the mode of production appears to have been in a state of decay, and we find increasing exactions, peasant revolts, migrations to agricultural frontiers and towns, intense warfare among ruling classes for access to producer populations, and more. By the fourteenth century, feudalism had entered a stage of crisis—although not of collapse—in Europe, but it appears that there were similar crises in parts of Asia and probably—as we will doubtless learn from further research—Africa.<ref>For India, see, for example, A. Chicherov, "On the Multiplicity of Socio-Economic Structures in India in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century" (1976); I. Habib, "Problems of Marxist Historical Analysis" (1969); S. Gopal, Nobility and the Mercantile Community in India" (1972); Radhakamal Mukherjee, ''The Economic History of India, 1600-1800'' (1967); Ramkrishna Mukherjee, ''The Rise and Fall of the East India Company'' (1958); Jha, ''Studies in the Development of Capitalism in India'' (1963); Nurul Hasan, "The Silver Currency Output of the Mughal Empire and Prices in India During the 16th and 17th Centuries" (1969); Yadava, "Immobility and Subjugation of Indian Peasantry in Early Medieval Complex" (1974). For West Africa, see Kea, ''Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast'' (1982). For China, see Harrison, ''The Communists and Chinese Peasant Rebellions'' (1969); Parsons, ''Peasant Rebellions in the Late Ming Dynasty'' (1970); Fu and Li, ''The Sprouts of Capitalistic Factors Within China's Feudal Society'' (1956).</ref> In all three continents there was a movement of peasants to the towns, perhaps at roughly comparable rates. In no large region, European or non-European, could this have become a flood of rural-urban migrants, since urban population was still a small percentage of total population everywhere at the end of the fifteenth century. Still, it was an effect of crises in the rural areas. Whether these crises were indications that the mode of production was truly near collapse, and this from internal contradictions, perhaps cannot as yet be decided, but in any case feudalism in Europe was no closer to its final demise, prior to 1492, than were the feudalism of many extra-European regions.

At this point in the argument, a disclaimer and a speculation. I am not arguing that the landlord-peasant mode of production had somehow gone through its allotted historical span and was about to collapse, or to transform itself into capitalism. The question whether capitalism had its earliest growth in an urban setting or a rural setting is a very complex one indeed; I will discuss the matter further below but I do not propose any sort of general historical theory of causation. I will argue only that the transition, or decay, or whatever one wants to call it, was far from complete in 1492, and the wealth from America precipitated the rise of capitalism and, simultaneously, the final decay of the feudal mode of production in Europe.

I speculate as follows: Given our overall model of an extremely rapid criss-cross diffusion of the cultural traits of agriculture (crops, stock, tools, water-management systems, etc.), and given the parallel conception of tight and intricate interlacing among class-organized agricultural societies in the medieval Eastern Hemisphere, one would expect that the general growth and evolution of the class-stratified agricultural form of society would proceed in a relatively even manner from one region to the next, as traits diffused, as social pressures were transmitted in space by migration, conquest, and the like, as ruling-class alliances proliferated, and so on. Perhaps the evolution of this feudal mode of production was everywhere conditioned by one common social fact: the steady and unrelenting demand of the landlord class and its allies (merchants, nobility, etc.) for more and more wealth, a demand that translated into constant pressure on peasants to increase production so that they could increase delivery of surplus. I view this as a long-term secular trend that led to specific responses in the peasant sector, including technological development, criss-cross diffusion of technology, asserting and pioneering, peasant revolts, rural-urban migration, participation in ruling-class military adventures, and more. I speculate, then, that these mechanisms evened out the social tensions that were created in many places by the increasing ruling-class demand for delivery of surplus. This would allow us to argue that, if the mode of production was in decay or in crisis in one part of the hemisphere, very likely the same was the case in many other parts of the hemisphere. In a word: the mode of production rose and then ebbed on a hemispheric scale, and what was happening in Europe in 1492 was also happening in Africa and Asia.

But why would we expect the feudal mode of production to decay or decline? This is the final point of speculation. We cannot assert simply that feudalism is a "stage" of evolution, and must eventually give way to the next, higher "stage" of evolution (capitalism), as some mechanistic Marxists argue. Nor can we accept the conservative form of this argument, which sees feudalism giving way to a higher and more "modern" form of society (capitalism) as a result of humanity's inevitable forward progress, social, intellectual, and moral. Nor can we invoke a Malthusian force of inevitably heightening population pressure (a thesis which was shown to be false in Chapter 2, on grounds mainly that human cultures always control their demographic behavior, more or less rationally). I would propose the following explanatory model. There are two essential facts about this form of society: first, the fact of family-scale farming as a way of life; second, the fact of a landlord class extracting, or trying to extract, an ever-increasing absolute surplus from farmers. Peasant farmers respond to this pressure in many ways, as we noted above. They certainly try to increase their population so long as each additional human being in the community can produce the requisite surplus, that is, contribute labor which yields more production than is needed for consumption by the incremental member of the community and for that individual's contribution to surplus delivery. Certainly they try to add additional land for cultivation, and sometimes try to move to another location, seeking agricultural or other land. But mainly they intensify. That is, they increase agricultural productivity by continuously experimenting with new crop varieties, new tools, new techniques, and they are ever on the alert for news about innovations that have been tried successfully elsewhere—in the next village, the next valley, the next island.

The process of technological improvement has no limit, but a point will be reached when the rate of increase in labor productivity declines, generation by generation, century by century. Doubtless the rate was at its highest during the period when many new crops and stock types were being domesticated at a rapid rate, and when the main tools, and iron, were being brought into the system. By the Middle Ages, the rate of improvement overall would have declined to a level insufficient to permit farmers to meet the landlords' incremental demands for surplus. If we set aside some of the alternative responses, such as pioneering and rural-urban migration, which must have been available in some regions but not in others, we are left with the following situation: a general crisis in the feudal mode of production.

Now this discussion has been grounded in one assumption: that improvements in agricultural production are taking place through innovations mainly on the farm itself. This is largely the case for family-scale farming in medieval and premedieval times. Of course, production is also improved by importing water and nutrients into the farm through irrigation or drainage. And always there is some off-the-farm sale or other exchange of products, and sale or exchange of products from the farm for inputs like fertilizer, seed, and labor. So the individual peasant farm, or family farm, is a relatively but not absolutely self-contained microgeographic system. We know very well, and farmers in those days also knew very well, that the best strategy for engineering a dramatic increase in production from a microgeographic system like the peasant farm is to integrate it more fully into a larger, macrogeographic system. Mainly this involves increasing the input of water and fertility elements, like lime and manure, and changing the pattern of crops and stock from one which must primarily feed the farm family to one which can involve some specialization in products that are saleable and that are well-suited to the ecological conditions of the farm. (This would commonly mean some specialization in one or a few food products, which are both sold and consumed, or specialization in an industrial product, like cotton.) When, today, we speak of the "agricultural revolution" of recent centuries, we are describing a revolution at this macrogeographic level: modern family farms import huge amounts of fertility; they import (purchase) many tools, pesticides, and like elements which are produced elsewhere; they use substantial amounts of nonfamily labor; and they specialize in ways that (sometimes) involve ecological optimization. This list pretty much exhausts the revolutionary changes that occurred prior to the present century, and it suggests that internal, microgeographic improvements—which never ceased to take place—played a secondary role at this stage in the development of agriculture.

For these macrogeographic improvements to take place there must be a high level of commercialization of farming, because moving things into and out of the farm microsystem (or at any rate the village microsystem) is mainly a process of buying and selling. It would seem to follow that a general crisis of the feudal mode of production would have one of two possible outcomes. One of these is a relatively smooth transition to an economy in which there is massive off-the-farm cash demand for farm products and supply of purchasable inputs, along with cash payment of rent (or payment on shares to a landlord who then markets the share for cash). This scenario takes place in a landscape in which there is a large nonagricultural population, hence a landscape that is either urbanizing or participating in major long-distance trade. Stated differently: the crisis can be met if commercialization and urbanization are taking place. Alternatively, there can be revolutionary changes of another sort: peasant revolts, either mild (such as withholding of rent) or violent, major cultural transformation in social, political, or religious life, or something else equally revolutionary. Perhaps both alternatives must occur in some combination for the crisis to be resolved. I conclude that the rather clear pattern in which feudal contradictions intensify, as a result of increasing demands for surplus and decreasing ability of farm families to increase the level of surplus, must lead to a revolutionary change of some sort. Most of the changes that I have mentioned did, in fact, occur in Europe in the late Middle Ages and involved the overthrow of feudalism as a political and social system and its replacement by the modern system after the model of England's "Glorious Revolution." But I am not arguing that this rural set of processes explains the rise of capitalism. Certainly it contributed to the rise of capitalism, and specifically to the processes of increasing urbanization and increasing long-distance commodity movements which characterized the late Middle Ages throughout the hemisphere, processes which I label "protocapitalist," and which we discuss in the following section of this chapter.

== Protocapitalism in Asia, Africa, and Europe ==

I use the word "protocapitalism" not to introduce a technical term but to avoid the problem of defining another term, "capitalism." Obviously, the kind of economic system that we ordinarily think of as capitalist did not exist in the Middle Ages; we are dealing with its forebear, which (as I will argue) exhibited most of the basic traits of capitalism, but on a spatially and socially small scale, and generally within, or on the edge of, a much larger, dominant economic system associated with the feudal mode of production. Protocapitalism, therefore, is incipient capitalism, or near-capitalism, or adolescent capitalism. It is the system as it existed prior to the two revolutionary transformations which brought modern capitalism into existence. The first of these was the political transformation which is usually, and conventionally, called "the bourgeois revolution" or "bourgeois revolutions"—the creation of large polities that were dominated, not by the feudal landlord class, but by an elite of townsmen (burghers, bourgeoisie) and their entrepreneurial allies in the countryside. The most famous example, and in a way the defining case, was Britain's "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, and I will use the date 1688 as the symbol or token for the political triumph of capitalism. The second transformation was, of course, the Industrial Revolution, which did not really begin in a big way until the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In Chapter 4 we will examine the role played by colonialism and non-Europe in both of these transformations.

In all three continents we find relatively small rural regions (they were generally hinterlands of major port cities) along with a few highly commercialized agricultural and mining regions, which were clearly being penetrated by capitalism—were protocapitalist—in the period just prior to 1492. Among these were Flanders, southeastern England, northern Italy, sugar-planting regions of Morocco, the Nile valley, the Gold Coast, Kilwa, Sofala (and hypothetically part of Zimbabwe), Malabar, Coromandel, Bengal, northern Java, and south-coastal China. Land was owned by commerce-minded landlords or by urban protocapitalists.<ref>Appadorai, ''Economic Conditions in Southern India'' (1936); Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1974); Nicholas, "Town and Countryside: Social and Economic Tensions in 14th Century Flanders" (1967-1968), pp. 458-485; Rawski, ''Agricultural Change and the Peasant Economy of South China'' (1972); T. Raychaudhuri, ''Jan Company in Coromandel'' (1962).</ref> Rents were generally paid in cash except in those areas, like Fukien, where more money profit could be extracted by landlords if they collected the farm produce and sold it themselves.<ref>Rawski, ''Agricultural Change and the Peasant Economy of South China'' (1972).</ref> Agricultural production was organized in various ways, ranging from peasant-scale farming to plantations, and very significant quantities of a number of agricultural products were grown, sold, and exported: rice, cotton, sugar, pepper, etc. Industrial production was spreading out into the countryside in all three continents: the early putting-out system was actually de-urbanizing industry in northwestern Europe, as the control by guilds became loosened; probably the same was occurring in parts of Asia and Africa (where merchant and artisan guilds were also well developed and strong in the Middle Ages).<ref>See Appadorai, ''Economic Conditions in Southern India'' (1936); Gernet, ''Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion'' (1962); Habib, "Problems of Marxist Historical Analysis" (1969); Mahalingam, ''Economic Life in the Vijayanagar Empire'' (1951); K. Nilikanta Sastri, ''A History of South India'' (1966); Tung, ''An Outline History of China'' (1979); Kea, ''Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast'' (1982), Sherif, ''Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar'' (1987).</ref> Over a much broader area, commodity production had fully penetrated the agricultural economy, and it is extremely doubtful whether west European peasant agriculture was more highly commercialized than that of many parts of China and India, as well as some other extra-European regions. Probably we can assume that level of urbanization is a good comparative indicator of level of agricultural commercialization for this period, since it must represent the main off-the-farm demand for agricultural products. By this measure, Chinese and Indian agriculture would have been more highly commercialized than European agriculture, because a larger percentage of total population was urban in those regions.

Cities dotted the landscape from northern Europe to southern Africa to eastern Asia. Some of these cities were seats of power for major feudal societies. Others were socially and geographically marginal to these societies, and were usually to be found along sea coasts, where they had mainly an interstitial relationship to the larger feudal societies, moving and trading goods among them and producing manufactured commodities for them. Probably it would be incorrect to speak of two distinct classes of urban place, internal and marginal (or peripheral), because many variations and gradations existed, and also because the internal, seat-of-power cities were in many cases also major centers for intersocietal trade and for nonagricultural production. Nevertheless, we can distinguish a special group of cities that were strongly oriented toward manufacturing and trade, were more or less marginal to powerful feudal states (some were within these states; some were small city-dominated states or even city-states), and were heavily engaged in long-distance maritime trade. Cities of this sort stretched around all of the coasts of western Europe, the Mediterranean, East Africa, and South, Southeast, and East Asia. In these cities the mode of production could probably be best described as incipient capitalism, protocapitalism—certainly it was not feudalism—with wageworkers being, apparently, the largest working-class sector, merchants, merchant-landlords, or merchant-manufacturers the ruling class, and economic activity a mixture of trade (movement of commodities, banking, and so on), manufacture (both large- and small-scale), and commercial agriculture.

Some of these mercantile-maritime cities were quite small, others quite large, but it appears that most of them were at roughly the same level in the development of protocapitalist institutions, classes, and technology. This is not surprising since they were intimately connected to one another in a tight network of trade, along which ideas, techniques, goods, and people flowed in all directions, in constant criss-cross diffusion.<ref>Blaut, "Where Was Capitalism Born?" (1976).</ref> (For example: Malacca, when the Portuguese first arrived, was trading with the Mediterranean, Inner Asia, East Africa, the Middle East, India, China, and probably Japan as well as all of Southeast Asia. The chronicler Tome Pires assures us that, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, 84 different languages are spoken in that city, and, boosting its importance for the Portuguese, asserts that "whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice."<ref>Pires, ''The Suma Oriental'' (1944 edition).</ref> A second example from a much earlier period: the Tenasserim port of Kalah, in the tenth century, was trading with China and Arabia. According to Ibn al-Faqih, the parrots of Kalah talked in Persian, Arabic, Chinese, Indian, and Greek.<ref>Pires, ''The Suma Oriental'' (1944); Di Meglio, "Arab Trade with Indonesia and the Malay Peninsula from the 8th to the 16th Century" (1970). The location of Kalah is tentatively placed in the Mergui region: see Wheatley, ''The Golden Khersonese'' (1961).</ref>)

The network of mercantile-maritime centers stretched, like a string of pearls, from the Baltic to the eastern Mediterranean, and from there southward to Sofala (or beyond—the history of East and southern Africa is still buried in colonial slumber) and eastward to Japan. The network also extended inland in all three continents, but the mercantile-maritime cities and oceanic routes were eventually of greater evolutionary importance in the rise of capitalism than were the inland centers. This was true for two (main) reasons.

First, foreign trade was the most peripheral of protocapitalist activities; it was literally beyond the reach of the law. (Inland cities that bordered on deserts would also have had this peripheral quality to some extent.) Thus, a protocapitalist port city could move products to and from any other oceanic port without having to pass through state-organized territories, and thereby avoid paying tolls, being forced to buy and sell goods to foreign merchants at intermediate trading centers, or perhaps even being denied permission to enter a state. It is worth noting, in this regard, that a substantial part of the high cost of Asian spices in European markets before 1492 resulted from the fact that shipments coming from India via overland routes ordinarily had to be passed from merchant to merchant at several trading points enroute, with profit taken at each intermediate market. The cheapness of Asian spices carried by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century therefore reflected, to a considerable extent, the fact that the spices could be on-loaded at an Asian port, and then transported direct to a European port with no intermediate transactions; perhaps this factor was more important than the generally lower cost of sea transport over land transport (a factor that is often overemphasized).

Second, long-distance commodity movement by sea, involving as it did the transport of vital staples as well as luxuries, was, among protocapitalist activities of the late Middle Ages, perhaps the closest we get to industrial capitalism in the urban economy of that time. It involved not merely an exchange of commodities but the production of many commodities including ships, and incorporated sophisticated technology, a large work force, complex transactions, and massive capital accumulation. This matter brings us back, inescapably, to the problem of defining "protocapitalism."

There is a widespread tendency, often encountered among Marxists but by no means confined to that school of thought, which argues the following position. Money, cash exchange, and trade have been going on for millennia but they do not signify capitalism or even the seeds of capitalism. This is so because capitalism is a matter of production, not exchange. "Real" capitalism requires the application of wage labor and the production of commodities. Exchange is merely buying and selling; it does not add value. For Marx, it produces wealth mainly as a result of unequal exchange (higher prices in one market than another, and the like), not as a result of labor input and the production of use-value.

From this model come a series of highly important theses. One is the argument that medieval European towns were not central to the rise of capitalism because their main activity was trade, exchange, not production. Therefore the rise of capitalism must have occurred, not in medieval towns but in medieval agriculture.<ref>This thesis is central to the famous debate over the role of urbanization in the medieval rise of capitalism; in Marxist literature this view is associated with Maurice Dobb (who in fact presented it very cautiously), and its opposition—emphasis on the role of towns in the rise of capitalism—is associated with Paul Sweezy. See Dobb, ''Studies in the Development of Capitalism'' (1947), Sweezy, "A Critique" (1976). The thesis is also central to the debates over "dependency theory." For instance, Robert Brenner argues that towns and trade were essentially irrelevant precisely because the issue is production, not exchange, and Brenner believes (wrongly) that towns were not really important points of production in the medieval world. See Brenner, "The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism" (1985), pp. 38-39. Also see Chapter 2, note 172, above.</ref> But a second thesis is more crucial for the issues discussed here. This is the argument that starts out by conceding that the great medieval trading cities and trading routes of Asia were much more impressive in scale than those of Europe and the Mediterranean, but this did not make them more significant for the rise of capitalism—because it was production, not exchange (trade, commerce), that was the crucial process. No matter how highly developed the trading routes and cities of Asia were, Europe's feudal agricultural production (in this argument) was closer to capitalism than either the rural or urban production systems of non-Europe and it is this fact—the nature of European rural society as contrasted with non-European rural society—that is crucial in explaining why capitalism arose in Europe, not in Asia (or Africa). The fallacy regarding rural production was discussed previously. But equally fallacious is the idea that Asian (and African) port cities, mercantile-maritime centers, were somehow purely or largely concerned with exchange, with "commerce." Here there are in fact three errors. First, production involves not merely change of form but also change of place. It is metaphysical to argue that there is something ontologically distinctive about the process of shaping nature into a "thing," a commodity. When a farmer produces an agricultural "thing," he or she must not only grow it but also transport it from field to farmstead and then to market, and must also transport inputs of water or fertilizer or labor from outside the farm. Farm production, therefore, involves both change of form and change of place. An automobile assembly line is a process of change both of form and of place. Thus, overall, spatial movement is part of production. It has nothing whatever to do with the entirely distinct process by which commodities are purchased and sold. Indeed, the farmer's crop can be subject to exchange right on the farm as well as in an off-the-farm market. Therefore, the medieval activities involved in moving commodities over long distances were not, ontologically, "exchange"; they were spatial transport. They involved huge labor forces, massive capital investment, major technologies—of navigation, ship construction, banking and insurance, and more—and significant tonnages. They produced use-value at the destination from commodities that had none, or less, at the point of departure. In a word, what is called "medieval trade" was a complex process in which production and manufacture played as great a role as did exchange.

The second error is the idea, very widely held today among historians, that the cities, the commodity movement, and the rest of the complex, was somehow a trivial process involving only the moving of a few luxury items to a tiny ruling class. In fact, most of the medieval seaborne trade was a matter of staple commodities, things like crude textiles, iron implements, rice, wheat, lumber, ships (which often were sailed from the place of construction to some other port where they were sold), and the like. But beyond that, the tonnage and value of products that would not be considered staples, things like pepper, sugar, finer textiles, pottery, and so forth, was, in and of itself, immensely important, because the market for such products was very large: the medieval elites were by no means insignificant.

The third error is a failure to perceive how important industrial production was in these medieval cities and their hinterlands. Thus, I conclude that the medieval mercantile-maritime system was very much a nursery bed of capitalism, in Asia and Africa as well as Europe.

The protocapitalist port cities of Europe were not more highly developed than those of Africa and Asia in the fifteenth century. This holds true regardless of the kinds of criteria chosen as measures. European cities, first, were not larger in absolute or relative population. In fact, urbanization in Europe was probably less advanced than urbanization in China, India, the Arab region, and no doubt many other non-European areas. The urban population in early Ming China was perhaps 10% of the total population.<ref>Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1973).</ref> In the Vijayanagar Empire of southern India it must have been at least as high: the inland capital alone held about 3% of the population—comparable centers in Europe, such as Paris, may have had half that percentage—and the coastal port cities were both numerous and large.<ref>Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1973); Mahalingam, ''Economic Life in the Vijayanagar Empire'' (1951); Naqvi, ''Urban Centres in Upper India, 1556-1803'' (1968); Satish Chandra, "Commerce and Industry in the Medieval Period" (1964).</ref> Second, the development of the techniques of business was fully as advanced, fully as complex, and fully as wideflung in space among the merchants and bankers of Asia and Africa as among those of Europe. (Tome Pires said of Gujarati businessmen in 1515: "They are men who understand merchandise; they are ... properly steeped in the sound and harmony of it" and "those of our people who want to be clerks and factors ought to go there and learn, because the business of trade is a science."<ref>Pires, ''The Suma Oriental'' (1944). Also see K. N. Chaudhuri, ''Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean'' (1985); Chan-Cheung, "The Smuggling Trade Between China and Southeast Asia During the Ming Dynasty (1967); Di Meglio, "Arab Trade with Indonesia and the Malay Peninsula from the 8th to the 16th Century" (1970); Elvin, "China as a Counterfactual" (1988); Gupta, ''Industrial Structure of India During Medieval Period'' (1970); I. Habib, "Usury in Medieval India" (1964); Jha, ''Studies in the Development of Capitalism in India'' (1963); Pires, ''The Suma Oriental'' (1944); Prakash, "Organization of Industrial Production in Urban Centres in India During the Seventeenth Century with Special Reference to Textiles" (1964); Victor Purcell, ''The Chinese in Southeast Asia'', 2nd ed. (1965); Jan Qaisar, "The Role of Brokers in Medieval India" (1974); Simkin, ''The Traditional Trade of Asia'' (1968); Toyoda, ''History of Pre-Meiji Commerce in Japan'' (1969); Udovitch, "Commercial Techniques in Early Medieval Islamic Trade" (1974).</ref>) Third, the technical and material means of production seem to have been at about the same level of development in many mercantile-maritime centers of all three continents, allowing for differences in the volume of production and trade, the kinds of merchandise, and the like. Maritime techniques were also comparable across the hemisphere: though they differed from ocean to ocean, it cannot be said that ships of one ocean were technologically more advanced than those of the others.<ref>Needham and collaborators, ''Science and Civilization in China'' (1954-1984), vol. 4, part 3; Lewis, "Maritime Skills in the Indian Ocean, 1368-1500" (1973); Lo, "China as a Sea Power" (1955); Ma Huan, ''The Overall Survey of the Ocean's Shores'' (1970); Purcell, ''The Chinese in Southeast Asia'', 2d ed. (1965).</ref> Manufactures in port cities and other industrial centers of Europe, Africa, and Asia were also roughly comparable in gross scale and level of development.<ref>S. Chaudhuri, "Textile Trade and Industry in Bengal Suba, 1650-1720" (1974); Elvin, "China as a Counterfactual" (1988); Gernet, ''Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion'' (1962); Jha, ''Studies in the Development of Capitalism in India'' (1963); Naqvi, ''Urban Centres in Upper India, 1556-1803'' (1968); Needham and collaborators, ''Science and Civilization in China'' (1965-1984); Jan Qaisar, "The Role of Brokers in Medieval India" (1974); Rodinson, "Le Marchand Musulman" (1974); Rodinson, ''Islam and Capitalism'' (1973); Bodo Wiethoff, ''Die Chinesische Seeverbotspolitik und der Private Überseehandel von 1368 bis 1567'' (1963); Yang, "Government Control of Urban Merchants in Traditional China" (1970).</ref> Fourth, the urban class composition of Asian and African centers appears to have been similar to that of European centers: in all regions there existed a powerful class of protocapitalists and a wage-earning class of workers, with or without involvement also of other classes such as feudal landlords, slaves, and so on. And finally, the old European myth, codified by Weber—that European cities were somehow more free than non-European cities, which were under the tight control of the surrounding polity—is essentially an inheritance from classical Eurocentric diffusionism, which imagined that everything important in early Europe was imbued with freedom while everything important in Asia (not to mention Africa) was ground under a stultifying "Oriental despotism" until the Europeans arrived there and brought freedom. The so-called "free cities" of central Europe were hardly the norm and were not central to the rise of capitalism. The partial autonomy of many mercantile-maritime port cities of Europe, from Italy to the Baltic, was of course a reality, and usually reflected either the dominance by the city of a relatively small polity (often a city-state) or the gradual accommodation of feudal states to their urban sectors, allowing the latter considerable autonomy for reasons of profit or power. But all of this held true also in various parts of Africa and Asia. Small city-states were common around the shores of the Indian Ocean, in the Maghreb, and in Southeast Asia; also common were quasi-independent cities, giving loose allegiance to larger states. This point was discussed in the previous chapter.

The preceding discussion was not a theory of the rise of capitalism. My aim was simply to show that all of the theories that claim causal superiority for Europe on the basis of Asia and Africa's supposed lack of progressive urbanization or because extra-European urban processes were not important since urban processes in general were of minor importance compared to rural processes—European rural feudalism—are very unconvincing.

It is not an exaggeration to describe this entire network of mercantile-maritime cities as a single protocapitalist system.<ref>I proposed this idea in Blaut, "Where Was Capitalism Born?" (1976). Janet Abu-Lughod's important book ''Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350'' (1989) is the first effort to show in precise detail how this system worked in the fourteenth century. Also see S. Chaudhuri, "Textile Trade and Industry in Bengal Suba" (1985); Simkin, ''The Traditional Trade of Asia'' (1968); Amin, ''Accumulation on a World Scale'' (1974) and ''Unequal Development'' (1976).</ref> The surrounding space of class-organized agricultural societies was, as I argued previously, made up of separate societies and polities in separate regions but was, nonetheless, integrated enough so that persistent criss-cross diffusion and other movements led to a degree of unity; perhaps even a degree of intercontinental equilibrium. The unity was very much more intense for the network of protocapitalist cities. The image I have in mind for this is a network of strings of electric lights of various sizes and colors illuminating a garden party. The current, so to speak, which flowed among those port cities consisted of human beings (sailors, workers, merchants, etc.), material things (commodities, ships, fertile seeds and cuttings of crops, musical instruments, and much more), and ideas—technological ideas, innovative social, economic, and religious ideas, and so on.

All of this is well known in qualitative terms but not fully so in terms of its intensity, its spatial extent, and, most critically, its unity. The entire system can be viewed as a single entity, so tightly integrated that there must have been rapid, almost instantaneous, criss-cross diffusion throughout the system of essentially every material or immaterial culture trait that is relevant to the economic and technical and ecological progress of this form of society. I believe it is an error, built into our way of conceptualizing cultures and cultural differences, to believe that the very profound differences of culture among the various societies that comprised this system would, somehow, have been reflected in a lack of integration across cultural boundaries in matters concerning the technical-economic-ecological dimension of culture. (Recall our discussion above concerning the distinction between evolutionary and nonevolutionary or partly non-evolutionary aspects of culture, in the theoretical tradition of anthropologists like Steward.<ref>Steward, ''Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution'' (1955). See note 1.</ref>) In those times, differences of language did not seem to interfere with the quest for profit among merchants and other participants in this system. (Recall the Greek-speaking parrots of Kalah, the 84 languages spoken in Malacca.) Nor were differences of religion any great impediment (as has been amply documented for Muslim-Christian-Jewish trade in the medieval Mediterranean<ref>Braudel, ''The Mediterranean'' (1972); Goitein, ''A Mediterranean Society'' (1967); Lane, ''Venice: A Maritime Republic'' (1973).</ref>). Certainly there were limited social networks, membership in which was a matter of religion or nationality or even kinship. Abu-Lughod has shown that the pattern of connections and distinctions produced a set of eight overlapping social regions—she writes of "The Eight Circuits of the Thirteenth-Century World System"—although her data and argument are consistent with my present thesis that all regions were in fact subregions of one protocapitalist system.<ref>Abu-Lughod, ''Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350'' (1989), fig. 1, p. 34. One of the eight regions is the nonmaritime circuit extending from China through Central Asia to the Black Sea.</ref> State boundaries do not seem to have played an important inhibiting role in the flows across the system, except in certain fairly limited periods when either political conflict or specific imperial policies and practices did, indeed, disrupt trade through one or another political partition; the truly nationalistic forms of capitalist enterprise become important much later; in fact, after 1492.<ref>Blaut, ''The National Question'' (1987b).</ref>

The network, or system, seems to have evolved over a period of several centuries, mainly from the tenth to the fifteenth. Without attributing cause, I would emphasize the fact that the period during which this system grew most rapidly in scale and intensity was the period during which the technology of oceangoing shipping increased explosively, in what may be thought of as a (or the) Spatial Revolution. In the Agricultural Revolution, we do not know whether the technical-ecological transformation was cause, or effect, or both, in relation to social transformation, although most scholars tend to treat agriculture as cause and social change as effect, rightly or wrongly. In the case of the medieval Spatial Revolution, it is most likely that the technological-ecological aspect was more a reflection of the economic and social processes associated with emergent protocapitalism and urban development than a cause of the latter. Nevertheless, the medieval Spatial Revolution was in one critical way a sequel to the Agricultural Revolution: it intensified spatial flows much as the earlier revolution intensified in situ production. This is not to say that earlier boat technology and earlier long-distance sailing out of sight of land was insignificant: the question is one of intensity.

Perhaps, as a final speculation, we might think of the Spatial Revolution as part of a larger process which was responding to the maturation and decline of the feudal mode of production. Certainly it is true that increasing commodity demand by elites was a major stimulus, but it is also possible that the emerging crisis of feudalism—the decreasing rate at which an absolute increase in surplus could be extracted from peasant producers, and the resulting stresses and strains—had much to do with the rise of the intercontinental protocapitalist system. In any case, the dramatic long-distance voyages of discovery of the later Middle Ages, voyages by Chinese, Indians, Polynesians, Europeans, and others, should be conceptualized as moments in a genuine Spatial Revolution.

Much of this is speculation beyond the empirical data. But we have important data about the parallels of development from one urban system to another, and from one trading region to another. We also have dramatic cases of almost instantaneous diffusion: for instance, the appearance of the cannon in the Mediterranean region and in China almost simultaneously; perhaps in the same decade.<ref>Needham and collaborators, ''Science and Civilization in China'' (1965-1984), Vol. 5, part 7; Needham, ''Gunpowder as the Fourth Power, East and West'' (1985).</ref> For the argument of this book, the one crucial generalization is the following: It is not surprising that the processes that I have called protocapitalist were going on across the Eastern Hemisphere in the later Middle Ages. Africa, Asia, and Europe were about equally close to—or distant from—capitalism and modernity in 1492. After 1492, the pace of development quickened for Europe and slowed for Africa and Asia, because of the wealth brought to Europe from America.

== Notes ==

1. Concerning my use of the term "cultural evolution," see Chapter 1, note 14.

2. The discussion in this section of the chapter mainly deals with the Eastern Hemisphere. The Western Hemisphere will be discussed separately in Chapter 4.

3. See Dobbs, ''Studies in the Development of Capitalism'' (1947).

4. Amin, ''Unequal Development'' (1976) and "Modes of Production: History and Unequal Development" (1985).

5. Kabaker, "A Radiocarbon Chronology Relevant to the Origins of Agriculture" (1977); Megaw, ''Hunters, Gatherers and First Farmers Beyond Europe'' (1977); Vishnu-Mittre, "Origin and History of Agriculture in the Indian Subcontinent" (1978). See the review in Blaut, "Diffusionism: A Uniformitarian Critique." (1987a).

6. Blaut, "Diffusionism" (1987a).

7. The assumption here is that agriculture itself was evolving because it was useful, but there is the corollary assumption that humanity realized this not just in one favored place but in many places and among many peoples. This should not be surprising, given the fact that agriculture is useful nearly everywhere today. But it is definitely contradictory to the assumptions of Eurocentric diffusionism.

8. Examples of this process include the eastward movement of the medieval agricultural frontier in the forests of eastern Europe and the reclaiming of swampland in Iraq. Cropland was being expanded in these and other ways in many regions. In addition, it seems certain that some societies that had not previously practiced agriculture were being pushed into smaller or less favorable regions and therefore were turning to agriculture as a means of increasing food production to meet the land shortage.

9. See R. Lee, "Art, Science, or Politics? The Crisis in Hunter-Gatherer Studies" (1992).

10. Water-control systems in farming, including irrigation, drainage, broad-based terracing, raised- or drained-field construction, and natural-levee adaptations are probably as old as agriculture itself, because (1) all farmers everywhere know the problem of moisture control (adding moisture when there is deficit; removing moisture when there is a surplus and a danger of root drowning); (2) all of these procedures are initially small-scale actions taken on an individual farm (recall our discussion in Chapter 2 of the fallacies of the "hydraulic theory"); and (3) there is direct archaeological evidence of very ancient (9,000-year-old) drainage systems in New Guinea (Golson, "No room at the top: Agricultural intensification in the New Guinea Highlands," 1977), and drained- or raised-field systems in tropical America (Denevan, "Hydraulic Agriculture in the American Tropics: Forms, Measures, and Recent Research," 1982). Thus we can infer the primitivity of irrigation and these other water-management systems: probably they are as old as the Neolithic, along with drainage and raised-field systems. All this shows that intensive technology had already diffused insofar as it was going to do so, and nonadoption reflected something other than lack of information. As we noted in Chapter 2, irrigation systems diffuse as a social process, associated with class society. Concerning the myth that the plow was not used in Africa, see Hopkins, ''An Economic History of West Africa'' (1973) and Onimode, ''Imperialism and Underdevelopment in Nigeria'' (1982). Note that plows are used in tropical agriculture very sparingly—mainly for some operations in rice paddies.

11. In classless societies, I speculate that the bundle of choices concerning crops, tools, field systems, labor input, and the like, led to roughly a common level of output per person, unaffected by differences in environmental quality over a great range of environments. In some areas very extensive systems like shifting cultivation would be used; in others, intensive systems, like wet-rice cultivation, would be used. But the productivity of labor in terms of product per hour input would tend to be about the same in this model for both intensive and extensive systems. This would hold true if two assumptions are accepted: (1) that rapid and thorough diffusion had taken place, and (2) that population was controlled by farming peoples so as to optimize the situation concerning output and leisure time. None of this would be true in a class society, where the constraints on technology and labor use are influenced profoundly by the demands and power of the ruling class.

12. See, for example, Kea, ''Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth Century Gold Coast'' (1982); Isichei, ''A History of Nigeria'' (1983); Rodney, ''A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800'' (1970); A. Smith, "The Early States of the Central Sudan" (1971); Usman, ''The Transformation of Katsina (1400-1883)'' (1981).

13. See Blaut, "Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism" (1989). It is also true that in all these societies there were parallel high-status groups, clergy, bureaucrats, military people, and so on, but there seems not to have been any case of a large, clearly feudal society—I exclude a few cases of small urbanized power centers in dry, pastoral regions, and a few large cities—in which wealth and status was clearly divorced from land ownership and from the surplus extracted from peasants.

14. Apparently such private (saleable) ownership of agricultural land was found mainly near important urban areas, ports, mining areas, etc. See Rawski, ''Agricultural Change and the Peasant Economy of South China'' (1972); Das Gupta, ''Malabar in Asian Trade: 1740-1800'' (1967); Nicholas, "Town and Countryside: Social and Economic Tensions in 14th Century Flanders" (1967-1968); Kea, ''Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast'' (1982); Rodney, ''A History of the Upper Guinea Coast'' (1970); Usman, ''The Transformation of Katsina'' (1981); Sherif, ''Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar'' (1987).

15. On the importance of hereditary fiefs and landed property in Asia, see, for example, Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1973); Sharma, ''Indian Feudalism, c. 300-1200'' (1965); Fei Hsiao-tung, ''China's Gentry'' (1953); Fu and Li, ''The Sprouts of Capitalistic Factors Within China's Feudal Society'' (1956); Rawski, ''Agricultural Change and the Peasant Economy of South China'' (1972); Tung, ''An Outline History of China'' (1979); Liceria, "Emergence of Brahmans as Landed Intermediaries in Karnataka, c. A.D. 1000-1300 (1974); Mahalingam, ''Economic Life in the Vijayanagar Empire'' (1951); Hasan, "The Position of the Zamindars in the Mughal Empire (1969); Raychaudhuri, "The Agrarian System of Mughal India" (1965); Yadav, "Secular Land Grants of the Post-Gupta Period and Some Aspects of the Growth of the Feudal Complex in Northern India" (1966). For Africa south of the Sahara (for which there is as yet only fragmentary evidence), see, for example, A. Smith, "The Early States of the Central Sudan" (1971); Mabogunji, "The Land and Peoples of West Africa" (1971); Kea, ''Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast'' (1982); Isichei, ''A History of Nigeria'' (1983); Onimode, ''Imperialism and Underdevelopment in Nigeria'' (1982); FRELIMO, ''Historia de Mozambique'' (1971); Rodney, ''A History of the Upper Guinea Coast'' (1970); and Usman, ''The Transformation of Katsina'' (1981).

16. On the manorial system of China, see Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1973). For India, see Gopal, "Quasi-Manorial Rights in Ancient India" (1963); Mahalingam, ''Economic Life in the Vijayanagar Empire'' (1951); Yadav, "Secular Land Grants of the Post-Gupta Period" (1966); Yadav, "Immobility and Subjugation of Indian Peasantry in Early Medieval Complex" (1974). Indian historians recognize important differences between the Indian and European forms of the manor, however. In early Indian feudalism manorial labor had some of the characteristics of serfs, some of wage laborers, and some of tenant farmers. Early Indian feudal estates also seem to have been less autarkic and insulated than the stereotypical European manor.

17. Marx's view is set forth in "The British rule in India" (1979). Irfan Habib, in part following Kosambi (both are Marxists), writes of "the creation of the traditional Indian village, closed and self-sufficient" (my emphasis) between 200 B.C. and 650 A.D., in a process involving "ruralization of crafts" and somewhat planned settlement of landless people in villages: Habib, in "The Social Distribution of Landed Property in Pre-British India" (1965).

18. On the unity of agriculture and handicraft industry in medieval European villages, see, for example, Sylvia Thrupp, "Medieval Industry 1000-1500" (1972).

19. Dobb, ''Studies in the Development of Capitalism'' (1947).

20. Serfdom was not characteristic of all parts of medieval Europe. On unfree labor in Asia and Africa, see, for example, Yadava, "Immobility and Subjugation of Indian Peasantry in Early Medieval Complex" (1974); Levitzion, "The Early States of the Western Sudan to 1500" (1972); Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1973).

21. See Brenner and critics in Aston and Philpin, ''The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe'' (1988); Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism." (1977); Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity: Caste and Feudality (India, Europe and Japan)." (1988). See comments on Brenner and Baechler in Chapter 2 above.

22. including Lynn White, Jr. in ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1968); Michael Mann, "European Development: Approaching a Historical Explanation" (1988); Perry Anderson, ''Lineages of the Absolute State'' (1974).

23. Blaut, ''The National Question'' (1987b), chap. 7.

24. For India, see, for example, A. Chicherov, "On the Multiplicity of Socio-Economic Structures in India in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century" (1976); I. Habib, "Problems of Marxist Historical Analysis" (1969); S. Gopal, Nobility and the Mercantile Community in India" (1972); Radhakamal Mukherjee, ''The Economic History of India, 1600-1800'' (1967); Ramkrishna Mukherjee, ''The Rise and Fall of the East India Company'' (1958); Jha, ''Studies in the Development of Capitalism in India'' (1963); Nurul Hasan, "The Silver Currency Output of the Mughal Empire and Prices in India During the 16th and 17th Centuries" (1969); Yadava, "Immobility and Subjugation of Indian Peasantry in Early Medieval Complex" (1974). For West Africa, see Kea, ''Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast'' (1982). For China, see Harrison, ''The Communists and Chinese Peasant Rebellions'' (1969); Parsons, ''Peasant Rebellions in the Late Ming Dynasty'' (1970); Fu and Li, ''The Sprouts of Capitalistic Factors Within China's Feudal Society'' (1956).

25. Appadorai, ''Economic Conditions in Southern India'' (1936); Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1974); Nicholas, "Town and Countryside: Social and Economic Tensions in 14th Century Flanders" (1967-1968), pp. 458-485; Rawski, ''Agricultural Change and the Peasant Economy of South China'' (1972); T. Raychaudhuri, ''Jan Company in Coromandel'' (1962).

26. Rawski, ''Agricultural Change and the Peasant Economy of South China'' (1972).

27. See Appadorai, ''Economic Conditions in Southern India'' (1936); Gernet, ''Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion'' (1962); Habib, "Problems of Marxist Historical Analysis" (1969); Mahalingam, ''Economic Life in the Vijayanagar Empire'' (1951); K. Nilikanta Sastri, ''A History of South India'' (1966); Tung, ''An Outline History of China'' (1979); Kea, ''Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast'' (1982), Sherif, ''Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar'' (1987).

28. Blaut, "Where Was Capitalism Born?" (1976).

29. Pires, ''The Suma Oriental'' (1944 edition).

30. Pires, ''The Suma Oriental'' (1944); Di Meglio, "Arab Trade with Indonesia and the Malay Peninsula from the 8th to the 16th Century" (1970). The location of Kalah is tentatively placed in the Mergui region: see Wheatley, ''The Golden Khersonese'' (1961).

31. This thesis is central to the famous debate over the role of urbanization in the medieval rise of capitalism; in Marxist literature this view is associated with Maurice Dobb (who in fact presented it very cautiously), and its opposition—emphasis on the role of towns in the rise of capitalism—is associated with Paul Sweezy. See Dobb, ''Studies in the Development of Capitalism'' (1947), Sweezy, "A Critique" (1976). The thesis is also central to the debates over "dependency theory." For instance, Robert Brenner argues that towns and trade were essentially irrelevant precisely because the issue is production, not exchange, and Brenner believes (wrongly) that towns were not really important points of production in the medieval world. See Brenner, "The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism" (1985), pp. 38-39. Also see Chapter 2, note 172, above.

32. Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1973).

33. Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1973); Mahalingam, ''Economic Life in the Vijayanagar Empire'' (1951); Naqvi, ''Urban Centres in Upper India, 1556-1803'' (1968); Satish Chandra, "Commerce and Industry in the Medieval Period" (1964).

34. Pires, ''The Suma Oriental'' (1944). Also see K. N. Chaudhuri, ''Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean'' (1985); Chan-Cheung, "The Smuggling Trade Between China and Southeast Asia During the Ming Dynasty (1967); Di Meglio, "Arab Trade with Indonesia and the Malay Peninsula from the 8th to the 16th Century" (1970); Elvin, "China as a Counterfactual" (1988); Gupta, ''Industrial Structure of India During Medieval Period'' (1970); I. Habib, "Usury in Medieval India" (1964); Jha, ''Studies in the Development of Capitalism in India'' (1963); Pires, ''The Suma Oriental'' (1944); Prakash, "Organization of Industrial Production in Urban Centres in India During the Seventeenth Century with Special Reference to Textiles" (1964); Victor Purcell, ''The Chinese in Southeast Asia'', 2nd ed. (1965); Jan Qaisar, "The Role of Brokers in Medieval India" (1974); Simkin, ''The Traditional Trade of Asia'' (1968); Toyoda, ''History of Pre-Meiji Commerce in Japan'' (1969); Udovitch, "Commercial Techniques in Early Medieval Islamic Trade" (1974).

35. Needham and collaborators, ''Science and Civilization in China'' (1954-1984), vol. 4, part 3; Lewis, "Maritime Skills in the Indian Ocean, 1368-1500" (1973); Lo, "China as a Sea Power" (1955); Ma Huan, ''The Overall Survey of the Ocean's Shores'' (1970); Purcell, ''The Chinese in Southeast Asia'', 2d ed. (1965).

36. S. Chaudhuri, "Textile Trade and Industry in Bengal Suba, 1650-1720" (1974); Elvin, "China as a Counterfactual" (1988); Gernet, ''Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion'' (1962); Jha, ''Studies in the Development of Capitalism in India'' (1963); Naqvi, ''Urban Centres in Upper India, 1556-1803'' (1968); Needham and collaborators, ''Science and Civilization in China'' (1965-1984); Jan Qaisar, "The Role of Brokers in Medieval India" (1974); Rodinson, "Le Marchand Musulman" (1974); Rodinson, ''Islam and Capitalism'' (1973); Bodo Wiethoff, ''Die Chinesische Seeverbotspolitik und der Private Überseehandel von 1368 bis 1567'' (1963); Yang, "Government Control of Urban Merchants in Traditional China" (1970).

37. I proposed this idea in Blaut, "Where Was Capitalism Born?" (1976). Janet Abu-Lughod's important book ''Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350'' (1989) is the first effort to show in precise detail how this system worked in the fourteenth century. Also see S. Chaudhuri, "Textile Trade and Industry in Bengal Suba" (1985); Simkin, ''The Traditional Trade of Asia'' (1968); Amin, ''Accumulation on a World Scale'' (1974) and ''Unequal Development'' (1976).

38. Steward, ''Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution'' (1955). See note 1.

39. Braudel, ''The Mediterranean'' (1972); Goitein, ''A Mediterranean Society'' (1967); Lane, ''Venice: A Maritime Republic'' (1973).

40. Abu-Lughod, ''Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350'' (1989), fig. 1, p. 34. One of the eight regions is the nonmaritime circuit extending from China through Central Asia to the Black Sea.

41. Blaut, ''The National Question'' (1987b).

42. Needham and collaborators, ''Science and Civilization in China'' (1965-1984), Vol. 5, part 7; Needham, ''Gunpowder as the Fourth Power, East and West'' (1985).

= CHAPTER 4: After 1492 =

== EXPLAINING 1492 ==

In 1492, as we have seen, capitalism was slowly emerging in many parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe. In that year there would have been no reason whatever to predict that capitalism would triumph in Europe, and would triumph only two centuries later.

By "the triumph of capitalism" I mean, in the present context, the political revolution that transferred power from the old feudal landlord elite to the bourgeoisie (the burghers, the capital-accumulating new elite): the bourgeois revolution. This was really a revolutionary epoch, not a single brief event, but I will follow convention by dating it to 1688, the year of England's "Glorious Revolution." In that year (minor qualifications aside) the bourgeoisie definitively took power in England. This class already held power in Holland and in some small states of southern Europe, while in some other parts of Europe (like France) the bourgeoisie was vigorously "rising" in certain regions although the conflict with feudal polities had not yet been won at the level of state power. It should be emphasized that the capitalism that triumphed was not industrial capitalism. How this preindustrial capitalism should be conceptualized is a difficult question because it is something much larger than the "simple commodity production" and "merchant capital" of earlier times. But the Industrial Revolution did not really begin until a century later, in the late eighteenth century, and those who conceptualize the Industrial Revolution as simply a continuation of the bourgeois revolution are neglecting a large and important block of history, both inside and outside of Europe.

The explanation for the rise of capitalism to political power in Europe in the (symbolic) year 1688 requires an understanding of (1) the reasons Europeans, not Africans and Asians, reached and conquered America, and thus garnered the first fruits of colonialism; (2) the reasons the conquest was successful; (3) the direct and indirect effects of the sixteenth-century plunder of American resources and exploitation of American workers on the transformation of Europe; and (4) the direct and indirect effects of seventeenth-century colonial and semicolonial European enterprise in America, Africa, and Asia on the further transformation of Europe and eventually the political triumph of capitalism in the bourgeois revolution.

In the following paragraphs we will summarize each of these processes in turn, and thus, so to speak, "explain 1492." Then we will turn to the problem of explaining the rise of capitalism to political power in Europe—or more properly, part of Europe—in the period 1492–1688, in the sense of trying to sort out the significance of colonialism and the extra-European world in this epochal transformation. Finally, we will look at the significance of colonialism, and the role of non-Europe, in the initial stages of the Industrial Revolution, roughly, in the period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and will look at the complementary process: the beginnings of underdevelopment in Africa and Asia.

This inquiry should lead to an explanation for the fundamental fact that capitalism became centrated in Europe. I use the verb "centrate" to emphasize one crucial theoretical argument of this book: the rise of a more-or-less capitalist system had been going on in many parts of the world prior to 1492; after 1492, new forces entered which slowed, then stopped, its evolution outside of Europe and quickened it inside. Thus the rise of capitalism after 1492 was as much a matter of shifting its main headquarters to Europe as it was a matter of "rising" in a simple evolutionary sense.

=== Why America Was Conquered by Europeans and Not by Africans or Asians ===

One of the core myths of Eurocentric diffusionism concerns the discovery (so-called) of America.<ref>Europeans did not "discover" America: the hemisphere was settled millennia earlier by people who migrated in from Siberia and the Arctic. So I prefer not to conceptualize the European arrival as a "discovery." Likewise, the idea that the Western Hemisphere is a "New World" is false since it was hardly new to those who lived there and greeted Columbus on his arrival in 1492. It is, however, very difficult to avoid using the phrase "New World" in certain contexts, and I will occasionally have to do so.</ref> Typically it goes something like this: Europeans, being more progressive, venturesome, achievement-oriented, and modern than Africans and Asians in the late Middle Ages, and with superior technology as well as a more advanced economy, went forth to explore and conquer the world. And so they set sail down the African coast in the middle of the fifteenth century and out across the Atlantic to America in 1492. This myth is crucial for diffusionist ideology for two reasons: it explains the modern expansion of Europe in terms of internal, immanent forces, and it permits one to acknowledge that the conquest and its aftermath (Mexican mines, West Indian plantations, North American settler colonies, and the rest) had profound significance for European history without at the same time requiring one to give any credit in that process to non-Europeans.

In reality, the Europeans were doing what everyone else was doing across the hemisphere-wide network of protocapitalist, mercantile-maritime centers, and Europeans had no special qualities or advantages, no peculiar venturesomeness, no peculiarly advanced maritime technology, and so on. What they did have was opportunity: a matter of locational advantage in the broad sense of accessibility. The point deserves to be put very strongly. If the Western Hemisphere had been more accessible, say, to South Indian centers than to European centers, then very likely India would have become the home of capitalism, the site of the bourgeois revolution, and the ruler of the world.

In the late Middle Ages long-distance oceanic voyaging was being undertaken by mercantile-maritime communities everywhere. In the fifteenth century Africans were sailing to Southeast Asia, Indians to Africa, Arabs to China, Chinese to Africa, and so on. Much of this voyaging was across open ocean and much of it involved exploration. Two non-European examples are well known: Cheng Ho's voyages to India and Africa between 1417 and 1433, and an Indian voyage around the Cape of Good Hope and apparently some 2,000 miles westward into the Atlantic circa 1420. In this period the radii of travel were becoming longer, as a function of the general evolution of protocapitalism, the expansion of trade, and the development of maritime technology. Maritime technology differed from region to region but no one region could be considered to have superiority in any sense implying evolutionary advantage, and novel ideas and techniques were being spread in all directions by rapid criss-cross diffusion. The entire hemisphere was participating and sharing in a Spatial Revolution.

Certainly the growth of Europe's commercial economy led to the Portuguese and Spanish voyages of discovery. But the essence of the process was a matter of catching up with Asian and African protocapitalist communities by European communities, which were at the margin of the hemisphere-wide system and were emerging from a period of downturn relative to some other parts of the system. Iberian Christian states were in conflict with Maghreb states and European merchant communities were having commercial difficulties both there and in the eastern Mediterranean. The opening of a sea route to West African gold mining regions, along a sailing route known since antiquity, and using maritime technology known to non-Europeans as well as Europeans, was an obvious strategy. By the late fifteenth century the radii of travel had lengthened so that a sea route to India was found to be feasible (with piloting help from African and Indian sailors). The leap across the Atlantic in 1492 was certainly one of the great adventures of human history, but it has been in a context of shared technological and geographical knowledge, high potential for commercial success, and other factors that place it, in a hemispheric perspective, as something that could have been undertaken by non-Europeans just as easily as by Europeans.

Europeans had one advantage. America was vastly more accessible from Iberian ports than from any extra-European mercantile-maritime centers that had the capacity for long-distance sea voyages. Accessibility was in part a matter of sailing distance. Sofala, which is presumed to have been the southernmost major seaport in East Africa in that period (there may have been others farther south), is roughly 3,000 miles farther away from an American landfall than are the Canary Islands (Columbus's jumping-off point) and 5,000 miles farther from any densely populated coast with possibilities for trade or plunder. The distance from China to America's northwest coast was even greater, and greater still to the rich societies of Mexico.

To all of this we must add the sailing conditions on these various routes. Sailing from the Indian Ocean into the Atlantic one sails against prevailing winds. The North Pacific is somewhat stormy and winds are not reliable. From the Canaries to the West Indies, on the other hand, there blow the trade winds, and the return voyage is made northward into the westerlies. Obviously an explorer does not have this information at hand at the time of the voyage into unknown seas. The extent of the geographical knowledge possessed by Atlantic fishing communities in the fifteenth century remains, however, an unanswered and intriguing question, and there is speculation that these people fished around Newfoundland and the Grand Banks before 1492. More concretely, the Iberian sailors going to and from the Canaries, Madeira, and the Azores made use of the same basic wind circulation as did Columbus in crossing the entire ocean; Columbus knew that the trade winds (or easterlies) would assist him outbound and had good reason to believe that the westerlies would assist the return voyage. The point here is a matter of strong probabilities. Overall, it is vastly more probable that an Iberian ship would effect a passage (round trip) to America than would an African or Asian ship in the late fifteenth century, and, even if such a voyage were made by the latter, it is vastly more probable that Columbus's landfall in the West Indies would initiate historical consequences than would have been the case for an African ship reaching Brazil or a Chinese ship reaching California.

Is this environmental determinism? There is no more environmentalism here than there is in, say, some statement about the effect of oilfields on societies of the Middle East. I am asserting only the environmental conditions that support and hinder long-distance oceanic travel. In any case, if the choice were between an environmentalistic explanation and one that claimed superiority of one group over all others, as Eurocentric diffusionism does, we would certainly settle for environmentalism.

Before we leave this topic, two important questions remain to be asked. First, why did not West Africans "discover" America since they were even closer to it than the Iberians were? The answer seems to be that mercantile, protocapitalist centers in West and Central Africa were not oriented to commerce by sea (as were those of East Africa). The great long-distance trade routes led across the Sudan to the Nile and the Middle East, across the Sahara to the Maghreb and the Mediterranean, and so forth. Sea trade existed all along the western coast, but it was not large in scale, given that civilizations were mainly inland and trading partners lay northward and eastward. Second, why did the trading cities of the Maghreb fail to reach America? This region (as Ibn Khaldun noted not long before) was in a political and commercial slump. In 1492 it was under pressure from the Iberians and the Turks. Just at that historical conjuncture, this region lacked a capacity for major long-distance oceanic expeditions. Also, these cities, which traded directly with the Sudan and the gold regions, did not have the economic incentive that Europeans had to bypass the Saharan land routes in search of a new—that is, cheaper—source of gold.

=== Why the Conquest Was Successful ===

America became significant in the rise of Europe, and the rise of capitalism, soon after the first contact in 1492. Immediately a process began, and explosively enlarged, involving the destruction of American states and civilizations, the plunder of precious metals, the exploitation of labor, and the occupation of American lands by Europeans. If we are to understand the impact of all of this on Europe (and capitalism), we have to understand how it occurred and why it happened so quickly—why, in a word, the conquest was successful.

There is a second crucial reason we need to understand the causality of the conquest. A nondiffusionist history starts all causal arguments with the working assumption that Europeans had no innate superiority, in any dimension of culture, over non-Europeans, no a priori "higher potential" for progress. This leads first to a recognition that Europeans in 1492 had no special advantage over Asians and Africans, ideological, social, or material. But it demands that we make the same working hypothesis about all human communities. Why, then, did Europeans discover America instead of Americans discovering Europe (or Africa, or Asia)? And why, after the first contact, did Europeans conquer the American civilizations instead of being defeated and driven from America's shores? The working assumption of cultural uniformitarianism—or, if you prefer, the psychic unity of humankind—here confronts the diffusionist tendency to dismiss the peoples of America as primitive and irrelevant.<ref>Blaut, "Diffusionism: A Uniformitarian Critique" (1987).</ref>

There were several immediate reasons why American civilizations succumbed, but one of these is of paramount importance and probably constitutes a sufficient cause in and of itself. This is the massive depopulation caused by the pandemics of Eastern Hemisphere diseases that were introduced to America by Europeans.<ref>For general reviews, see Crosby, ''The Columbian Exchange'' (1972) and McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976). See Borah and Cooke, "La Demografía Histórica de América Latina: Necesidades y Perspectivas" (1972); Whitmore, "A Simulation of Sixteenth-Century Population Collapse in the Basin of Mexico" (1991); Alchon, ''Native Society and Disease in Colonial Ecuador'' (1991); Lovell, "'Heavy Shadows and Black Night': Disease and Depopulation in Colonial America" (1992).</ref> A second factor was the considerable advantage Europeans held in military technology, but this advantage has to be kept in perspective. The technological gap was not so great that it could by itself bring military victory—after the initial battles—against American armies that were vastly larger and would sooner or later have adopted the enemy's technology. America is a vast territory, and in 1492 it had a very large population, numbering at least 50 million people and conceivably as many as 200 million, a goodly proportion of these people living in state-organized societies with significant military capability.<ref>See Denevan, ''The Native Population of the Americas in 1492'' (1976), for a review of the disputes concerning the American population at the time of the conquest.</ref> Military technology tends, historically, to diffuse from one camp to the opposing camp in a relatively short time. Moreover, the superiority of the Spaniards' primitive guns was not really very great when compared with the Americans' bows and arrows. I think it is, therefore, certain that the tide would have turned against the Europeans had the matter been merely one of military capability. There would have been no conquest, or the conquest would have embraced only a limited territory, and certainly would not have swept south as far as the great civilizations of the central Andes. The point is that history went in a different direction because of the incredibly severe and incredibly rapid impact of introduced diseases. Resistance collapsed because the Americans were dying in epidemics even before the battles were joined.<ref>Crosby, ''The Columbian Exchange'' (1972); Alchon, ''Native Society and Disease in Colonial Ecuador'' (1991).</ref> Probably 90% of the population of central Mexico was wiped out during the sixteenth century; the majority of these deaths occurred early enough to assist the political conquest. Parallel processes took place in other parts of the hemisphere, especially where there were major concentrations of population, these in most cases being areas of state organization and high civilization. Perhaps three-quarters of the entire population of America was wiped out during that century.<ref>For a discussion of the various calculations, see Denevan, ''The Native Population of the Americas in 1492'' (1976); Denevan, "The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492" (1992); Lovell, "'Heavy Shadows and Black Night'" (1992); and Whitmore, "A Simulation of Sixteenth-Century Population Collapse in the Basin of Mexico" (1991).</ref> Millions died in battle with the Spaniards and Portuguese and in forced-labor centers such as the mines of Mexico and Peru, but much greater numbers died in epidemics, and this was the reason that resistance to the conquest was rapidly overcome in most areas.

Both the susceptibility of American populations to Eastern Hemisphere diseases and the lower level of military technology among Western Hemisphere peoples can be explained in fairly straightforward cultural evolutionary terms, although evidence bearing on the matter is partly indirect. The Western Hemisphere was not occupied by humans until very late in the Paleolithic period; there is dispute about the first arrivals, but most scholars do not believe that the Americas were occupied before 30,000 B.P. The first immigrants did not possess agriculture. The earliest migrations preceded the Agricultural Revolution in the Eastern Hemisphere; in addition, the source area for the migrations, northeastern Siberia, is generally too cold for agriculture, even for present-day agriculture, and we would not expect to find that these cultures were experimenting with incipient agriculture 20,000 years or so ago although some low-latitude cultures were doing so. Migrants to America were paleolithic hunters, gatherers, fishers, and shellfishers. They came in small numbers, apparently in a widely spaced series of relatively small population movements, and spread throughout both North and South America. Only after some millennia had passed was the stock of resources for hunting, fishing, gathering, and shellfishing under any significant pressure from humans. One assumes that population growth was slow but—this is of course speculative—that population growth eventually did reach the point where conditions were favorable to an Agricultural Revolution.<ref>The assumption here is that population continued to grow so long as food resources for hunting, gathering, fishing, and shellfishing were abundant. At a certain purely hypothetical time, it is likely that people who had certainly already experimented with crop cultivation, found that a better supply of food (and fiber, etc.) would be obtained through agriculture, and so began the transformation. Note that this argument is in no way Malthusian.</ref> In the Eastern Hemisphere the Agricultural Revolution seems to have occurred (as a qualitative change) roughly 10,000–12,000 years ago. In the Western Hemisphere that point may have been reached about 4,000 years later.<ref>See Fiedel, ''Prehistory of the Americas'' (1987).</ref> Thereafter, cultural evolution in the Western Hemisphere proceeded along lines somewhat parallel to those of Eastern Hemisphere evolution: the development of agricultural societies, of monumental ceremonial centers, science, writing, cities, feudal class structures, and mercantile trade. It seems, indeed, that the Western Hemisphere societies were closing the gap. But in 1492, military technology in the most advanced and powerful states was still well behind that of Eastern Hemisphere states. Metal was just coming into use in this arena, and guns had not been invented. Hence the superiority of Cortes's armies over Moctezuma's and Pizarro's over the Incas'. (When Cortes arrived at Tenochtitlán the Aztecs were already dying in great numbers from European diseases which, apparently, had been carried by American traders from Cuba to Mexico. Likewise, the Incas apparently were succumbing to these diseases before Pizarro arrived.<ref>See Crosby, ''The Columbian Exchange'' (1972), Lovell, "'Heavy Shadows and Black Night,'" and Alchon, ''Native Society and Disease in Colonial Ecuador'' (1991).</ref>)

The susceptibility of American populations to Eastern Hemisphere diseases, and the consequent devastation of American settlements, collapse of states, and defeat and subjugation by the Europeans, is explained within the same general model. Small populations entered America and probably bore with them only a small subset of the diseases that existed in the Eastern Hemisphere at the time of their departure. They came, in addition, from a rather isolated, thinly populated part of the hemisphere, and a part which, having a cold climate, would have lacked some diseases characteristic of warm regions. Perhaps more important is the history of the diseases themselves. Many diseases originated or became epidemiologically significant during or after the Agricultural Revolution, and have ecological connections to agriculture, to urbanization, to zoological and botanical changes in the ecosystems strongly modified by human land use, and so on. In the Eastern Hemisphere humanity entered these ecological situations after the initial migrations to the Western Hemisphere, hence these migrants to America would not have carried these diseases with them. Later migrants may have done so (although this is again unlikely because they came from a cold and isolated part of Asia, and came in small numbers). But we can assume that the sparse settlement, the hunting-gathering-fishing-shellfishing way of life, and the absence of agricultural settlements and urbanization in the Americas during many millennia, would have caused a disappearance of some of the Eastern Hemisphere diseases that had been carried across to the Americas by migrants. After a time the American populations would have lost their physiological immunities to diseases no longer present in these populations, and they would of course lack immunities to diseases never before encountered. It is known, in this regard, that utter devastation was produced in the Americas from diseases to which Eastern Hemisphere populations had such high levels of immunity that they experienced these diseases as minor maladies only.

Hence there is no need to take seriously any longer the various myths that explain the defeat of the Americans in terms of imputed irrationality or superstitiousness or any of the other classical, often racist, myths about American civilizations in 1492. (The most widely known of these myths is the idea that Mexicans imagined that Cortés and his troops were gods, and fell down before them in awe instead of fighting. This did not happen.) The relatively minor difference in technology between the two communities, and the impact of Eastern Hemisphere diseases upon Western Hemisphere communities, can be explained in terms of the settlement history of the Western Hemisphere and its consequences. The Americans were not conquered: they were infected.

=== Europe in 1492 ===

In 1492, European society was rather sluggishly moving out of feudalism and toward capitalism. Nothing in the landscape would suggest that a revolutionary transformation was imminent, or even that the social and economic changes taking place were very rapid. The growth of the English woolen trade in the fifteenth century was not (as it is often depicted) a sign of revolutionary economic change: it was complemented by a decline in competing woolen industries in southern Europe.<ref>Miskimin, ''The Economy of Early Renaissance Europe, 1300-1460'' (1969).</ref> Rural growth in this century reflected mainly population recovery (in some areas) after the great plagues of the preceding century, and the commercialization of agriculture that was then taking place had been doing so for some time.<ref>Abel, ''Agricultural Fluctuations in Europe from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Centuries'' (1980).</ref> Towns were growing, but only slowly, and the urban population was still only a small fraction of total population (except in Italy and the Low Countries); and the urban population of Europe was smaller than it was in many non-European areas.<ref>de Vries, ''European Urbanization, 1500-1800'' (1984).</ref> There were strong signs even of economic contraction instead of growth.<ref>Hodgett, ''A Social and Economic History of Medieval Europe'' (1972) ("[The] 200 years after c.1320 may be said to be a period of down-turn in the [European] economy as a whole," p. 212); Lopez and Miskimin, "The Economic Depression of the Renaissance," (1961-1962); C. T. Smith, ''An Historical Geography of Western Europe Before 1800'' (1969).</ref> The Italian Renaissance, in economic terms, did not raise the Italian centers above the level of many non-European centers, including those in nearby Islamic countries (for instance, Cairo), and the Renaissance was not at all a technological revolution.<ref>Lopez, "Hard Times and Investment in Culture" (1953); Thorndyke, "Renaissance or Prenaissance?" (1943).</ref> All of this needs to be said by way of setting the stage. Before 1492 there was slow growth in Europe, perhaps even a downturn. Certainly—and this is accepted by the majority of European historians—no truly revolutionary transformation was underway in 1492.

Within a few decades after 1492 the rate of growth and change speeded up dramatically, and Europe clearly entered a period of rapid metamorphosis. There is no dispute about this fact, which is seen in the known statistics relating to prices, urban growth, and much more beside.<ref>Braudel, "Prices in Europe from 1450 to 1750" (1967); de Vries, ''European Urbanization'' (1984). On the rapid impact of these changes on Asia, see, for example, Atwell, "International Bullion Flows and the Chinese Economy circa 1530-1650" (1982); Aziza Hasan, "The Silver Currency Output of the Mughal Empire and Prices in India during the 16th and 17th centuries" (1969).</ref> What is disputable is the causal connection between these explosive sixteenth-century changes and the beginnings of economic exploitation in America (and, significantly but secondarily, in Africa and Asia). There is agreement that the effect was profound. But did it truly generate a qualitative transformation in Europe's economy? Or did it suddenly quicken a process already well underway? Or did it merely modify this process slightly with effects such as inflation? This question cannot be answered unless we break out of the European historical tunnel and look at what was going on in America, Asia, and Africa between 1492 and 1688, the symbolic date for Europe's bourgeois revolution.

== COLONIALISM AND THE RISE OF EUROPE, 1492-1688 ==

=== Colonialism and Capitalism in the Sixteenth Century ===

Enterprise in the Americas was from the start a matter of capital accumulation: of profit. No matter if some elements of medieval law were incorporated in legal and land-granting systems in (for Europeans) the New World, and if the Iberian governments took a substantial, though usually overestimated, portion of the profits. The goal of all European individuals and groups involved in the enterprise, clergy apart, was to make money, for oneself or one's country (usually the former).

The leading group, almost everywhere, was the European protocapitalist class, not only merchants but also industrialists and profit-oriented landlords—not only Iberian but also Italian, Flemish, Dutch, German, English, and so on. This class community took its profit from American enterprise and invested part of it in Europe, buying land and developing commercial agriculture, developing industries (like shipbuilding, sugar refining, and so on) that were associated with the growing colonial enterprise, developing profitable businesses in spheres of activity which served the growing European economy (for instance, the burgeoning Atlantic fisheries), building urban structures, and the like. Part of the profit was plowed back into additional colonial risk enterprise, in America and in the new trading enterprises in southern Asia, Africa, and the Levant. One of the deceptively subtle aspects of the process was the immense increase in purchases of all sorts by European merchants in all markets, inside and outside of Europe, growing out of the fact that these merchants now had incredible amounts of precious metals or metal-based money at their command and could offer previously unheard-of prices. Perhaps half the gold and silver brought back from America in the sixteenth century was contraband, hence available directly for this kind of enterprise, but the remainder, after passing through the great customs houses, quickly entered circulation as the Iberian governments paid out gold and silver for goods and services.<ref>Céspedes, ''Latin America: The Early Years'' (1974); McAlister, ''Spain and Portugal in the New World, 1492-1700'' (1984).</ref>

Colonial enterprise in the sixteenth century produced capital in a number of ways. One was gold and silver mining. A second was plantation agriculture, principally in Brazil. A third was the trade with Asia in spices, cloth, and the like. A fourth and by no means minor element was the profit returned to European investors from a variety of productive and commercial enterprises in the Americas, including profit on production for local use in Mexico, Peru, and elsewhere; profit on sale of goods imported from Europe; profit on a variety of secondary exports from America (leather, dyestuffs, etc.); profit on land sales in America; profit returned to Europe by families and corporations holding land grants in Mexico and other areas. A fifth was slaving. A sixth, piracy. Notice that all of this is normal capital accumulation; none of it is the mysterious thing called "primitive accumulation."<ref>In classical political economy, and in some of modern Marxist economics, the idea of "primitive accumulation" serves as a kind of catchall for ways of accumulating capital that did not involve—in essence—capitalist enterprise. Pirate treasures and the like were "primitive accumulation," and, in general, the kind of wealth brought from the American colonies in the sixteenth century was considered primitive accumulation. (According to Marx, "The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement and murder flowed back to the mother-country and were turned into capital there": Marx, ''Capital'', 1976, vol. 1, p. 918). But "primitive accumulation" cannot really be defined with any precision. I will argue here that the wealth accumulated in the Americas was primitive only in the sense that it was part of a preindustrial-capitalist economy. In other respects, notably in the involvement of labor and value produced by labor, it was regular accumulation. The distinction is very fundamental, as we will see, because, if what transpired in the colonies was not "real" or "ordinary" accumulation, scholars can claim that the colonial economy was backward and "feudal," rather than a primitive sort of capitalism.</ref> (Value from wage labor, not to mention forced labor, was involved, and much of it was value from production, not simply from trade.) Accumulation from these sources was massive. It was massive enough so that the process cannot be dismissed as a minor adjunct of protocapitalist accumulation in Europe itself, and it was massive enough, I believe, to fuel a major transformation in Europe, the rise to power of the bourgeoisie and the immense efflorescence of preindustrial capitalism, in ways that we will discuss.

==== Precious Metals ====

We notice first the export of gold and silver from the Americas and its insertion within the circuits of an Eastern Hemispheric market economy in which gold and silver already provide the common measure of value, directly or indirectly, in almost all markets. The flow of precious metals began immediately after the European discovery of America, and by 1640 at least 180 tons of gold and 17,000 tons of silver are known to have reached Europe.<ref>E. J. Hamilton, ''American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501-1650'' (1934); Brading and Cross, "Colonial Silver Mining: Mexico and Peru" (1972); H. and P. Chaunu, ''Séville et l'Atlantique (1504-1650)'', vol. 6, pt. 1 (1956); Cross, "American Bullion Production and Export 1550-1750" (1983).</ref> (The real figures must be at least double these amounts, since records were poor for some areas and periods and since contraband was immensely important.<ref>See note 19 above.</ref>) Additional quantities of gold came from colonial activities in Africa. In the period 1561 to 1580 about 85% of the entire world's production of silver came from the Americas. The simple quantity of gold and silver in circulation in the Eastern Hemisphere economy as a whole was profoundly affected: hemispheric silver stock may have been tripled and gold stock increased by 20% during the course of the sixteenth century as a result of bullion brought from America.<ref>Vicens Vives, ''An Economic History of Spain'' (1969).</ref> The fact that much of the pre-existing stock must have been frozen in uses not permitting direct or indirect conversion to money suggests to me that American bullion may have as much as doubled the gold- and silver-based money supply of the Eastern Hemisphere as a whole. (In Europe, the circulation of metal coins increased eight- or ten-fold in the course of the century.<ref>Vilar, ''A History of Gold and Money, 1450-1920'' (1976).</ref>) This process must be seen in perspective: it is money flowing constantly and in massive amounts into Europe, through Europe, and from Europe to Asia and Africa, constantly replenished at the entry points (Seville, Antwerp, Genoa, etc.) with more American supplies, and constantly permitting those who hold it to offer better prices for all goods—as well as labor and land—in all markets, than anyone else had ever been able to offer in prior times.

The importance of these flows of gold and silver is routinely underestimated by scholars, mainly for three reasons (apart from implicit diffusionism, the simple tendency to undervalue causal events in non-Europe). First, the process is seen somehow as purely primitive accumulation. But the metals were mined by workers and transported by workers; the enterprise overall involved risk capital and all of the other familiar traits of the sorts of protocapitalist productive enterprises which were characteristic of that time (that it was partly state-controlled does not alter this argument, nor does the fact that some of the labor was unfree); and very major economic and social systems were built around the mines themselves in Mexico, Peru, and other parts of America.

Second, the argument that precious metal flows significantly affected the European economy is dismissed by some scholars as "monetarism" (roughly, the theory that changes in money alone are very significant for changes in the economy overall). The error in this charge is a failure to see the sixteenth-century economy in its own, appropriate, geographical and social context, and to impute to the economy of that time the liquidity of exchange and the relative lack of spatial friction that characterizes the capitalist economy of our own time. Two facts here are basic. First of all, the possession of precious metal was highly localized in space. European merchants, as a community, obtained it and set it in motion outward, toward rural Europe and toward markets outside of Europe. Second of all, the supply of precious metal was essentially continuous, and therefore the advantage held by European protocapitalists in terms of prices they could offer for commodities, labor, and land was persistently higher than the prices which competitors anywhere could offer. So the protocapitalist community very steadily undermined the competition in all markets across the Eastern Hemisphere, within Europe and without, eventually gaining control of most international seaborne trade in most of the mercantile-maritime centers from Sofala to Calicut to Malacca.<ref>There remained, nonetheless, a very large trade carried on by non-European merchants in the China Seas and the Indian Ocean.</ref> The penetration of these markets, the acquisition of trading bases, and the control of a few small but important producing areas (like some islands of the Moluccas), was not a matter of European rationality or venturesomeness, but rather reflected the availability to Europeans of American gold and silver, trans-shipped through Lisbon, Antwerp, Acapulco (in the "Manila galleons"), and so on.

A third sort of doubt about the importance of American gold and silver is associated with the critique of Earl Hamilton's classic theory that the precious metal supply produced an imbalance between factors of production in the European economy, produced thereby a windfall of profits, and thus in effect destabilized the economy and moved it toward capitalism.<ref>E. J. Hamilton, "American Treasure and the Rise of Capitalism" (1929), and ''American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain'' (1934). Also see the important book by Walter Prescott Webb, ''The Great Frontier'' (1951), which builds in part on Hamilton's theory to argue for the great importance of the Americas in the rise of Europe during this period and later.</ref> Hamilton was one of the few economic historians to perceive that American gold and silver was a crucial, central cause of change in Europe, although he was (partly) wrong about the mechanisms that brought about this change. The metals did not transform the economy in any direct sense. Rather, they enriched the protocapitalist class and thereby gave them the power to immensely accelerate the transformation that was already underway—not only in Europe—toward capitalism as a political and social system, and to prevent non-European capitalists from sharing in the process. American bullion hastened the rise of capitalism and was crucial in the process by which it became centrated in Europe.

==== Plantations ====

The impact of the slave plantation system on Europe's economy was felt mainly in the seventeenth century and thereafter. But part of the general undervaluing of the significance of early colonialism—of the world outside of Europe—is a tendency not to notice that the plantation system was of considerable importance even in the sixteenth century. Moreover, the early history of the Atlantic sugar plantation economy gives a revealing picture of the way in which the protocapitalist colonial economy was eroding the feudal economy. Sugar planting was not a new enterprise; sugar (contrary to myth) was not a rare commodity, and sugar planting (also contrary to myth) was not an insignificant economic curiosity at the fringe of capitalist development. Commercial and feudal cane sugar production was found throughout the Mediterranean in the fifteenth century.<ref>Galloway, ''The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from its Origins to 1914'' (1989); Deerr, ''The History of Sugar'' (1949-1950).</ref> Although little is known about the way planting was organized, it is known that commercial sugar production was important in India 2,000 years ago (apparently it was a Mauryan state industry), and in the Middle Ages commercial sugar planting under various feudal and probably protocapitalist systems of organization was found in East Africa, part of West Africa, Morocco, Egypt, Cyprus, the Levant, various parts of Mediterranean Europe, and other regions.<ref>See, for example, Galloway, ''The Sugar Cane Industry'' (1989); Deerr, ''The History of Sugar'' (1949-1950); Watson, ''Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 700-1100'' (1983); N. S. Gupta, ''Industrial Structure of India During the Medieval Period'' (1970); Niane, ed., ''UNESCO General History of Africa, Vol. 4'' (1984); Bray, ''Science and Civilization in China, Vol. 6, Part 2, Agriculture'' (1984).</ref> If cane sugar was not an important commodity in northern Europe this was because of its price, as against that of sweeteners like honey. Europeans first moved the commercial plantation system out into the newly settled Atlantic islands from Madeira to São Tomé and then vastly expanded production in the Americas. But throughout the sixteenth century the new plantations merely supplanted the older Mediterranean sugar-producing regions; total production for the Europe-Mediterranean market did not rise until later.<ref>Deerr, ''The History of Sugar'' (1949-1950).</ref> This was capitalist production displacing feudal and semifeudal plantation production, using the twin advantages of colonialism: empty land and cheap labor. No other industry was as significant as the plantation system for the rise of capitalism before the nineteenth century.

In 1600 Brazil exported about 30,000 tons of sugar with a gross sale value of £2,000,000. This is about double the total annual value of all exports from England to all of the world in that period.<ref>Simonsen, ''Historia Económica do Brasil, 1500-1820'' (1944); Furtado, ''The Economic Growth of Brazil'' (1963); Minchinton, ''The Growth of English Overseas Trade'' (1969). Also see the more general, but extremely important, works of I. Wallerstein, A. G. Frank, and S. Amin, particularly Wallerstein's ''The Modern World System'', 3 vols. (1974-1988), Frank's ''Capitalism and underdevelopment in Latin America'' (1968) and his ''World Accumulation, 1492-1789'' (1978), and Amin's ''Accumulation on a World Scale'' (1974) as well as his ''Unequal Development'' (1976).</ref> It will be recalled that British exports in that period, principally of wool, are sometimes considered paradigmatic for the "awakening," indeed the "rise," of early-modern Europe. Also in 1600, per capita earnings from sugar in Brazil, for all except Indians, was about equal to per capita income in Britain later in that century.<ref>Edel, "The Brazilian Sugar Cycle of the 17th Century and the Rise of West Indian Competition" (1969).</ref> The rate of accumulation in the Brazilian plantation industry was so high at the end of the sixteenth century that it was able to generate enough capital to finance a doubling of its capacity every two years.<ref>Furtado, ''Economic Growth of Brazil'' (1963).</ref> Early in the seventeenth century the Dutch protocapitalist community (which was heavily involved in the Brazilian sugar enterprise, mainly in the shipping and sales dimensions) calculated that profit rates in the industry were 56% per year, totalling nearly £1,000,000 per year. The rate of profit was higher still a bit earlier, at the close of the sixteenth century, when production costs, including the cost of purchasing slaves, amounted to only one-fifth of income from sugar sales. These statistics should be seen against the background of an industry that was not responding to some novel demand for some novel product in an already-rising Europe, but was merely (in essence) undercutting the precapitalist Mediterranean producers of Spain, Italy, Morocco, Egypt, and elsewhere, in the supply of a highly important commercial product.

Sugar is of course the centerpiece of the plantation system down to the late eighteenth century. But other kinds of colonial production, mainly but not only agricultural, and fully as close to capitalism as was the Brazil plantation system, were of some significance even before the end of the sixteenth century. There was, for instance, some direct production of spices in the Moluccas and some European involvement with Indian merchant capitalists in the organization pepper production in South India. Dyes, tobacco, and other commercially valuable products were flowing from America to Europe. A very large agricultural economy existed in parts of America to supply food, fiber, leather, and other necessities to the mining settlements and other settlements. Immediately after 1492 (or before?) west European fishermen and whalers developed an immense industry in Newfoundland and elsewhere on the North American coast.

To all of this must be added the profits from other sorts of colonial and semicolonial activities in the Eastern Hemisphere.<ref>See K. N. Chaudhuri, ''Trade and civilization in the Indian Ocean'' (1985); Satish Chandra, ''The Indian Ocean: Explorations in History, Commerce and Politics'' (1987); Magalhães-Godinho, ''L'Economie de L'Empire Portugais aux XV et XVI Siècles'' (1969).</ref> The slave trade was highly profitable even in the sixteenth century. European merchant capitalists of all nations profited greatly from the Lisbon trade with Asia and East Africa in textiles and particularly spices (the Asian spices carried by the Portuguese and sold mainly through Antwerp did not replace the traditional Mediterranean flow but rather added to it, hence providing a novel and important source of accumulation). There was, in addition, considerable profit from the within-Asia trade resulting from the domination of long-distance oceanic trade in East Africa, India, and Southeast Asia by Portugal (with participation also by Spain and later Holland). Broadly speaking, however, accumulation deriving from Western Hemisphere colonial activities far outweighed that from Eastern Hemisphere activities, colonial and semicolonial, in the sixteenth century. Overall, both the quantitative significance, in that century, of production and trade in colonial and semicolonial areas and the immense profitability of the enterprise, that is, the rapid capital accumulation which it fostered directly and (in Europe) indirectly, add up to a significant vector force, easily able to change the process of economic transformation in Europe from sluggish evolution to rapid revolution.

==== Effects ====

There seem to be two particularly good ways to assess the real significance for the rise of capitalism of sixteenth-century colonial production in America, and some other areas, along with trading, piracy, and the like, in Asia and Africa. One way is to trace the direct and indirect effects of colonialism on European society, looking for movements of goods and capital, tracing labor flows into industries and regions stimulated or created by colonial enterprise, and looking at the way urbanization flourished in those cities that were engaged in colonial (and more generally extra-European) enterprise or closely connected to it, and the like. This processes overall would then be examined in relation to the totality of changes taking place in Europe in that century, to determine whether, in Europe itself, changes clearly resulting from the direct and indirect impact of extra-European activities were the prime movers for economic and social change. This task still remains undone. The second way is to attempt to arrive at a global calculation of the amount of labor (free and unfree) that was employed in European enterprises in America, Africa, and Asia, along with the amount of labor in Europe itself which was employed in activities derived from extra-European enterprise, and then to look at these quantities in relation to the total labor market in Europe for economic activities that can be thought of as connected to the rise of capitalism. This task has not been done either; indeed, as far as I know little research has been done on sixteenth-century labor forces and labor markets in American settlements or indeed in Europe. So the proposition which I am arguing here, concerning the significance of sixteenth-century colonialism (and related extra-European activities) for the rise of capitalism in Europe, perhaps cannot be tested as yet.

Still, there are suggestive indications. Some of these have been mentioned already: matters of assessing the quantities and values of colonial exports to Europe. We can also speculate about labor. One approach is through population. The population of Spain and Portugal in the mid-sixteenth century may have been around nine million.<ref>de Vries, ''European Urbanization'' (1984).</ref> Estimates of sixteenth-century populations for America vary widely and there is much controversy about population levels and rates of decline,<ref>William Denevan, "Introduction," in Denevan, ed., ''The Native Population of the Americas in 1492'' (1976), and "The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492" (1992); Lovell, "'Heavy Shadows and Black Night'" (1992).</ref> but for the present, highly speculative, and essentially methodological, argument, I will ignore the controversies and play with global estimates. The population of Mexico at midcentury may have been around six million, a population that was undergoing continuous decline from its preconquest level of perhaps 30 million down to one-tenth of that figure (or perhaps less) in 1600.<ref>See Borah and Cook, "La demografía histórica de América Latina: necesidades y perspectivas" (1972); Whitmore, "A Simulation of Sixteenth-Century Population Collapse in the Basin of Mexico" (1991).</ref> Populations in the Andean regions involved in mineral and textile production for the Spaniards may (I am speculating) have totalled five million in the late sixteenth century. Perhaps we can add an additional two million for the population of other parts of Ibero-America that were within regions of European control and presumably involved, more or less, in the European-dominated economy. Let us, then, use a ball-park estimate of 13 million for the American population that was potentially yielding surplus value to Europeans in the mid-to-late sixteenth century. The population seems larger than that of Iberia. Granted, the comparison should be made with a larger part of Europe, certainly including the Low Countries, which were intimately involved in the exploitation of America (and Asia) at this period, along with parts of Italy and other countries. Assume then a figure of 20 million for Europe as against 13 million for America.

I see no reason to argue that the European populations were more intimately involved in the rise of capitalism than the American populations—that is, the 13 million people who we assume were in European-dominated regions. It is likely that the proportion of the American population that was engaged in labor for Europeans, as wage work, as forced labor including slave labor, and as the labor of farmers delivering goods as tribute or rent in kind, was no lower than the proportion of Iberian people engaged in labor for commercialized sectors of the Spanish and Portuguese economy. Moreover, the level of exploitation for Indian labor must have been much higher than that for Iberian labor because portions of the Indian labor force were worked literally to death in this period—depopulation was due in part to forced labor—and so the capital generated by each American worker must have been higher than that generated by a European worker. (We need to remind ourselves again that we are dealing with a preindustrial, basically medieval economy in Europe. It cannot be argued, for instance, that technology or fixed capital in production was more advanced in the utilization of European than in that of American labor, so exploitation was in the last analysis a function of human effort.)

We must next take into account the fact that the capital accumulated from the labor of Americans went directly to the economic sectors in Europe that were building capitalism, whereas most workers and peasants in Europe were still connected to essentially medieval sectors of the economy. Then we must add the labor of Africans and Asians. And finally, we must take into account the European workers, in Europe and elsewhere, whose labor must be considered part of the extra-European economy. By this admittedly speculative reasoning, free and unfree workers in the colonial and semicolonial economy of the late sixteenth century were providing as much or more surplus value and accumulated capital for European protocapitalism, the rising bourgeoisie, as were the workers of Europe itself.

Little is known about the American work force in the sixteenth century, but, again, some speculations are possible. Las Casas asserted that three million or more Indians had been enslaved by the Spaniards in the northern part of Spanish America during the first half of the sixteenth century, and this figure, once dismissed, is now taken seriously.<ref>Semo, ''Historia del Capitalismo en México: Los Orígenes, 1521-1763'' (1982).</ref> It is known that more than 400,000 were enslaved in Nicaragua alone.<ref>Radell, "The Indian Slave Trade and Population of Nicaragua During the Sixteenth Century" (1976).</ref> It is realized also that Indian slave labor was extremely important in the European economy of America in that period, in Brazilian sugar planting, Mesoamerican and Antillean mining, and elsewhere. Let us speculate that 100,000 Indians were working as slaves for Spaniards in a given year in the mid-sixteenth century. Perhaps 20,000 Indians were working at free and forced labor in the mines of Mexico and the Andes in the latter part of the century,<ref>Bakewell, "Mining in Colonial Spanish America" (1984).</ref> and it is safe to assume that five times that number were involved in the mining economy overall. Potosí, the great Andean silver-mining city, had a population of 120,000 in the 1570s (larger than Paris, Rome, Madrid, Seville). A much greater but unknown number of Indians were workers on haciendas and other European enterprises, or provided periodic forced labor, or provided tribute and rent in kind. (The Cortés encomienda in Mexico included 50,000 Indians.<ref>Semo, ''Historia del Capitalismo'' (1982).</ref>) There may have been 100,000 African slaves in America and on the island of São Tomé in the closing years of the century.<ref>For various calculations, see Curtin, ''The Atlantic Slave Trade'' (1969); Furtado, ''Economic Growth of Brazil'' (1963); Deerr, ''History of Sugar'' (1949-1950); Florescano, "The Formation and Economic Structure of the Hacienda in New Spain"; Inikori, ''The African Slave Trade from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century'' (1979), esp. pp. 57 and 248; McAlister, ''Spain and Portugal in the New World'' (1984).</ref> There may have been 300,000 Europeans, Mulattos, and Mestizos in the Americas in 1570,<ref>McAlister, ''Spain and Portugal in the New World'' (1984).</ref> of whom conceivably as many as 250,000 were workers.

Perhaps it would not be unreasonable to estimate that one million people were working in the European economy of the Western Hemisphere in the closing years of the sixteenth century, perhaps half of them engaged in productive labor in distinctly capitalist enterprises. Can this have been more than the European protocapitalist work force of the time? All of this is somewhat speculative, but it points toward the conclusion that American labor was a truly massive part of the total labor, and the surplus value it produced, that fueled the rise of capitalism in Europe in the early modern period. To this we must add three additional quantities: labor involved in the slave trade within continental Africa;<ref>In the present discussion I am giving far too little attention to Africa and particularly to the effects of the slave trade in Africa. See Chapter 2.</ref> labor in other extra-European regions (São Tomé, Ternate, Calicut, and so on) that was incorporated into the European economy or produced goods for trade to Europeans; and labor of Europeans, inside and outside of Europe, which was part of the extra-European economy—sailors, soldiers, stevedores, teamsters, clerks, foremen, and the rest.

By the end of the sixteenth century the rise of Europe had well begun. As capital flowed into Europe, and as other effects of colonial enterprise also flowed into the European system or region, secondary causation appeared, including agricultural expansion and transformation, primitive manufacturing, urbanization, and expansion of rural settlements and the commercial economy. These latter have been looked at carefully but in a mainly tunnel-historical framework; as a result, the rise of Europe in the sixteenth century has appeared to be a process taking place wholly within the European spatial system, and caused wholly (or mainly) by autochthonous forces. As we have seen, this is an inaccurate picture and an incomplete one. Urbanization was taking place, but mainly in areas connected to the extra-European economy. Inflation was also (with some qualifications) most severe in these areas.<ref>Fisher, "The Price Revolution: A Monetary Interpretation" (1989).</ref> Among the sectors of the European economy that were growing in the sixteenth century, some, like piracy and shipbuilding, were tied directly to the extra-European economy, while others, like wheat production and North Atlantic fishing, were stimulated directly and indirectly by that economy.<ref>Dunn, ''Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713'' (1972), pp. 10-11.</ref>

I would generalize as follows. The initiating condition, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, is a west and central European economy that is undergoing slow but definite change toward capitalism—as are many regions of Asia and Africa at that same time. Novel forces intrude into the European system, as impinging boundary processes, because of the conquest of America and the other extra-European events, intruding processes which consist mainly of capital and material products (and of course the labor embedded in these things). These then intersect with the ongoing evolving economic, technological, demographic, and other changes. Many new changes appear, as a result not of direct stimulus from the extra-European world but from the changes already underway, which themselves are mainly results of those extra-European boundary processes. The internal European changes of course feed forward to produce intensification of the processes going on in America, Asia, etc., and these, in turn, produce still more changes within Europe.

We can see a geographical pattern in all of this. There is a tendency for major economic changes to occur first near the mercantile-maritime centers that participate in the extra-European processes. Obviously, not all of the centers that existed in 1492 were equal participants in that process, with some of the Iberian, Italian, and Flemish port cities taking the lead. But the network was sufficiently tight so that Hanseatic and English ports were early participants, as were inland cities with special economic characteristics, like Augsburg and Paris. From these many centers, the process spread into the interior of Europe, first into areas that supplied basic staple goods like wheat—the growth at that time of the Baltic wheat trade and manorial production of wheat in parts of central and east Europe is well known—and then elsewhere. At any given time we see a broad and irregular spatial pattern (of the type which geographers call "distance decay") of descending levels of urbanization and commercial production as we move across the landscape toward interior Europe.

Other processes were underway as well, and so the pattern that I have mapped out here is much too simple. Population growth in some areas reflected sixteenth-century economic changes associated with extra-European events but in other areas it signified recovery from the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century population declines. Other changes, such as peasant revolts, reflected the general crisis of the late feudal economy, but the sixteenth-century rise of prices and (at least in some areas) rents was a contributing force in the unrest. As to the Reformation, I would argue in the Tawneyan tradition that it was broadly an effect, not an independent cause, of the economic changes that were taking place in Europe in the sixteenth century.<ref>Tawney, ''Religion and the Rise of Capitalism'' (1952 edition).</ref> But which changes? The internal crumbling of feudalism? The forces impinging from the extra-European world? Both? Probably the spatial diffusion of the Reformation in the sixteenth century reflected mainly intra-European forces,<ref>Hannemann, ''The Diffusion of the Reformation in Southwestern Germany, 1518-1534'' (1975).</ref> but by the time of the seventeenth-century bourgeois revolutions, the areas most deeply involved in extra-European activities tended to be centers also of Protestantism. In short: the spatial patterns of change in sixteenth-century Europe reflect to some extent the integration of Europe with America, and secondarily Africa and Asia, but the pattern is still somewhat unclear.

Overall, the processes of transformation and modernization in sixteenth-century Europe were terribly complex, varying in time and place throughout most of that continent. But the generalization is nonetheless fairly straightforward. The extra-European component, after 1492, led to an immense stimulation of changes in Europe, those that produced on the one hand an increase in the rate of European economic change and growth, and on the other hand the beginnings of a centration of capitalism in Europe (a process discussed further below). By the end of the sixteenth century these extra-European forces had laid the foundation for the political and social triumph of (preindustrial) capitalism, or rather for the fact that the Glorious Revolution occurred in 1688, instead of much later, and in England, instead of Egypt or Zimbabwe or India or China (or all of these at once).

=== Colonialism and Capitalism in the Seventeenth Century ===

By the middle of the seventeenth century, changes were taking place in Europe at a rapid rate and on a massive scale, and the problem of sorting out the internal and external causes and effects for this period is a very complex matter. In this same period there occurred a massive expansion, in location and intensity, of formal and informal colonialism in the Americas and around the coasts of Africa and Asia, and for these extra-European processes the problem of complexity is compounded by a lack of quantitative data regarding volume of production, numbers in the labor forces, capital accumulation, and other information that would help us to judge the role of colonialism (as a broad concept) in the changes that were taking place within Europe. These matters are far too complex to permit us to discuss them satisfactorily here. I will limit myself to a rather sketchy intervention or (if you prefer to call it that) a model.

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Netherlands and England had emerged as the centers (or center) of capitalist development in Europe.<ref>There is debate as to why the center shifted from Iberia to the lower Rhine-southern England region. Perhaps the same forces which had made this northern region a mercantile-maritime center in the Middle Ages permitted it to gain control of the overseas enterprise: namely, large population, abundant nearby fertile land and forest resources, access to many markets (the Rhine, the Baltic, etc.). Vis-à-vis Italy, it held most of these same advantages plus that of location on the Atlantic and possession of the requirements for rapid growth of oceanic shipping and fishing fleets.</ref> Although Spain continued to feed huge quantities of silver and some gold into Europe in the first half of this century, and Portuguese plantations in Brazil and trading activities in Asia continued to be important fountains of accumulation, the main expansion of colonial enterprise after 1600 was Dutch and English. The crucial component was the West Indian plantation system, which expanded explosively after about 1640. (Fifty thousand slaves were imported into Barbados alone in the following 50 years. Probably two million slaves were imported into America in the course of the seventeenth century.<ref>See Deerr, ''The History of Sugar'' (1949-1950); Curtin, ''The Atlantic Slave Trade'' (1969); and Inikori, ''The African Slave Trade from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century'' (1979). The question whether slave labor is or is not proletarian—a serious issue in discussions of the slave plantation system (see Mintz, ''Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History'', 1985)—will be taken up later in this chapter. In any event there is no disagreement about the contribution of slave (and other forced) labor to capital accumulation, hence to surplus value generation, using "surplus value" in a sense appropriate to modes of production different from industrial capitalism.</ref>) If we place the Dutch and British sugar colonies in the same economic space as the metropolitan countries themselves, it seems likely that the sugar plantation economy was the single largest productive sector in this expanded European economy (or "Atlantic economy," as it is often called) aside from family farming, and by far the largest single generator of value. (Brazilian plantations, producing partly for Dutch capital, were still, in the mid-seventeenth century, more massive than the West Indian.) But British and Dutch enterprise in the Eastern Hemisphere was also expanding very rapidly; the East India companies were formed around 1600, and by 1650 the Dutch and British together controlled most of the intercontinental trade—unequal trade, and in a sense semicolonial trade—with Asia, as well as the slave trade in Africa. Meanwhile, Spanish enterprise was yielding substantial accumulation in America (whether or not there was a "seventeenth-century depression"). And we must not ignore the great variety of additional extra-European sources of accumulation: a now massive fishing industry in the northwestern Atlantic, resource extraction and the beginnings of European settlement in North America, the slave trade, piracy, Russian enterprise in Siberia, and much more.

The key question is this: How central was the role played by colonial and semicolonial enterprise in the seventeenth-century rise of Europe and of capitalism within Europe? The model I would build involves two elements. The first is a continuation and enlargement of the sixteenth-century processes, which, as I argued, involved a sluggishly growing European economy quickened into rapid development by extra-European forces after 1492. By the middle of the next century the European bourgeoisie had strengthened their class position and (in the key locations) had enticed much of the feudal aristocracy into joining bourgeois enterprise,<ref>However, a good share of the old landowning elite joined in the new enterprise. It is not correct to assume that the new protocapitalist elite was in simple opposition to the old elite. There is much confusion on this matter, some of it occasioned by literal acceptance of Marx's idea that merchants are somehow not the class that evolves into the early capitalist, entrepreneurial, accumulating class. On the role of medieval merchants in protocapitalism, see Thrupp, ''The Merchant Class of Medieval London (1300-1500)'' (1948); Carus-Wilson, ''Medieval Merchant Venturers'' (1967).</ref> and had well begun the process of destroying protocapitalist enterprise outside of Europe, as a result of the inflowing capital from America (and secondarily in that period, Africa and Asia).

Now, apart from stocks of precious metal, it is improbable that capital accumulated from extra-European enterprise in 1500-1650 amounted to a sizeable share of total invested capital in Europe, even in the more advanced regions of Europe, even in the economic sectors in which capital was more or less fluid. What it did do was provide a critical increment: everywhere it allowed the merchant-entrepreneurial community to offer higher prices for products, labor, and land; everywhere it put investment capital in the hands of classes and communities other than the traditional elite, the group less likely to accumulate beyond its social needs and less likely to reinvest profits in new ventures. Colonial capital, in a word, was new capital. Without it, the sluggish late-medieval economy of pre-1492 days would have continued its slow progress out of feudalism and toward capitalism (or something like capitalism), but there would have been no Seventeenth-Century Bourgeois Revolution.

Perhaps the essence of capitalism, at a level of aggregation above the worker-capitalist class relation, is the reinvestment of profits to enlarge productive capacity. Capitalist enterprise can be technologically primitive or advanced but always, to survive, it must accumulate capital. It is never in equilibrium. This point leads us to focus on the conditions that permitted continued growth, exponential growth, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This growth did not involve technological change in any important way: production increases were mainly matters of drawing more workers and more productive materials into traditional productive processes to yield more output. Given the fact that capital for expansion was available because of the extra-European enterprises and other, related developments, the key problem in the seventeenth century must have been markets, or demand. The capitalist had access to capital, had access to labor—at the levels of production then prevailing a truly massive proletarianization was not necessary—and had access to raw materials (some European, some colonial). The growth of a capitalist enterprise in that period was perhaps constrained most seriously by the need to open up new markets: to sell more of the product so that more could be produced, more capital generated, and so on.

Some of these markets were in Europe itself, reflecting at first the ability of capitalist enterprise to sell traditional products (like sugar) at lower costs than prevailed under the feudal economy, but gradually the urbanization and commercialization of the continent brought in feedback loops so that the newer way of life, generated by the rise of capitalism, itself generated more internal markets for capitalism. But probably the main growth of markets for protocapitalist enterprise in the seventeenth century, and thus the main stimulus for the rise of capitalism, was outside the system. This is well known in the case of trade with eastern Europe. It is known in the case of markets in America, Africa, and Asia, but the quantitative significance of these extra-European markets has not been fully evaluated. In the case of the English bourgeoisie, the main markets for capitalist enterprise, including agricultural and nonagricultural products from England and re-exported products from abroad, were in America, Africa, and Asia, along with nontraditional markets in the Baltic. For the Dutch, extra-European commerce was even more important. Italian communities continued to depend considerably on the eastern Mediterranean.

In the seventeenth century, then, the crucial role of the extra-European world, added on to and perhaps more significant than its sixteenth-century role as provider of bullion and some other products, was to permit an expansion of demand—including forced demand, as on the slave plantations—for capitalist products, a demand sufficiently great so that productive capacity and output of capitalist enterprises could continue to grow at an incredibly fast rate. This growth in output was one of the two essential seventeenth-century forces involved in the rise of capitalism. The second force was, simply, the political triumph itself, the bourgeois revolution. This provided the bourgeoisie with the legal and political power to rip apart the fabric of the society in its quest for accumulation. Forced proletarianization thereby became possible, as did government support for almost any strategy that the new accumulating elite had in mind. And an Industrial Revolution, a transformation of the methods of production so that output could increase at an even greater rate, became (one might say) inevitable.

== THE CENTRATION OF CAPITALISM ==

The phrase "the rise of capitalism" generally evokes an image of factories, steam engines, masses of wage workers, cities grimy with coal dust: industrial capitalism. Our discussion thus far has not dealt with the rise of industrial capitalism—the Industrial Revolution—but with the precursors to that momentous event. But let me, for a moment, review some of these precursors.

Before 1492, most of the preconditions that would be critical for the eventual rise of industrial capitalism were present not merely in parts of Europe but also in parts of Asia and Africa. After 1492, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europe acquired three additional preconditions. One was the very considerable accumulation of wealth from the mines and plantations of America and from trade in Asia and Africa. The second, closely related to the first, was the huge enlargement of markets outside of western Europe for products either produced in western Europe or imported and then reexported; that is, a very great and almost constantly growing demand. Third, and most important of all, the social sectors involved with capitalism took political power on a wide scale in western Europe, something that had not happened elsewhere except on very small terrains. This, the bourgeois revolution, allowed the emerging capitalist class-community to mobilize state power toward its further rise, such that the entire society contributed to the underwriting of colonial adventures and to the preparation of infrastructure such as cities and roads, while the state's police and military power could now be mobilized to force people off the land and into wage work, and to conscript people and resources for advantageous wars abroad. All three of these precursors, as I have argued, appeared because of—or would not have appeared had it not been for—colonialism.

Historians engage in fierce debates about the causes of the Industrial Revolution. Most of the candidate causes, or "factors," are theories within the "European miracle" category which we discussed and tried to refute in Chapter 2. Propositions about, for instance, general medieval modernization of the European economy and polity, medieval technological revolutions, "rationality" in medieval and later times, and the like, are built into the most common explanations for the later emergence of an Industrial Revolution. We showed, I hope, that all of these processes were at work outside of Europe as well as inside, so that they cannot be enlisted as causes of an event that happened only in Europe.

This is a problem where the sequence and dating of events is extremely important. The concept of the Industrial Revolution is usually bound up with two more specific transformations: the development of steam power and generally novel technology in industrial production, and the development of wage labor in industrial production. But the timing is wrong. The technological part of the Industrial Revolution became important very late in the process, too late to explain the revolution itself. It is certainly true that technological advances were taking place in European manufacturing during the period from 1492 to, say, 1750, but very little of this technology was unique to Europe, as we have seen, and, most crucially, the technological advances that eventually became important in increasing manufacturing production and increasing labor efficiency in that production occurred much later: in the last decades of the eighteenth century and, much more profusely, in the nineteenth century. In agriculture, the main technological advances were matters of increasing areal productivity in an environment of declining agricultural labor, but all of the essential technological changes that were involved in this process were traditional and were known outside of Europe. (A few scholars give great weight to newer crops like turnips, but such matters were of very minor importance—setting aside the much earlier introduction of the potato—compared to such things as the increased use of capital and purchased input nutrients. The fact that farmers in western Europe learned how to increase their production while decreasing labor inputs is not at all novel in the history and geography of agriculture. Thus the agricultural revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be considered an effect, not a cause, in the industrializing and urbanizing process.) So the technological side of the Industrial Revolution was not primary cause except as it may have been primary cause for a hemisphere-wide and very slow transformation, as we discussed previously. It appeared too late.

A somewhat similar argument can be given in response to the thesis that the development, by capitalism, of mass wage labor in manufacturing production was primary cause of the Industrial Revolution. This argument is most commonly put forth by those Marxist economists who hold to a strict construction of one of the arguments in Marx's ''Capital''. It is indisputable that you cannot have fully mature industrial capitalism without basing it in a wage-labor setting that is also a (relatively) free labor market, one in which workers can go from employer to employer. But these conditions did not exist prior to the late eighteenth century. Wage labor was predominant, but little of it was employed in manufacturing, and hardly ever did a worker confront a really free labor market, with real choices as to place of employment. These were features of industrial capitalism as it emerged after the Industrial Revolution really got rolling.

All such theories about the causes of the Industrial Revolution are diffusionist in the sense, and to the degree, that they see the process as an internal evolution within European history and society. As we noted in Chapter 2, an antidiffusionist, anti-Eurocentric body of historical theory has been developing over the past 50-odd years, a body of theory developed mainly, but not solely, by scholars from the extra-European world. In no other arena of historical discussion has this emerging critical school had as great an impact as it has had on the debates about the origins of the Industrial Revolution.

The thesis that industrial development in Europe depended in many ways on colonial processes was widely accepted in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.<ref>See R. W. Bailey, "Africa, the Slave Trade, and the Rise of Industrial Capitalism in Europe and the United States: A Historiographic Review" (1986); W. Darity, Jr., "British Industry and the West Indies Plantations" (1990).</ref> Later, perhaps because of the growth of diffusionist ideology with its guiding proposition that Europe is the autonomous source of progress, this thesis fell into disfavor among European historians.<ref>There were, of course, exceptions. Brooks Adams, in his 1895 work ''The Law of Civilization and Decay'', argued (pp. 259-260) that the British victory at Plassey in 1757, which immediately gave Britain access to cheap Indian cotton (and other Indian "plunder") set into motion the explosive industrialization of Britain's cotton textile industry, leading directly and immediately to the major inventions of that industry: the spinning jenny in 1764, the mule in 1776, and Watt's steam engine in 1768.</ref> It was forcefully advanced by a number of colonial scholars in the 1930s and 1940s. Perhaps understandably it was Indian scholars who emphasized the fact that a highly developed Indian cotton textile industry not only provided some of the new technology for Britain's industry, particularly in dyeing, but also had to be forcibly suppressed by Britain—in a process which some Indian scholars call "the de-industrialization of India"—in order to allow the British industry to develop in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.<ref>See Palme Dutt, ''The Problem of India'' (1943); Alavi et al., ''Capitalism and Colonial Production'' (1982).</ref> (The cotton textile industry was the leading sector in the early Industrial Revolution.) Also in the 1930s, West Indian scholars, notably C. L. R. James and Eric Williams, began to advance the thesis that slave-based industry and the slave trade were crucial causal forces in British and French industrialization. This general argument evolved into a broad theory which is now widely argued both by Caribbean scholars—it is sometimes called "the Caribbean school of history," rather too narrowly—and by others, many of whom are African-American and African scholars. This theory is of great importance, and I will try to summarize it briefly, ignoring a number of secondary disagreements among some of its proponents.

The most basic and general argument, advanced first by C. L. R. James and Eric Williams, was the proposition that the West Indian slave-based plantation system in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a highly advanced form of industrial system, implicitly the most advanced form in existence at that time. They, and later writers in the same scholarly tradition, showed that the plantation system involved very heavy capitalization, complex business organization, very advanced industrial technology (in milling, rum manufacture, transport, and so on), a large labor force in the sugar factory as well as in the fields, a considerable force of free workers and supervisors as well as slaves, and, most important of all, immense profits—profits not only from the plantation and its production but also from the slave trade and many ancillary components of what Williams called "the triangular trade."<ref>C. L. R. James, ''The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution'' (1938) and ''A History of Negro Revolt'' (1938); Eric Williams, ''Capitalism and Slavery'' (1944). Also see the later work by James, "The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery: Some Interpretations of their Significance in the Development of the United States and the Western World" (1970); and the later work by Williams, ''British Historians and the West Indies'' (1966). Important recent contributions include: R. W. Bailey, "The Slave(ry) Trade and the Development of Capitalism in the United States: The Textile Industry of New England" (1990); W. Darity, "British Industry and the West Indian Plantations" (1990); J. Inikori, "Slavery and the Revolution in Cotton Textile Production in England" (1989). Also see note 60 below.</ref> (Said James in his classic history of the Haitian revolution, ''The Black Jacobins'', "the slave-trade and slavery were the economic basis of the French revolution ... Nearly all the industries which developed in France during the eighteenth century had their origin in goods or commodities destined either for the coast of Guinea or for the Americas."<ref>''The Black Jacobins'' (1938), pp. 47-48.</ref>) I would extend this argument to a slightly more general proposition: Within the overall economic space which the Europeans controlled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they found it possible to advance the capitalist industrial production system—large-scale, organized, semimechanized—to its highest level, for that era, mainly in the plantation system, using slave labor, until the evolution of industrial production as an overall system had evolved sufficiently so that profits could be made even when the labor force was paid a living wage, a wage permitting subsistence and reproduction of the working class, and the system could then be centrated, imported into Europe itself.<ref>I have argued elsewhere (Blaut, ''The National Question'', 1987b, chap. 7) that the level of oppression and exploitation associated with slave labor as it was used in the plantations could not have been applied to members of the European cultural community itself. (This was indeed tried, but quickly abandoned in favor of slave labor.) Generally, cultural rules and practices limit the level of exploitation of producers within a society—a matter of maintaining social peace in a society—but no such rules apply to external or foreign workers.</ref> Stated differently, the earliest phase of the Industrial Revolution was so crude, undeveloped, and indeed barbaric that free labor could not be used, if the output was to be profitable. Therefore, the capture and forced labor of slaves was necessary for production, or, alternatively, colonial rule elsewhere (as in India) was needed to force the delivery of commodities at very low prices.

Both James and Williams argued that the profits from this complex were crucial in providing much, perhaps most, of the capital required in the early phase of the Industrial Revolution. Williams's book, ''Capitalism and Slavery'', provided the classic statement of and argument for this thesis. He showed in great detail how the profits from the slave trade, the slave plantation, and the ancillary economic sectors flowed into England and then into the forms of investment that fueled the Industrial Revolution and its infrastructure (canals, ports, and the like). Most of the mainstream (European) community of scholars has rejected this theoretical position. The general view is that the industrial revolution was an almost entirely intra-European phenomenon, and such matters as the slave trade, the slave plantation, and the profits from all of this had to be merely a detail or footnote.<ref>See the excellent review by C. Robinson, "Capitalism, Slavery and Bourgeois Historiography" (1987). Also excellent is Bailey, "The Slave(ry) Trade and the Development of Capitalism in the United States" (1990).</ref> Periodically, efforts have been made to refute the theory, but the only part of the theory which has really been subjected to empirical critique is the most limited and in a way least crucial part. Engerman and some others tried to show that, if various assumptions of neoclassical economics are made about the eighteenth-century British economy, and if traditionally low calculations are used as regards the number of slaves brought to America, then it would appear that the slave trade was not really very profitable. But in fact the slave trade itself was only a part of the overall complex that Williams and others were looking at; in fact, the plantation as an industrial system was much closer to the center of their attention because it was here that labor was put to use in generating mass commodities. Inikori and others have shown that the numbers of slave transported to the Americas has been underestimated. Finally, the neoclassical assumptions (among them the argument that there were "normal" profits in an eighteenth-century industry, as though the Industrial Revolution and factor and product markets had already matured) are widely questioned.

Another stream of criticism has come from some Marxists, among them Brenner and Laclau, who share the Eurocentric-diffusionist views of the conventional historical school just discussed.<ref>See Brenner's "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism" (1977); E. Laclau, ''Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory'' (1977).</ref> Their positions tend to be grounded in two arguments, one of which is dogmatic and the other fallacious. First, they claim that unfree labor cannot, by definition, be considered part of capitalism. This has been answered by C. L. R. James who showed that the error is that of trying to judge a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century labor system by the standards of the mid-nineteenth century, the era of mature competitive capitalism as described by Marx. Even more effective has been the demonstration by Immanuel Wallerstein that capitalism uses a range of alternative labor systems under alternative production conditions, and forced labor is one of these alternative systems.<ref>Wallerstein, ''The Modern World System'' (1974-1988).</ref> Second, the Marxist critics claim that processes that occurred outside of Europe and involved then the import of commodities and capital into Europe, must be denominated "exchange" rather than "production," and so cannot be considered crucial for industrial development or capitalism. This thesis is simply false: production on a slave plantation is just as much production as is production in a Birmingham needle factory.

Scholars such as Bailey, Beckles, Darity, Mintz, Sheridan, Solow, Robinson, and Rodney, and (on a world-scale canvas) Amin, Wallerstein, and Frank, have, in recent years, given strong backing to the critical theory I have outlined here.<ref>See Bailey, "The Slave(ry) Trade and the Development of Capitalism in the United States" (1990), Darity, "British Industry and the West Indian Plantations" (1990), Mintz, ''Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History'' (1985), and Robinson, "Capitalism, Slavery and Bourgeois Historiography" (1987); also see Beckles, "'The Williams Effect': Eric Williams' Capitalism and Slavery and the Growth of West Indian Political Economy" (1987); Sheridan, ''Sugar and Slavery'' (1973), and his "Eric Williams and Capitalism and Slavery: A Biographical and Historiographical Essay" (1987); Solow, "Capitalism and Slavery in the Exceedingly Long Run" (1987); Inikori, "Slavery and the Development of Industrial Capitalism" (1989); Rodney, ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa'' (1972).</ref> Conventional historians sometimes label it "the Williams thesis." My point is that this "thesis" is something much larger: it is the current state of the body of theory that pays adequate attention to the role played by colonialism in the Industrial Revolution.

One other point of contention concerns the significance of demand. All parties concede that the decisions to increase productive capacity, decisions which, in aggregate, led to the Industrial Revolution, were made on the basis of judgments that additional commodities, if produced, could be sold. The conventional historians generally treat the increase in demand as a somehow natural product of the modernization of Europe.<ref>Some Marxists treat it this way, too: "(What) distinguished the English industrial development of the early modern period was its continuous character, its ability to sustain itself and to provide its own self-perpetuating dynamic. Here ... the key was to be found in the capitalist structure of (English) agriculture" (Brenner, "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe," 1985, p. 53).</ref> The critical historians insist, rather, that colonialism was itself required in order to increase the level of demand such that industrialists would make efforts to increase capacity, efforts which, when the revolution got truly underway, involved the use of powerful new productive technology. The critical historians have indeed shown that an immense amount of demand was generated by the slave trade, by the plantations (demand for food, clothing, machinery, ships, and so on), and by the overall expansion of the trading sphere in which European commodities moved in the eighteenth century and thereafter. I would generalize the case as follows: there would not have been an Industrial Revolution had it not been for the immense demand that Europeans were able to generate in the colonies, and it was this fact that, more than anything else, pushed the Industrial Revolution forward.

Capitalism arose as a world-scale process: as a world system. Capitalism became centrated in Europe because colonialism gave Europeans the power both to develop their own society and to prevent development from occurring elsewhere. It is this dynamic of development and underdevelopment which mainly explains the modern world.

In this chapter and the two preceding ones I have tried to show, with empirical evidence, that there was no "European miracle." Africa, Asia, and Europe shared equally in the rise of capitalism prior to 1492. After that date, Europe took the lead. This happened, as I have tried to demonstrate in this chapter, because of Europe's location near America and because of the immense wealth obtained by Europeans in America and later in Asia and Africa—not because Europeans were brighter or bolder or better than non-Europeans, or more modern, more advanced, more progressive, more rational. These are myths of Eurocentric diffusionism and are best forgotten.

== NOTES ==

1. Europeans did not "discover" America: the hemisphere was settled millennia earlier by people who migrated in from Siberia and the Arctic. So I prefer not to conceptualize the European arrival as a "discovery." Likewise, the idea that the Western Hemisphere is a "New World" is false since it was hardly new to those who lived there and greeted Columbus on his arrival in 1492. It is, however, very difficult to avoid using the phrase "New World" in certain contexts, and I will occasionally have to do so.

2. See K. N. Chaudhuri, ''Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean'' (1985); Simkin, ''The Traditional Trade of Asia'' (1968); Sherif, ''Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar'' (1987). It is highly likely that West Africans sailed across to the Americas before 1492. (See DeVisse and Labib, "Africa in Intercontinental Relations," 1984.) However, because there seem not to have been major mercantile-maritime port cities in West Africa—unlike East Africa—it is not likely that transatlantic voyages before 1492 had significant impact on Africa or on America. This is probable for several reasons. First, in the absence of such major port cities and large-volume long-distance sea commerce, it is likely that ships along the coast were rather small. They would easily have been capable of a westward voyage to America, given the strong and steady trade winds blowing westward, but a return voyage would have to have been made far to the north or the south, in the zone of the westerlies—roughly as far north as the latitude of southern Europe or as far south as the latitude of Namibia. Therefore the round trip would have been a very formidable undertaking. On the other hand, we may indeed learn from future scholarship that West African sailors, Moroccan sailors, and West European sailors all were fishing and whaling quite regularly off the coast of America (perhaps on the Grand Banks) before 1492; if strong evidence for this emerges, then we would consider it likely that West Africans were familiar with the round-trip voyage and with some parts of the American coast. But we do not have such evidence at present, and we have to consider it more likely that any West African ships that reached America were blown off course, in which case a return voyage would have been very difficult. It would have to have been made without prior knowledge of the long, circuitous route (unless American sailors knew the route and gave navigational information to the African sailors—but we do not have convincing evidence at present that Americans crossed the Atlantic before 1492). Secondly, the portion of the American coast that is closest to Africa, roughly the Brazilian coast south of the mouth of the Amazon, seems not to have had major population concentrations and abundant gold and silver artifacts inviting trade or plunder. (Granted, if West Africans reached the West Indies, they would have found such artifacts in abundance, as did Columbus.) And thirdly, the complex of historical conditions that would turn a single voyage into the beginning of a massive conquest seem unlikely to have been present in coastal West Africa. Large-scale trade, a class of merchant-capitalists, banking and other institutions of capitalism, and the like, were found in interior West African urban centers, but not, it seems, in the urban centers along the coast: these were not important as mercantile-maritime centers. For the interior cities, major long-distance trade went northward and eastward overland, and it is unlikely that attempts would have been made to develop large-scale oceanic travel from a coastal harbor.

Some scholars maintain the truth of two propositions about West African transatlantic voyaging that I cannot accept. The first of these asserts that Africans exerted an important influence on American cultures before 1492. The second asserts that West Africans crossed the Atlantic in much the same way as did Columbus, but they had different values than the Europeans, and did not choose to murder, plunder, enslave, and enrich themselves at the expense of Americans as did the Europeans; and therefore they did not attempt conquest. Most of the evidence offered in support of important precolumbian diffusion from Africa to America is taken from the old arguments of European scholars of the "extreme diffusionism" school we discussed in Chapter 1. The extreme diffusionists claimed that ancient Egyptians or Phoenicians crossed the Atlantic, and, in essence, brought civilization to the Americans. Some modern scholars modify this mainly by insisting that because Egypt was a clearly African civilization—this I am certain is true—it was an African people, not a putatively European people, who brought civilization to the Americas. A second source of evidence is the apparently African facial features of the great Olmec head sculptures of southern Mexico. But some precolumbian Americans must have had these features, too: they are not rare among modern Latin American Indians. But the most serious objection to this theory is the following: The Olmec civilization is the oldest known civilization in the Americas. If Olmec civilization came from Africa, and was not developed indigenously by people of America, then we would have to say that Americans simply did not have the ability to civilize themselves; civilization had to be something brought in from elsewhere, by diffusion. This is viewed as a deep insult by Latin Americans, who maintain, I am sure correctly, that Western Hemisphere peoples developed civilization on their own. Perhaps they acquired a few domesticates from sailors arriving from across the Atlantic or the Pacific. But the real cultural development was a matter of independent invention, not diffusion. Again we notice that the form of argument comes from classical diffusionism: some human communities are inventive and others merely imitative. Based only on the thin and questionable evidence that has been presented thus far that Africans brought major cultural advances to America, this thesis is not persuasive.

Somewhat more troublesome to me is the argument that when Africans crossed the Atlantic before or at the same time as Columbus did, they did not have the savage values of the Europeans, and so did not try to conquer, loot, and enslave. To accept this, one would have to believe that there is something absolutely fundamental in European culture, something very old, and very deeply embedded, that makes Europeans different from other humans. This admits a good part of the Eurocentric claim that Europeans are unique among humans; it merely inverts the argument and claims that their uniqueness lies not in progressiveness but in aggressiveness, predatoriness, and cupidity. I am much more comfortable with an argument that begins with the idea of a common basal human mentality ("psychic unity"). It then explains the bloodthirstiness of the European conquistadors as an effect of the kind of civilization they represented: its development of an oppressive class structure in feudalism, and its further development of protocapitalism, a system in which wealth is obtained at all cost and in any way possible. Bloodthirsty protocapitalist communities, ready and anxious to conquer, loot, and enslave wherever this brought a profit, were found in many parts of the Eastern Hemisphere, in all three continents. My argument in this book is that the key factor favoring European moves of conquest in the Americas, and not favoring West African moves of this sort, was the existence of major mercantile-maritime centers in coastal Europe, protocapitalist centers of the sort found in the interior of Africa but with the added features associated with long-distance oceanic trade. Sofala and Kilwa in East Africa had these features but Sofala and Kilwa were—as we note in this chapter—very much farther from the American looting grounds than were the Iberian ports and the Canary outports. (I have not cited specific scholars who hold these views that I criticize because a full and fair review of their theories is not possible in the space of a single long footnote. Obviously, I do not agree with the theory of Ivan Van Sertima, as presented in his important work ''They Came Before Columbus'' [1976], concerning the precolumbian diffusion of major civilizing traits from Africa to America, although he is very probably correct in his view that Africans did come to America before Columbus did.)

3. Filesi, ''China and Africa in the Middle Ages'' (1972); Ma Huan, ''The Overall Survey of the Ocean's Shores'' (1970); Panikkar, ''Asia and Western Influence'' (1959).

4. I have not learned of documented evidence that North Africans or West Africans regularly sailed up and down the coast past Cape Bojador. (See DeVisse and Labib, "Africa in Intercontinental Relations," 1984.) Apparently medieval sailing techniques—European and non-European—had difficulty with the passage prior to the time when Portuguese voyages began in the fifteenth century. However, there was no question of "discovery." The sea route was known in antiquity. Important land routes paralleled the entire length of the coast, from Fez south to Takrur (near modern Dakar) and beyond (see Niane, "Mali and the Second Mandingo Expansion," 1984, and Levitzion, "The Early States of the Western Sudan to 1500," 1971), and there were medieval-era settlements in the Canaries and along the coast itself. Basically, it was much cheaper to travel overland, and probably faster. What the Portuguese "discovered" was a method of outflanking the competing merchant interests of North and West Africa, by applying sailing technology known to Europeans and East Africans but not known (or at any rate used, or at any rate known to have been used) by West Africans in that period. It should be noted also that the Portuguese navigational strategy in passing Bojador was basically the same strategy used for voyages to the Atlantic islands, and probably known to Moroccan sailors as well as Europeans.

5. Blaut, "Diffusionism: A Uniformitarian Critique" (1987).

6. For general reviews, see Crosby, ''The Columbian Exchange'' (1972) and McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976). See Borah and Cooke, "La Demografía Histórica de América Latina: Necesidades y Perspectivas" (1972); Whitmore, "A Simulation of Sixteenth-Century Population Collapse in the Basin of Mexico" (1991); Alchon, ''Native Society and Disease in Colonial Ecuador'' (1991); Lovell, "'Heavy Shadows and Black Night': Disease and Depopulation in Colonial America" (1992).

7. See Denevan, ''The Native Population of the Americas in 1492'' (1976), for a review of the disputes concerning the American population at the time of the conquest.

8. Crosby, ''The Columbian Exchange'' (1972); Alchon, ''Native Society and Disease in Colonial Ecuador'' (1991).

9. For a discussion of the various calculations, see Denevan, ''The Native Population of the Americas in 1492'' (1976); Denevan, "The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492" (1992); Lovell, "'Heavy Shadows and Black Night'" (1992); and Whitmore, "A Simulation of Sixteenth-Century Population Collapse in the Basin of Mexico" (1991).

10. The assumption here is that population continued to grow so long as food resources for hunting, gathering, fishing, and shellfishing were abundant. At a certain purely hypothetical time, it is likely that people who had certainly already experimented with crop cultivation, found that a better supply of food (and fiber, etc.) would be obtained through agriculture, and so began the transformation. Note that this argument is in no way Malthusian.

11. See Fiedel, ''Prehistory of the Americas'' (1987).

12. See Crosby, ''The Columbian Exchange'' (1972), Lovell, "'Heavy Shadows and Black Night,'" and Alchon, ''Native Society and Disease in Colonial Ecuador'' (1991).

13. Miskimin, ''The Economy of Early Renaissance Europe, 1300-1460'' (1969).

14. Abel, ''Agricultural Fluctuations in Europe from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Centuries'' (1980).

15. de Vries, ''European Urbanization, 1500-1800'' (1984).

16. Hodgett, ''A Social and Economic History of Medieval Europe'' (1972) ("[The] 200 years after c.1320 may be said to be a period of down-turn in the [European] economy as a whole," p. 212); Lopez and Miskimin, "The Economic Depression of the Renaissance," (1961-1962); C. T. Smith, ''An Historical Geography of Western Europe Before 1800'' (1969).

17. Lopez, "Hard Times and Investment in Culture" (1953); Thorndyke, "Renaissance or Prenaissance?" (1943).

18. Braudel, "Prices in Europe from 1450 to 1750" (1967); de Vries, ''European Urbanization'' (1984). On the rapid impact of these changes on Asia, see, for example, Atwell, "International Bullion Flows and the Chinese Economy circa 1530-1650" (1982); Aziza Hasan, "The Silver Currency Output of the Mughal Empire and Prices in India during the 16th and 17th centuries" (1969).

19. Céspedes, ''Latin America: The Early Years'' (1974); McAlister, ''Spain and Portugal in the New World, 1492-1700'' (1984).

20. In classical political economy, and in some of modern Marxist economics, the idea of "primitive accumulation" serves as a kind of catchall for ways of accumulating capital that did not involve—in essence—capitalist enterprise. Pirate treasures and the like were "primitive accumulation," and, in general, the kind of wealth brought from the American colonies in the sixteenth century was considered primitive accumulation. (According to Marx, "The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement and murder flowed back to the mother-country and were turned into capital there": Marx, ''Capital'', 1976, vol. 1, p. 918). But "primitive accumulation" cannot really be defined with any precision. I will argue here that the wealth accumulated in the Americas was primitive only in the sense that it was part of a preindustrial-capitalist economy. In other respects, notably in the involvement of labor and value produced by labor, it was regular accumulation. The distinction is very fundamental, as we will see, because, if what transpired in the colonies was not "real" or "ordinary" accumulation, scholars can claim that the colonial economy was backward and "feudal," rather than a primitive sort of capitalism.

21. E. J. Hamilton, ''American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501-1650'' (1934); Brading and Cross, "Colonial Silver Mining: Mexico and Peru" (1972); H. and P. Chaunu, ''Séville et l'Atlantique (1504-1650)'', vol. 6, pt. 1 (1956); Cross, "American Bullion Production and Export 1550-1750" (1983).

22. See note 19 above.

23. Vicens Vives, ''An Economic History of Spain'' (1969).

24. Vilar, ''A History of Gold and Money, 1450-1920'' (1976).

25. There remained, nonetheless, a very large trade carried on by non-European merchants in the China Seas and the Indian Ocean.

26. E. J. Hamilton, "American Treasure and the Rise of Capitalism" (1929), and ''American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain'' (1934). Also see the important book by Walter Prescott Webb, ''The Great Frontier'' (1951), which builds in part on Hamilton's theory to argue for the great importance of the Americas in the rise of Europe during this period and later.

27. Galloway, ''The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from its Origins to 1914'' (1989); Deerr, ''The History of Sugar'' (1949-1950).

28. See, for example, Galloway, ''The Sugar Cane Industry'' (1989); Deerr, ''The History of Sugar'' (1949-1950); Watson, ''Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 700-1100'' (1983); N. S. Gupta, ''Industrial Structure of India During the Medieval Period'' (1970); Niane, ed., ''UNESCO General History of Africa, Vol. 4'' (1984); Bray, ''Science and Civilization in China, Vol. 6, Part 2, Agriculture'' (1984).

29. Deerr, ''The History of Sugar'' (1949-1950).

30. Simonsen, ''Historia Económica do Brasil, 1500-1820'' (1944); Furtado, ''The Economic Growth of Brazil'' (1963); Minchinton, ''The Growth of English Overseas Trade'' (1969). Also see the more general, but extremely important, works of I. Wallerstein, A. G. Frank, and S. Amin, particularly Wallerstein's ''The Modern World System'', 3 vols. (1974-1988), Frank's ''Capitalism and underdevelopment in Latin America'' (1968) and his ''World Accumulation, 1492-1789'' (1978), and Amin's ''Accumulation on a World Scale'' (1974) as well as his ''Unequal Development'' (1976).

31. Edel, "The Brazilian Sugar Cycle of the 17th Century and the Rise of West Indian Competition" (1969).

32. Furtado, ''Economic Growth of Brazil'' (1963).

33. See K. N. Chaudhuri, ''Trade and civilization in the Indian Ocean'' (1985); Satish Chandra, ''The Indian Ocean: Explorations in History, Commerce and Politics'' (1987); Magalhães-Godinho, ''L'Economie de L'Empire Portugais aux XV et XVI Siècles'' (1969).

34. de Vries, ''European Urbanization'' (1984).

35. William Denevan, "Introduction," in Denevan, ed., ''The Native Population of the Americas in 1492'' (1976), and "The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492" (1992); Lovell, "'Heavy Shadows and Black Night'" (1992).

36. See Borah and Cook, "La demografía histórica de América Latina: necesidades y perspectivas" (1972); Whitmore, "A Simulation of Sixteenth-Century Population Collapse in the Basin of Mexico" (1991).

37. Semo, ''Historia del Capitalismo en México: Los Orígenes, 1521-1763'' (1982).

38. Radell, "The Indian Slave Trade and Population of Nicaragua During the Sixteenth Century" (1976).

39. Bakewell, "Mining in Colonial Spanish America" (1984).

40. Semo, ''Historia del Capitalismo'' (1982).

41. For various calculations, see Curtin, ''The Atlantic Slave Trade'' (1969); Furtado, ''Economic Growth of Brazil'' (1963); Deerr, ''History of Sugar'' (1949-1950); Florescano, "The Formation and Economic Structure of the Hacienda in New Spain"; Inikori, ''The African Slave Trade from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century'' (1979), esp. pp. 57 and 248; McAlister, ''Spain and Portugal in the New World'' (1984).

42. McAlister, ''Spain and Portugal in the New World'' (1984).

43. In the present discussion I am giving far too little attention to Africa and particularly to the effects of the slave trade in Africa. See Chapter 2.

44. Fisher, "The Price Revolution: A Monetary Interpretation" (1989).

45. Dunn, ''Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713'' (1972), pp. 10-11.

46. Tawney, ''Religion and the Rise of Capitalism'' (1952 edition).

47. Hannemann, ''The Diffusion of the Reformation in Southwestern Germany, 1518-1534'' (1975).

48. There is debate as to why the center shifted from Iberia to the lower Rhine-southern England region. Perhaps the same forces which had made this northern region a mercantile-maritime center in the Middle Ages permitted it to gain control of the overseas enterprise: namely, large population, abundant nearby fertile land and forest resources, access to many markets (the Rhine, the Baltic, etc.). Vis-à-vis Italy, it held most of these same advantages plus that of location on the Atlantic and possession of the requirements for rapid growth of oceanic shipping and fishing fleets.

49. See Deerr, ''The History of Sugar'' (1949-1950); Curtin, ''The Atlantic Slave Trade'' (1969); and Inikori, ''The African Slave Trade from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century'' (1979). The question whether slave labor is or is not proletarian—a serious issue in discussions of the slave plantation system (see Mintz, ''Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History'', 1985)—will be taken up later in this chapter. In any event there is no disagreement about the contribution of slave (and other forced) labor to capital accumulation, hence to surplus value generation, using "surplus value" in a sense appropriate to modes of production different from industrial capitalism.

50. However, a good share of the old landowning elite joined in the new enterprise. It is not correct to assume that the new protocapitalist elite was in simple opposition to the old elite. There is much confusion on this matter, some of it occasioned by literal acceptance of Marx's idea that merchants are somehow not the class that evolves into the early capitalist, entrepreneurial, accumulating class. On the role of medieval merchants in protocapitalism, see Thrupp, ''The Merchant Class of Medieval London (1300-1500)'' (1948); Carus-Wilson, ''Medieval Merchant Venturers'' (1967).

51. See R. W. Bailey, "Africa, the Slave Trade, and the Rise of Industrial Capitalism in Europe and the United States: A Historiographic Review" (1986); W. Darity, Jr., "British Industry and the West Indies Plantations" (1990).

52. There were, of course, exceptions. Brooks Adams, in his 1895 work ''The Law of Civilization and Decay'', argued (pp. 259-260) that the British victory at Plassey in 1757, which immediately gave Britain access to cheap Indian cotton (and other Indian "plunder") set into motion the explosive industrialization of Britain's cotton textile industry, leading directly and immediately to the major inventions of that industry: the spinning jenny in 1764, the mule in 1776, and Watt's steam engine in 1768.

53. See Palme Dutt, ''The Problem of India'' (1943); Alavi et al., ''Capitalism and Colonial Production'' (1982).

54. C. L. R. James, ''The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution'' (1938) and ''A History of Negro Revolt'' (1938); Eric Williams, ''Capitalism and Slavery'' (1944). Also see the later work by James, "The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery: Some Interpretations of their Significance in the Development of the United States and the Western World" (1970); and the later work by Williams, ''British Historians and the West Indies'' (1966). Important recent contributions include: R. W. Bailey, "The Slave(ry) Trade and the Development of Capitalism in the United States: The Textile Industry of New England" (1990); W. Darity, "British Industry and the West Indian Plantations" (1990); J. Inikori, "Slavery and the Revolution in Cotton Textile Production in England" (1989). Also see note 60 below.

55. ''The Black Jacobins'' (1938), pp. 47-48.

56. I have argued elsewhere (Blaut, ''The National Question'', 1987b, chap. 7) that the level of oppression and exploitation associated with slave labor as it was used in the plantations could not have been applied to members of the European cultural community itself. (This was indeed tried, but quickly abandoned in favor of slave labor.) Generally, cultural rules and practices limit the level of exploitation of producers within a society—a matter of maintaining social peace in a society—but no such rules apply to external or foreign workers.

57. See the excellent review by C. Robinson, "Capitalism, Slavery and Bourgeois Historiography" (1987). Also excellent is Bailey, "The Slave(ry) Trade and the Development of Capitalism in the United States" (1990).

58. See Brenner's "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism" (1977); E. Laclau, ''Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory'' (1977).

59. Wallerstein, ''The Modern World System'' (1974-1988).

60. See Bailey, "The Slave(ry) Trade and the Development of Capitalism in the United States" (1990), Darity, "British Industry and the West Indian Plantations" (1990), Mintz, ''Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History'' (1985), and Robinson, "Capitalism, Slavery and Bourgeois Historiography" (1987); also see Beckles, "'The Williams Effect': Eric Williams' Capitalism and Slavery and the Growth of West Indian Political Economy" (1987); Sheridan, ''Sugar and Slavery'' (1973), and his "Eric Williams and Capitalism and Slavery: A Biographical and Historiographical Essay" (1987); Solow, "Capitalism and Slavery in the Exceedingly Long Run" (1987); Inikori, "Slavery and the Development of Industrial Capitalism" (1989); Rodney, ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa'' (1972).

61. Some Marxists treat it this way, too: "(What) distinguished the English industrial development of the early modern period was its continuous character, its ability to sustain itself and to provide its own self-perpetuating dynamic. Here ... the key was to be found in the capitalist structure of (English) agriculture" (Brenner, "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe," 1985, p. 53).

= CHAPTER 5: Conclusion =

This book has two basic themes or arguments. First, in Chapter 1, I try to explain what Eurocentric diffusionism is as a body of ideas, and to show how this theory—or supertheory, or world model—came to dominate European scholarship long ago and why it still does so to a considerable extent today. And second, in Chapters 2 through 4, I carefully examine the single most important part of diffusionism, the theory of Europe's historical superiority or priority, the theory of "the European miracle," and I try to refute it.

Diffusionism needs to be analyzed much more thoroughly than I have been able to do in this book. Many diffusionist theories and programs that, today, exert an important and unfortunate influence on many fields of thought and action have not been discussed here. In other writings I have explored the influence of diffusionism on theory and practice concerning the national question, or nationalism,<ref>Blaut, ''The National Question'' (1987b); Blaut and Figueroa, ''Aspectos de la cuestion nacional en Puerto Rico'' (1988).</ref> and on theory and practice concerning the development of peasant agriculture.<ref>Blaut, "Two Views of Diffusion" (1977) and "Diffusionism: A Uniformitarian Critique" (1987a).</ref> Other writers have, of course, examined many aspects of diffusionism and problems caused by diffusionism.<ref>Reference has been made to this work in Chapters 2, 3, and 4.</ref> But, overall, the critique of diffusionism has barely begun.

The critique will have to range across many fields of scholarship and practice. Here—just to make this point clear—are four examples.

1. Philosophical dualism, the body of epistemological and ontological doctrine developed in European thought from Descartes to Kant and the neo-Kantians, appears to be, in part, a projection of the dualism of Inside and Outside. Reason is Inside. Mere matter, mere sensuousness, is Outside—the non-European world and the irrational mentation of its inhabitants.

2. The so-called Big Bang Theory, the theory that everything began at one space-time point and this point was here, seems to be diffusionism on the largest canvas of all. Big Bang cosmogony appears to be fortified less by empirical evidence than by a hunch that the whole idea is "reasonable"—the essential judgment (as we noticed in Chapter 1) by which culture projects its prejudices into science.<ref>See Talkington, "But the Editor Looks at the Universe from a Different Frame of Reference" (1986); Frankel, "Marxism and Physics: A New Look" (1991).</ref><ref group="Correction">Correction by ProleWiki: The modern scientific consensus on the big bang does not actually claim that everything began at one single point in spacetime, nor does it claim that everything began anywhere near Earth.</ref>

3. The theory that AIDS diffused out of Africa is very reminiscent of a historical chain of theories, each explaining some plague as a counterdiffusion from non-Europe to Europe. (We discussed aspects of this question in Chapters 1 and 2.) A recent book entitled ''AIDS, Africa and Racism'' gives important evidence that the AIDS-out-of-Africa doctrine may, indeed, be simply a new incarnation of this diffusionist view of human disease.<ref>Chirimuuta and Chirimuuta, ''AIDS, Africa and Racism'' (1989). A naively diffusionist view of AIDS is given in Shannon and Pyle, "The Origin and Diffusion of AIDS" (1989); see the critique of this view in Watts, Okello, and Watts, "Medical Geography and AIDS" (1990).</ref> If this is the case, the matter of causality of HIV-retrovirus-caused disease may have to be rethought. The forms found outside of Africa may be more relevant for explanation and cure than those inside Africa.

4. Many theories about economic history since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and about economic development today, seem to be steeped in diffusionism. The Industrial Revolution has not diffused outward from Europe to non-Europe. Not only does it have origins in non-Europe as well as Europe (we discussed this matter in Chapter 4), but the notion that industrialization has been spreading to the non-European world is largely a false (conformal) idea. The diffusion of maquiladora-style assembly-plant activities in the Third World is not genuine industrialization but rather a kind of world-scale putting-out system: Outside provides cheap labor, Inside provides most of the raw materials and most of the consumption, and garners nearly all of the profit as well as the permanent infrastructure. The industrialization of Japan began long ago and was not an effect of diffusion.<ref>Japan became industrialized precisely because of a lack of diffusion. It was the only major non-European country that managed to avoid European domination, and this resulted from its inaccessibility. It was, among major societies, the farthest and most inaccessible from the standpoint of Europeans, and by the time European power had subdued China, in the nineteenth century, Japan had been able to begin its military modernization; hence the victory over Russia, the beginnings of colonial expansion, and the onset of an industrial revolution around 1900.</ref> The industrialization of Korea and one or two East Asian ministates in recent decades has not been imitated elsewhere.<ref>At the other end of the scale, giant countries like India and Brazil have a great deal of industry but in proportion to their size—and on a per capita measurement—they are no more industrialized than are smaller Third world countries. See Amin, ''Delinking: Toward a Polycentric World'' (1990).</ref> The diffusion of industrialization, therefore, is not a simple and natural diffusion process, but a political agenda. And an agenda for scholarly inquiry.

This book, therefore, has no real conclusion. The book itself is an introduction: an introduction to the study, to the diagnosis and treatment, of a serious malady of the mind.

== Notes ==

1. Blaut, ''The National Question'' (1987b); Blaut and Figueroa, ''Aspectos de la cuestion nacional en Puerto Rico'' (1988).

2. Blaut, "Two Views of Diffusion" (1977) and "Diffusionism: A Uniformitarian Critique" (1987a).

3. Reference has been made to this work in Chapters 2, 3, and 4.

4. See Talkington, "But the Editor Looks at the Universe from a Different Frame of Reference" (1986); Frankel, "Marxism and Physics: A New Look" (1991).

5. Chirimuuta and Chirimuuta, ''AIDS, Africa and Racism'' (1989). A naively diffusionist view of AIDS is given in Shannon and Pyle, "The Origin and Diffusion of AIDS" (1989); see the critique of this view in Watts, Okello, and Watts, "Medical Geography and AIDS" (1990).

6. Japan became industrialized precisely because of a lack of diffusion. It was the only major non-European country that managed to avoid European domination, and this resulted from its inaccessibility. It was, among major societies, the farthest and most inaccessible from the standpoint of Europeans, and by the time European power had subdued China, in the nineteenth century, Japan had been able to begin its military modernization; hence the victory over Russia, the beginnings of colonial expansion, and the onset of an industrial revolution around 1900.

7. At the other end of the scale, giant countries like India and Brazil have a great deal of industry but in proportion to their size—and on a per capita measurement—they are no more industrialized than are smaller Third world countries. See Amin, ''Delinking: Toward a Polycentric World'' (1990).

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= Index =

Abel, W., 209
Abu-Lughod, J., 51, 57, 172, 177, 178
Acapulco, 190
Accessibility. See Location
Accumulation, 129, 152, 187, 189, 192, 195, 199, 204-206, 212
primitive, 188, 189, 210
Adams, B., 212
Adulthood, 17, 95-98
Africa, Africans, 4, 15, 20-22, 45, 51, 57, 62, 64, 98-99, 103, 105-107, 109, 116, 119, 120, 123-124, 138, 140, 149, 153, 155-158, 160, 162, 166, 168-169, 171, 173-174, 180, 183, 187, 188, 189, 193, 195, 196, 197, 200, 201, 203, 206, 209
East, 167, 182-183, 191, 192, 207-209
South, 89, 141, 144, 152, 155-157, 166-167
apartheid in, 75, 141, 144
myth of emptiness in, 75
North, 3, 46, 82-90, 157, 209
tropical, 69-80, 140, 141
West, 79, 155, 181-183, 191, 204, 207-209
African-Americans, 98
Agriculture, 29, 44-45, 117, 154-165, 169
aridity and, 80-90, 143
drainage, 85-86, 143, 164, 174
and industrial revolution, 213
intensification and commercialization, 157-158, 161, 163-164, 166
irrigated, 74-78, 80-90, 109-110, 143, 162, 164, 174
labor productivity in, 89, 91, 143, 157, 174
medieval, 110-115, 157-165, 168
origins. See Agricultural revolution
peasant. See Peasants
plantation. See Plantations
rain-fed (dry field), 74-76, 84, 86, 88-91
sedentary, 74-76
shifting, 72-76, 141-142, 174
tropical, 70-77, 140, 174
Agricultural revolution, 4, 7, 23, 44-45, 155-157, 164, 172, 174, 185-186, 209
Ahn, P., 140
AIDS, 77, 215-216
and Africa, 142, 215-216
Ajayi, J., 176
Akan, 157
Alavi, H., 212
Alchon, S., 209
Alliance for Progress, 49
Amazon river and basin, 71, 74, 207
America, 51, 103, 152, 162, 173, 180, 183-184, 187, 200, 204, 206, 208-209
Latin, 22, 76, 131
North, 180
South, 141
Americans, Native, 97, 138, 194, 195
Amin, S., 51, 56, 57, 47, 135, 136, 137, 154, 173, 177, 205, 211
Andean region, 20, 184, 194, 195
Anderson, J., 44
Anderson, P., 58, 108, 138, 142, 146, 176
Angola, 49
Anthrax, 78
Anthropology, 23-24, 30-33, 65, 97, 102
and primitive mind, 97, 102
Antilles. See West Indies, Antilles
Antwerp, 189-190, 192
Appadorai, A., 176
Arabia, 92, 167
Arabs, 98, 99, 181
Aristocracy, medieval, 123, 125-127
Armenia, 43
Aryan theory, 12, 84, 89
Asad, T., 48
Asia, 21-22, 77, 80-90, 103-107, 123, 155-158, 160, 162, 165-166, 171, 173, 180, 183, 187-189, 193, 195, 196, 197, 200, 206
aridity in, 80-90
East, 30, 46, 152, 167
South, 46, 56, 76, 167
Southeast, 21, 56, 76, 117-120, 167, 171, 181
Asiatic mode of production, 81-83, 125, 157
Aston, T., 140, 149, 150
Athenian empire, 125
Atlantic Ocean, 181-182, 211
crossing, 14, 181, 207-209
Atwell, W., 210
Augsburg, 197
Australians, 45
Azores Islands, 182
Aztecs, 185

Baechler, J., 122-123, 125-127, 147, 149, 160, 176
Bailey, A., 142
Bailey, R., 205, 212, 213
Bakewell, P., 211
Bali, 120
Baltic Sea, 167, 171, 197, 200, 211
Bangladesh, 71
Barbados, 68, 71, 197
Barbarism, zone of, 14
Barnes, H. E., 44
Beckles, H., 205, 213
Belief-value matrix, 38
Beliefs, 30-43
compatibility of, 34-37
conformality and binding of, 35-41
ethnography of, 30-41
explicit and implicit, 36, 40-41, 65
truth and, 30-32
Bengal, 166
Berkner, L., 150
Bernal, M., 44, 55, 57, 137, 138, 144
Bernier, F., 142
Bible Lands, 3, 5, 7, 29, 43-45, 81
Big Bang Theory, 214-216
Birth
conception and, 67, 139
control, 66-67, 129, 139
rates, 128-130, 140
Bjørklund, O., 149
Black, C., 136
Black death, 46, 77
Black magic, 16
Blaut, J., 48, 49, 136, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 149, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 209, 212, 215
Blockages, historical, 69, 80, 117, 137
Blow-gun, 11
Blum, J., 139
Boas, F., 97, 139, 144
Bogeyman, 16, 47
Bois, G., 150
Bojador, Cape, 209
Borah, W., 209, 211
Bourgeois revolutions, 165, 179-180, 187, 199, 200
Bourgeoisie, 179, 195
Bowler, P., 48, 138, 141, 144
Brading, D., 210
Brantlinger, P., 48
Braudel, F., 178, 210
Bray, Francesca, 143, 146, 211
Brazil, 20, 182, 188, 191-192, 195, 197, 216
Brenner, R., 58, 108, 127-128, 138, 146, 149, 150, 151, 160, 176, 177, 205, 213
Britain, 108, 146-147, 150, 166, 179, 187-188, 191-192, 197, 203, 211, 213
Brown, L., 145
Buck, J. L., 131
Buckle, H. T., 76, 77, 141, 142
Burghers. See Bourgeoisie
Burma, 147

Cabral, A., 54, 136
Cairo, 187
Calicut, 190, 196
Cambodia, 147
Cambridge University, 135
Canada, 43, 156
Canals, in China, 93, 113
Canary Islands, 182, 208, 209
Cape Bojador, 209
Cape of Good Hope, 181
Capes and bays theory, 92, 122
Capitalism, 8, 51, 102, 152, 161-163, 165, 167, 169-170, 179-180, 187-206, 210
centration of, 180, 191, 197, 201-206
in colonial America, 55
origins and rise, 55, 102, 127-128, 150
triumph of, 179
Caribbean. See under West Indies
Carter, G., 47
Carus-Wilson, E., 212
Cassava, 156
Caucasus, 11, 43
Center-periphery model, 14
Centration of capitalism. See Capitalism, centration of
Céspedes, G., 210
Ch'in empire, 125
Chad, Lake and region, 120, 157
Chambers, M., 46
Chan-Cheung, J., 177
Chandra, B., 48, 142
Chandra, S., 177, 211
Chao Phraya Basin, 120
Chariots, 143
Chaudhuri, K. N., 177, 207, 211
Chaudhuri, S., 177
Chaunu, H. and P., 210
Cheng Ho, 181, 182, 207
Chicherov, A., 176
Childhood, 17, 95-98
China, 15, 21, 29, 46-47, 56-57, 78, 82, 87, 94, 96, 110, 113, 115-120, 122-123, 125, 131, 158-159, 166-167, 169-170, 173, 181-182, 198, 216
Jones on, 67, 106-107
Weber on, 64, 103, 116
Chirimuuta, R. C. and R. J., 142, 216
Christendom, 18
Christianity, 123-124
and diffusionism, 18-19, 21, 60-61, 108
Western (L. White, Jr.), 114-115
Church, 119, 123-124, 147-149
Cipolla, C., 118-119, 147
Cities, 153, 161, 167, 196, 207
ancient, 84
European, 84, 128, 188, 193
medieval, 113, 167, 175, 177
mercantile-maritime, 167-173, 181, 196, 207
Weber on, 84, 103-104, 116
City-states, 104, 123, 167, 171
Civil Rights movement, 5, 137
Civilization, zone of, 14
Class, 33-34, 41, 57, 88, 119, 123-128, 154, 157-158, 170
Baechler on, 125-127
Brenner on, 127-128, 150
Godelier on, 127
in precolonial Africa, 124-125
Class struggle, 8, 53, 127, 149, 150
Classless society, 123-125
Climate and personality, 70-71
Climatic determinism or energy, 70-71, 140
Clocks, in China, 117
Cockburn, A., 140, 141
Cognition, 98
of environmental hazards, 93, 101
of space, 101
Cohen, I., 145
Collier, W., 43, 44
Collins, K., 140
Collyer, O., 140
Colonial Development and Welfare, 49
Colonial Office, British, 24
Colonialism, 2, 4, 10, 18-30, 41, 49, 53-57, 62, 70-71, 75, 81, 96, 135, 140, 150, 152-153, 179, 187-206
and diffusionism, 16, 18-30, 53-58
classical, 21-25
modern, 26-30
and rise of Europe, 2, 17-29, 187-205
settler, 15, 21-22, 25, 183
Colonizer's model, 10, 17-30, 41-42
Columbus, C., 209
Congo, 157
Conklin, H., 49
Conquest of America, 179-186
disease and, 183-186
technology and, 182-184
Consciousness, 98, 100-101, 144
Contemporary ancestors, theory of, 16
Continence, European sexual, 66-68, 121, 133-135
Hall on, 134
Jones on, 67, 121
Cook, S. F., 209, 211
Cooper, J., 150
Cordell, D., 139
Core areas, ecological and political, 93-97, 120, 122
Coromandel, 166
Cortés, H., 185, 186
Cotton, cotton textile industry, 164, 166, 212
in Britain and India, 203
Counterdiffusion, 17, 77. See also Black magic; Dracula; AIDS; Plagues
Coursey, D., 141
Cro-Magnon, 4
Crone, P., 131, 133, 144, 150, 151
Croot, P., 150, 151
Crosby, A., 209
Cross, H. C., 210
Crowder, M., 176
Cuba, 29, 53, 185
Culture, 11, 27, 32-33, 94, 123, 172, 183, 208, 212
Curtin, P., 76, 79, 140, 141, 211, 212
Cyprus, 191

Dalai, F., 144
Danube R., 93
Darby, H., 146
Darity, W., Jr., 205, 212, 213
Darwin, C., 4, 23
Das Gupta, A., 175
Decolonization, 28-30, 49, 55, 137
Deerr, Noel, 210, 211, 212
Degeneration, 44-45
Demesnes, farming, 112, 159
Democracy, 8, 88, 107, 120-121, 126
Demography, and diffusionism, 42, 53, 66-68, 93, 119, 139
Denevan, W., 140, 143, 174, 209, 211
Dependency theory, 55, 137, 149, 177
Depopulation
of America, 141, 184-186, 194
of Mexico, 184, 194
of West Africa, 76, 78-79
Development, 27-30, 53-55, 100-101, 105, 129, 133, 136, 152-153, 214-215
even and uneven, 152-153, 162
DeVisse, J., 207, 209
Dew, T., 44
Dewey, J., 38, 49, 145
Di Meglio, R., 176, 177
Diffusion, 11, 47, 98, 100-101, 115, 136, 145, 155-157, 161-162, 171, 173-174, 215
criss-cross, 115, 156, 160-162, 167, 171, 173
Diffusionism, 11-30, 52-54, 70, 100, 104, 137, 142, 180, 183, 189, 203, 205, 208, 214-215
as a belief system, 41-43
classical, 21-26, 81, 95-98, 170
extreme, 11-12, 27, 47, 49
modern, 26-30
origins of, 18-21
Dirks, N., 147
Disasters, natural, 93, 145
Disease, 60, 107, 142. See also Plagues
and conquest of America, 184-186
and Africa, 77-80, 142
and Europe, 77-78
and tropics, 77-80, 142
Dobb, M., 173, 176, 177
Doolittle, W., 143
Dracula, 16, 21, 47
Dualism, 95-97
Man and Nature, 112
mind-body, 101
philosophical, 101, 145, 214
Dualistic-developmental theory of rationality, 95-98
DuBois, W. E. B., 55
Dunn, R. S., 211
Duruy, V., 44
Dutt, R. P., 55, 212
Duyvendak, J., 56, 137

East India companies, 24, 197
East Indies, Dutch, 49
Edel, M., 211
Eden, Garden of, 3, 43-44
Edmonson, M., 47
Education, U. S., 101, 145
Egypt, 12, 47, 82-83, 87, 143, 191-192, 197, 208
El Salvador, 71
Eliot Smith, G., 47, 49
Elvin, M., 57, 117, 137, 175, 176, 177
Empires, 120, 147
Chinese, 123
Oriental. See Oriental despotism
Roman, 147
Emptiness, myth of, 15, 25, 75
Engels, F., 48, 82-84, 86, 127, 142
Engerman, S., 205
England. See Britain
Environment, 69-94, 119
arid, 80-90
European, 90-94
humid-tropical, 69-80, 141
Environmentalism, environmental determinism, 69, 140, 141, 182, 183
Episteme, Western (Marglin), 101
Equilibrium theories, 27-28
Ethiopia, 157
Ethnogeography, 23, 32
Ethnography of beliefs. See Beliefs
Ethnohistory, 32
Ethnoscience, 2, 32-43, 49
Ethology, 105, 107, 151
Eurocentrism, 1-2, 7-11, 47. See also Diffusionism
Europe, 43, 45, 51, 90-94, 152, 186-187
Greater, 3-8, 14, 46
European intellect, 1, 15-17, 20, 95-108, 121
mind, 58
miracle, myth of, 2, 50-151, 214
personality, 132-135, 144
rationality. See Rationality, European
spirit, 1, 15-17, 20, 103-104, 121
Evolution, cultural, 11, 16-17, 22-26, 47, 57, 65, 85, 127, 152-153, 172, 174, 185, 209
Evolutionism, 12, 24, 47
Exploitation, internal and external, 161

Family, 58, 68, 119, 128-135
extended and nuclear, 128-134, 150
European, 90, 126, 128-135
Hajnal on, 129-130
Macfarlane on, 131-134
modern, 128
preindustrial, traditional, 68, 128
Stone on, 130-135
Fei Hsiao-tung, 175
Feminism, 139
Feudal mode of production, 154, 157-165, 171, 173
Feudal property and tenure, 83, 104, 158
Feudalism, 8, 46, 51, 95, 110, 112, 126-128, 146, 152-154, 158-165, 197, 210
in Africa, 157-158
in India, 55, 158, 160, 175
Fez, 209
Fiedel, S., 209
Fiefs, 158, 175
Figueroa, L., 215
Filesi, T., 209
Finley, M., 108, 146
Fisher, D., 211
Fisher, G., 44
Fisheries, Atlantic, 92, 182, 188, 192, 196-197, 207
Flanders, 166, 188, 197
Fleck, L., 49
Florescano, E., 211
Forests, 89, 106, 140, 143
and ancient Europeans, 84, 107
European, 89-90, 94, 108
tropical, 71-76
Foster, G., 145
Frake, C., 49
France, 147, 179, 203, 204
Frank, A. G., 51, 149, 205, 211
Frankel, H., 216
Freedman, M., 150
Freedom, love of, in Europe, 26, 107, 119, 120-121, 171
Freeman, E., 44
FRELIMO, 175
Freund, J., 145
Fu Chu-fu, 175, 176
Fukien, 166
Functionalism, 27
Furtado, C., 211

Galloway, J. H., 210
Garraty, J., 141
Gay, P., 141
Genesis, Book of, 23, 43-45
Genoa, 189
Gentry and nobility, 158
Geography, 1, 3-8, 17, 23-24, 31-32, 45, 47, 65, 96-97, 101, 125, 127, 136
in 19th-century education, 3-7, 96
Germanic culture, ancient, 25, 131-132
Germany, 147
Gernet, J., 176, 177
Giblin, J., 142
Gilfillan, S., 71, 140
Gill, D., 139
Gilman, A., 44
Glorious revolution (English), 165, 197
Godelier, M., 127, 149
Goitein, S., 178
Gold, 183, 188-191
American production, 188-191
and Asian trade, 118, 190
stock in E. Hemisphere, 189
Gold Coast, 166
Golson, J., 143, 174
Goodfield, J., 48
Gopal, L., 175
Gopal, S., 176
Gossett, T., 48, 138, 139
Gould, P., 145
Grand Banks, 182, 207
Greece, 4, 8, 50, 88, 107-108, 123, 147
Greenland, D., 140
Gregory, J., 139
Grosvenor, E., 44
Guilds, medieval, 166
Gunpowder, 115, 117
Guns, cannon, in China, 117-119, 173
Gupta, N. S., 177, 210

Habib, I., 55, 175, 176, 177
Hagen, E., 100-101, 144
Haitian revolution, 204
Hajnal, J., 129-130, 150
Hall, J. A., 59, 67, 77, 86-87, 91, 108, 122-124, 139, 141, 143, 144, 147, 151
Hallam, H., 124, 147
Haller, J., 139
Hallpike, C., 145
Ham, 44
Hamilton, E. J., 190-191, 210
Handler, R., 150, 151
Hannemann, M., 211
Hanseatic League and cities, 197
Hardy, F., 140
Harewood, J., 140
Harris, M., 44, 47, 49, 138
Harrison, P., 143, 176
Hasan, A., 175, 210
Haskel, D., 48
Hassan, F., 139
Hawaii, 156
Hecht, S., 140, 141
Hegel, G. W. F., 53, 142
Hegelianism, 43, 48, 91, 120
Hilgemann, W., 149
Hilton, R., 140, 150
Historians, 52-59, 65, 136
absolutionist, 76, 79-80
Historical and ahistorical societies, 137
Historical atlases, 124
Historiography, modernization and, 53-59
History, 1, 3-8, 97, 127
in 19th-century education, 3-7, 43-46
march of (Mann), 91, 108
textbooks, 3-7, 43-46, 96, 124
Western, 46
world, 46
Hodgett, A. J., 210
Holism and reductionism, 22, 33, 41, 48, 119
Hølmhoe, H., 149
Hopkins, A., 174
Horse-collar, horse power, 111, 112-114
Household, extended-family and nuclear-family, 128-129
Hoyle, R., 150
Huddleston, L., 48
Hudson, B., 45
Hulme, P., 48
Humboldt, W. von, 97
Huntington, E., 70
Hydraulic society. See Agriculture, irrigated; Asiatic mode of production; Oriental despotism

Iberia, 181-182, 183-184, 188, 197, 211
Ibn al-Faqih, 167
Ibn Khaldun, 183
Iceland, 93
India, 21, 47, 69, 82, 96, 98, 103, 106, 111, 116, 119-120, 122, 131
caste in, 122, 126, 161
classes, 126
de-industrialization of, 203
medieval polity, 122
personality (Weber), 64, 103, 138
Indian Ocean, 92, 117-118, 171, 182
Individual(ism), 25, 87, 90-91, 119, 132, 135, 144
English, 132
European, 87, 90-91, 107, 109, 132-133
Indo-European peoples, languages, 44, 50, 88, 97, 109, 131
Indo-European warrior aristocracy (Baechler), 123, 126
Indochina, French, 49
Indonesia, 92
Indus valley, 82
Industrial revolution, 8, 55, 107, 165, 179, 180, 201-206, 213, 215-216
and mechanization, 202
Industrial production, medieval, 110-115
Inflation, 16th-century,
in Asia, 210
in Europe, 187, 196
Inikori, J., 212, 213
Inner Asia, 93
Innovation, 15, 110-115, 116, 128, 149, 163
Insanity. See Sanity
Inside and Outside, 1, 5, 12-17, 30, 42, 138, 214
Interests and values, 30-31, 37-41
Invention, independent, 11-12, 47, 208
Inventiveness, 12-14, 17, 105, 108-109, 110-115, 208
Iron, 88-89, 169
early use, 7, 75, 88-89, 109, 141
iron age, 7, 50, 88-89, 91, 107, 109, 131
Irrawaddy plain, 85
Irvine, F., 141
Irwin, G., 141
Isichei, E., 175
Islam, 119, 122, 123
Italy, 166, 171, 187, 192, 197, 211
Ivanov, V., 144

Jackson, P., 138, 139
Jagirdars, 158
James, C. L. R., 55, 137, 203-206, 212
Japan, 5, 30, 82, 149, 155, 167, 216
Japheth, 44
Java, 71, 120, 166
Jett, S. C., 47
Jews, 99
Jha, S. C., 176, 177
Joly, N., 45
Jones, E. L., 50, 58, 67, 70-71, 77, 86-87, 89, 91, 93, 104-108, 110, 120-121, 123-124, 131-133, 135, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 147, 150, 151
Judeo-Christian teleology, 114
Jung, C., 98, 144

Kabaker, A., 173
Kagan, D., 46
Kalah, 167, 172, 277
Kant, I., 214
Kantianism, Neo-Kantianism, 48, 101, 214
Kaplan, B., 144
Kea, R., 174, 175, 176
Keightley, T., 43, 44, 48
Kenya, 49
Kertzer, D., 150
Keynesianism, 27
Kilwa, 166, 208
Kinder, H., 149
Kitching, G., 139
Koepping, K.-P., 47
Korea, 147
Kosambi, D. D., 146, 175
Kuhn, T., 37, 49

Labib, S., 207, 209
Labor,
counterdiffusion of, 16
colonial, 193-196
Labor force, colonial Americas and Europe, 193, 195, 196
Laclau, E., 205, 213
Laibman, D., 142
Lambert, D., 71, 140
Landlords, 158-160, 162, 170
Landownership,
medieval European, 104, 159, 160
peasant, 127, 160
Lane, F., 178
Languages, primitive, 97, 145
Las Casas, B., 195
Laslett, P., 131, 133-134, 150, 151
Le Roy Ladurie, E., 150
Lee, G., 150
Lee, R., 174
Lelekov, L., 144
Levant, 191
Levidow, L., 139
Levitzion, N., 176, 209
Lévy-Bruhl, L., 97, 101, 144
Lewis, A., 177
Lewis, W. A., 48
Li Ching-neng, 175, 176
Liceria, M. A. C., 175
Lie, B., 149
Lisbon, 190
Livingstone, D., 23
Llobera, J., 142
Lo Jung-pang, 177
Location, accessibility, 2, 157, 161-162, 169-173, 181, 182, 197
Lombok, 120
Lopez, R., 147, 210
Love and marriage, in Europe, 132-133
Lovell, W. G., 209, 211
Lowie, R., 49
Löwith, K., 145
Luzon, 85, 120

Ma Huan, 177, 209
Mabogunji, A., 175
Macauley, T., 48
Macfarlane, A., 131-133, 150, 151
Madeira, 182, 191
Madrid, 195
Magalhães-Godinho, V., 211
Maghreb, 171, 181, 183
Magna Carta, 122
Magubane, B., 139
Mahalingam, T., 175, 176, 177
Maize, 107, 156
Malabar, 166
Malacca, 167, 172, 190
Malaria, 78
Malthus, T., 48, 66-68, 133
Malthusian theory, 66-68, 73, 87, 129, 133-134, 139-140, 162, 209
Mamdani, M., 139
Mandelbaum, M., 48
Manila Galleons, 190
Manila, 117
Mann, M., 59, 86-91, 93, 107-110, 122-124, 131-133, 139, 143, 144, 146, 147, 148, 150, 151, 176
Manorial system, 159-160
Maquiladora plants, 215
Marglin, F., 145
Marglin, S., 101, 145
Mariana Islands, 49
Markets, 17th-century, 199-201
Markham, S., 70
Marriage pattern, European and non-European, 129-135, 139
Marx, K., 25, 39, 48, 76, 82-84, 86, 127, 141, 142, 158, 159, 175, 202, 205, 210, 212
Marxism, 46, 55-57, 77, 94-95, 137, 148, 168, 177, 202, 210, 212
Marxists, Eurocentric, 46, 56, 58, 83, 108, 125, 137-138, 149, 157, 162, 205, 213
Maya civilization, 72-73
Mbithi, P., 141
McAlister, L., 210, 211
McClelland, D., 100, 144
McCurdy, D., 49
McKay, D., 45
McNeill, W., 45, 46, 79, 140, 142, 143, 144, 146, 209
Mead, G. H., 48, 145
Mead, M., 97, 144
Mediterranean, 43-44, 92, 159, 167-168, 172, 181, 183, 200
Megaw, J., 173
Mekong valley, 120
Merchant capital, 179, 188, 192, 207-208, 212
Mesoamerica, 86, 195
Mesopotamia, 82, 85, 120, 143
Metals
age of, 7
precious. See Gold; Silver
Mexico, 20, 180, 182, 185-186, 188, 190, 194-195, 208
Middle East, 4, 7-8, 45-46, 63, 82-90, 109, 110, 116, 155, 156, 167, 170, 183
Migration, rural-urban, 161-162
Mill, J. S., 48
Miller, J., 76, 140, 141
Milne, G., 140
Minchinton, W., 211
Mind
criminal, 144
European. See European mind
female, 96
and matter. See Dualism
primitive, 17, 95-102, 144-145, 148, 151, 206
traditional, 15, 98-102, 145
Mintz, S. W., 205, 212, 213
Miskimin, H., 209, 210
Moctezuma, 185
Modernization, 2, 27-30, 52-54, 59, 98-102, 206
as history, 53-54, 136
theory, 27-30, 98, 128-129, 131
Mohr, E., 140
Moluccas, 190, 192
Montesquieu, 140, 142
Morocco, 166, 191-192, 207, 209
Motivation, need-achievement (McClelland), 100, 125
Mozambique, 49
Mukherjee, Radhakamal, 176
Mukherjee, Ramkrishna, 176
Müller, J., 43
Myth, 59

Nag, M., 139, 140
Naqvi, H. K., 177
Nationalism, nation-state, 119-120, 172, 214
Nazism, 27, 63-64
Needham, J., 56, 115, 137, 143, 146, 147, 177, 178
Neocolonialism, 26-30
Neo-Kantianism. See Kantianism
Neolithic revolution. See Agricultural revolution
Neolocality, 131-133
Netherlands, Holland, 187-188, 194, 197
Neumann, E., 144
New Guinea, 155
New World (term), 207
Newfoundland, 192
Niane, D., 209, 211
Nicaragua, 195
Nicholas, D., 175, 176
Niger Valley, 86
Nile river and valley, 82, 86, 166, 183
Nisbet, R., 48
Noah, 43, 44, 48
Nurul Hasan, S., 176
Nye, P., 140

O'Keefe, P., 141
Oceania, 158
Okello, R., 142, 216
Olmec civilization, 208
Onimode, B., 174, 175
Operation Bootstrap, 49
Orient Express model, 4, 45, 91
Oriental despotism, 3, 4, 25, 80-92, 120, 142, 157, 171, 174
Hall on, 87, 147
Jones on, 86-87, 120
Mann on, 87-89, 109, 147
Marx and Engels on, 81-82
Weber on, 83-84, 86, 103-104
Wittfogel on, 84-88
Orwin, C. S., 146
Ottoman empire, region, 20, 45, 81, 96
Outside. See Inside
Overpopulation, 66-68, 121, 129, 133, 139. See also Demography; Malthusianism

Pacey, A., 147
Padgug, R., 125, 149
Padmore, G., 55
Paleolithic, 124
Palmer, R., 149
Panikkar, K. M., 55, 209
Paris Basin, 170, 195, 197
Parker, D., 150, 151
Parsons, J. B., 176
Peace Corps, 49
Peasants, 100-101, 107, 109, 112, 133-134, 154, 161-162, 214
Chinese, 166
European, 104
Indian, 127, 166, 175
Pendleton, R., 140
Pepper, 166, 169
Perry, W., 47, 49
Peru, 184-185, 188, 190
Philosophy, 26, 101, 106, 145, 214
Philpin, C., 140, 149, 150
Phoenicians, 47, 208
Piaget, J., 99, 101, 144
Piracy, 188, 196-197
Pires, T., 167, 170, 176, 177
Pizarro, F., 185
Plagues, 78, 142. See also AIDS; Disease, Black death
counterdiffusion from non-Europe, 16, 77
Plantations, 166, 188, 191-193, 197-201, 204-205, 212. See also Slave plantation
Brazil, 191-193
Caribbean, 198-201
Ploetz, C., 44
Plow, 88-89, 110-112, 174
Poland, 147
Polygenesis, theory of, 3, 23, 43-45, 61
Portugal, 181, 188, 192, 194, 197, 209
Potato, 156
in Europe, 92, 201
Potosí, 195
Powell, J., 23
Prakash, I., 177
Precious metals. See Gold; Silver
Prescott, J., 140
Printing, in China, Korea, 117
Production versus exchange, 168-170, 177, 205
Progress, 1, 14, 16, 19, 20, 22, 24, 48, 53-54, 60, 102, 114, 132, 136, 155, 180, 206
Progressiveness. See Progress
Property, private, 15, 25-26, 83-84, 88, 104, 116, 158
concept of, 15, 25-26
in medieval Europe, 83-84, 104, 127
in non-Europe, 25-26, 83-84, 116, 158, 175
Protocapitalism, 152, 165-173, 181
in Asia and Africa, 153, 165-173, 190, 195, 197
Protocapitalist system, network, 168-173, 177
Psychic Unity of Mankind, 12, 47, 94-96, 184, 208
Psychology, 17, 94-100. See also Mind, Reasoning
cross-cultural, 98-100, 144
primitive. See Mind, primitive
Puerto Rico, 49
Putting-out system, 166, 215
Purcell, V., 116, 177
Pyle, G., 142, 216

Qaisar, A. J., 177
Quackenbos, J., 44

Racism, 27, 29, 43-44, 61-65, 138
cultural, 64
moderate, 64-65
and myth of European miracle, 1, 4, 29, 61-65, 186
Weber and, 64-65, 138
Radell, D. R., 211
Radin, P., 49, 97, 144
Rain forest, 72-76, 141
Rational Modern Adult European Man, 96-97
Rationality, 15, 17, 19, 21, 94-109, 145, 149, 186, 214
and diffusionism, 17, 60, 94-108, 214
European, 15, 17, 19, 27, 30, 47, 88, 94-108, 110, 114, 120, 129, 135, 139, 143, 149, 206
Hall on, 87
Indo-European, 107, 109
Jones on, 58, 104-107, 120
Jung on, 98
Lévy-Bruhl on, 97
Mann on, 107-110
Piaget on, 99, 101
Weber on, 102-104, 145
Rawski, E., 175, 176
Raychaudhuri, T., 175, 176
Reasoning. See also Thought, abstract and concrete
theoretical vs. empirical, 17, 96-101, 105
Reclus, E., 45
Red R. (Vietnam), 120
Reductionism. See Holism
Reformation, Protestant, 103, 124, 197
Regionalism, 27
Relativism, cultural, 27
Religion and rise of Europe, 8, 18-19, 29, 60-61
Renaissance, 117, 187
Restlessness, of Europeans, 108
Rhine R., 93, 211
Rice
wet, agriculture, 85, 143, 166, 169, 174
Ritter, K., 82, 142
Robbins, R., 43
Roberts, D., 140
Roberts, J., 45, 46, 140, 141, 147
Robinson, C., 205, 212, 213
Rodinson, M., 177
Rodney, W., 175, 205, 213
Rogers, E., 100, 144
Røhr, A., 149
Roman land law, 25
Rome, 4, 8, 25, 50, 107, 110, 125, 147, 195
Rorty, R., 145
Rostow, W., 53
Rotation, 74, 111, 113-114
fallowless, 114
shifting, 74
three-field, 111, 113-114
two-field, 113-114
Roy, M. N., 55
Rules, cultural, and exploitation, 212
Russia, 147
Rwanda, 71

Sack, R., 102, 145
Sahara, 76, 183
Sahel, 76
Said, E., 48, 58, 144
Sanderson, E., 44
Sanity, insanity, 17, 96
São Tomé, 191, 195-196
Sastri, K. N., 176
Savagery, zone of, 14, 44
Savages, 4, 60, 96
Schmidt, W., 49
Schweder, R., 145
Science, social, 31, 37, 38-41, 54, 97
Seccombe, W., 139
Semitic peoples, 44, 63
Semo, E., 211
Serfs, 127-128, 134, 154, 160, 175-176
Service tenure, 158
Seville, 189, 195
Sexual frustration, and rise of Europe (Stone), 134-135
Shannon, G., 142, 216
Sharma, R. S., 55, 146, 175
Shem, 44
Sheridan, R., 205, 213
Sherif, A., 175, 176, 207
Shipping, 169-170, 181, 196
African and Asian, 117-118, 170, 181
medieval, 117-118, 169-170
Shoemaker, F., 144
Siberia, 199
Silver, 183, 188-191
American production, 188-191
and Asian trade, 118, 190
stock in E. Hemisphere, 189
Simkin, C., 177
Simonsen, R., 211
Sinclair, P., 141
Slave plantation, 70, 125, 191-198, 204-205
Slave trade, 70, 79, 188, 192, 199, 203-205
Slavery, 62, 70, 79, 107, 125, 170, 192, 195, 197, 203-205, 208, 212
Smallpox, 78
Smith, Abdullahi, 175
Smith, Adam, 142
Smith, C. T., 146, 210
Sofala, 166, 208
Soils. See also Agriculture
fertility, 72-77, 85, 89, 91
gley, in Europe, 92
podzolic, in Europe, 92
temperate, 90-92
tropical, 42, 71-76, 140
waterlogged, 92
Solow, B., 205, 213
South China Sea, 92
Sovereignty, concept of, 15, 25
Soviet Union, Russia, 29, 76, 81, 84
Spain, 181, 188, 192, 194, 197
Spatial revolution, medieval, 169-173, 181
Spatial transport of commodities. See Location; Spatial revolution
Spencer, H., 22, 48
Spices, 168, 192
Spradley, J., 49
Stages, evolutionary, 125
Stagnation, cultural, 6, 17, 84, 90, 116, 124-125
Stagnation of Chinese society, theory of, 115-119, 142, 147
Stalinism, and theory of Oriental despotism, 81
State, 8, 58, 81, 85, 87, 94, 119-123, 141, 147, 157, 161, 172
in Asia, 123, 126. See also Empire; Oriental despotism
medieval European, 122
modern, 120-122
size of, 94, 119-122
Steele, E., 44
Steele, J., 44
Steward, J., 47, 172, 178
Stirrup, iron, 111
Stocking, G., 47, 48, 138, 144
Stone, L., 130, 134-135, 150, 151
Sudan, 157, 183
Sudanic caravans, 93
Sugar, 166, 169, 191, 200
Sugar-cane. See Sugar
Sulawesi, 120
Sumatra, 120
Swai, B., 48
Sweden, 147
Sweet potato, 107, 156
Sweezy, P., 149, 177
Swindell, K., 139
Swinton, W., 44

Taeuber, I., 131, 150
Takrur, 209
Talkington, L., 216
Tarzan, 97, 105
Tawney, R. H., 211
Taylor, G., 47, 49
Technological determinism, 108-109
Technology, 29, 57, 94, 108-119, 161, 184, 186, 202
ancient, 109-110
Chinese medieval, 116-119
European medieval, 110-115, 128, 160-161, 163
Temu, A., 48
Tenochtitlán, 185
Ternate, 196
Testing (ACT, SAT, IQ), 101, 145
Textbooks, as cultural windows, 6, 43-46
Textiles, 169, 192, 203. See also Cotton
Thackeray, W., 48
Thailand, 147
Thalheimer, M., 44
Thapar, R., 48
Theory, scientific, 17, 24, 31-32, 34
Third World, 54
Third Worldism, 79, 125, 149
Thorndyke, L., 147, 210
Thought, abstract and concrete, 17, 96-99, 103. See also Reasoning
Thrupp, S., 176, 212
Tigris-Euphrates valley, 82, 86
Tillinghast, W., 44
Tobacco, 156, 192
Tolman, E., 38, 49
Torras, J., 150
Toulmin, S., 48
Toynbee, A., 71
Toyoda, T., 177
Trade winds, 182
Traditional society, 6, 68, 98, 128
Traditionalism, 15, 98-102, 145
Transoceanic diffusion, 11, 14, 207-209
Travel, radii, 181
Tributary mode of production, 154
Trigger, B., 138
Tropical soils. See Soils
Tropical-nastiness theory, 69-80
Tropics, humid (term), 71
Trypanosomiasis, 79-80
Tung, C., 176
Tunnel history, 3-8, 103, 109-110, 115, 150, 180, 187
Turkey, 45, 183
Turner, B. L., 143
Turshen, M., 142
Tytler, A., 43

Udovitch, A., 177
Underdevelopment, 153, 180
Underdevelopment theory, 55-56, 137, 149
Uniformitarianism, cultural, 42, 47, 122, 124, 184, 208
United Nations, 28
United States, 28, 43
Urbanization. See Cities
Usman, Y. B., 175

Validation of belief, 34
Values, 15, 30-31, 37-41, 103, 207
Vampires, 16, 21, 47
Van Baren, F., 140
Van Leur, J. C., 55, 56, 137
Van Sertima, I., 208-209
Venice, 167
Venturi, F., 142
Verifiability, 34, 36, 40
Verification of belief. See Verifiability
Vijayanagar, 170
Vilar, P., 210
Village, 90
European, 159-160, 176
Indian, 127, 159-160, 175-176
Virgin Islands, US, 49
Vishnu-Mittre, 173
Vives, J. Vicens, 210
de Vries, J., 209, 210, 211

Wage labor, 167, 202-205
and slave labor, 203-206, 212
in post-Conquest America, 189
Wai Andah, B., 141
Wallerstein, I., 51, 149, 205, 211, 213
Warren, B., 58, 138
Watson, A., 210
Watts, S., 142, 216
Watts, S. J., 216
Webb, W. P., 210
Weber, G., 43
Weber, M., 15, 47, 59, 64-65, 83-84, 86-90, 102-104, 115-116, 124, 131, 138, 142, 143, 145, 158, 170
Weberianism, 54, 64-65, 87, 102-104, 114, 117
Wei R., 86
Werner, H., 99, 144
Werner, K. F., 61, 124, 147-149
West, the, 1, 46, 94
West Indies, 20, 55, 180, 182, 203, 207. See also under specific topics
and industrial revolution in Britain, 203-206
Whaling, 207, 192
Wheat, 169, 197
Wheatley, P., 57, 137, 177
Whelpley, S., 43
White, G., 145
White, Lynn, Jr., 61, 108, 110-115, 146, 147, 176
White man's grave, 78
Whitehead, A. N., 37, 49, 145
Whitman, J., 144
Whitmore, T., 209, 211
Wiethoff, B., 177
Wilken, G., 140
Willard, E., 43
Williams, E., 48, 137, 203-206, 212, 213
Williams, R., 48
Williams thesis, 55, 205
Wisner, B., 141
Wittfogel, K., 83-88, 142
Wolf, E., 137
Women, and rationality, 96-97
Woolen trade, English, 191-192
World models, 30-31, 41-43, 214
World system, capitalist, 206
Wrigley, E., 151
Wunder, H., 150

Yadava, B., 175, 176
Yam, 74-75
Yang Lien-sheng, 177
Yellow R., 86

Zamindars, 24, 175
Zimbabwe, 157, 166, 197
Zwernemann, J., 47

Library:The Colonizer's Model of the World

2026-07-14T21:53:17Z

The Phantom Bull: I created a library page for The Colonizer's Model of the World by J. M. Blaut.

{{Library work|title=The Colonizer's Model of the World|author=J. M. Blaut|published_date=1993|source=https://annas-archive.gl/md5/ac90d2ead54c271679c5e9bef00192f3}}

== Acknowledgments ==

Many people contributed in many important ways to the writing of this book. Peter Taylor and Wilbur Zelinsky gave me great encouragement and wise counsel (not always heeded) during the years that I have been struggling with the issues and ideas discussed here. Among many others who contributed immensely to the book, and are happily given credit for many of the ideas it contains (the good ideas, not the errors), I wish particularly to mention Abdul Alkalimat, Samir Amin, William Denevan, Loida Figueroa, Andre Gunder Frank, William Loren Katz, José López, Kent Mathewson, Antonio Ríos-Bustamante, América Sorrentini de Blaut, and Ben Wisner. Over the years many other people have set me to thinking about the problems discussed in the book and have shown me the answers to some of these problems. Among these friends, teachers, and students, I would like to mention Chao-li Chi, Ghazi Falah, Fred Hardy, Fred Kniffen, Juan Mari Brás, Francis Mark, Sidney Mintz, Ng Hong, Doris Pizarro, Randolph Rawlins, Anselme Rémy, Waldo Rodríguez, Digna Sánchez, Howard Stanton, David Stea, and Lakshman Yapa. Peter Wissoker and Anna Brackett edited the book with patience and skill. A number of paragraphs in Chapters 3 and 4 and one in Chapter 2 are taken from an article in ''Political Geography'' (Blaut 1992b), and are reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher of that journal, Butterworth-Heinemann.

= CHAPTER 1: History Inside Out =

== The Argument ==

The purpose of this book is to undermine one of the most powerful beliefs of our time concerning world history and world geography. This belief is the notion that European civilization—"The West"—has had some unique historical advantage, some special quality of race or culture or environment or mind or spirit, which gives this human community a permanent superiority over all other communities, at all times in history and down to the present.

The belief is both historical and geographical. Europeans are seen as the "makers of history." Europe eternally advances, progresses, modernizes. The rest of the world advances more sluggishly, or stagnates: it is "traditional society." Therefore, the world has a permanent geographical center and a permanent periphery: an Inside and an Outside. Inside leads, Outside lags. Inside innovates, Outside imitates.

This belief is diffusionism, or more precisely Eurocentric diffusionism. It is a theory about the way cultural processes tend to move over the surface of the world as a whole. They tend to flow out of the European sector and toward the non-European sector. This is the natural, normal, logical, and ethical flow of culture, of innovation, of human causality. Europe, eternally, is Inside. Non-Europe is Outside. Europe is the source of most diffusions; non-Europe is the recipient.<ref>In this book the word "Europe" refers to the continent of Europe and to regions dominated by European culture elsewhere, regions like the United States and Canada.</ref>

Diffusionism lies at the very root of historical and geographical scholarship. Some parts of the belief have been questioned in recent years, but its most fundamental tenets remain unchallenged, and so the belief as a whole has not been uprooted or very much weakened by modern scholarship.

The most important tenet of diffusionism is the theory of "the autonomous rise of Europe," sometimes (rather more grandly) called the idea of "the European Miracle." It is the idea that Europe was more advanced and more progressive than all other regions prior to 1492, prior, that is, to the beginning of the period of colonialism, the period in which Europe and non-Europe came into intense interaction. If one believes this to be the case—and most modern scholars seem to believe it to be the case—then it must follow that the economic and social modernization of Europe is fundamentally a result of Europe's internal qualities, not of interaction with the societies of Africa, Asia, and America after 1492. Therefore: the main building blocks of modernity must be European. Therefore: colonialism cannot have been really important for Europe's modernization. Therefore: colonialism must mean, for the Africans, Asians, and Americans, not spoliation and cultural destruction but, rather, the receipt-by-diffusion of European civilization: modernization.

This book will analyze and criticize Eurocentric diffusionism as a general body of ideas, and will try to undermine the more concrete theory of the autonomous rise of Europe. The first chapter of the book discusses the nature and history of diffusionism. Chapter 2 analyzes the theory of the autonomous rise of Europe as a body of propositions about European superiority (and "the European miracle"), then tries to disprove these propositions, one after the other. Chapter 3 discusses world history and historical geography prior to 1492, attempting to show that Europe was not superior to other civilizations and regions in those times. Chapter 4 argues that colonialism was the basic process after 1492, which led to the selective rise of Europe, the modernization or development of Europe (and outlying Europeanized culture areas like the United States), and the underdevelopment of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Chapter 4 also argues that the conquest of America and thereafter the expansion of European colonialism is not to be explained in terms of any internal characteristics of Europe, but instead reflects the mundane realities of location. The chain of argument in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, as a whole, therefore, is an attempt to show that Europe did not have historical priority—historical superiority—over what we now call the Third World.

This may seem to be too ambitious a project for one small book. I am really making just one claim. I am asserting that a fundamental and rather explicit error has been made in our conventional past thinking about geography and history, and this error has distorted many fields of thought and action. I am going to present enough evidence to show that the belief in Eurocentric diffusionism and Europe's historical superiority or priority is not convincing: not well grounded in the facts of history and geography, although firmly grounded in Western culture. It is in a sense folklore.

== The Tunnel of Time ==

If you had gone to school in Europe or Anglo-America 150 years ago, around the middle of the nineteenth century, you would have been taught a very curious kind of history. You would have learned, for one thing, that every important thing that ever happened to humanity happened in one part of the world, the region we will call "Greater Europe," meaning the geographical continent of Europe itself, plus (for ancient times only) an enlargement of it to the southeast, the "Bible Lands"—from North Africa to Mesopotamia—plus (for modern times only) the countries of European settlement overseas. You would have been taught that God created Man in this region: the Garden of Eden was mentioned as the starting point of human history in typical world history textbooks of the period, and these textbooks placed Eden at various points between the shores of the Mediterranean Sea and the mountains of Inner Asia.

Some of your teachers would have also claimed that only the people of this region are really human: God created the people of other places as a different, nonhuman, or rather infrahuman, species. And all of your teachers of science as well as history would have agreed that non-Europeans are not as intelligent, not as honorable, and (for the most part) not as courageous as Europeans: God made them inferior. If you had asked your teachers why Europeans are more human and more intelligent than everyone else you would perhaps have been chastised for asking such a question. You would have been told that a Christian God created and now manages the world, and it would be both silly and blasphemous to suggest that He might show the same favor to non-Europeans, non-Christians, that He does to those people who worship the True God and moreover worship Him with the proper sacrament.

If you had been studying geography as well as history back in the middle of the nineteenth century, you would indeed have learned something about the non-European world. The people living in Africa and Asia would have been depicted not only as inferior but as in some sense evil. They are the people who refused to accept God's grace and so have fallen from His favor. Africans are thus cruel savages, for whom the best possible fate is to be put to useful work, and Christianized. Chinese and Indians for some unknown reason managed to build barbaric civilizations of their own, but because they are not Europeans and not Christians, their civilizations long ago began to stagnate and regress. And, for all their splendor, these never were real civilizations: they are cruel "Oriental despotisms." Only Europeans know true freedom.

Ideas of course change, and if you had gone to school some 50 years later, around the turn of the century, you would have been taught a much more secular form of history, and it would have had a strongly evolutionary (though not yet Darwinian) flavor. You would have learned that the earth is very old, that life is old, and that our species itself has been around for a long time. But everything important still happened in Europe (that is, in Greater Europe). The first true man, Cro-Magnon, lived in Europe. Agriculture was invented in Greater Europe (perhaps in the continent, perhaps in the Bible Lands, Europe's self-proclaimed cultural hearth). You would have been told in world history class that the first barbaric beginnings of civilization occurred in the Bible Lands. There in the Bible Lands emerged the two Caucasian peoples who make all of history. The Semites invented cities and empires, and gave us monotheism and Christianity, but stopped at that point and then sank back into Oriental decadence. The Aryans or Indo-Europeans, freedom-loving though backward folk, built on these foundations, migrating from southeastern Europe or western Asia into and through geographical Europe, and creating the first genuinely civilized society, that of ancient Greece. Then the Romans raised civilization to its next level, and thereafter world history marched inexorably northwestward. If your school was in England you would have been told that History marched from "the Orient" (the Bible Lands) to Athens, to Rome, to feudal France, and finally to modern England—a kind of westbound Orient Express.

By now a secular picture of the geography of non-Europe had begun to be taught in European schools. Africans continued to be described as savages and Oriental societies as decadent and despotic. But important changes had taken place in the relations between Europe and non-Europe during the course of the nineteenth century, and by 1900 a particular theory about this relationship had become fixed in popular discourse and was now taught in schools as standard world geography. This was the theory (described later in this chapter) according to which non-Europeans can and do rise to a civilizational level, if not equal to that of Europeans at least near that level, under European tutelage, that is, under European colonial control.

Suppose we move forward another half century, to the history and geography taught around the end of World War II. Not much change. The first True Man is still the Cro-Magnon of Europe. Agriculture was invented in the Bible Lands; so too was barbaric civilization. True civilization still marches from Athens to Rome to Paris to London, and perhaps sets sail then for New York. Non-Europeans do not contribute much to world history, although they begin to do so as a result of European influence. (Colonial peoples learn from their tutors; Japanese imitate successfully, and so on.) Europeans are still brighter, better, and bolder than everyone else.<ref>This quick survey of 150 years or so of world history textbooks is, of course, very schematic and impressionistic. Some further comments may be of use. In textbooks of the first period, around 1850 (plus or minus a decade or so), the original home of Man is often stated to be the Garden of Eden, which is located by different textbook writers in different parts of western Asia. For instance: somewhere east of Canaan and near Mesopotamia (Robbins, ''The World Displayed in its History and Geography'', 1832, p. 13); somewhere in the "healthful" mountains between the Caspian Sea and Kashmir or Tibet (Müller, ''The History of the World to 1783'', 1842, pp. 27, 43-44); perhaps near the borders of the Mediterranean Sea (Tytler, ''Universal history, From the Creation to the beginning of the Eighteenth Century'', vol. 1, 1844, p. 17); in the Vale of Kashmir (Willard, ''Universal History in Perspective'', 1845, p. 34); somewhere between the Caucasus Mountains and the Himalayas (Keightley, ''Outlines of History'', 1849); in the Himalayas (Weber, ''Outlines of Universal History'', 1853, p. 6); in Armenia (Collier, ''Outlines of General History'', 1868). There seems to be a kind of median location of Eden near the Caucasus Mountains, which was also, by no coincidence, the supposed place of origin of the "Caucasian race." Noah, of course, began postdeluvian history on Mt. Ararat, in Armenia (also roughly in the region of the Caucasus). Noah is supposed to have migrated then to Europe (Whelpley, ''A Compound of History, From the Earliest Times'', vol. 1, 1844, p. 10), or Mesopotamia (Robbins, 1832, p. 20), or Palestine, or some other part of the Bible Lands. Noah's three sons are supposed, then, to have dispersed and to have founded the branches of mankind—the first great diffusion process. In most textbooks of this period history tends to move west; some textbooks present the Hegelian notion that history proceeds inexorably westward, following the sun, with the implication that the United States, farther west still, will replace Europe as the next center of world civilization.

It was widely believed in this period that nonwhites were not truly and fully human. One version of this theory, the notion of "polygenesis," claimed that God had created true humans in the Garden of Eden and other races—or at least the "black race"—in other places and times. This theory questioned the standard interpretation of the Old Testament (that everyone is descended from Adam and Eve), so, not surprisingly, it was not stated as truth in the textbooks I consulted. (I have not, however, looked at textbooks used in the antebellum South, and the theory of polygenesis was most popular in slaveholding regions, as an ideological grounding for the treatment of blacks as things rather than people.) Yet polygenesis was important enough to be mentioned and then rejected—in favor of the view that all humans are descendants of Adam and Eve—in some textbooks, down to the end of the century (see, for example, Dew, ''A Digest of the Laws, Customs, Manners, and Institutions of the Ancient and Modern Nations'', 1853; Fisher, ''Outlines of Universal History'', 1885; Duruy and Grosvenor, ''A General History of the World'', 1901). But polygenesis was not needed; the belief that nonwhites are inferior to whites is asserted in one way or another in all the textbooks I examined. The theory of "degeneration" served just as well as polygenesis. It was the notion that the descendants of Ham, and perhaps other biblical peoples, migrated away from the Bible Lands, eastward and southward, and degenerated from civilization toward savagery, or even lower, as they did so, because they had not accepted Christ, or because they migrated into inferior environments, or for some other reason. (See, for instance, Keightley, 1849, 5-6: "the savage is a degeneration from the civilized life," and Africans are near the apes.) Degeneration was asserted in some textbooks, but in most the simple fact of white superiority was stated and left unexplained. The history of the world is, in general, the history of the white race, or the Semitic and Aryan peoples (see below). For times later than the Roman era, non-Europe is scarcely discussed, except as a backdrop for discussions of the Crusades, the building of colonial empires, and the like. (See Harris, ''The Rise of Anthropological Theory'', 1968, for an excellent discussion of polygenesis and degeneration.)

Nearly all textbooks of the period around 1900 (give or take a few years) accepted the newer scientific theories about the age of the earth and the fact of biological evolution (though not the Darwinian theory of evolution). The biblical account of human history, however, was retained in many books, although fewer of them accepted the formerly standard Old Testament chronologies (for instance, that things began in 4004 B.C.). Books of this period tended to present the so-called "Aryan theory," a theory derived from philology but expanded into a theory of culture history. Earlier philologists had identified an "Aryan" or "Indo-European" language family, and also a "Semitic" family (which many authorities, including textbook writers, identified with Noah's sons Japheth and Shem, respectively). The white race consists of these two peoples. One branch of the Aryans supposedly migrated west into Europe (from the supposed "Aryan hearth," somewhere southwest or northwest of the Caucasus). These were progressive, energetic people, who founded European civilization mainly after they had acquired Christianity from the Semites, who invented the first barbaric civilizations and monotheism but then stagnated into a dreamy, decadent, unambitious culture and thereafter ceased to advance civilization. No other culture, apart from these two, had much to do with history. (According to Freeman, ''General Sketch of History'', 1872, p. 2, history "in the highest and truest sense is the history of the Aryan nations of Europe"; see also Collier, 1868; Swinton, ''Outlines of the World's History'', 1874; Gilman, ''First Steps in General History'', 1874; Anderson, ''New Manual of General History'', 1882; Steele and Steele, ''A Brief History of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Peoples'', 1883; Fisher, 1896; Quackenbos, ''Illustrated School History of the World'', 1889; Thalheimer, ''Outline of General History for the Use of Schools'', 1883; Sanderson, ''History of the World from the Earliest Time to the Year 1898''; Duruy and Grosvenor, 1901. Ploetz and Tillinghast presented this theory in ''Epitome of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern History'', first published in 1883, in its many editions down to 1925 when, in an edition edited by H. E. Barnes, the theory was finally eliminated.) See Bernal's ''Black Athena'' (1987, 1991) for an insightful discussion of the Aryan theory and related topics in the history of European thought.

Because the Old Testament spoke of agriculture—Cain knew farming and Abraham herded domesticated animals—the history textbooks tended not to address the problem of where agriculture was invented until very late in the nineteenth century, the period when science was beginning to deal with this problem. Some scientists and some textbook writers then began to speculate that, just possibly, agriculture was as old in continental Europe as it was in western Asia and Egypt. (From the point of view of science, see Joly, ''Man Before Metals'', 1897.) But the idea that agriculture originated in the Bible Lands remained dominant although now it was viewed (by most) as an invention, not an artifact of original creation. The ethnographic fact that some tribal peoples (for instance, in Australia) did not practice agriculture was commonly explained, in the textbooks of the earlier nineteenth century, in terms of the theory of degeneration: their ancestors had somehow lost the art. Later in the century it became more common to use the diffusionist conception that agriculture had been invented by west Asian or (conceivably) European peoples, then diffused outward over the rest of the world, and cultures that did not practice it in modern times simply had not yet acquired it, either because of their isolation or because they were too stupid to take it up.

The Orient Express was a famous train that ran between western Europe and western Asia. Although various routes were used in different eras, the basic line ran from Constantinople (Istanbul) through Greece to northern Italy or Austria, then on to France, and (via Ostend) England. Most of the history textbooks write about world history as though it marched northwesterward, rather like the westbound Orient Express, with stations (so to speak) in Athens, Rome, Paris, and London. (See Chapter 2 for further discussion of the Orient Express model.)</ref>

We can sum all of this up with an image that will prove quite useful in this book. This is the idea that the world has an Inside and an Outside. World history thus far has been, basically, the history of Inside. Outside has been, basically, irrelevant. History and historical geography as it was taught, written, and thought by Europeans down to the time of World War II, and still (as we will see) in most respects today, lies, as it were, in a tunnel of time. The walls of this tunnel are, figuratively, the spatial boundaries of Greater Europe. History is a matter of looking back or down in this European tunnel of time and trying to decide what happened where, when, and why. "Why" of course calls for connections among historical events, but only among the events that lie in the European tunnel. Outside its walls everything seems to be rockbound, timeless, changeless tradition. I will call this way of thinking "historical tunnel vision," or simply "tunnel history."

The older form of tunnel history simply ignored the non-European world: typical textbooks and historical atlases devoted very few pages to areas outside of Greater Europe (that is, Europe and countries of European settlement overseas plus, for ancient history and the Crusades, the Near East), until one came to the year 1492. Non-Europe (Africa, Asia east of the Bible Lands, Latin America, Oceania) received significant notice only as the venue of European colonial activities, and most of what was said about this region was essentially the history of empire.<ref>In nineteenth-century world history textbooks, Turkey was given some attention because of its political involvement with European affairs. World geography, in contrast to world history, always covered the entire world, and textbooks as well as the great multivolume descriptive geographies (like Reclus's classic 19-volume ''Nouvelle Géographie Universelle'', published between 1876 and 1894) gave considerable attention to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This should not mislead us, however. One of the primary functions of geography throughout this entire period was to teach European children what they needed to know about non-Europe in order to participate in their countries' imperial and commercial activities in these regions. See Hudson, "The New Geography and the New Imperialism: 1870-1918" (1977) and McKay, "Colonialism in the French Geographical Movement" (1943), on the close relation between geography and colonial activities.</ref> Not only was the great bulk of attention devoted to Greater Europe in these older textbooks and historical atlases, but world history was described as flowing steadily westward with the passage of time, from the Bible Lands to eastern Mediterranean Europe, to northwestern Europe. This pattern is readily discernible if we notice the salience of places mentioned in these sources, that is, the frequency of place-name mentions for different regions at different periods. For the earliest period, place-name mentions cluster in the Bible Lands and the extreme eastern Mediterranean. For successively later periods, place-name mentions cluster farther and farther to the west and northwest, finally clustering in northwestern Europe for the period after about A.D. 1000: this is the "Orient Express" pattern to which we referred previously.

After World War II, however, history textbooks began to exhibit another, more subtle, form of tunnel history. The non-European world was now beginning to insert itself very firmly in European consciousness, in the aftermath of the war with Japan and in the midst of the intensified decolonization struggles, the Civil Rights movement in the United States, and the like. Most newer textbooks enlarged the discussion of non-European history, and said something about the historical achievements of non-European cultures. Most textbooks gave a flavor of historicity, of evolutionary progress, to non-European history, thus departing from the older pattern, which dismissed these societies as stagnant and nonevolving. Asian societies were now described as having had an evolutionary motion, though a motion slower than that of Europe. Africa was still described as stagnant, history-less, prior to the colonial era. More salience was given to Asia. However, Africa and the Western Hemisphere still received little mention for eras prior to 1492. The pattern of place-name mentions in most (not all) texts and historical atlases still suggested a flow to the west and northwest, from the Near East to western Europe. And tunnel history dominated most textbooks in the most important matter of all, the question of "why," of explanation. Historical progress still came about because Europeans invented or initiated most of the crucial innovations, which only later spread out to the rest of the world. So the textbooks depicted a world in which historical causes were to be found basically inside the European tunnel of time, although historical effects were to be seen basically everywhere.<ref>The character of this newer approach can be seen if we look at two well-known modern university-level texts, one written by W. H. McNeill of the University of Chicago (''A World History'', 3rd ed., 1979), the other by J. M. Roberts of Oxford University (''The Hutchinson History of the World'', 2d ed., 1987; published in the United States as ''The Penguin History of the World''). For pre-Christian-era world history, more than three-quarters of the place-name mentions in both books are places in Europe and the Middle East (including North Africa); less than one-quarter of the place-name mentions are places in other parts of the world and only about 1% are in Africa. For the Christian era to A.D. 1491 there is significant divergence between the two books. In Roberts's text, European and Middle Eastern places constitute about 85% of place-name mentions. In McNeill's text, European and Middle Eastern places constitute only 60% of the place names mentioned, a significant departure from the older tradition although still well out of proportion to this region's size in area and population. (Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for only 2% of mentions for the period A.D. 1-1491.) In both books, therefore, the region I have been calling "Greater Europe" has considerably lower salience for pre-1492 history than was typically the case in older world history textbooks. As to explanation, however, both books retain much of the traditional perspective. Roberts gives almost no causal role to the cultures and regions of the world other than Europe and the Middle East (including North Africa) for any period prior to 1492. McNeill gives considerable weight to East Asia and some to South Asia for certain historical periods, but almost all of the world history-making forces emanate from Europe, western Asia, and North Africa for the period before 1492. (An exception is the Black Death, which, according to McNeill, swept westward into these regions from farther Asia. On this matter, see also McNeill's ''Plagues and Peoples'', 1976.) Examples of the Eurocentric explanations offered by both authors will be given in Chapter 2 of the present book.

It is, however, insufficient to look only at those present-day textbooks that are clearly identified as "world history" textbooks. Quite frequently university courses covering the subject of world history use history textbooks that carry titles like "The History of Western Civilization." (See, for instance, Lerner, et al., ''Western Civilizations: Their History and Their Culture'', 1988; Kagan, et al., ''The Western Heritage'', 1987; Chambers, et al., ''The Western Experience'', 1987.) If such a textbook neglects the non-Western world, there can be no complaint that it is misleading: the title clearly specifies "West" not "World." But if the course is designated as "world history" and the textbook is designated as "Western history," then we have a problem. The worst scenario would be one in which world-history teaching continues to be Eurocentric history in disguise. I do not know of any research which tests the following hypotheses: (1) Given that, today, historians are sensitive to the need to avoid Eurocentric bias in the teaching of world history, do some of them simply change the title to "Western" so that Eurocentrism becomes, then, licit? And (2) is it possible that there is a trend away from the teaching of "World" history and toward "Western" (etc.) history and that this trend reflects a reaction (or adjustment) to present-day demands for nontechnocentrism and "fairness?"</ref>

Textbooks are an important window into a culture; more than just books, they are semiofficial statements of exactly what the opinion-forming elite of the culture want the educated youth of that culture to believe to be true about the past and present world.<ref>A school textbook is truly a key social document, a kind of modern stele. In the typical case, a book becomes accepted as a high school (or lower-level) textbook only after it has been reviewed very carefully by the publisher, school boards, and administrators, all of whom are intensely sensitive to the need to print acceptable doctrine; they are concerned to make it certain that children will read only those facts in their textbook which are considered to be acceptable as facts by the opinion-forming elite of the culture. The resulting textbook is, therefore, less an ordinary authored book than a vetted social statement of what is considered valid and acceptable for entry into the mind of the child. For this reason, research on textbooks (including college textbooks, in which the same process is at work, though more subtly) is, in fact, ethnographic research. It tells us about the belief system of the opinion-forming elite of the culture as a whole. Therefore, geography texts in the United States are really ethnogeography documents. Likewise, history texts are really ethnohistory documents. They are probably as useful as cultural artifacts as any old potsherd or inscription. See the final section of this chapter.</ref> As we have seen, European and Anglo-American history textbooks assert that most of the causes of historical progress occur, or originate, in the European sector of the world. Textbooks of the early and middle nineteenth century tended to give a rather openly religious grounding for this Eurocentric tunnel history. In later textbooks the Bible is no longer considered a source of historical fact, but causality seems to be rooted in an implicit theory that combines a belief that Christian peoples make history with a belief that white peoples make history, the whole becoming a theory that it is natural for Europeans to innovate and progress and for non-Europeans to remain stagnant and unchanging ("traditional"), until, like Sleeping Beauty, they are awakened by the Prince. This view still, in the main, prevails, although racism has been discarded and non-Europe is no longer considered to have been absolutely stagnant and traditional.

Schools are always a little behind the time when it comes to the teaching of newer topics and ideas. I wish I could report that the old notions about Inside and Outside are today just artifacts, still taught in some schools because of the usual lag between research and pedagogy, but which have been discarded by Real Scholars, those who pursue historical research and write the important and influential books on world history. But this is not the case. In the matter that concerns us most, that of explaining the larger flows of world history, the views put forward by historical scholars today tend to be quite consonant with the theories projected in textbooks. We can set aside the fact that many of the most widely used textbooks, today as in the past, are written by prominent historical scholars. There are many complex cultural reasons why historical scholarship remains committed to Eurocentric explanations for most of the crucial developments in world history: we will discuss some of these reasons later in the present chapter and return to the question at various points throughout the book. Suffice it at this point to notice a very peculiar paradox. Historians have amassed a fine record of meticulous scholarship, and rarely indeed do we encounter prejudice or deliberate distortion in their work. Moreover, their judgments about historical causation are constrained by the same methodological rigor as we find in any other field of scholarship. It is only when we come to the larger issues of causation, matters of explaining historical progress over long periods and for larger regions, and matters of explaining profound revolutions in history, that Eurocentrism exerts an important influence on discourse, and often—as we will see—leads to the acceptance of poor theories in spite of a lack of supporting evidence.

Most European historians still maintain that most of the really crucial historical events, those that "changed history," happened in Europe, or happened because of some causal impetus from Europe. ("Europe" continues to mean "Greater Europe.") To illustrate this fact, I will list now, in historical order, a series of crucial Europe-centered propositions. All of them are accepted as true by the majority, in some cases the great majority, of European historical scholars. Some of them indeed are true, but that is beside the present point, which is to show that historical reasoning still focuses on Greater Europe as the perpetual fountainhead of history.

1. The Neolithic Revolution—the invention of agriculture and the beginnings of a settled way of life for humanity—occurred in the Middle East (or the Bible Lands). This view was unopposed before about 1930, and is still the majority view.

2. The second major step in cultural evolution toward modern civilization, the emergence of the earliest states, cities, organized religions, writing systems, division of labor, and the like, was taken in the Middle East.

3. The Age of Metals began in the Middle East. Ironworking was invented in the Middle East or eastern Europe and the "Iron Age" first appeared in Europe.

4. Monotheism appeared first in the Middle East.

5. Democracy was invented in Europe (in ancient Greece).

6. Likewise most of pure science, mathematics, philosophy, history, and geography.

7. Class society and class struggle emerged first in the Greco-Roman era and region.<ref>This argument is given much weight by Eurocentric Marxists, since class struggle, for Marxists, is the central force in historical evolution.</ref>

8. The Roman Empire was the first great imperial state. Romans invented bureaucracy, law, and so on.

9. The next great stage in social evolution, feudalism, was developed in Europe, with Frenchmen taking the lead.<ref>A form of political feudalism is sometimes conceded to have been developed earlier by the Chinese, but the great majority of European scholars, including most Marxists, believe that European feudalism was unique in representing a form of society that was a crucial, essential, stepping stone to modernity. See Chapter 3.</ref>

10. Europeans invented a host of technological traits in the Middle Ages which gave them superiority over non-Europeans. (On this matter there are considerable differences of opinion.)

11. Europeans invented the modern state.

12. Europeans invented capitalism.

13. Europeans, uniquely "venturesome," were the great explorers, "discoverers," etc.

14. Europeans invented industry and created the Industrial Revolution.

... and so on down to the present.

All of the propositions in this list are widely accepted tenets of European historical scholarship today, although (as we will see) there is scholarly dispute about some of the propositions. All of this means that you and I learned these things, perhaps in elementary school, perhaps in university, perhaps in books and newspapers. We learned that all of this is the truth. But is it? Clearly, some of these propositions are true. Some others are true with qualifications. But some, as I will argue in this book, are not true at all: they are artifacts of the old tunnel history, in which Outside plays no crucial role and Inside is credited with everything important and everything efficacious.

== Eurocentric Diffusionism ==

=== Eurocentrism ===

What we are talking about here is generally called, these days, "Eurocentrism."<ref>See Samir Amin's ''Eurocentrism'' (1988) for an excellent discussion of this notion. The word "Eurocentrism" apparently was coined quite recently, to assemble "European ethnocentrism" into one word. However, I (like Amin) do not think of Eurocentrism as merely a species of ethnocentrism, as the following paragraphs will make clear.</ref> This word is a label for all the beliefs that postulate past or present superiority of Europeans over non-Europeans (and over minority people of non-European descent). A strong critique of Eurocentrism is underway in all fields of social thought, and this book is certainly part of that critique.

There is, however, a problem with the word "Eurocentrism." In most discourse it is thought of as a sort of prejudice, an "attitude," and therefore something that can be eliminated from modern enlightened thought in the same way we eliminate other relic attitudes such as racism, sexism, and religious bigotry. But the really crucial part of Eurocentrism is not a matter of attitudes in the sense of values and prejudices, but rather a matter of science, and scholarship, and informed and expert opinion. To be precise, Eurocentrism includes a set of beliefs that are statements about empirical reality, statements educated and usually unprejudiced Europeans accept as true, as propositions supported by "the facts." Consider, for instance, the 14 propositions about Europe's priority in historical innovation which we listed above. Historians who accept these propositions as true would be most indignant if we described the propositions as "Eurocentric beliefs." Every historian in this category would deny emphatically that he or she holds any Eurocentric prejudices, and very few of them actually do hold such prejudices. If they assert that Europeans invented democracy, science, feudalism, capitalism, the modern nation-state, and so on, they make these assertions because they think that all of this is fact.

Eurocentrism, therefore, is a very complex thing. We can banish all the value meanings of this word, all the prejudices, and we still have Eurocentrism as a set of empirical beliefs.

This, in a way, is the central problem for this book. We confront statements of presumed historical and scientific fact, not prejudices and biases, and we try to show, with history and science, that the presumptions are wrong: these statements are false.

How is it that Eurocentric historical statements which are not valid—that is, not confirmed by evidence and sometimes contradicted by evidence—are able to gain acceptance in European historical thought, and thereafter survive as accepted beliefs, hardly ever questioned, for generations and even centuries? This is a crucial problem for historiography and the history of ideas. To deal with it satisfactorily would take us well beyond the scope of this book, the main concern of which is empirical history and geography. Yet the problem cannot be avoided here. Libraries are full of scholarly studies that support the Eurocentric historical positions we are rejecting and refuting in this book. The sheer quantity of this work, and the respect that is properly owed to the scholars who assembled it, makes it certain that one cannot convincingly refute these positions with the factual arguments that can be presented in one book. No matter how persuasive these arguments may be, they cannot be placed, so to speak, on one arm of a balance and be expected to outweigh all of the accumulated writings of generations of European scholars, textbook writers, journalists, publicists, and the rest, heaped up on the other arm of the balance.

So, in this book, we must make a sort of two-level argument. The main level is the empirical one: What did happen inside and outside of Europe in the medieval and early modern centuries, and what connections did take place between the two sectors in that period? At the second level, we will look at some pertinent aspects of the history of Eurocentric ideas and the social context surrounding these ideas. This will be done mainly in the present chapter, which analyzes the nature and history of diffusionist ideas and concludes with a discussion of the process of social licensing by which these ideas gain currency and hegemony, and in Chapter 2, which rather systematically examines the most important arguments for European superiority prior to 1492 and to an extent discusses their historical genealogies.

Scholars today are aware, as most were not a few decades ago, that the empirical, factual beliefs of history, geography, and social science very often gain acceptance for reasons that have little to do with evidence. Scholarly beliefs are embedded in culture, and are shaped by culture. This helps to explain the paradox that Eurocentric historical beliefs are so strangely persistent; that old myths continue to be believed in long after the rationale for their acceptance has been forgotten or rejected (as in the arguments grounded in belief in the Old Testament as literal history); that newer candidate beliefs gain acceptance without supporting evidence if they are properly Eurocentric; and that, most generally, the Eurocentric body of beliefs as a whole retains its persuasiveness and power. But there is more to the matter than this. Eurocentrism is, as I will argue at great length in this book, a unique set of beliefs, and uniquely powerful, because it is the intellectual and scholarly rationale for one of the most powerful social interests of the European elite. I will argue not only that European colonialism initiated the development of Europe (and the underdevelopment of non-Europe) in 1492, but that since then the wealth obtained from non-Europe, through colonialism in its many forms, including neocolonial forms, has been a necessary and very important basis for the continued development of Europe and the continued power of Europe's elite. For this reason, the development of a body of Eurocentric beliefs, justifying and assisting Europe's colonial activities, has been, and still is, of very great importance. Eurocentrism is quite simply the colonizer's model of the world.

Eurocentrism is the colonizer's model of the world in a very literal sense: it is not merely a set of beliefs, a bundle of beliefs. It has evolved, through time, into a very finely sculpted model, a structured whole; in fact a single theory; in fact a super theory, a general framework for many smaller theories, historical, geographical, psychological, sociological, and philosophical. This supertheory is diffusionism.

=== Diffusionism ===

When culture change takes place in a human community, that change can be the result of an invention that occurred within this community. Or it can be the result of a process in which the idea or its material effect (such as a tool, an art style, etc.) came into the community, having originated in some other community, in some other part of the landscape. The first sort of event is called "independent invention." The second is called "diffusion." Both processes occur everywhere. So far so good. But some scholars believe that independent invention is rather uncommon, and therefore not very important in culture change in the short run and cultural evolution in the long run. These scholars believe that most humans are imitators, not inventors. Therefore diffusion, in their view, is the main mechanism for change.

The scholars who hold this view are called "diffusionists." Whenever they encounter a cultural innovation in a particular region, they are inclined to look diligently for a process of diffusion into that region from somewhere else, somewhere the trait is already in use. For instance, the fact that the blow-gun is traditionally used among some Native American peoples as well as some Old World peoples is explained by diffusionists as being the result of the diffusion of this trait from the Old World to the New: the New World people, they believe, probably did not invent the trait for themselves. Why? Because they probably were not inventive enough to do so. A larger form of this same diffusionist argument claims that the great pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas must be, ultimately, the result of transpacific or transatlantic diffusions, because these civilizing traits (agriculture, temple architecture, writing, and so on) were found much earlier in the Old World than the New, and Native Americans probably were not inventive enough to think up these things on their own. Some scholars, those who have been traditionally described as "extreme diffusionists," believe that all civilization diffused from one original place on earth: some of them think that this original source of civilization was ancient Egypt, others place it somewhere in Central Asia (for instance, the Caucasus region—which scholars used to think was the original home of the "white" or "Caucasian" race).<ref>See, for instance, Eliot Smith, ''The Diffusion of Culture'' (1933), Perry, ''The Primordial Ocean'' (1935), and Taylor, ''Environment and Nation'' (1945). Eliot Smith flatly asserts that the ancient diffusion process radiating mainly from Egypt and Phoenicia "continued for many centuries to play upon the Pacific littoral of America, where it is responsible for ... the remarkable Pre-Columbian civilizations" (quoted in Zwernemann, ''Culture History and African Anthropology'', 1983, p. 15).</ref>

The debates between diffusionists and their opponents have been going on for more than a century in anthropology, geography, history, and all fields concerned about long-term, large-scale cultural evolution.<ref>On these matters, see Harris, ''The Rise of Anthropological Theory'' (1968) and Steward, ''Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution'' (1955).</ref> There are two basic criticisms of diffusionism.

1. Diffusionists hold much too sour a view of human ingenuity: people are in fact quite inventive and innovative, so the possibility that new culture traits will appear as a result of independent invention is actually vastly greater than diffusionists admit. So investigators should consider the possibility of independent invention in any given case, rather than assuming a priori that a diffusion process explains the situation at which one is looking.

2. Diffusionists are elitists. Every diffusion must start somewhere. An invention must take place in some one community before it begins to spread (diffuse) to others. If we accept the quite fundamental assumption that all human groups are truly human in their thinking apparatuses, and therefore broadly similar in their ability to invent and innovate—this assumption is known as "the psychic unity of mankind," a nineteenth-century label that is quaint but still in use—we would expect inventions to occur everywhere across the human landscape.<ref>See Koepping, ''Adolf Bastian and the Psychic Unity of Mankind'' (1983), Stocking ''Race, Culture, and Evolution'' (1968), and Harris, ''The Rise of Anthropological Theory'' (1968).</ref> But most diffusionists claim that only certain select communities are inventive. In other words, most communities change only as a result of receiving new traits by diffusion, but some places are uniquely inventive and are the original sources of the new traits. The people of these communities are more inventive than are people elsewhere. The psychic unity of mankind is denied: some people, or cultures, are simply smarter than others. They are permanent centers of invention and innovation.

This is spatial elitism. If we make a map of this landscape, we find that it has a permanent center and a permanent periphery. For the "extreme diffusionists" the entire world was mapped out this way, at least for the pre-Christian era: the permanent center of invention and innovation was thought to be Egypt, or the "Ancient Aryan Homeland" (a mythical place located somewhere in western Asia or southeastern Europe), or the Caucasus, or some other supposed navel of the ancient world. But the charge was leveled more broadly: diffusionists as a group tended to imagine that some few places, or some one place, was the primary source from which culture spread to all the other places.

It should be evident that diffusionism is very nicely suited to the idea that the world has an Inside and an Outside. In fact, diffusionism was the most fully developed scientific (or pseudoscientific) rationale for the idea of Inside and Outside. That idea, as we saw, postulates one permanent world center for new ideas; cultural evolution everywhere else results, broadly, from the diffusion of new ideas from this permanent center. This is simply the diffusionists' map on a world scale.

We come now to a fascinating anomaly. The critics of diffusionism, in the nineteenth century and even in the twentieth century, failed entirely to grasp the full implications of their critique. None of them denied that the world has an Inside and an Outside. While criticizing the diffusionists for their rejection of the principle of the psychic unity of mankind, the antidiffusionists nonetheless believed that cultural evolution has been centered in Europe, and they therefore accepted the idea—explicitly or implicitly—that Europeans are more inventive, more innovative than everyone else.<ref>Often the antidiffusionist camp was labeled the "cultural evolutionist" camp, and the debate as a whole was labeled "diffusionism versus evolutionism." But, as I argue here, evolutionists were to some extent diffusionists and diffusionists were to some extent evolutionists. Moreover, I want to use the term "cultural evolution" in this book in a much broader and much less controversial sense, as indicating merely the search for explanation in larger questions of historical and cultural change. A problem that is "historical" becomes a problem of "cultural evolution" when we ask, broadly, "why?" Some scholars, of course, are not comfortable with this usage of the phrase "cultural evolution." For some it carries baggage of economic determinism or environmental determinism or technological determinism, or it signifies the notion of an invariant sequence of cultural stages through which all human groups must pass—but I mean none of that. Most cultural geographers use the phrase "cultural evolution" just about as I use it here.</ref> This is made explicit when they write about recent centuries, and particularly when they discuss the modernizing, missionarizing effect of European colonialism. It is also implicit in their writings about ancient times. These anthropologists, archaeologists, geographers, and historians of the second half of the nineteenth century and the present century do not focus on the Bible Lands, and their scholarly writings do not display any acceptance of religious assumptions. Yet Inside and Outside are explicit. They write about the Near Eastern origins of agriculture, of urbanization, and so forth. They then move smoothly to arguments about European origins of most of the rest of civilization.

My basic argument is this: all scholarship is diffusionist insofar as it axiomatically accepts the Inside-Outside model, the notion that the world as a whole has one permanent center from which culture-changing ideas tend to originate, and a vast periphery that changes as a result (mainly) of diffusion from that single center. I do not argue that the formal theory of diffusionism, as it was advanced and defended by scholars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, explains the Inside-Outside model, the mythology of Europe's permanent geographical superiority and priority. Rather, the theory developed as a result of broad social forces in Europe, and entered the world of scholarship from outside of that world—from European society. Diffusionist scholars were, in essence, elaborating and codifying this theory in the realms of scholarship within which they worked: realms like archaeology, world history, and so on.

Before we proceed further I must post a warning: the word "diffusionist" has some ambiguities, and these should not be allowed to bring confusion into the present discussion. In any given debate as to whether a novel trait in a certain place was invented by the people of that place or was received from elsewhere by diffusion, those scholars who take the latter view are supporters of a "diffusionist" position, that is, they favor the specific hypothesis of diffusion as against that of independent invention. This does not necessarily mean that they have a general propensity to favor diffusion as a causal formula. Sometimes the specific issue can be a very major problem. For instance, some scholars argue that important West African culture traits diffused across the Atlantic to America before 1492. Whether they are right or wrong in this matter, they are not arguing any sort of Eurocentric diffusionism, nor do they necessarily favor diffusion over independent invention in other contexts. But most scholars who are consistent diffusionists are also Eurocentric diffusionists.

Now I will describe Eurocentric diffusionism in somewhat formal terms as a scientific theory. That theory has changed through time, but its basic structure has remained essentially unchanged. I will describe what can be called the classical (essentially nineteenth-century) form of the theory, leaving until a later section of this chapter a discussion of the not very dissimilar modern form.

Diffusionism is grounded, as we saw, in two axioms: (1) Most human communities are uninventive. (2) A few human communities (or places, or cultures) are inventive and thus remain the permanent centers of culture change, of progress. At the global scale, this gives us a model of a world with a single center—roughly, Greater Europe—and a single periphery; an Inside and an Outside. There are a number of variants of this two-sector model. Sometimes the two sectors are treated as sharply distinct, with a definite boundary between them. (This form of the model is the familiar one. It is sometimes called the "Center-Periphery Model of the World.") Another form sees the world in a slightly different way: there is a clear and definite center, but outside of it there is gradual change, gradual decline in degree of civilization or progressiveness or innovativeness, as one moves outward into the periphery. Another variant depicts the world as divided into zones, each representing a level of modernity or civilization or development.<ref>Both forms are sometimes combined; for instance, in the nineteenth century northwestern Europe was considered (by northwestern Europeans) to be absolutely civilized, Africa absolutely uncivilized, and all other areas (of the Eastern Hemisphere) somewhere in between. These matters are discussed later in this book.</ref> The classical division was one with three great bands: "civilization," "barbarism," and "savagery."

The basic model of diffusionism in its classical form depicts a world divided into the prime two sectors, one of which (Greater Europe, Inside) invents and progresses, the other of which (non-Europe, Outside) receives progressive innovations by diffusion from Inside. From this base, diffusionism asserts seven fundamental arguments about the two sectors and the interactions between them:

1. Europe naturally progresses and modernizes. That is, the natural state of affairs in the European sector (Inside) is to invent, innovate, change things for the better. Europe changes; Europe is "historical."

2. Non-Europe (Outside) naturally remains stagnant, unchanging, traditional, and backward. Invention, innovation, and change are not the natural state of affairs, and not to be expected, in non-European countries. Non-Europe does not change; non-Europe is "ahistorical."

Propositions 3 and 4 explain the difference between the two sectors:

3. The basic cause of European progress is some intellectual or spiritual factor, something characteristic of the "European mind," the "European spirit," "Western Man," etc., something that leads to creativity, imagination, invention, innovation, rationality, and a sense of honor or ethics: "European values."

4. The reason for non-Europe's nonprogress is a lack of this same intellectual or spiritual factor. This proposition asserts, in essence, that the landscape of the non-European world is empty, or partly so, of "rationality," that is, of ideas and proper spiritual values. There are a number of variations of this proposition in classical (mainly late-nineteenth-century) diffusionism. Two are quite important:

a. For much of the non-European world, this proposition asserts an emptiness also of basic cultural institutions, and even an emptiness of people. This can be called the diffusionist myth of emptiness, and it has particular connection to settler colonialism (the physical movement of Europeans into non-European regions, displacing or eliminating the native inhabitants). This proposition of emptiness makes a series of claims, each layered upon the others: (i) A non-European region is empty or nearly empty of people (hence settlement by Europeans does not displace any native peoples). (ii) The region is empty of settled population: the inhabitants are mobile, nomadic, wanderers (hence European settlement violates no political sovereignty, since wanderers make no claim to territory). (iii) The cultures of this region do not possess an understanding of private property—that is, the region is empty of property rights and claims (hence colonial occupiers can freely give land to settlers since no one owns it). The final layer, applied to all of the Outside sector, is an emptiness of intellectual creativity and spiritual values, sometimes described by Europeans (as, for instance, by Max Weber) as an absence of "rationality."<ref>Max Weber's notion of "European rationality" is discussed in Chapter 2.</ref>

b. Some non-European regions, in some historical epochs, are assumed to have been "rational" in some ways and to some degree. Thus, for instance, the Middle East during biblical times was rational. China was somewhat rational for a certain period in its history.<ref>The varying conceptions of China, and also India, as semirational or intermittently rational or rational in some ways but not in others are discussed in Chapters 2 and 3.</ref> Other regions, always including Africa, are unqualifiedly lacking in rationality.

5. The normal, natural way that the non-European part of the world progresses, changes for the better, modernizes, and so on, is by the diffusion (or spread) of innovative, progressive ideas from Europe, which flow into it as air flows into a vacuum. This diffusion may take the form of the spread of European ideas as such, or the spread of new products in which the European ideas are concretized, or the spread (migration, settlement) of Europeans themselves, bearers of these new and innovative ideas.

Proposition 5, you will observe, is a simple justification for European colonialism. It asserts that colonialism, including settler colonialism, brings civilization to non-Europe; is in fact the natural way that the non-European world advances out of its stagnation, backwardness, traditionalism.

But under colonialism, wealth is drawn out of the non-European colonies and enriches the European colonizers. In Eurocentric diffusionism this too is seen as a normal relationship between Inside and Outside:

6. Compensating in part for the diffusion of civilizing ideas from Europe to non-Europe, is a counterdiffusion of material wealth from non-Europe to Europe, consisting of plantation products, minerals, art objects, labor, and so on. Nothing can fully compensate the Europeans for their gift of civilization to the colonies, so the exploitation of colonies and colonial peoples is morally justified. (Colonialism gives more than it receives.)

And there is still another form of interaction between Inside and Outside. It is the opposite of the diffusion of civilizing ideas from Europe to non-Europe (proposition 5):

7. Since Europe is advanced and non-Europe is backward, any ideas that diffuse into Europe must be ancient, savage, atavistic, uncivilized, evil—black magic, vampires, plagues, "the bogeyman," and the like.<ref>The "bogeyman" refers to the Buginese, a Malay people who fought fiercely against the Europeans and so were stigmatized in this way. The most famous fictional vampire, Count Dracula, came to England from Outside (a barbarous mountain region on the frontier of the Turkish empire).</ref> Associated with this conception is the diffusionist myth which has been called "the theory of our contemporary ancestors." It asserts that, as we move farther and farther away from civilized Europe, we encounter people who, successively, reflect earlier and earlier epochs of history and culture. Thus the so-called "stone-age people" of the Antipodes are likened to the Paleolithic Europeans. The argument here is that diffusion works in successive waves, spreading outward, such that the farther outward we go the farther backward we go in terms of cultural evolution. But conversely, there is the possibility that these ancient, atavistic, etc., traits will counterdiffuse back into the civilized core, in the form of ancient, magical, evil things like black magic, Dracula, etc.

The main oppositions between the two sectors can be shown in tabular form. The following contrast-sets are quite typical in nineteenth-century diffusionist thought:

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Characteristic of Core !! Characteristic of Periphery
|-
| Inventiveness || Imitativeness
|-
| Rationality, intellect || Irrationality, emotion, instinct
|-
| Abstract thought || Concrete thought
|-
| Theoretical reasoning || Empirical, practical reasoning
|-
| Mind || Body, matter
|-
| Discipline || Spontaneity
|-
| Adulthood || Childhood
|-
| Sanity || Insanity
|-
| Science || Sorcery
|-
| Progress || Stagnation
|}

What I have described thus far is, of course, a highly simplified version of the diffusionist world model. We will add qualifications and modifications as we proceed, and in particular we will see that there are significant differences between the classical form of diffusionism and the modern form of the model.

So much for what diffusionism is. What does it do? In this book I will show in some detail how diffusionism has shaped our views of history, both European and non-European. Later in the present chapter and in Chapter 2 I will show some of the concrete influences of diffusionism on theories outside of history, some in psychology, some in geography, some in economics, some in sociology.

But this discussion will be more meaningful after a different question has been addressed. This is the question of how and why diffusionism became such a foundation theory in Western thought. To this question we now turn.

== The Colonizer's Model ==

Perhaps all civilizations have a somewhat ethnocentric view of themselves in relation to their neighbors, believing themselves better, brighter, and bolder than every other human community and constructing empirical theories to explain why this is the case, and to explain away embarrassments. Perhaps we would find the seeds of diffusionism in all these beliefs: the idea that progress is natural and calls for no explanation in "our" society but is unnatural or at any rate, less impressive in "their" societies; the idea that "they" progress by borrowing from "us" and imitating "our" ideas; and so on. But this does not add up to the theory of diffusionism, nor is it very important for an understanding of diffusionism. Diffusionism as I have been discussing it is a product of modern European colonialism. It is the colonizer's model of the world.

=== Origins ===

Diffusionism became a fully formed scientific theory during the nineteenth century. The origins of the theory, however, go back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Western Europe, where a belief system was being constructed to give some coherence to the new reality of change within Europe and colonial expansion outside Europe. The conception of a two-sector world, the diffusionist distinction between Inside and Outside, emerged from a very old conception of Christendom and the Roman imperial legacy (which meant, for most of western and southern Europe, a common source of legitimacy for the political and landholding elites). But it is certainly not true that medieval Europeans saw Christendom as a sharply defined space, naturally in conflict with surrounding societies. Nor did medieval European thinkers have many illusions about the relative power, wealth, and technological prowess of Christendom as compared with Islamic and Oriental civilizations. But certainly they had some idea, not of a collective identity, but of a distinction between the lands inhabited by Christians, given divine guidance and protection for this reason, and the lands of non-Christians. Nevertheless, it was only after 1492 that Inside acquired a sharp geographical definition, less as a result of medieval ideas than of colonialism in the early modern period.

European ideas about European progressiveness, Europe's somehow inevitable progress, are also essentially postmedieval. Obviously, these ideas were being discussed during the Middle Ages, and certainly there was hope, prayer, and struggle for betterment, but medieval folk tended rather to see their society as being in a relative state of equilibrium; their religion spoke of the Fall, and of the need to accept existing conditions (and rules), while the reality of medieval life (particularly fourteenth- and fifteenth-century life) was not one of perceptible forward progress for the mass of people. But European thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were coming to conceive of history—their own history—as a progressive process. Real progress (or at any rate accelerating change) indeed was taking place in the communities occupied by these thinkers, and the climate of ideas was changing in a complex but close association with the rise of capitalism, the expansion of opportunity for individuals in many regions, and the like.

One of the main problems confronted by these early modern thinkers, both secular and religious, was the need to establish a belief system, an ideology, that would convince conservative sectors of the European community to accept the idea that progress is inevitable, natural, and desirable, and thus to accept changes in the legal system which would permit more rapid and widespread capital accumulation, to persuade the landowning classes to treat land as a commodity and invest their real holdings in risk enterprises, to introduce laws and practices to mobilize labor for emerging capitalist activities at home and abroad, to persuade Europeans in general to accept the painful changes being imposed on them, and so on. Equally important was the need to explain progress in ways that accorded with religion. This was done by seeing God's guidance of (European) history, and by conceptualizing progressive innovations as being products of the European mind or spirit and thus ultimately products of the Christian soul. (We will go into these matters later in this book.)

Thus emerged the conception of Inside as being naturally progressive (diffusionist proposition 1), and as being progressive because of the workings of an intellectual or spiritual force, "European rationality" (diffusionist proposition 3). By the eighteenth century it had become the practice in secular writings to discuss causality in history and philosophy without referencing God and Scriptures, but the basic model of European progress as natural, as rational, remained unchanged in its essence; became, indeed, much fortified.<ref>On the history of the idea of progress in European thought, see, for instance, G. H. Mead, ''Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century'' (1936), Toulmin and Goodfield, ''The Discovery of Time'' (1965), Nisbet, ''History of the Idea of Progress'' (1980), and Bowler, ''The Invention of Progress'' (1989). It is true that the idea of progress as the normal condition was doubted by some thinkers during the nineteenth century (and especially in opposition to the idea of biological evolution), but this was a minor and intermittent countercurrent. See Stocking, ''Race, Culture, and Evolution'' (1987) and Bowler, ''The Invention of Progress'' (1989).</ref> In none of this thought was there any real suspicion that non-European civilizations might have had much to do with the earlier, medieval progress of Christian Europe, or much to do with its modern (sixteenth- to eighteenth-century) progress except in the purely passive role of provider of labor, commodities, and land for settlement, and, marginally, in some traits of technology and art. Nor was there very much awareness that colonialism and its windfalls—inflow of capital, intensification of intra- as well as extra-European trade, increase in employment opportunities in mercantile centers and in the colonial world, and much more—was an important cause of European progress. Then, as later, the European conception of its own dynamic society attributed dynamism not to external causes but to internal causes, and to God. This relatively constant blindness to the importance of colonialism, historically and even today, will claim our attention at various points in this book.

The development of a conception of Outside proceeded in a more complicated way. The sixteenth-century Spanish debates about the nature of New World Indians—Are they human? Can they receive the True Religion and, if so, can they be made slaves?—was a crucial part of the early formulation of diffusionism, because it entailed an attempt to conceptualize European expansion and explain why it was, somehow, natural, desirable, and profitable, and to conceptualize the societies that were being conquered and exploited, explaining why it was, again, natural for them to succumb and to provide Europeans with labor, land, and products.<ref>See Huddleston, ''Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492-1729'' (1967), Williams, ''The American Indian in Western Legal Thought'' (1990); Hulme, ''Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797'' (1992); Gossett, ''Race: The History of an Idea in America'' (1963).</ref> European views of New World peoples were formed rather quickly because in that region the basic pattern of colonialism emerged quickly. The enterprise was immensely profitable from the very beginning, from the first great shipments of gold in the early sixteenth century (see Chapter 4). Resistance was rapidly overcome in Spanish colonies and surviving Americans were rather quickly forced to submit to colonial exploitation. (I refer here to the major centers of early colonialism, such as central Mexico, the Greater Antilles, and the Andes.) In the next century the profitability of slave plantations in Brazil and the Antilles, and the fact that African slaves could, in spite of their resistance, be forced to work and produce profit for Europeans, added further to the conception of Outside: these people were naturally inferior to Europeans, naturally less brave, less freedom loving, less rational, and so on, and progress for them depended on acceptance of European domination, hence diffusion. In sum, the New World experience, with Native Americans, Africans, mestizos, and mulattos, in areas of mining, large-scale estate agriculture, commercial plantations, and so forth, produced the kernel of the diffusionist propositions (2, 4, and 5), which assert that non-Europe naturally depends on Europe for progress and this is due to a lack of the intellectual and spiritual qualities that Europeans possessed. It also produced the diffusionist proposition (6) that European expansion is natural and leads naturally to the transfer of wealth from non-Europe to Europe.

But these activities were taking place only in the New World and the slave-trading coasts of Africa. The civilizations of Sudanic, southern, and eastern Africa were not conquered by Europeans until (in most cases) the nineteenth century; the Ottoman Empire was not only formidable throughout this period, but was indeed expanding its territorial control in southeastern Europe at the same time that Iberians were conquering the New World. And the other great empires did not begin to succumb to colonialism before the mid-eighteenth century: European activities in nearly all parts of Asia and Africa were mainly matters of trade, with dominance of long-distance maritime trade, small territorial footholds here and there on certain coasts, and the like (see Chapter 4). Thus, in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, the diffusionist model of Outside which had been applied to Americans and to the groups of Africans transported to America as slaves could not be applied to the civilizations of the Old World.

For these Eastern Hemisphere civilizations a limited and somewhat tentative form of the diffusionist model was accepted during this period. These civilizations were indisputably rich and technically advanced. Rationality in the sense of inventiveness was clearly present, or at least had been present in the past, when the great and impressive innovations (technology, architecture, banking, and so on) had occurred. What these civilizations lacked was the moral component of rationality, because, fundamentally, they were not Christians. These were "Oriental despotisms," societies in which there was, naturally, cruelty, lack of freedom, lack of a decent life for the common people (while the elite wallowed in decadence and sin), etc. (We discuss this concept at some length in Chapter 2.) The moral failing necessarily led to an inability of these societies to progress in the present, the era when Europe is naturally progressing, although Europeans could not deny, even though they found it most puzzling, that these despotic civilizations had, indisputably, progressed in the past. (At times the puzzle was resolved by declaring that they had progressed in pre-Christian times, and had lost the Grace of God through having refused to accept Christianity.<ref>At times the notion was advanced that these civilizations had somehow evolved in antediluvian times and had not been wiped out in the Flood (see, for example, Keightley, ''Outlines of History'', 1849). Haskel (''Chronology and Universal History'', 1848, p. 9) speculates that Noah migrated to China where he or his descendants founded the Chinese monarchy. "The early improvement and populousness of the east, seems to favor this idea."</ref>) Only in the nineteenth century, with the rapid colonization of India, Southeast Asia, interior Africa, and (as a kind of collective colony) China, did the diffusionist propositions about Outside, and about the natural relations between Inside and Outside, become generalized to all of non-Europe. It was in this late period, I think, that the final diffusionist proposition, the notion of counterdiffusion of evil and savagery and disease from Outside to Inside, become fully developed. The bogeyman (from the Malay Buginese people) came from Outside. So too did Dracula, whose homeland lay on the edge of Asia.<ref>From the mid-nineteenth century or perhaps earlier, the literature on the occult, on ghosts and monsters, and the like, tended to focus on extra-European origins or homes or sources of the witches, monsters, demons, zombies, walking mummies, evil spells ("black magic"), artifacts with supernatural powers, and so on, all of which have a tendency to diffuse into Europe as a kind of counterdiffusion, an undertow beneath European expansionism. See Brantlinger, ''Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism'' (1988).</ref>

=== Classical Diffusionism ===

The nineteenth century was the classical era for colonialism, and the era when Eurocentric diffusionism assumed what I will call its classical form. After the Napoleonic Wars colonialism expanded and intensified with remarkable rapidity. Between 1810 and 1860 or thereabouts Europeans subdued most of Asia, settled most of North America, and began the penetration of Africa. Between 1860 and the start of World War I, the rest of Asia and Africa was occupied and the profits from colonialism, the value of capital accumulated in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, along with the riches flowing from newly settled areas of European settlement, expanded enormously. In the latter part of the century the rate of growth in colonial agricultural enterprise exceeded that of industrial development on a world scale, and other forms of development, such as the mining of nonprecious metals, were becoming important for the first time.<ref>See W. A. Lewis, ed., ''Tropical development, 1880-1913'' (1970).</ref> There is profound disagreement as to how important all of this was for European social and intellectual evolution in this period. I will enter this debate in Chapter 4, but for the present it is sufficient to assert that the overall effect of European expansion, through colonialism in the narrow sense, through settlement, and through semicolonial economic dominance, was profound enough to create a very large intellectual model, the classical form of diffusionism.

By 1870 or thereabouts there was broad agreement among European thinkers about the basic nature and dynamics of the world. Few doubted that biological and social evolution—that is, progress—were fundamental truths, although evolutionary processes were more often explained in religious or metaphysical ways than in naturalistic ways, as in Darwin's theory.<ref>See Bowler, ''The Invention of Progress'' (1989), Stocking, ''Victorian Anthropology'' (1987), Mandelbaum, ''History, Man and Reason'' (1971).</ref> It seemed clear that Europeans were naturally to experience permanent social evolution, that this had been God's or Nature's plan throughout history. Some historical thinkers described the general process in holistic terms, as the evolution of society or the state; others treated it in reductionist (in a sense, psychological) terms as an intellectual ascent, a matter of the steady advance of human reason, with capitalism, industry, and so on, treated as products of mind; but many thinkers (among them Herbert Spencer) saw no opposition between the social and intellectual models, treating progress as a kind of flowing stream, which carried with it an evolution both of society and of mind.<ref>Spencer, ''The Man Versus the State'' (1969). The complex interplay between individualistic and holistic theories of historical progress during the nineteenth century is discussed in G. H. Mead, ''Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century'' (1936) and Mandelbaum, ''History, Man and Reason'' (1971). I try to show in Blaut, ''The National Question: Decolonizing the Theory of Nationalism'' (1987b) how most theories of nationality and national evolution emerge from one or the other of these intellectual streams, one essentially Kantian and psychologistic, the other essentially Romantic and Hegelian.</ref> Thus by the 1870s at the latest the central diffusionist proposition, the notion of natural, continuous, internally generated progress in the European (or west European) core, was very firmly in place. Its truth was no longer really questioned by mainstream thinkers.

There was, at the same time, a convergence of views about the nature and historical dynamics of the non-European world. By the middle of the nineteenth century the biblical time scale had been rather definitively rejected (though not yet in all history textbooks), and it was no longer necessary to argue that differences between Europeans and all other cultures had to have evolved in the space of a few thousand years unless they had been there from the start, unless, that is, polygenists were right and some human groups had been created separately from, and perhaps much earlier than, Adam and Eve. This gave room for wide-ranging theorization about the way cultural differences had evolved. Paralleling this change was a general rejection of the literal biblical beliefs about the original nature of human society. Culture was now (after midcentury) quite generally seen as a product of evolution from very primitive beginnings, exemplified in the notion of a primordial "stone age." (According to the Old Testament, humans had possessed advanced technology, including agriculture and the use of metals, in the days of Genesis.)

The reasons for the rapid crystallization of beliefs about non-Europeans are complex, but the most important underlying reason was the progress of colonialism. This produced two effects in particular. One was a flood of information about non-European people and places, such that, for the first time, a coherent—though highly distorted—description could be given in the European literature about non-Europeans, both civilized and "savage." The second reason was a practical, political and economic interest in proving certain things to be true, and other things untrue, about the extra-European world and its people. The two processes were tightly interconnected.

Colonialism in its various forms, direct and indirect, was an immensely profitable business and considerable sums of money were invested in efforts to learn as much as possible about the people and resources of the regions to be conquered, dominated, and perhaps settled, and to learn as much as possible about the regions already conquered in order to facilitate the administration and economic exploitation of these regions. The nineteenth century was the age of scientific exploration—Darwin in the Beagle, Livingstone in Africa, Powell in the Rockies, and so on—but the sources of support for these efforts tended to be institutions with very practical interest in the regions being studied. Paralleling all of this was the great surge of missionary activity that supported some exploration (including Livingstone's) but most crucially led to the gathering of important, detailed, information about ethnography, languages, and geography by hundreds of dedicated missionaries throughout the non-European world. Also of great importance were the detailed reports that colonial administrators everywhere were required to submit, reports providing information about native legal systems, land tenure rules, production, and much more.

Most of what was learned about non-Europeans came from these sources. It is not necessary for me to dwell on the fact that the people who supplied the information were Europeans with very definite points of view, cultural, political, and religious lenses that forced them to see "natives" in ways that were highly distorted. A missionary might have great love and respect for the people among whom he or she worked but could not be expected to believe that the culture and mind of these non-Christians was on a par with that of Christian Europeans. A colonial administrator not only had cultural distortions but usually worked with economic interests and classes (European planters, mining corporations, zamindars, and so on) and consciously or unconsciously put forward views about common people, and about resources, that reflected the biases and concrete interests of these elite groups. Strictly speaking, missionaries and colonial administrators were in the business of diffusing Europe to non-Europe. Thus the entire corpus of information about non-Europeans that was gathered in this process has certain quite definite distortions. It was immensely valuable in spite of this fact, but the plain fact is that theories constructed from this information—and this includes the great bulk of nineteenth-century anthropological, geographic, and politicoeconomic theories about non-Europeans—are systematically distorted. The distortions are, broadly, those of diffusionism.

But colonial interest added an additional kind of distortion, a matter of shaping knowledge into theories that would prove useful for colonialism. Scientific and legal theories were constructed in general by policymakers and by intellectuals who were either themselves policymakers or were close to policy. (In England, for instance, an extraordinary percentage of the influential historians, social theorists, even novelists and poets, had direct connections with the East India Company, the Colonial Office, and other private and public agencies of empire.<ref>Among them: Malthus, J. S. Mill, T. Macauley, and Thackeray. See Brantlinger, ''Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914'' (1987). Also see Williams, ''British Historians and the West Indies'' (1966) and Said, ''Orientalism'' (1979).</ref>) I include under the label "theory" a wide range of general arguments, including the larger constructs of history.

At the most general level, intellectuals were shaping theories of social evolution which were in essence demonstrations that the postulates of diffusionism are natural law. As we noticed previously, the nineteenth-century debates between those called "evolutionists" and those called "diffusionists" were essentially debates between two versions of diffusionism. A great range of theories in both camps were constructs aimed to assist in colonial activity, and to develop and strengthen the doctrine that European colonialism is scientifically natural, a matter of the inevitable working out of social laws of human progress (development of the family, law, the state, etc.). Also at the very general level, seminal works of the middle and later nineteenth century on ancient and modern history presented various sophisticated diffusionist ideas, mainly about the reasons for and the facts of Europe's natural and persistent progress compared with other peoples, those now being colonized. These historical constructs were important in building support for colonial activities among European populations; and later, as colonial educational systems appeared, for convincing the natives that colonialism was natural, inevitable, and progressive.

In Chapter 2 I will discuss a number of these diffusionist theories which emerged, or became concrete, in the nineteenth century in the complex association of scholarship and colonialism, focusing on those theories that today underlie the myth of Europe's historical and cultural superiority. Here I need only show how classical diffusionism arose in tandem with classical colonialism, and for this purpose a pair of representative theories can be singled out by way of illustration.

One such theory was the postulate that non-Europeans have not developed concepts of private property in important material resources such as land. The theory asserted that private property emerged from ancient European roots, notably Roman land law and various putative Germanic traits relating to individualism; that other civilizations, lacking this history (and, by implication, lacking the mental and cultural qualities associated with this history), remained in a stage of evolution in which true individual ownership could not be fully conceptualized. These people, therefore, needed to have capitalism imposed on them. In fact, the theory was developed mainly by lawyers and administrators in the European colonial corporations and colonial offices, and had one very concrete purpose: to establish the legal basis for expropriating land from colonized peoples, on the fiction that the colonized had no property rights to this land because they had no concept of property rights in land.<ref>See Thapar, ''Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations'' (1978) and "Ideology and the Interpretation of Early Indian History" (1982), and B. Chandra, "Karl Marx, His Theories of Asian Societies, and Colonial Rule" (1981). We return to this issue in Chapter 2.</ref> Yet the theory became essentially an axiom in nineteenth-century intellectual thought. Even Karl Marx accepted it, and doing so produced a large theory about the evolution of private property—a major part of his theory about the origins of capitalism—in which it was argued (or rather assumed) that this evolution was peculiarly a European phenomenon, and that colonialism, for all its horrors, did at least bring about the diffusion of capitalism to the non-European world, a necessary though painful process for the non-Europeans. Thus even Marxism, perhaps the most antisystemic doctrine to come out of nineteenth-century Europe, was strongly shaped by diffusionism.<ref>See in particular Marx's article, "The British Rule in India" (1979). In later work, Marx and Engels adopted a much more negative opinion about colonialism, developing to some extent the idea of colonial underdevelopment: see Blaut, ''The National Question: Decolonizing the Theory of Nationalism'' (1987b) for a discussion.</ref>

A larger form of this doctrine, the more general "myth of emptiness," the diffusionist idea that a colonized or colonizable territory was empty of population, or was populated only by wandering nomads, people with no fixed abode and therefore no claim to territory, or lacked people with a concept of political sovereignty or economic property, had similar colonialist functions, and arose in a similar way. The same is true of a closely related doctrine, the theory of "Oriental despotism" (older in point of origin, but developed fully in nineteenth-century diffusionist thought), according to which non-Europeans lack the concept of freedom, hence suffer despotic governments that stifle all progress—until Europeans bring freedom to them in the form of colonialism (which ironically is the purest negation of freedom). These and other theories that arose from classical diffusionism are still employed today to reinforce the myth of Europe's historical and cultural superiority; we will discuss them in Chapter 2, which seeks to refute this myth.

The era of classical diffusionism was the era of classical colonialism, the era when European expansion was so swift and so profitable that European superiority seemed almost to be a law of nature. Diffusionism, in its essence, codified this apparent fact into a general theory about European historical, cultural, and psychological superiority, non-European inferiority, and the inevitability and absolute righteousness of the process by which Europe and its traits diffused to non-Europe. Diffusionism then ramified the general theory into innumerable empirical beliefs in all the human sciences, in philosophy, in the arts.<ref>See Chapter 2.</ref> And it applied these beliefs in particular cases, explaining and justifying the individual acts of conquest, of repression, of exploitation. All of it was right, rational, and natural.

=== Modern Diffusionism ===

The nineteenth century, or more precisely the interval between the defeat of Napoleon and the beginning of World War I, was a time of relative peace and relative progress for Europeans. Colonialism fueled this process with resources, markets, cheap labor, and lands for settlement by Europeans, and colonialism resolved many of Europe's internal contradictions in the process. The idea that progress in European civilization and expansion of that civilization in space were different dimensions of the same historical force was the dominant idea of the time, and this was, of course, the central notion of diffusionism.

But all of this changed early in the twentieth century. The world is finite in size, so spatial expansion had to come to an end, and by 1900 all of the non-European world had been carved up into colonies, semicolonial spheres of control, and territories of settlement. This change of conditions produced a change in thought: the essential problem now was exploitation and the maintenance of control in the face of native resistance. Thus it became a question not of expansion but of equilibrium. At the same time tensions among European powers—some of the tensions were connected to conflicts over colonies—boiled over into general war among the European powers. Soon after World War I came the Great Depression. Then, immediately, World War II. Between 1914 and 1945, then, the minds of European intellectuals were focused not on the idea of progress and expansion, but on the question of how to prevent disaster: how to maintain, or return to, peace and prosperity. The code word was "normalcy."

The central notion of diffusionism did not fit this intellectual mood. The prevailing doctrines of this period were theories of stasis, of equilibrium, not theories of expansion. Economics dwelled on Keynesian ideas of equilibrium. In geography, the doctrine known as "regionalism" prevailed, the idea that the various parts of the world are stable, coherent, well-demarcated regions and tend to remain that way. Anthropology was emphasizing two equilibrium theories: "functionalism," a model of social systems (and cultures) as stable and self-correcting systems, and "cultural relativism," a doctrine that declared in essence that each culture has intrinsic worth. Anthropologists of course worked primarily among colonized peoples, and these two theories were closely integrated with colonial policy, mainly as a basis for policies designed to prevent native unrest while allowing European exploitation of land, minerals, and labor.<ref>See Asad, ''Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter'' (1975), and Temu and Swai, ''Historians and Africanist History'' (1981).</ref> Thus equilibrium doctrines were very widespread, probably dominant, in European thought throughout most of the first half of the twentieth century.

Diffusionism, in this period, seems to have gone into a partial eclipse. History and geography textbooks were still sublimely diffusionist, in an essentially nineteenth-century mood, emphasizing the beneficial spread of civilization to Africa, Asia, and Latin America ("where our bananas come from"), the teleological rise of "the West," and so on. In social thought, the doctrines of "extreme diffusionism" (discussed earlier) were still being advanced, and still debated.<ref>Important examples are Eliot Smith ''The Diffusion of Culture'' (1933), Perry, ''The Primordial Ocean'' (1935), Schmidt, ''The Culture Historical Method of Ethnology'' (1939), Griffith Taylor, ''Environment and Nation'' (1945). See critiques in Radin, ''The Method and Theory of Ethnology'' (1965), Lowie, ''The History of Ethnological Theory'' (1937), and Harris ''The Rise of Anthropological Theory'' (1968).</ref> And it should not be thought that the decline of diffusionism as a doctrine of cultural dynamics implied a decline in prejudice. The notion that non-Europeans are less rational, less innovative, and so on, was as intense as ever: perhaps even more intense since this was the period of Nazism and like doctrines, and since genetic racism seemed, in this era, to be science, not prejudice. We return to this matter in Chapter 2.

A new and modern form of diffusionism gained prominence after the end of World War II, in the period of collapsing colonial empires and an emerging "Third World" of underdeveloped but legally sovereign countries. This doctrine, generally known today by the title "modernization," or "the diffusion of modernization," arose in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Immediately after the Japanese surrender in 1945 it became clear that a number of colonies would gain independence immediately: liberation forces were now very strong and, in the wake of the world war, all of the colonial powers except the United States were now quite weak. All of them wanted to hold on to their colonies, the sources of great profit in the past and presumably also in the future. Each of the colonial powers maneuvered in its own way to hold on to its colonies, sometimes resorting to forcible efforts to suppress independence movements, sometimes conceding political independence grudgingly but peacefully where continued colonial control seemed patently impossible.<ref>Here I am of course rejecting the view, common among European scholars, that colonies were relinquished voluntarily. This view has been rejected almost universally by scholars in the formerly colonial world. It may conceivably have been true for a few small islands from which profits no longer flowed to the colonizing power, but even such cases are debatable. It is worth noting that the United States has not given independence to any of the colonies it held at the close of World War II; has not even formally conceded the right of full self-determination (including independence) to Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, the Marianas, etc. The other colonial powers would presumably have taken the same position, had they had the power to do so in the face of colonial pro-independence forces; in such cases as the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, Kenya, Angola, Mozambique, and so on, the colonizers tried to hold on to their possession by force of arms and failed. My view is set forth in Blaut, ''The National Question'' (1987b), chap. 4, and Blaut and Figueroa, ''Aspectos de la cuestion nacional en Puerto Rico'' (1988).</ref>

All colonies had been saturated during the classical colonial era with the ideological message that economic and social progress for the colonial people had to come through the diffusion of "modernization" from the colonizing power. "Modernization" meant the diffusion of a modern economy (with major corporations owned by the colonizer), a modern public administration (the colonial political structure), a modern technical infrastructure (bridges, dams, and the like, built by the colonizer), and so on. I call this an ideological message, but it was in fact believed in profoundly by the colonizers, who felt that their mission was, indeed, to diffuse their own civilization to the peoples who were under their "colonial tutelage," and the fact that this mission produced wealth for their own country seemed only logical (recall diffusionist proposition 6). In the new situation the colonizers had to persuade the colonized that the "modernization" message was still valid. Doing so, they might convince the colonized to voluntarily relinquish the ideal of political independence in favor of the more pragmatic ideal of economic and social development under a wise and benevolent colonial rule. Or, if independence was insisted upon, this ideology would convince the people of the country now acquiring freedom that the only way to develop that country economically and socially was to retain the colonial economy, that is, to allow the colonizer's corporations and banks to continue their (profitable) work under the new regime: a system everyone today describes as "neocolonialism."

Now all colonial powers began a major campaign to intensify the process of colonial economic development.<ref>Representative examples include "Operation Bootstrap" in Puerto Rico, the Colonial Development and Welfare programs in parts of the British Empire, the increased funding for colonial agriculture and health departments, the establishment of colonial universities, and so on. These programs, regardless of their underlying political purposes (often hidden from the technical personnel involved) were, overall, very impressive.</ref> This should not be thought of as cynical or hypocritical: remember that diffusionism defined the colonial process as beneficial for the colonized as well as the colonizer, and the technical and other personnel involved in the new colonial development activities were utterly convinced that they were working for the advancement of the colonized people. At the same time, a parallel campaign was developed to further the same form of economic development in the independent countries, partly through agencies of the United Nations, partly through bilateral aid agreements.<ref>Often this work was a direct continuation of colonial technical work, often with the same personnel, now "foreign advisor" or "United Nations expert" rather than "colonial technical officer."</ref> The United States, now the leading economic power, began to establish its own aid programs in countries throughout the underdeveloped world. Again, this should not be dismissed as cynical and political: there was, in this period, a tremendously euphoric ideology that saw the end of the world war as the beginning of an Age of Development, a time when the advanced nations would work to bring—that is, diffuse—prosperity and advancement to the poor nations.

Decolonization spread, and many liberation movements and newly independent countries refused to accept the neocolonial option, either ejecting foreign corporations (as did Indonesia) or opting for a specifically socialist society. This added a new impetus to the diffusion-of-modernization project. Efforts to bring about development through diffusion were intensified in hopes that their success would lead countries to reject the anticapitalist and antifeign options. But the choice of either of these two options seemed to imply a political alignment with the Soviet Union and China, so the diffusion-of-modernization project now became important as a matter of foreign policy in the Cold War. In 1959 the Cuban revolutionary victory gave the project very high priority for the United States, which now treated modernization and economic development, particularly in Latin America, as a matter of the highest priority, calling for very large investment.<ref>Thus the Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps, the elevated funding of technical and financial agencies of the Organization of American States, and the like.</ref>

Modern diffusionism is the body of ideas which underlay, and still underlies, this new set of conditions in the Third World. The diffusion of modernization, as it is carried out by public policy makers and private corporations and theorized by intellectuals (at least in the metropolitan, formerly colonizing, countries), is considered to be essentially the process by which Third World countries gain prosperity by accepting the continuous and increasing diffusion of economic and technological plums from the formerly colonial countries, a process that now, as in the past, is supremely profitable for the latter. In the diffusionist belief system, it is profitable for everybody, and also is right, rational, and natural, just as it had been a century earlier.

The ideas of 1993 are of course very different from the ideas of 1893, so it would be wrong to think that modern diffusionism is the same as classical diffusionism. Biological racism is no longer part of the model (as we will see in Chapter 2), and few modern European thinkers believe that non-Europeans simply do not have the potential to develop eventually to the level of Europeans. Religious undertones are largely absent, and the notion that a Christian god began things with the putative ancestors of Europeans, in the Bible Lands, and thereafter guided Europeans, Christians, to persistent superiority over all others, is no longer very popular. The historical greatness of some non-European civilizations is now fully conceded. (But with one vital qualification: less rationality, less innovativeness, than European civilization. We deal with this in Chapter 2.)

After about a quarter-century of blind faith that the diffusion of modernization would bring about economic development everywhere, European experts and scholars now qualify their belief in this model, and in particular draw back from their former naive faith that the diffusion of modern technology, particularly in agriculture, is the key to economic development, the key to what used to be called "the take-off into sustained growth."

But, all of this notwithstanding, the basic propositions of diffusionism remain in place. Europeans still believe that Inside has one fundamental cultural nature and Outside another, now admitting Japan into the Inside sector. It is still believed that Europe in the past displayed a progressiveness not found in any other civilizations, except in one or two places, at one or two moments of history. Although European scholars no longer insist that this fundamental difference between a progressive Inside and a stagnant or slow-moving Outside will persist into the indefinite future, most of them write and speak about the present and future as though this fundamental dynamic will continue (again qualifying the picture to admit Japan, and perhaps a few small East Asian societies, into the dynamic of Inside). But today, as we will see in the next chapter, there is a growing, though still small, group of European scholars, mainly responding to the newer ideas that now emanate from non-European scholarship in postcolonial societies, who question the overall diffusionist model, and who deny its historical conceptions about the superiority of Inside over Outside.

== World Models and Worldly Interests ==

Diffusionism is a poor theory. Diffusionism, as I argue in this book, is not good geography and not good history. Yet it exerts a tremendous influence on scholarship, and has done so for a very long time. How do we account for the fact that a bad theory can be so widely believed to be true, and for such a long time? We should briefly consider this question before we shift from the discussion of the nature and evolution of diffusionism as a theory to the discussion of empirical history, the topic of later chapters. It is important to understand how this (and every) theory interlocks with other ideas and responds to social interests.

=== The Ethnography of Beliefs ===

In this discussion we will look at ideas as cultural facts: we will look at them ethnographically, as beliefs held by human beings who belong to specific sorts of communities and categories. We will see that a study of ideas-as-beliefs is quite different from an inquiry into the validity or truth of ideas, and that the study of ideas-as-beliefs is in some cases the more important and more basic of the two sorts of inquiry. We will see, in addition, that scientific beliefs arrange themselves in larger structures, belief systems, and that belief systems (like diffusionism) have certain crucial relationships of compatibility to one another and conformality to the values or interests of the groups of people who hold them to be valid. Pursuing this ethnographic exploration of the character of ideas-as-beliefs we will, I think, discover why the theory of diffusionism has had a life history that is more clearly explained by the life history of European society, and more particularly European colonialism, than it is by any intellectual or social process within the scientific community.

Scientific ideas, and empirical ideas in general, can be examined in two ways. One is comfortable and traditional. It considers ideas in terms of their communicated meaning. Are they logical; that is, do they reflect an internally consistent argument? Are they valid in the sense that what they assert about the real world seems to have evidential support? This combination of logic, or structure of argument, and evidential basis is the kind of thing we look for whenever we evaluate scientific ideas—indeed all ideas that concern empirical reality. The second way of looking at ideas inquires about the people who believe a given idea, who communicate it to others as a belief, and about the people who listen and in turn accept the idea as a belief. The question whether a person believes in the validity of an idea is not at all the same as the question whether the idea is in fact a valid one. Questions about belief status are matters of ethnography: of finding out why beliefs are held by given people; how beliefs come to be accepted and rejected by these people; how given beliefs are connected in the minds of these people with other beliefs held by them; how new candidate beliefs are weighed and accepted or rejected; and how beliefs as such are connected to other parts of culture, including values, social organization, class organization, politics, and so on. What makes this kind of inquiry threatening is the fact that it can provide independent and reliable evidence that a given group of people holds a given idea to be true for reasons that have little to do with logic and evidence, for reasons grounded in culture.

Interestingly, we experience no discomfort and sense no threat when we read an account written by some anthropologist or cultural geographer about the beliefs, values, myths, and so on, of some small and obscure society in some far corner of the earth. Indeed, we expect an anthropologist to tell us more about the social or cultural reason why the "natives" hold to these ideas than about the validity of the ideas. In this kind of context it is quite normal to have a description of ideas that distinguishes between the matter of their logical and evidential basis and the matter of their cultural binding. But when this ethnographic approach is applied to what are called "Western" ideas, in the realms of science, history, and the like, the results are disturbing and the enterprise itself seems somehow improper.

Ideas are, so to speak, surrounded by culture, and we can examine the surroundings and the way ideas are embedded in their surroundings. This is the ethnographic study of ideas. Now it happens to be a terminological convention in the field of anthropology to attach the prefix ''ethno-'' to a word designating a particular field of knowledge, such as medicine, botany, geography, and the like, when our purpose is to study that body of knowledge ethnographically. The study of "medicine," for instance, is different from the study of "ethnomedicine." The latter is an ethnographic field, asking what the medical beliefs are in a given culture, how these beliefs relate to the rest of that culture, and how to generalize cross-culturally about medical beliefs in all (or some set) of cultures. When we put together along with ethnomedicine all the other scientific fields prefixed by "ethno-," we get, naturally enough, ethnoscience, meaning the ethnographic study of all sciences; more broadly, all fields of empirical belief. Ethnohistory is part of that corpus.<ref>On ethnoscience, see, for example, Conklin, "Lexicographical Treatment of Folk Taxonomies" (1969), Frake, "The Ethnographic Study of Cognitive Systems" (1969), Blaut, "Some Principles of Ethnogeography" (1978), and Spradley and McCurdy, ''Anthropology: A Cultural Perspective'' (1975). In my view, the categories "history" and "science" cannot be distinguished ontologically, although historiography is hardly an exact science.</ref> So, too, is ethnogeography.

The subject matter of ethnoscience is belief. Ordinarily we look at beliefs as they are enshrined in empirical statements, generally sentences that assert some predicate to be true about some subject. The fundamental, though not the smallest, unit of study in ethnoscience is the statement of belief and the person or group who makes—and holds to—this belief statement. For every empirical statement in social science there is an ethnoscientific question about its belief status and there is a profoundly different question about its truth status. The two questions do not forever remain separate, but they come together only at the conclusion of a long analysis. That analysis explains in the end why so many diffusionist statements in which historians and geographers firmly believe are really false.

The study of beliefs is also the study of belief-holding groups. Two very important points have to be made about belief-holding groups. A belief-holding group can be a group of any type. However, among the various types of belief-holding groups, the most fundamentally important are cultures, classes, and combinations that can be thought of as ethnoclasses. None of these types is an abstraction, except in the matter of defining units and boundaries. Cultures are highly variable from place to place and person to person, but the analytical unit itself is real and concrete. Its individual members also have concrete reality. There is no philosophical conundrum about the cultural whole "versus" its individual (human) parts in the matters we are discussing now. Thus there is an ethnoscience of each individual human being and also an ethnoscience of groups as collectives. Classes are a bit more problematic. However, most people accept the broad idea that there is a basic division between two class communities, one, the working class, the other an elite class, deploying political power and generally accumulating wealth. I will simply take it as given here that a rough class bifurcation exists in most societies of this and the preceding century, while conceding that it is not always possible to tell whether a given group in a given society belongs to the working (producing) class or to the elite class or to some ambiguous or uncertain grouping that does not fit comfortably in either of the two. One such problematic grouping that relates closely to the issues discussed in this book includes professors and others engaged in studying and writing about society and the environment. They are not members of the accumulating class, the elite, but scholars and writers are in most cases (not all) strongly bound to that class, and for all their intellectual penetration, discipline, and honesty, they tend to think, say, and write down ideas that are useful to the elite. This is true most pointedly for ideas of the sort related to diffusionism.

Culture and class intersect in ethnoclass communities. There is a crucial use in this book for the concept of an ethnoclass community. I will argue strongly that the elite groupings of European countries together, in spite of their cultural (and national) differences, are a basic and permanent belief-holding group, and that their beliefs form, to a large extent, a single ethnogeography and ethnoscience. This reflects the fact that, for the period with which we are mainly concerned, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these elites have had a common set of interests in relation to the working classes of their own countries and of the non-European world, and they have together underwritten the production of a coherent belief system about the European world, the non-European world, and the interactions between the two. The most important proposition in this book, in fact, is the assertion that diffusionist ideas are at the core of the single belief system generated under the influence of, and for the interests of, the European elite. Although it should not be thought that the science and history produced under the stimulus of this ethnoclass is "biased," nevertheless we will see that the entire body of ideas concerning geography, history, and social science are strongly influenced by their ethnoclass patronage. Overall, and through the two-century-long flow of ideas, the product is a body of diffusionist beliefs which persist, and continue to influence social practice, although they are quite unscientific.

Beliefs assemble themselves into belief systems. The difference is not exactly a matter of relative complexity. Most simple beliefs are just those ideas that can be expressed in simple declarative sentences (although some call for a poem or a painting), and which people do express as assertions, with more or less confidence as to their veracity. We are interested in three things about these belief sentences and the acts in which they are expressed. They are empirical (not purely logical or purely evaluative). They are expressed as true, or possibly true. And they are thought of by the belief holders as cognitively whole or discriminable, as, putting it crudely, "concept," "ideas." What makes such a hard-to-be-precise-about unit important is the fact that individual humans do not simply think up such ideas or concepts out of thin air or immediate perceptual experience. These unit beliefs tend to retain their character as beliefs through long intervals of time, often generations, and among large numbers of people. Still more structure is to be found in a belief system that consists of chains of statements connected together by implication ("because..."). This kind of belief system I will call, unoriginally, an argument. It simply needs to be noted that the chain of statements in an argument may or may not proceed from simple to complex. A tighter structure is to be found in those systems called theories. Simple beliefs, then, are aggregated in various ways into belief structures, belief systems. Each belief system, in turn, is assembled (psychologically) into various sorts of higher order systems.

The highest level, comprehending all of the empirical beliefs held by a given belief-holding unit—including some beliefs that contradict one another—is the group's (or individual's) ethnoscience as a whole. Included here are all of the beliefs held to be true, or possibly true, about the external world, natural and social; beliefs about the self or person; and beliefs about technique—the self's capability to manipulate and influence the world. The ethnoscience, in a way, is an encyclopedia.

How does it happen that a new belief is admitted into a belief system? The question is not where new ideas come from but how they become validated, that is, given a kind of social license that admits them to the status of a belief, a belief that is at least accepted as a tenable hypothesis, a "reasonable idea," and at most accepted as fact. Three quite distinct judgments—I think also distinct procedures—are involved in this licensing process. One is a judgment of compatibility. The second is a judgment of verifiability (the matter of empirical verification). The third is a judgment of conformity (or value conformality). Scholarly conceits to the contrary notwithstanding, verification is the least important of the three.

All the belief systems held by a given group are in one way or another interrelated. Some are tightly connected: one theory may seem to follow directly from another, for example. Normally the relationship is much looser. But all belief systems have one basic and common relationship with all other belief systems held by a group. They are compatible. This means that they can coexist peacefully in the same ethnoscience: they are not cognitively or culturally dissonant. Although beliefs may occasionally contradict one another, total lack of relationship is not in principle possible: directly or indirectly, all beliefs held by a given belief-holding group (or individual) are somehow linked together, and some judgment of their compatibility will be made more or less often. Typically, belief systems reinforce one another: "If P is true, it is reasonable to suppose that Q is true." Or "If P is true, it follows necessarily that Q is true." What counts here, because this is an ethnographic scenario, is the fact that the belief systems are judged to be compatible. The judgment of compatibility is not simply a definition, an assertion to the effect that when the group holds two or more beliefs at the same time they are merely labeled "compatible." Compatibility is the outcome of an important social process. The process is most transparent when new candidate beliefs are introduced: when some new hypothesis is proposed within a belief-holding group and must, as it were, apply for a license. One of the most crucial tests it must pass is that of compatibility with existing beliefs.

Compatibility is the loosest of all relations among theories and other beliefs within an ethnoscience. Compatibility is, in a sense, a bridge that must be built over gaps in the overall body of thought. One sort of gap is obvious: it is the incompleteness of knowledge. The other sort, less obvious, is highly significant for the argument of this book. Here, the gap among theories (and other beliefs) is actually filled, but not by argument. In ordinary language, "it seems reasonable" to suppose that one theory lends support to another, or one historical belief is explained by another. This matter of "reasonableness" bears very close examination, because "reasonableness" is that form of the relation of compatibility which allows the most absurdly unreasonable ideas to pass for well-founded scientific argument.

Broadly speaking, there are two important ways in which gaps are bridged with "reasonableness" in place of—and disguising the lack of—an explicit, defensible argument. One way calls for an insertion of value statements in place of belief statements; we will explore this device in the next section. The other device lies within the belief system itself. It substitutes, for an explicit argument, an implicit one. To understand how it works we have to distinguish between explicit and implicit beliefs.

Implicit beliefs are usually matters "too obvious to mention," "beneath notice," "obviously true," "taken for granted." They are ordinary beliefs (and theories) which tend not to surface in discourse. There is nothing mysterious about most implicit beliefs; they are not somehow buried in the unconscious, or deliberately hidden from view. Some beliefs simply tend to be more often thought about consciously and verbalized than others, for a variety of unsurprising reasons. Those readily verbalized are explicit beliefs, those not, are implicit beliefs. There is no hard line of demarcation in a case of this sort, involving informal communication of belief.

But the demarcation is quite sharp in the case of formal, written and published, expositions of belief. The implicit beliefs are simply not written about. If they emerge in print at all, it is in the form of explicitly stated assumptions, or "axioms." Here, the conclusion that terminates an implicit argument is exposed to view, but not the argument itself. Rarely is there any attempt to deceive or obfuscate. The writer merely takes it for granted that the reader holds the same set of implicit beliefs and is willing to accept the "reasonableness" of unsupported assumptions. Both share the same ethnoscience and the same value system.

Implicit beliefs, as we will see, are the weakest link in the diffusionist world model. Throughout this book we will encounter diffusionist theories that simply hang in the air, unsupported by argument and evidence. In fact we will find, for large chunks of the diffusionist world model, that most of the propositions which would be needed to make these areas of belief coherent and sound are simply missing. In other words, relatively few of the beliefs are explicit and grounded. And these few are not connected together, so the fabric as a whole is incomplete. It seems complete only to those who are prepared to take a great deal for granted, who fill in the gaps with implicit beliefs.

Verification is the matter of testing a candidate belief to see whether it fits the facts. There are various kinds of test and various controversies about the nature of verification, but such questions need not detain us. The normal sort of verification involves a search for evidence that would seem to support or contradict the new hypothesis, the candidate belief. The process is never complete: everyone, of every culture and community, has to be satisfied with partial confirmation (and disconfirmation) of empirical beliefs. For us the important point about verification is this: verification is never sufficient grounds for converting a hypothesis into an accepted belief. Nor is it even necessary.

The judgment of compatibility is more crucial than that of verifiability, and this holds true among social scientists as it does among all other groups of natives. Part of verification is itself a matter of judging compatibility. The words and procedures used in verification, the criteria on which a test is deemed adequate, and much more besides, are drawn from the stock of existing beliefs, and the test of a candidate belief is therefore only partly a matter of direct confrontation with new evidence. But this is not the main point. In any belief-holding group, a new idea, a candidate belief, tends to be judged more on the basis of the way it fits into the existing belief system than on the basis of its directly apprehended meaning.

The same thing happens in self-conscious scholarship. It has long been a truism that existing scientific beliefs tend to be defended in the face of new hypotheses that question them, and the defense is often fierce, bitter, and dogmatic. (Whitehead once called scientists "the leading dogmatists. Advance in detail is admitted: fundamental novelty is barred."<ref>Whitehead, ''Science and Philosophy'' (1948), p. 129.</ref>) The truism was popularized by Thomas Kuhn in a dramatic scenario that he called a theory of scientific revolutions: in essence, crucial scientific beliefs gain a position of suzeriegnity, their supporters gain positions of academic power, and so the beliefs become entrenched and hold sway for long periods of time, even after evidence against these beliefs has massively accumulated. Eventually there is a historic break: a "scientific revolution" which overthrows the existing ruling theory or paradigm and installs another one, which, in turn, holds sway for a period of time.<ref>Kuhn, ''The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'' (1970). More relevant is Fleck's ''Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact'' (1979).</ref> But Kuhn's frame of reference (in his ''Structure of Scientific Revolutions'') was physical science, and we are told very little about the historic process by which beliefs gain, and retain, hegemony in social science, including history and cultural geography. In these fields the process is fundamentally different. For one thing, influential beliefs hold sway for reasons that reflect much more directly the interests of elite groups outside of the scholarly field itself, and the replacement of one theory by another reflects mainly these external interests, not a Kuhn-like intellectual revolution within the community of scholars itself. Secondly, in these fields it is much less easy to attack old theories with new evidence, in part because scientific methods here are usually very inexact and in part because the collecting of evidence itself is guided and sometimes determined by existing beliefs. Thus it is that large belief structures, like diffusionism, persist for generations, untroubled by "scientific revolutions."

People have a tendency, sometimes slight, sometimes strong, to believe what they want to believe. Another way of putting this is to say that beliefs are influenced by values, or that cognition interacts with valuation to produce what Tolman elegantly called the "belief-value matrix."<ref>Tolman, "A Psychological Model" (1951).</ref> The most straightforward (or at least modest) notion of "values" finds them to be judgments of preference, assertions of what is good and bad, right and wrong, liked and disliked, by individuals and groups. Values, like beliefs, are aggregated into systems. But value systems are very different from empirical belief systems. The latter, broadly put, assert things to be true (or untrue) about the world; the former assert things to be preferable (or not), hence they call for action upon the things uncovered by belief, and John Dewey was right in describing such assertions as "agendas."<ref>Dewey, "The Logic of Judgements of Practice," in his ''Essays in Experimental Logic'' (1916).</ref> Viewed in this way, the realm of value is not autonomous and opaque. It is mainly a transition zone between belief and practice. Values are interests.

Values interact with beliefs in a belief-value matrix. A belief system and a value system tend to maintain some degree of consistency with each other during limited periods (except in times of very rapid social change). This somewhat regular relation between the two systems I will call conformality, and it works both ways. Statements do not ordinarily become validated beliefs if they do not conform to the values, and therefore the interests, of the group. But value judgments indicate preferences for future action, and a given judgment is likely to be rejected by a group, sooner or later, if the future action it calls for is flagrantly impractical: if the action clearly cannot succeed given the nature of the real world as depicted in the belief system. Obviously, matters are more complex than this and also less predictable. In any case, the dominant belief system for a group must in the long run conform to the value system, and when the two fall out of conformality, one or the other will be forced to change. Since values are the expression of concrete worldly interests, the belief system will tend, in ordinary times, to bend more readily to the value system, and to worldly interests, than vice versa.

The judgment of value conformality is a crucial part of the binding of belief to culture. The notion that beliefs are culture-bound is of course a familiar one, but the idea that this proposition applies fully to the belief systems of scholars is not really accepted except in the most general and abstract way and therefore in a way that does not usually permit an analysis of the manner in which a particular scholar's values (or interests) affect his or her empirical statements. The stronger proposition, that all new ideas in social science are vetted for their conformality to values, and more precisely to the value system of the elite of the society—which is not necessarily the value system of the scholars themselves—and that this process of validation normally and frequently leads to the acceptance and persistence of really unscientific ideas, is hardly even considered, even though it is normal doctrine in ethnoscience (normal, at least, when applied to natives other than ourselves).

But there is an even stronger proposition that I will defend in this book with concrete arguments and evidence: the proposition that our world-scale models, and many of our specific theories and factual truisms, are accepted mainly—and in some cases only—because of their conformality to the values of the European elites; that this has been the case since the beginning of the nineteenth century, and is true today. Many of these demonstrably false beliefs are built into the world model of diffusionism, and this is so because diffusionism is the central intellectual doctrine that explains and rationalizes the actions and interests of European colonialism and neocolonialism.

Conformality is really the crucial part of validation. This is not ordinarily a matter of the "establishment" suppressing free speech (although this happens quite frequently). The judgment of conformality is a complex binding process. At all times the dominant group (a class or ethnoclass) has a fairly definite set of concrete worldly interests. Some of these conflict with others, but all tend toward the maintenance of the elite group's power and position. Because of its power to reward, punish, and control, this group succeeds in convincing most people, including most scholars, that its interests are the interests of everyone. These interests are social, economic, and political agendas, and it is a simple transformation to insert the word "ought" and turn them into values. Viewed statically, the interests are always clear, and the values derived from them cohere into a dominant value system that more or less mirrors these interests. Hence we have at all times a kind of environment of values, surrounding and influencing the ongoing validation process in scholarship.

The way this influence is exerted is very complex in our society today, but it was quite simple and transparent in the last century, when the main lineaments of diffusionism and other beliefs related to colonialism were being sketched in. In those days, not only was it true, as Marx said, that the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class, but it was also true that almost nobody but the ruling class, and its subalterns, had the opportunity to render those ideas effective, in the form of publication, lecturing at influential schools and universities, and participating in policy formation and execution. Conformality, in those times and places, was accomplished largely through the social vetting process by which only those people who adhered to the dominant value system were in a good position to tender hypotheses as candidate beliefs. I do not believe that the process is altogether different today, but it would take us far afield to discuss it here at length. We can simply take note of the background of most professors (very few of whom are the offspring of poor or minority families), the reward structure in universities and consultantships, and other elements that jointly produce this result: few professional social scientists want to propose candidate beliefs which do not conform. This explains why, in spite of the most rigorous adherence to scientific method and scholarly canons, our theories remain, to a large degree, conformal.

In sum, validation proceeds by subjecting any candidate belief to three tests: compatibility, verifiability, and value conformality. Of these three, perhaps only conformality is essential (and then only in relatively tranquil times). Verification can be waived on occasion, provided that the hypothesis is both conformal to interests and nicely compatible with existing beliefs, be they explicit theories or implicit beliefs emerging as stated or unstated assumptions. Strong verification is, in any case, pretty hard to come by in the social sciences (a methodological fact that is often mistaken for an epistemological verity). In these fields, a judgment of compatibility is always rendered—if not on the candidate belief then on the person who proposes it—and it is most unusual for a new hypothesis or theory to become accepted as a belief if it contradicts the corpus of accepted beliefs in its field. But it is always the case that society and its elite need to be supplied with answers to pressing problems confronting them. So there is an important countercurrent. New hypotheses that display a touch of the novel and hold some possibility of solving an already recognized problem are encouraged, indeed rewarded. They must be compatible but not completely so.

There is simply no way that a scholar, once installed in the profession, can prevent conformal values from creeping into his or her work. This in spite of the fact that nearly all are honest, careful, and competent. The reason why my argument seems, incorrectly, to be an attack on scholarship is because the problem is almost always seen in connection with explicit beliefs, and with consciously held attitudes. The fields that study human society are a weak infusion of explicit theory within a body of belief that is largely implicit. Scientific method prevents us from accepting the arguments of an explicit theory merely because we want to do so. But the main grounding for each such theory is its compatibility with other beliefs in the system, expressed as a matter of "reasonableness." It is "reasonable" to accept certain assumptions (reflecting certain implicit beliefs) and not others. One theory seems "reasonable," or plausible, because it is compatible with another, accepted theory, although no explicit chain of connection exists: most links in the chain are buried in the realm of implicit belief. Finally, it seems "reasonable" to seek verification for a hypothesis with certain observations and not with others.

It should be added that the disciplined work of social scientists usually prevents them from unwittingly validating a hypothesis on grounds of value conformality. The problem, and it is a severe one, is that, thinking that our explicit beliefs are not validated by value conformality, we let value conformality control our implicit beliefs. These then provide a bridge across gaps between explicit theories, rendering them compatible, or serve up the assumptions which provide the starting point for new explicit theories, formal and informal. Scientific and scholarly method demands rigor only for the explicit theories.

=== Diffusionism as a Belief System ===

The discussion thus far has been designed to lay the foundation for an understanding of three aspects of the diffusionist belief system: its structure, its binding to certain groups in certain societies, and its evolution, this last aspect including the important questions of why diffusionism became prominent and why it has persisted. It would not be much of an oversimplification to say that diffusionism developed as the belief system appropriate to one powerful and permanent European interest: colonialism. From 1492 to the present the wealth drawn into Europe—meaning, as in all of this discussion, Greater Europe—from the non-European world has been a vital nutriment for the elite classes of Europe: for their maintenance of status within their societies, and for their progress. Whether this statement can be generalized to include all classes within European society, whether, that is, colonialism was an interest of the nonelite classes of Europe in most times and places, is a contentious issue which I do not need to address. I am merely asserting that (1) Europe's elite depended on colonialism; (2) Europe's elite was tremendously influential in the evolution of European ideas and more specifically European scholarship; and (3) Europe's elite held a permanent social interest in the creation and development of a conformal belief system, a body of thought that would rationalize, justify, and, most importantly, assist the colonial enterprise. As that enterprise evolved and changed, so too did the body of ideas constituting diffusionism.

Most of this book is devoted to a delineation and critique of diffusionist beliefs, so I do not need to review the nature of the belief system here. Suffice it to say, the doctrine ranges over all scales of fact, from world geography and world history to ideas about the qualities of individual human beings, European and non-European, and descriptions and explanations of particular local events. The scope of the diffusionist belief structure encompasses a fair share of European ethnoscience. That is, a fair share of the licensed belief statements in European ethnoscience are used within the diffusionist belief structure, although they are also used in other structures. (Some examples to be discussed in Chapter 2 are: beliefs about demographic behavior, about intelligence, about the origins of civilization, about the fertility of tropical soils.) These statements range from modest assertions of evidential fact to complex and elaborate theories, both formal and informal. They enter the diffusionist canon through all of the licensing procedures for belief acceptance discussed above. Over time, all of them go through the screening process of conformality with the value or interest of colonialism, or go through the indirect screening process that accords them the status of being compatible with other beliefs which are themselves conformal. Over time, the belief system accretes new diffusionist beliefs and discards those that contradict the canon or that have lost their relevance in a changing world. Since colonialism, in various newer forms such as neocolonialism, remains an interest of the elite, and since implicit beliefs go unnoticed and uncriticized, the process of adding, subtracting, and modifying diffusionist beliefs continues in the present. Were this not the case, the multitude of beliefs about Eurocentric history which claim our attention in this book would long since have been discarded.

Diffusionist beliefs at the space-time scale that embraces the whole world and the whole of history, tend to form a rather tightly structured theory, as we saw earlier in this chapter. The theory, in brief, describes the essential processes that take place in an "inner," essentially European, core sector of the world, describes those that take place in an "outer," essentially non-European sector, and describes the modes of interaction between the two sectors, the most important of which is the inner-to-outer diffusion of innovative ideas, people, and commodities.

We can describe this world-scale space-time theory as the "diffusionist world model." It is the colonizer's model of the world.

The obvious question arises: what would we conceive to be a nondiffusionist world model? This would be a world in which the processes at work in any one sector are expected also to be at work in the other sectors. In essence, this model is driven by a concept of equal capability of human beings—psychological unity—in all cultures and regions, and from this argument it demands that any spatial inequalities in matters relating to cultural evolution, and more specifically economic development, be explained. Stated differently: equality is the normal condition and inequalities need to be explained. Diffusionism, in contrast, expects basic inequality between the Inner and the Outer sectors of the world—and of humanity. The uniformitarian principle is not one of uniformity; it is the principle of human equality.

At space-time scales smaller than the world, the diffusionist belief system is very diffuse, parts of it hanging together as formally elegant theories, parts of it floating around as compatible but weakly connected belief statements. It would take us far beyond the scope of this book to attempt a description of all of the parts, levels, and subsystems in the diffusionist model as a whole, ranging upward and downward from the world model to the level of particular space-time event descriptions. But we can make a start.

== Notes ==

1. In this book the word "Europe" refers to the continent of Europe and to regions dominated by European culture elsewhere, regions like the United States and Canada.

2. This quick survey of 150 years or so of world history textbooks is, of course, very schematic and impressionistic. Some further comments may be of use. In textbooks of the first period, around 1850 (plus or minus a decade or so), the original home of Man is often stated to be the Garden of Eden, which is located by different textbook writers in different parts of western Asia. For instance: somewhere east of Canaan and near Mesopotamia (Robbins, ''The World Displayed in its History and Geography'', 1832, p. 13); somewhere in the "healthful" mountains between the Caspian Sea and Kashmir or Tibet (Müller, ''The History of the World to 1783'', 1842, pp. 27, 43-44); perhaps near the borders of the Mediterranean Sea (Tytler, ''Universal history, From the Creation to the beginning of the Eighteenth Century'', vol. 1, 1844, p. 17); in the Vale of Kashmir (Willard, ''Universal History in Perspective'', 1845, p. 34); somewhere between the Caucasus Mountains and the Himalayas (Keightley, ''Outlines of History'', 1849); in the Himalayas (Weber, ''Outlines of Universal History'', 1853, p. 6); in Armenia (Collier, ''Outlines of General History'', 1868). There seems to be a kind of median location of Eden near the Caucasus Mountains, which was also, by no coincidence, the supposed place of origin of the "Caucasian race." Noah, of course, began postdeluvian history on Mt. Ararat, in Armenia (also roughly in the region of the Caucasus). Noah is supposed to have migrated then to Europe (Whelpley, ''A Compound of History, From the Earliest Times'', vol. 1, 1844, p. 10), or Mesopotamia (Robbins, 1832, p. 20), or Palestine, or some other part of the Bible Lands. Noah's three sons are supposed, then, to have dispersed and to have founded the branches of mankind—the first great diffusion process. In most textbooks of this period history tends to move west; some textbooks present the Hegelian notion that history proceeds inexorably westward, following the sun, with the implication that the United States, farther west still, will replace Europe as the next center of world civilization.

It was widely believed in this period that nonwhites were not truly and fully human. One version of this theory, the notion of "polygenesis," claimed that God had created true humans in the Garden of Eden and other races—or at least the "black race"—in other places and times. This theory questioned the standard interpretation of the Old Testament (that everyone is descended from Adam and Eve), so, not surprisingly, it was not stated as truth in the textbooks I consulted. (I have not, however, looked at textbooks used in the antebellum South, and the theory of polygenesis was most popular in slaveholding regions, as an ideological grounding for the treatment of blacks as things rather than people.) Yet polygenesis was important enough to be mentioned and then rejected—in favor of the view that all humans are descendants of Adam and Eve—in some textbooks, down to the end of the century (see, for example, Dew, ''A Digest of the Laws, Customs, Manners, and Institutions of the Ancient and Modern Nations'', 1853; Fisher, ''Outlines of Universal History'', 1885; Duruy and Grosvenor, ''A General History of the World'', 1901). But polygenesis was not needed; the belief that nonwhites are inferior to whites is asserted in one way or another in all the textbooks I examined. The theory of "degeneration" served just as well as polygenesis. It was the notion that the descendants of Ham, and perhaps other biblical peoples, migrated away from the Bible Lands, eastward and southward, and degenerated from civilization toward savagery, or even lower, as they did so, because they had not accepted Christ, or because they migrated into inferior environments, or for some other reason. (See, for instance, Keightley, 1849, 5-6: "the savage is a degeneration from the civilized life," and Africans are near the apes.) Degeneration was asserted in some textbooks, but in most the simple fact of white superiority was stated and left unexplained. The history of the world is, in general, the history of the white race, or the Semitic and Aryan peoples (see below). For times later than the Roman era, non-Europe is scarcely discussed, except as a backdrop for discussions of the Crusades, the building of colonial empires, and the like. (See Harris, ''The Rise of Anthropological Theory'', 1968, for an excellent discussion of polygenesis and degeneration.)

Nearly all textbooks of the period around 1900 (give or take a few years) accepted the newer scientific theories about the age of the earth and the fact of biological evolution (though not the Darwinian theory of evolution). The biblical account of human history, however, was retained in many books, although fewer of them accepted the formerly standard Old Testament chronologies (for instance, that things began in 4004 B.C.). Books of this period tended to present the so-called "Aryan theory," a theory derived from philology but expanded into a theory of culture history. Earlier philologists had identified an "Aryan" or "Indo-European" language family, and also a "Semitic" family (which many authorities, including textbook writers, identified with Noah's sons Japheth and Shem, respectively). The white race consists of these two peoples. One branch of the Aryans supposedly migrated west into Europe (from the supposed "Aryan hearth," somewhere southwest or northwest of the Caucasus). These were progressive, energetic people, who founded European civilization mainly after they had acquired Christianity from the Semites, who invented the first barbaric civilizations and monotheism but then stagnated into a dreamy, decadent, unambitious culture and thereafter ceased to advance civilization. No other culture, apart from these two, had much to do with history. (According to Freeman, ''General Sketch of History'', 1872, p. 2, history "in the highest and truest sense is the history of the Aryan nations of Europe"; see also Collier, 1868; Swinton, ''Outlines of the World's History'', 1874; Gilman, ''First Steps in General History'', 1874; Anderson, ''New Manual of General History'', 1882; Steele and Steele, ''A Brief History of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Peoples'', 1883; Fisher, 1896; Quackenbos, ''Illustrated School History of the World'', 1889; Thalheimer, ''Outline of General History for the Use of Schools'', 1883; Sanderson, ''History of the World from the Earliest Time to the Year 1898''; Duruy and Grosvenor, 1901. Ploetz and Tillinghast presented this theory in ''Epitome of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern History'', first published in 1883, in its many editions down to 1925 when, in an edition edited by H. E. Barnes, the theory was finally eliminated.) See Bernal's ''Black Athena'' (1987, 1991) for an insightful discussion of the Aryan theory and related topics in the history of European thought.

Because the Old Testament spoke of agriculture—Cain knew farming and Abraham herded domesticated animals—the history textbooks tended not to address the problem of where agriculture was invented until very late in the nineteenth century, the period when science was beginning to deal with this problem. Some scientists and some textbook writers then began to speculate that, just possibly, agriculture was as old in continental Europe as it was in western Asia and Egypt. (From the point of view of science, see Joly, ''Man Before Metals'', 1897.) But the idea that agriculture originated in the Bible Lands remained dominant although now it was viewed (by most) as an invention, not an artifact of original creation. The ethnographic fact that some tribal peoples (for instance, in Australia) did not practice agriculture was commonly explained, in the textbooks of the earlier nineteenth century, in terms of the theory of degeneration: their ancestors had somehow lost the art. Later in the century it became more common to use the diffusionist conception that agriculture had been invented by west Asian or (conceivably) European peoples, then diffused outward over the rest of the world, and cultures that did not practice it in modern times simply had not yet acquired it, either because of their isolation or because they were too stupid to take it up.

The Orient Express was a famous train that ran between western Europe and western Asia. Although various routes were used in different eras, the basic line ran from Constantinople (Istanbul) through Greece to northern Italy or Austria, then on to France, and (via Ostend) England. Most of the history textbooks write about world history as though it marched northwesterward, rather like the westbound Orient Express, with stations (so to speak) in Athens, Rome, Paris, and London. (See Chapter 2 for further discussion of the Orient Express model.)

3. In nineteenth-century world history textbooks, Turkey was given some attention because of its political involvement with European affairs. World geography, in contrast to world history, always covered the entire world, and textbooks as well as the great multivolume descriptive geographies (like Reclus's classic 19-volume ''Nouvelle Géographie Universelle'', published between 1876 and 1894) gave considerable attention to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This should not mislead us, however. One of the primary functions of geography throughout this entire period was to teach European children what they needed to know about non-Europe in order to participate in their countries' imperial and commercial activities in these regions. See Hudson, "The New Geography and the New Imperialism: 1870-1918" (1977) and McKay, "Colonialism in the French Geographical Movement" (1943), on the close relation between geography and colonial activities.

4. The character of this newer approach can be seen if we look at two well-known modern university-level texts, one written by W. H. McNeill of the University of Chicago (''A World History'', 3rd ed., 1979), the other by J. M. Roberts of Oxford University (''The Hutchinson History of the World'', 2d ed., 1987; published in the United States as ''The Penguin History of the World''). For pre-Christian-era world history, more than three-quarters of the place-name mentions in both books are places in Europe and the Middle East (including North Africa); less than one-quarter of the place-name mentions are places in other parts of the world and only about 1% are in Africa. For the Christian era to A.D. 1491 there is significant divergence between the two books. In Roberts's text, European and Middle Eastern places constitute about 85% of place-name mentions. In McNeill's text, European and Middle Eastern places constitute only 60% of the place names mentioned, a significant departure from the older tradition although still well out of proportion to this region's size in area and population. (Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for only 2% of mentions for the period A.D. 1-1491.) In both books, therefore, the region I have been calling "Greater Europe" has considerably lower salience for pre-1492 history than was typically the case in older world history textbooks. As to explanation, however, both books retain much of the traditional perspective. Roberts gives almost no causal role to the cultures and regions of the world other than Europe and the Middle East (including North Africa) for any period prior to 1492. McNeill gives considerable weight to East Asia and some to South Asia for certain historical periods, but almost all of the world history-making forces emanate from Europe, western Asia, and North Africa for the period before 1492. (An exception is the Black Death, which, according to McNeill, swept westward into these regions from farther Asia. On this matter, see also McNeill's ''Plagues and Peoples'', 1976.) Examples of the Eurocentric explanations offered by both authors will be given in Chapter 2 of the present book.

It is, however, insufficient to look only at those present-day textbooks that are clearly identified as "world history" textbooks. Quite frequently university courses covering the subject of world history use history textbooks that carry titles like "The History of Western Civilization." (See, for instance, Lerner, et al., ''Western Civilizations: Their History and Their Culture'', 1988; Kagan, et al., ''The Western Heritage'', 1987; Chambers, et al., ''The Western Experience'', 1987.) If such a textbook neglects the non-Western world, there can be no complaint that it is misleading: the title clearly specifies "West" not "World." But if the course is designated as "world history" and the textbook is designated as "Western history," then we have a problem. The worst scenario would be one in which world-history teaching continues to be Eurocentric history in disguise. I do not know of any research which tests the following hypotheses: (1) Given that, today, historians are sensitive to the need to avoid Eurocentric bias in the teaching of world history, do some of them simply change the title to "Western" so that Eurocentrism becomes, then, licit? And (2) is it possible that there is a trend away from the teaching of "World" history and toward "Western" (etc.) history and that this trend reflects a reaction (or adjustment) to present-day demands for nontechnocentrism and "fairness?"

5. A school textbook is truly a key social document, a kind of modern stele. In the typical case, a book becomes accepted as a high school (or lower-level) textbook only after it has been reviewed very carefully by the publisher, school boards, and administrators, all of whom are intensely sensitive to the need to print acceptable doctrine; they are concerned to make it certain that children will read only those facts in their textbook which are considered to be acceptable as facts by the opinion-forming elite of the culture. The resulting textbook is, therefore, less an ordinary authored book than a vetted social statement of what is considered valid and acceptable for entry into the mind of the child. For this reason, research on textbooks (including college textbooks, in which the same process is at work, though more subtly) is, in fact, ethnographic research. It tells us about the belief system of the opinion-forming elite of the culture as a whole. Therefore, geography texts in the United States are really ethnogeography documents. Likewise, history texts are really ethnohistory documents. They are probably as useful as cultural artifacts as any old potsherd or inscription. See the final section of this chapter.

6. This argument is given much weight by Eurocentric Marxists, since class struggle, for Marxists, is the central force in historical evolution.

7. A form of political feudalism is sometimes conceded to have been developed earlier by the Chinese, but the great majority of European scholars, including most Marxists, believe that European feudalism was unique in representing a form of society that was a crucial, essential, stepping stone to modernity. See Chapter 3.

8. See Samir Amin's ''Eurocentrism'' (1988) for an excellent discussion of this notion. The word "Eurocentrism" apparently was coined quite recently, to assemble "European ethnocentrism" into one word. However, I (like Amin) do not think of Eurocentrism as merely a species of ethnocentrism, as the following paragraphs will make clear.

9. I use the word "community" to refer to any social unit, of any size. In this discussion, for the sake of simplicity, the "communities" will be thought of as villages distributed across a rural landscape. I neglect here the cases in which culture change results from the combination of an independent invention and a diffusion event. See my "Two Views of Diffusion" (1977) and "Diffusionism: A Uniformitarian Critique" (1987a).

10. See Jett, "Further Information on the Geography of the Blowgun and Its Implications for Transoceanic Contact" (1991); also see Carter, ''Man and the Land'' (1968), and Edmonson, "Neolithic Diffusion Rates" (1961).

11. See, for instance, Eliot Smith, ''The Diffusion of Culture'' (1933), Perry, ''The Primordial Ocean'' (1935), and Taylor, ''Environment and Nation'' (1945). Eliot Smith flatly asserts that the ancient diffusion process radiating mainly from Egypt and Phoenicia "continued for many centuries to play upon the Pacific littoral of America, where it is responsible for ... the remarkable Pre-Columbian civilizations" (quoted in Zwernemann, ''Culture History and African Anthropology'', 1983, p. 15).

12. On these matters, see Harris, ''The Rise of Anthropological Theory'' (1968) and Steward, ''Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution'' (1955).

13. See Koepping, ''Adolf Bastian and the Psychic Unity of Mankind'' (1983), Stocking ''Race, Culture, and Evolution'' (1968), and Harris, ''The Rise of Anthropological Theory'' (1968).

14. Often the antidiffusionist camp was labeled the "cultural evolutionist" camp, and the debate as a whole was labeled "diffusionism versus evolutionism." But, as I argue here, evolutionists were to some extent diffusionists and diffusionists were to some extent evolutionists. Moreover, I want to use the term "cultural evolution" in this book in a much broader and much less controversial sense, as indicating merely the search for explanation in larger questions of historical and cultural change. A problem that is "historical" becomes a problem of "cultural evolution" when we ask, broadly, "why?" Some scholars, of course, are not comfortable with this usage of the phrase "cultural evolution." For some it carries baggage of economic determinism or environmental determinism or technological determinism, or it signifies the notion of an invariant sequence of cultural stages through which all human groups must pass—but I mean none of that. Most cultural geographers use the phrase "cultural evolution" just about as I use it here.

15. Both forms are sometimes combined; for instance, in the nineteenth century northwestern Europe was considered (by northwestern Europeans) to be absolutely civilized, Africa absolutely uncivilized, and all other areas (of the Eastern Hemisphere) somewhere in between. These matters are discussed later in this book.

16. Max Weber's notion of "European rationality" is discussed in Chapter 2.

17. The varying conceptions of China, and also India, as semirational or intermittently rational or rational in some ways but not in others are discussed in Chapters 2 and 3.

18. The "bogeyman" refers to the Buginese, a Malay people who fought fiercely against the Europeans and so were stigmatized in this way. The most famous fictional vampire, Count Dracula, came to England from Outside (a barbarous mountain region on the frontier of the Turkish empire).

19. On the history of the idea of progress in European thought, see, for instance, G. H. Mead, ''Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century'' (1936), Toulmin and Goodfield, ''The Discovery of Time'' (1965), Nisbet, ''History of the Idea of Progress'' (1980), and Bowler, ''The Invention of Progress'' (1989). It is true that the idea of progress as the normal condition was doubted by some thinkers during the nineteenth century (and especially in opposition to the idea of biological evolution), but this was a minor and intermittent countercurrent. See Stocking, ''Race, Culture, and Evolution'' (1987) and Bowler, ''The Invention of Progress'' (1989).

20. See Huddleston, ''Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492-1729'' (1967), Williams, ''The American Indian in Western Legal Thought'' (1990); Hulme, ''Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797'' (1992); Gossett, ''Race: The History of an Idea in America'' (1963).

21. At times the notion was advanced that these civilizations had somehow evolved in antediluvian times and had not been wiped out in the Flood (see, for example, Keightley, ''Outlines of History'', 1849). Haskel (''Chronology and Universal History'', 1848, p. 9) speculates that Noah migrated to China where he or his descendants founded the Chinese monarchy. "The early improvement and populousness of the east, seems to favor this idea."

22. From the mid-nineteenth century or perhaps earlier, the literature on the occult, on ghosts and monsters, and the like, tended to focus on extra-European origins or homes or sources of the witches, monsters, demons, zombies, walking mummies, evil spells ("black magic"), artifacts with supernatural powers, and so on, all of which have a tendency to diffuse into Europe as a kind of counterdiffusion, an undertow beneath European expansionism. See Brantlinger, ''Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism'' (1988).

23. See W. A. Lewis, ed., ''Tropical development, 1880-1913'' (1970).

24. See Bowler, ''The Invention of Progress'' (1989), Stocking, ''Victorian Anthropology'' (1987), Mandelbaum, ''History, Man and Reason'' (1971).

25. Spencer, ''The Man Versus the State'' (1969). The complex interplay between individualistic and holistic theories of historical progress during the nineteenth century is discussed in G. H. Mead, ''Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century'' (1936) and Mandelbaum, ''History, Man and Reason'' (1971). I try to show in Blaut, ''The National Question: Decolonizing the Theory of Nationalism'' (1987b) how most theories of nationality and national evolution emerge from one or the other of these intellectual streams, one essentially Kantian and psychologistic, the other essentially Romantic and Hegelian.

26. Among them: Malthus, J. S. Mill, T. Macauley, and Thackeray. See Brantlinger, ''Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914'' (1987). Also see Williams, ''British Historians and the West Indies'' (1966) and Said, ''Orientalism'' (1979).

27. See Thapar, ''Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations'' (1978) and "Ideology and the Interpretation of Early Indian History" (1982), and B. Chandra, "Karl Marx, His Theories of Asian Societies, and Colonial Rule" (1981). We return to this issue in Chapter 2.

28. See in particular Marx's article, "The British Rule in India" (1979). In later work, Marx and Engels adopted a much more negative opinion about colonialism, developing to some extent the idea of colonial underdevelopment: see Blaut, ''The National Question: Decolonizing the Theory of Nationalism'' (1987b) for a discussion.

29. See Chapter 2.

30. See Asad, ''Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter'' (1975), and Temu and Swai, ''Historians and Africanist History'' (1981).

31. Important examples are Eliot Smith ''The Diffusion of Culture'' (1933), Perry, ''The Primordial Ocean'' (1935), Schmidt, ''The Culture Historical Method of Ethnology'' (1939), Griffith Taylor, ''Environment and Nation'' (1945). See critiques in Radin, ''The Method and Theory of Ethnology'' (1965), Lowie, ''The History of Ethnological Theory'' (1937), and Harris ''The Rise of Anthropological Theory'' (1968).

32. Here I am of course rejecting the view, common among European scholars, that colonies were relinquished voluntarily. This view has been rejected almost universally by scholars in the formerly colonial world. It may conceivably have been true for a few small islands from which profits no longer flowed to the colonizing power, but even such cases are debatable. It is worth noting that the United States has not given independence to any of the colonies it held at the close of World War II; has not even formally conceded the right of full self-determination (including independence) to Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, the Marianas, etc. The other colonial powers would presumably have taken the same position, had they had the power to do so in the face of colonial pro-independence forces; in such cases as the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, Kenya, Angola, Mozambique, and so on, the colonizers tried to hold on to their possession by force of arms and failed. My view is set forth in Blaut, ''The National Question'' (1987b), chap. 4, and Blaut and Figueroa, ''Aspectos de la cuestion nacional en Puerto Rico'' (1988).

33. Representative examples include "Operation Bootstrap" in Puerto Rico, the Colonial Development and Welfare programs in parts of the British Empire, the increased funding for colonial agriculture and health departments, the establishment of colonial universities, and so on. These programs, regardless of their underlying political purposes (often hidden from the technical personnel involved) were, overall, very impressive.

34. Often this work was a direct continuation of colonial technical work, often with the same personnel, now "foreign advisor" or "United Nations expert" rather than "colonial technical officer."

35. Thus the Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps, the elevated funding of technical and financial agencies of the Organization of American States, and the like.

36. On ethnoscience, see, for example, Conklin, "Lexicographical Treatment of Folk Taxonomies" (1969), Frake, "The Ethnographic Study of Cognitive Systems" (1969), Blaut, "Some Principles of Ethnogeography" (1978), and Spradley and McCurdy, ''Anthropology: A Cultural Perspective'' (1975). In my view, the categories "history" and "science" cannot be distinguished ontologically, although historiography is hardly an exact science.

37. Whitehead, ''Science and Philosophy'' (1948), p. 129.

38. Kuhn, ''The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'' (1970). More relevant is Fleck's ''Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact'' (1979).

39. Tolman, "A Psychological Model" (1951).

40. Dewey, "The Logic of Judgements of Practice," in his ''Essays in Experimental Logic'' (1916).

= CHAPTER 2: The Myth of the European Miracle =

Most European historians believe in some form of the theory of "the European miracle." This is the argument that Europe forged ahead of all other civilizations far back in history—in prehistoric or ancient or medieval times—and that this internally generated historical superiority or priority explains world history and geography after 1492: the modernization of Europe, the rise of capitalism, the conquest of the world. Most historians do not see anything miraculous in this process, but the phrase "the European miracle" became in the 1980s a very popular label for the whole family of theories about the supposedly unique rise of Europe before 1492. The phrase acquired its new popularity mainly from a book by Eric L. Jones which appeared in 1981, a book simply entitled ''The European Miracle''.<ref>Although Eric L. Jones's 1981 book ''The European Miracle'' popularized the phrase "the European miracle," it had been in use for a long time with the same essential meaning: the unique rise of Europe before or during the Middle Ages. Not every historian would describe this as a "miracle," but the term has wide acceptance, as evidence the fact that an international symposium entitled "The European Miracle" was held at Cambridge University in 1985.</ref>

The historians do not agree among themselves on the question why the miracle occurred: why Europe forged ahead in this perhaps miraculous way. Is it because Europeans are genetically superior? are culturally superior? live in a superior environment? Is it because one special, wonderful thing happened in Europe, or happened to Europeans at a special moment in history, giving Europeans a decisive advantage over other societies?

Nor do the historians agree about when the miracle occurred or began. Did it occur back in the prehistoric age in what some still call the "Aryan" or "Indo-European" culture? in the late-prehistoric "European 'Iron Age'?" Did it begin with the Greeks? with the Romans? in the early Middle Ages? in the late Middle Ages? Did it happen continuously throughout history—a series of miracles—each pushing the Europeans farther and farther ahead of the rest of humanity?

The historians debate these matters, the questions "why" and "when," but not the question "whether"—whether a miracle happened at all. Or, to be more precise, they do not even consider the possibility that the rise of Europe above other civilizations did not begin until 1492, that it resulted not from any European superiority of mind, culture, or environment, but rather from the riches and spoils obtained in the conquest and colonial exploitation of America and, later, Africa and Asia. This possibility is not debated at all, nor is it even discussed, although a very few historians (notably Janet Abu-Lughod, Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein) have come close to doing so in very recent years.<ref>Apparently my 1976 article, "Where Was Capitalism Born?" was the first publication to reject the "miracle" theory absolutely, that is, without qualification. In 1990 Samir Amin, commenting on a later paper of mine, indicated his basic agreement with this rejectionist position. (Amin, "Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism: A Comment," 1990; Blaut, "Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism," 1989; also see Blaut, "Fourteen Ninety-Two," 1992; and Amin, "On Jim Blaut's 'Fourteen Ninety-Two,'" 1992.) A few other historians have taken positions approaching this one; their views are discussed later in this chapter.</ref>

My task in this chapter and in Chapter 3 ("Before 1492") is to show that Europeans indeed had no superiority over non-Europeans at any time prior to 1492: they were not more advanced, not more modern, not more progressive. Then in Chapter 4 ("After 1492") I will show how colonial riches brought about the rise of Europe and led to Europe's ultimate hegemony over the world, showing also that Europe's internal characteristics do not explain 1492—do not, that is, explain the origins of colonialism.

There seem to be two basic ways to argue that the myth of the European miracle is wrong, that Europe did not surpass other world civilizations before 1492. The best way by far is to look at the facts of history, and demonstrate that the evolutionary processes that were going on in Europe during and before the Middle Ages were essentially like the processes taking place elsewhere in the world in terms of rate and direction of development. I will try to demonstrate precisely this in Chapter 3, which compares the medieval landscapes of Europe, Africa, and Asia, and shows how a transition from feudalism and toward capitalism was occurring in many parts of the Eastern Hemisphere just prior to 1492.

But the myth of Europe's unique "rise," its "miracle," is so deeply embedded in European historical thought that an ordinary argument from the facts probably would not be persuasive. As we saw in Chapter 1, the dominant theory has been defended by generations of historians, with practically no dissenting argument; it is supported as well by many other ideas which are accepted as unquestioned truth in European culture; and it fits in with and supports the interests of European countries (and corporations) in their dealings with the non-European world. For these reasons, I have decided to use another kind of argument—to demonstrate the fallacies in the dominant theory—as a sort of ground-laying for the empirical argument.

In the present chapter I will examine the most common arguments used by historians today to support the theory of the European miracle, and will try to show that they are unconvincing. This task is rendered somewhat complicated, for a small book like the present one, by the sheer number of different arguments currently in circulation and the number of historians who are writing books and articles on the subject of, and in support of, the theory of the European miracle. How, then, to proceed? I will advance by stages. First I will present a brief discussion of the ways in which historians have tended to argue the myth of the European miracle in recent decades, and I will show how a critical, revisionist point of view has begun to appear. Next I will lay out, in a kind of menu or classification or checklist, the most important arguments in support of this myth that are being put forward today, and I will try to show, for each argument in turn, how unconvincing it really is. In the third stage, I will summarize the empirical argument against the "miracle" position in two parts (the topics of Chapters 3 and 4, respectively): the evidence that Europe was not ahead of Africa and Asia (at a continental scale of attention) prior to 1492, and the evidence that colonialism after 1492 accounts for the selective rise of Europe.

== Mythmakers and Critics ==

The idea that Europe was more advanced and more progressive than all other civilizations prior to 1492 was the central idea of classical Eurocentric diffusionism, as we saw in Chapter 1. Therefore we do not have to consider the origins of the European miracle theory: it is our inheritance from earlier times. However, after World War II the doctrine assumed a distinctly modern form. First of all, the racist arguments had been decisively rejected: no longer was it argued that non-Europeans are genetically inferior to Europeans and that it is this inferiority that explains why they lagged behind in history. Historians now generally accepted the idea that European historical advantages reflected facts and happenings of much earlier times. European superiority was a matter of prior arrival by Europeans at a stage of development that all other people could aspire to reach in the future: a matter, therefore, of priority, not innate superiority. Second, there was a rapid increase in historical scholarship concerning the non-European world after 1945, grounded in rather pragmatic political and economic interests, and emanating in part from government- and foundation-sponsored "foreign area studies programs," but this scholarship nonetheless added greatly to the knowledge available in Western countries concerning non-Western history. The new knowledge was fairly quickly put to rather limited use: some of the wilder fables were discarded but the basic ideas about the non-Western world did not significantly change. Third, and most importantly, the postwar world came to embrace the crucial new theory of "modernization," the theory that the diffusion of European ideas, things, and influence would bring about the economic development of the non-Western world in the coming Age of Development. This theory had important effects on history writing.

=== Modernization as History ===

The theory of modernization addressed the present and the future but it was fundamentally historical. Its basic principle was the notion that whatever had led in the past to European superiority could now be diffused out into the non-European world and assist that world to more or less catch up. As we saw in the last chapter, this new doctrine went through two phases of development, the first in the post-World War II period of decolonization, the second—an intensification of the diffusion effort—after the rise of socialist countries in the Third World, and particularly after the Cuban revolutionary victory in 1959.

A number of historical works appeared in the 1960s as part of this intellectual process. Their central purpose was to show that the European pattern of development, including most particularly the development of capitalism, had been somehow the one, the natural course of human progress, and many of these volumes quite explicitly drew the ideological conclusion that the proper, natural course of future development in the Third World would be to follow this natural European pattern (but not, of course, slavishly). The most influential of these works was Rostow's 1960 volume, ''The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto''. This book was a plain assertion that Europe's past formula for development, up to and including capitalism, was the only workable formula for non-Europe's future development. Rostow married world history to world development in a single diffusionist argument.<ref>Another seminal work was Cyril Black's ''The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History'' (1966). Other such works in various fields will be discussed later in this chapter.</ref>

But there was a problem. Precisely what had caused the unique rise of Europe? Now we must return for a moment to the classical diffusionist period. European historians of the prior century were unanimous (I think) in their acceptance of the fundamental idea that Europe has been naturally and uniquely progressive. For most of them the basic force underlying the process was unquestioned: some drew on their religious faith, others built on metaphysical ideas (like Hegel's evolving "spirit"), others appealed to a Smithian or Utilitarian idea of individual human activity and purpose, and still others invoked the natural environment, or demographic behavior, or class struggle, or something else, but I think it likely that all of them held a common conception of an underlying force of Progress, a basic directional force like the Solar Wind, in relation to which partial facts (economic, psychological, environmental, and so on) were epiphenomenal or merely symptomatic. After World War II, however, a profoundly different set of basic beliefs became the norm. Now the problem of explaining the rise of Europe was seen as a total problem. That is, all of the phenomenon, including its most fundamental dynamics, required explanation, or, stated differently, had to be put into an explicit model in which explicit variables or "factors" were identified. There were, doubtless, many reasons for this new—or rather newly popular—approach, among them the maturation of the discipline of history itself, the loss of faith (in this age of chaos) in the idea of inevitable progress, the general secularization of European thought, and the development of social science disciplines. But whatever the overall explanation, what emerged was a set of historical models, some new, others (like Weberianism) refurbished, that explicitly tried to explain the "European miracle" in terms of specific causal factors. This was the signature of the modern form of diffusionist history. The effect of the modernization perspective was not, by any means, dominant in all of historical scholarship, but it was so in writings that sought to explain the larger transformations of European history, and particularly the problem of explaining the medieval changes that brought about the rise of capitalism and modernity—the "European miracle." We will review many of these explanatory propositions later in the present chapter.<ref>Perhaps one reason was the maturation of the discipline of history itself. Another was the influence, not entirely salutary, of positivistic scientific method on history, which led to an attempt to specify variables and "factors," and, if possible, quantify each of them. Another reason was the loss of faith in the nineteenth-century idea of inevitable progress: after nearly a half century of chaos and war, progress definitely did not appear to be something natural and inevitable; it had to be explained and also produced. Still a third reason was the general secularization of European thought, including history, such that human events could not be assumed to reflect guidance of a higher power. Another reason, possibly a very important one, was the general development of academic disciplines, and their involvement in (and nutrition from) international and domestic policy. This implied that each discipline, seeing the world with some degree of bias in favor of its own subject-as-factor (for economists, the market factor; for psychologists, the motivation factor; for sociologists, the demographic factor and the social-structural factor; for geographers, the resource factor; etc.) tended to argue in favor of historical models that treated our factor as crucial and those of others as secondary. Since many social scientists wrote history in this process, this led to some special pleading.</ref>

=== The Critique ===

The modernization approach was quickly challenged because it gave no real role to non-Europe, past and present, save as an essentially passive recipient of diffusions from Europe. For the period before 1492, it claimed that the significant evolutionary processes took place in Greater Europe. For the period from 1492 to World War II, it claimed that evolutionary processes continued to effloresce mainly in Europe and that colonialism brought the fruits of this progress to non-Europe. For the present and the future, progress for non-Europe (the Third World) would consist of the continued spread of innovations, mainly through mechanisms basically inherited from the colonial era. These propositions were distinctly unpopular among intellectuals of the Third World, and the rapid development of Third World scholarship in this postcolonial period led rather quickly to the emergence of a critical, even rejectionist, body of thought, including a new historiography.

The basic thinking went about as follows: For the precolonial era, it was necessary to resurrect one's own history and find out how it had contributed to the history of the world. (Colonialist history dismissed precolonial history for some colonies and distorted it for others. Therefore, as Amilcar Cabral said with deep irony, when the colonies gain their independence, they re-enter history.<ref>Cabral, ''Unity and Struggle'' (1979).</ref>) For the colonial era, the belief that colonialism itself the was source of all progress was patently untrue and colonial history had to be rewritten to show how it had led to poverty rather than to progress. On a world scale, new models had to be developed to show that colonialism, far from diffusing modernization to non-European societies, had diffused a mixture of good and bad innovations, which, for much of the world, had been a process not of development but of underdevelopment.<ref>As to the present and future, Third World intellectuals tended to make two arguments. Those who supported the idea of a capitalist form of development argued that economic development must consist of the defense of native capital against the corrosive diffusion into one's country of the economic and political dominance of European countries and corporations. For socialists, influence and dominance by international capitalism quite obviously had to be rejected. Both groups tended to adopt "dependency theory" or "underdevelopment theory," which was a theory both of history and of modern social processes and development. A relatively small minority of Third World intellectuals, usually reflecting the thinking and interests of the very wealthy and very right-wing sectors, welcomed the idea of economic domination by foreign capitalist interests. Since the wealthy social sectors dominated most Third World societies, this minority point of view often determined policy. Also, it received much more prominence than it deserved in the journals of the First World.</ref> This body of thought came to be known as "underdevelopment theory" in Africa and Asia and as "dependency theory" in Latin America. Out of it came the first serious critique of Eurocentric historiography.

One can trace the origins of this critique to earlier writings by a small number of historians, most of them colonial subjects, often writing in exile. Their main theme was a documentation of the negative effects of colonialism on a particular place and people. Some of the writers—among them W. E. B. DuBois, R. Palme Dutt, K. M. Panikkar, M. N. Roy, J. C. Van Leur, C. L. R. James, George Padmore, and Eric Williams—developed arguments on colonial processes at a world scale, and on the role of colonialism in the postmedieval and modern rise of capitalism and Europe. James showed that Caribbean slaves had played a role in the development of capitalism not fundamentally different from that of the working class in Europe. Williams's work ultimately had the strongest impact on Eurocentric history. He showed that the wealth from slavery and the slave plantation had been the crucial factor in the amassing of capital for the Industrial Revolution in England. This argument was the first major demonstration that non-Europe had played a central role in modernization itself, and a sizeable literature has grown up among European historians arguing about, and generally trying to counter, what is now generally called "the Williams thesis."<ref>See James, ''A History of Pan-African Revolt'' (1938), ''The Black Jacobins'' (1938), "The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery" (1970); Williams, ''Capitalism and Slavery'' (1944). We discuss these matters in Chapter 4.</ref> During and after the period of decolonization this critical historical literature expanded greatly, and a large number of scholars began a direct attack on the diffusionist history of the colonial period.

Much of this work will be discussed in later chapters. Here I want to make several concrete points about the critique. First of all, a number of historians from the European world (Bernal, Frank, Wallerstein, and others) joined Third World historians as central figures in the movement. Second, while the critique focused a good deal of attention on the pre-1492 period, showing that development had taken place in non-Europe—for instance, Sharma and Habib documented the development of feudal and postfeudal society in medieval India—for a long time very little scholarly attention, within this critical tradition, was focused on pre-1492 Europe; the first major work that dealt with this problematic from a non-Eurocentric point of view, that is—was Amin's 1974 volume ''Accumulation on a World Scale''.<ref>Amin, ''Accumulation on a World Scale'' (1974) and later works. My articles "Geographic Models of Imperialism" (1970) and "Where Was Capitalism Born?" (1976) laid out the skeleton of a general theory.</ref> This is perhaps understandable since most of the critical historians were themselves from the Third World, not from Europe, and European history was not often a major interest. Yet it was anomalous nonetheless. The core of the modernization doctrine in history was, after all, the argument that Europe had begun to modernize before other regions and before it established colonial control of other regions. Thus, to refute the basic thesis one would have to show (as I try to now in this book) that pre-1492 Europe was not uniquely progressive. Of course, part of this argument consists of demonstrations that other regions were progressive. But part of it must consist of refutations of the various "miracle" propositions, those that claim to find in ancient or medieval Europe some special quality of progressiveness.

There is another, quite curious anomaly in the relative lack of attention to pre-1492 Europe by historians in this critical tradition, the tradition associated with underdevelopment or dependency theory and the critique of colonialism. This has to do with the curious relation between Third World scholarship, much of which is Marxist, and the Marxist scholarship of the European world. European Marxists were among the main critics of colonialism and among the main contributors to dependency-underdevelopment theory. Marxist theory also inherited from former times a strong anticolonial flavor and a profound skepticism regarding the theories propounded by nineteenth-century mainstream European historians.<ref>I deal with this matter in ''The National Question'' (1987b).</ref> Yet, oddly, most European Marxist historians writing about pre-1492 Europe have tended to argue in favor of the uniqueness-of-Europe doctrine.

Mainstream European historians have also contributed to the critique of the central Eurocentric doctrine. This is not an anomaly. Scholars try to pursue the truth and accept it whether or not it accords with their ideological or cultural preferences. To some extent they succeed. Thus a number of European scholars specializing in non-Europe have uncovered some of the most important evidence against the Eurocentric model of pre-1492 world history. The work of the Dutch historian J. C. Van Leur in the 1930s, concerning the economic history of South and Southeast Asia is a classic example of this antisystemic scholarship.<ref>See Van Leur's 1934 essay "On Early Indonesian trade," reprinted in his ''Indonesian Trade and Society'' (1955).</ref> Another example relates to Chinese history. Half a century ago Duyvendak uncovered truly crucial facts about China's long-range voyaging in medieval times. Later, Needham and his associates produced a series of studies about the history of Chinese science and technology that had a profound impact on the Eurocentric model and (as we will see) forced Eurocentric historians to abandon a large piece of their argument concerning the supposed uniqueness of medieval European technology. Other Western scholars, like Wheatley and Elvin, delving into the empirical history of China with indifference to ideological questions, have produced other sorts of evidence about China's progressiveness in ancient and medieval times. All of this damages the miracle theory, although, as we will see later in this chapter, Eurocentric historians have found ways to repair most of the damage.<ref>Duyvendak, ''Ma Huan Re-examined'' (1933); Needham and collaborators, ''Science and Civilization in China'', published in 6 volumes between 1965 and 1984; Wheatley, ''The Golden Khersonese'' (1961) and ''The Pivot of the Four Quarters'' (1971); Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1973).</ref>

The critique of Eurocentric history is a very large subject, and our concern in this volume is with just one part of it: the critique of European miracle theories about the world before 1492, and related theories which treat early modern world history as though non-Europe, and colonialism, were merely marginal to evolutionary processes. On these issues the critique has not progressed very far. I will give a few examples of important recent contributions, and others will be cited throughout this book. Janet Abu-Lughod's recent (1989) book, ''Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350'', is a seminal study that demonstrates (I think conclusively) that Europe was not more progressive and not more advanced than other civilizations in A.D. 1350. Having made this demonstration, she offers only a tentative and partial explanation for the selective rise of Europe, and decline of the Orient, after 1350. She suggests that the divergence took place in the period between 1350 and 1492. (I argue in this book that the divergence occurred only after 1492, with the beginnings of massive accumulation in the Western Hemisphere, a windfall that did not accrue to non-European civilizations of the Eastern Hemisphere, and so gave Europeans their first and decisive advantage over these other civilizations. See Chapter 4 below.) Samir Amin has argued in various recent works that Europe was not more advanced than Africa and Asia at the end of the Middle Ages, but rather was more unstable: because of its marginal location at the edge of the hemispheric zone of civilization, medieval class society was less fully seated, less stable, less indurated in Europe than elsewhere, and so Europe changed toward capitalism more readily. This argument, although it does not grant any "miracle" to pre-1492 Europe, nonetheless allows one of the old beliefs to stand: that Europe was more dynamic than non-Europe during the Middle Ages.<ref>Amin, ''Unequal Development'' (1976), ''Eurocentrism'' (1988), "Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism: A Comment" (1990).</ref> Martin Bernal's new book ''Black Athena'' appears to have little connection to the subject of the present volume, yet his arguments are very closely connected indeed. Bernal shows that European historians have created a myth about ancient Europe according to which African and Asian origins and innovations are written out of history: the goddess Athena was African. Bernal's work undercuts the still very popular theories about ancient Europe's supposed uniqueness, and also exposes the ethnocentric and ideological roots of much of the European scholarship that underlies the classical diffusionist model.<ref>Bernal, ''Black Athena'', vol. 1 (1987) and vol. 2 (1991).</ref> Edward Said's 1979 volume, ''Orientalism'', a seminal critique of this process by which Eurocentrism and conservative ideology has dominated European scholarly writing about the Near East and Asia, is also important and quite relevant to our argument here. Other such works will be referred to as we proceed.<ref>Mention should also be made of Eric Wolf's 1982 book ''Europe and the Peoples Without History'' which provides a useful and important survey of the history of both European and non-European civilizations and shows how unconvincing is the theory that non-European civilizations, historically, were stagnant and unprogressive (that they were "peoples without history"). Wolf, however, stops short of questioning the truly crucial Eurocentric belief that Europeans were more progressive than non-Europeans in several ways that are crucial to the "European miracle" theory, and so he does not directly confront that theory. (It should be noted that most mainstream historians no longer argue that non-European civilizations are, or were, totally unprogressive, totally "unhistorical," arguing instead about slow rates of change, "blockages" inhibiting change, and the like—a difference of phrasing which, as we will see, is not always a difference of argument.)</ref>

=== The Countercritique ===

In recent years there has been an outpouring of writings that strongly defend the traditional Eurocentric view, upholding the European miracle theory in some of its various forms: we discuss many of these writings in this chapter. In the same stream of writings there are counterattacks against the more specific theories that question the traditional European views about slavery, colonialism, and the like (see Chapter 4), views that treat these processes and events as marginal in social evolution. And new theories (or modified forms of old theories) about the precise reason for the uniqueness of Europe are being put forward and discussed. I have a hunch that this is a scholarly movement that resonates with the new political attitudes concerning the Third World. In any event, the decade of the 1980s saw a number of writings of this sort and they appear to embody a rather conscious counterattack against the critical history discussed above.<ref>It is always risky to try to explain broad changes of fashion in scholarship, especially when the changes are still underway, so this interpretation cannot be more than a hunch, or hypothesis. Scholarly attitudes toward the Third World were very positive in the period of anticolonial and civil rights struggles. After the late 1960s the mood changed. Not only did more conservative views come to dominate the Western world, but rather unexpected difficulties emerged in the Third World itself: national conflicts, failure of development programs, and more. Western scholarship had never really abandoned the traditional view of Europe and its relations to non-Europe, including the diffusionist view of colonialism, and it appears that this older paradigm, never abandoned, simply became, once again, thoroughly dominant. Certainly the attention that had been paid previously to dependency theory and related views fell away among mainstream scholars. Among Marxists the process was even more dramatic, because it was less expected. In brief, Eurocentric Marxists who dismissed the role of the Third World both historically and in the present now became virtually the only Marxists within the academic world to pronounce upon issues related to the Third World. It became quite fashionable to insist, once again, that only the working class of the advanced capitalist countries can bring about socialism because each stage of history commences in this part of the world (Inside) before it spreads to the rest of the world (Outside). In the conservative camp, not only did Eurocentric views regain their hegemony, but one began, now, to hear whispers of views not far distant from racism: views about Third World peoples not having the potential to develop.</ref>

Some of the writers in this new literature are very self-consciously engaged in such a counterattack. A number of them are Marxists and are insisting that the true, the original, the correct Marxist doctrine recognizes the priority, past and present, of Europe. Robert Brenner, for example, boldly argues that capitalism was invented by northwestern Europeans, with no help from others, and therefore (600 years later) we must acknowledge the continued priority of Europe. A number of other Marxists, like Perry Anderson and Bill Warren, argue similar positions.<ref>See Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism" (1977), "Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe" (1985), "The Agrarian roots of European capitalism" (1985b); Anderson, ''Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism'' (1974), ''Lineages of the Absolute State'' (1974); Warren, ''Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism'' (1980).</ref> Among mainstream historians the most dramatic event was the appearance in 1981 of Eric L. Jones's ''The European Miracle''. This book is a remarkable recital of a goodly share of the colonial-era ideas about the precocity of Europe and the backwardness and irrationality of non-Europe. More remarkable still is the positive reception this book has received among many scholars, as though most of these old doctrines had not long since been disproved.

Another movement at present is an attempt to find qualities present in ancient and medieval European culture, and absent in other cultures, which were the reasons for European development: qualities in the European family, the European political system, the European mind, and so forth. This movement is actively resurrecting the turn-of-the-century views of Max Weber about Europe's supposed "rationality" and the like; indeed, most (not all) of these scholars can be thought of as Weberians and many of them define themselves in that way. I will discuss Weber's views later in this chapter, along with the views of some modern Weberian scholars, among them Michael Mann and John A. Hall.

In the next section of this chapter I will try to extract the most important of these newer views proclaiming Europe's pre-1492 "miracle," and I will try to show that these views are mistaken.

== The Myth ==

The myth of the European miracle is the doctrine that the rise of Europe resulted, essentially, from historical forces generated within Europe itself; that Europe's rise above other civilizations, in terms of level of development or rate of development or both, began before the dawn of the modern era, before 1492; that the post-1492 modernization of Europe came about essentially because of the working out of these older internal forces, not because of the inflowing of wealth and innovations from non-Europe; and that the post-1492 history of the non-European (colonial) world was essentially an outflowing of modernization from Europe. The core of the myth is the set of arguments about ancient and medieval Europe that allow the claim to be made, as truth, that Europe in 1492 was more modernized, or was modernizing more rapidly, than the rest of the world.

This is a myth in the classical sense of the word: a story about the rise of a culture that is believed widely by the members of that culture. It is also a myth in the sense of the word that implies something not true. In the following discussion I will unravel the fabric of this myth and show that the strands of belief that compose it are very feeble.<ref>I will discuss only the more important beliefs, perhaps neglecting a few of these. And I will give just enough evidence to show that these beliefs are not self-evidently true. Much fuller evidence is given, to dispute some of the beliefs, in Chapters 3 and 4.</ref>

The number of distinguishable belief statements that make up this myth are, I am sure, uncountable. One of the many reasons the myth is so durable is the fact that the basic generalization, the doctrine of the miracle, is supported by such a great variety of individual beliefs that historians of a given era can disprove some subset of these beliefs and yet the supporters of the myth can merely shift to other beliefs as grounding for the myth.

A more fundamental problem has to do with the way beliefs are licensed. Beliefs tend to gain acceptance if they support the myth, and are either rejected or denied attention if they do not do so. One part of this problem of belief licensing (and relicensing, delicensing, etc.) poses a particularly, perhaps uniquely, serious difficulty for efforts to critique the miracle theory. Many of the beliefs that support this theory are implicit, not explicit; that is, they do not enter into the scholarly discourse of historians, and sometimes they do not enter even into conscious discourse in general. (Recall the discussion of implicit beliefs in Chapter 1.) Many of these beliefs we learn as children. Others seem self-evidently "reasonable" because they accord with deep values of the culture, or with other, accepted beliefs (historical, practical, religious, and so on). Thus, the conviction that ancient and medieval Europe was more progressive than other civilizations is supported by explicit beliefs, but these lie in a matrix of implicit beliefs—unquestioned and usually unnoticed—about the progressive Europeans who "were our ancestors." By contrast, the matrix of implicit beliefs about historical non-Europe includes ideas of alienness, savagery, cruelty, cannibalism, deceitfulness, stupidity, cupidity, immodesty, dirtiness, disease, and so on—a matrix firmly supporting the general belief that non-Europe cannot have been progressive. Examples of these sorts of implicit beliefs, both positive and negative, will appear as we proceed.

One kind of explicit belief about European superiority will not be discussed here in detail. This is the openly religious statement, grounded in faith, that a Christian god will naturally raise His people higher than all others. Although we will refer to this view in various contexts, it is not the kind of argument that can be analyzed or criticized, because it is grounded in a faith that cannot be tested empirically; some believe it to be true and others do not, and that is as far as the matter can be taken. Suffice it to say at this point: the religious argument was so nearly universally accepted down to the nineteenth century that other arguments were not seen as necessary to many European intellectuals. Why, indeed, ask for the reasons that Christian Europeans are superior when we know that unbelievers will not go to heaven and, in this world, will not enjoy the grace of God? Unbelievers will naturally be rendered less intelligent, less fortunate, and so on. So long as scholars and educated people believed that religion underlies all things, including science, and that God intervenes to control human affairs, then it could simply be assumed that Europeans were superior because that was God's will. It is what you would expect a Christian god to do for Christians, particularly for those Christians who worship Him in the right way. By the middle of the nineteenth century, when Eurocentric diffusionism was at its height, when Europeans hardly ever doubted their superiority over everyone else, although the explicitly religious arguments were disappearing from scholarly discourse, they were still there implicitly, as implicit beliefs. I rather suspect that the great majority of arguments for the superiority of Europeans were finally grounded in a religious faith: if the European environment is superior, that is because God made it so; if the white race is superior, that is because God made it so; if Europeans are more rational than everyone else and this has no explicit explanation, one can infer that it is the work of God; and so on. I do not know to what extent this kind of implicit appeal to the Deity is still present but unnoticed in the thinking of contemporary Eurocentric scholars, but I am certain that it quite often is so. We will from time to time discuss the ideas of scholars (like Lynn White, Jr. and K. F. Werner) who explicitly connect their views about history with their religious beliefs; in such thinkers the directionality of the causal arguments will be noted but not in any sense condemned. Sometimes a scholar makes such arguments unconsciously and implicitly. The only really disturbing cases are those that exhibit conscious hypocrisy.

=== Biology ===

Basically two sorts of argument have been used to explain the uniqueness, the superiority, of Europe and Europeans. One sort appeals to some noncultural force or factor as prime cause; the other finds the prime cause within culture itself. Setting aside the doctrine of divine intervention (which one would generally think of as a cause external to human culture, although the point is theologically rather complicated), two kinds of noncultural, external causation are common. One appeals to human biology, the other to the natural environment.

=== Race ===

Biological arguments assert, in general, that Europeans are superior, biologically, to non-Europeans. The classical and typical form of this argument was biological racism, the idea that Europeans had superior heredity, and so were born with abilities greater than those displayed by non-Europeans. Europeans were brighter, better, and bolder than non-Europeans because of their heredity. Generally the descriptive category used was not "Europeans" but rather "members of the white race," but the distinction was not usually very important. Non-Europeans who were classified as members of the white (so-called) race were nonetheless believed to be inferior because they belonged to inferior subraces. Sometimes Europeans themselves were divided into superior and inferior subraces. Early in the nineteenth century it was widely, though not dominantly, believed that white people were not even of the same biological species as people of other races. This theory, "polygenesis," claimed to have both biblical and scientific support.<ref>See Chapter 1, note 2.</ref> Its primary importance was its use as a rationalization for slavery: if Africans were not truly human, why, enslaving them could not be an evil act. This theory melted away during the course of the nineteenth century, mainly because it was offensive to liberal, modern, antislavery thought; what replaced it, however, was not much of an improvement. This was the doctrine we call classical racism, the belief that different human races have different endowments, just as different breeds of domestic animals have such differences—differences of intelligence, aggressiveness, courage, and the rest—and these different endowments are matters of biological inheritance. It was then argued, for instance, that Africans were endowed with lower intelligence than Europeans, so it was both natural and moral for Europeans to colonize Africa and make all decisions on behalf of the Africans who, themselves, either did not have the innate ability to make these decisions, to govern themselves, or were just sufficiently less intelligent than the Europeans that a period of European control and tutelage was necessary while these slow-thinking Africans learned how to govern themselves. Racism, in a word, had as its main function the justification of colonialism and all other forms of oppression visited upon non-Europeans, including minority peoples in countries such as the United States.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century racism acquired a pseudoscientific aura of apparent truth. Scientists claimed to have proof of the differences among races, particularly as to intelligence. Now, also, they were armed with Mendelian genetics, so it seemed eminently reasonable for scientists who were, themselves, racists, now to assert that they had proof of the truth of the racist theories in which they already believed. These so-called proofs were unmasked as pseudoscience in a slow process that continued down to World War II: indeed, even today there are more than a few so-called "scientific racists." What we need to notice about scientific racism is that it merely provided a new way of justifying something that was already almost universally believed to be true among Europeans. This meant, on the one hand, that it did not do much to intensify racism—which was in fact reaching a crescendo of intellectual and scholarly importance around the turn of the century for social reasons, having to do mainly with the growing importance of colonialism—and, on the other hand, that the disproving of scientific racism did not have much to do with the decline of racism's popularity in the present century. Racism emerged from prescientific roots and survived so long as it was useful, science or no science.

This is not to deny that scientific racism gave strong impetus to racist beliefs in society; in a time when science was acquiring great prestige and influence, scientific arguments were indeed important.<ref>Bowler, ''The Invention of Progress'' (1989); Harris, ''The Rise of Anthropological Theory'' (1968); Gossett, ''Race: The History of an Idea in America'' (1963); Jackson, ''Race and Racism: Essays in Social Geography'' (1987); Stocking, ''Race, Culture, and Evolution'' (1968); Trigger, ''A History of Archeological Thought'' (1989).</ref> And scientific racism helped in some special ways. One important example here has to do with supposed differences in endowment among the supposed subraces within the so-called white race. Anti-Semitism, along with anti-Muslim attitudes relating to colonialism in the Middle East, led to a proliferation of theories about the inferiority of the so-called "Semitic" subrace. ("Semite," of course, should refer only to someone who speaks a Semitic language, such as Hebrew or Arabic.) This racist underpinning for anti-Semitism, then, became extremely useful for the general argument about the superiority of Europeans in history over all non-Europeans.<ref>See Bernal, ''Black Athena'', vol. 1 (1987).</ref> Semitic peoples were acknowledged to belong to the white race. Now it could be argued that only Europeans belonged to the really superior subrace of whites. Semites were inferior. So were the non-Semitic peoples of western Asia (Persians, Turks, and so forth). Indeed, in certain situations it was even argued that scientific racism proved the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans: the northern, British and Germanic stock was truly superior to Italians, Slavs, and the rest. One famous instance of this sort of argument was the series of pseudoscientific testimonials given before the U.S. Congress at the time it was debating the first important immigration legislation in the 1920s. Scientists solemnly assured the Congress that southern Europeans were inferior people, and so should be excluded from free immigration to the United States in order to maintain the high racial quality of American stock.<ref>See Gossett, ''Race'' (1963).</ref>

Today very few educated Europeans believe that there are genetic, inherited differences among the races as to intelligence or any other quality that might favor or inhibit social progress. Although a few people believe in the doctrine of classical racism, most of them are careful to keep their views to themselves, because today the doctrine is so thoroughly rejected, and viewed with such repugnance. If this were a book dealing with the history of ideas, we could go into the explanation for this transformation—the decline and fall of classical racism over a period of no more than two scholarly generations. During the 1920s the belief in the influence, major or minor, of inherited or racial differences was very widespread. After 1945 the theory was very rarely defended. Probably the key factor was Nazism. The Nazis grounded their ideology in this belief, claiming that the so-called Nordics were a Master Race, that inferior kinds of Europeans, inferior (so-called) subraces of whites—like the so-called Semitic race—and all other races as a whole deserved to be ruled by the Master Race. The Master Race, moreover, had the right to eliminate inferior subraces by genocide. Racism therefore was seen, and still is seen, as a component of the horrible ideology of Nazism. It is true that a small and fanatic group still preaches classical racism, and that a very small number of academics still proclaim its validity. The need to fight against the doctrine has not entirely ended. But this no longer is the important issue when we talk about Eurocentric prejudices, because another doctrine has largely replaced classical racism and performs much the same function, rooting its argument not in genetics but in culture. This doctrine can be thought of as cultural racism.<ref>Blaut, "The Theory of Cultural Racism" (1992).</ref>

Classical racism was so pervasive, down through the 1920s, that it probably figured as an explicit or implicit foundation for most arguments about the superiority of Europeans in history. It is as though the scholars who asked why Europe had risen and other societies had not done so had part of their answer at the outset: Europeans began with a genetic advantage, large or small, and then, throughout later history, they were always to a greater or lesser extent favored by the influence of their genetic superiority in matters intellectual, giving them superior decision-making ability, inventive ability, and so on. Here was an important reason why it did not, in those times, seem crucial to ask the question, "Why?" At root, the answer was considered self-evident. Even moderate racists, such as Max Weber (whose views we examine below), could therefore assume that European superiority was carried along by a kind of subtle undertow of genetics, that this made Europeans at all times slightly more "rational" (Weber's favorite word), and, therefore, slightly more progressive. It is very interesting that modern scholars retain the notion of the superiority of European "rationality," a notion derived from Weber and through him from all of nineteenth-century social thought, yet they vigorously deny that the source of this "rationality" is racial superiority. The intellectual contortions they have to go through to retain the one without the other will claim our interest when we discuss this matter.

Among the historians whose theories about the "European miracle" are at present widely supported, only Max Weber uses classical racist argument in a clear and overt way. But Weber was writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when classical racism was accepted by the majority of European scholars. Weber's arguments are a rather mild form of racism. He did indeed write of the "hereditary . . . hysteria of the Indian," a basis for his argument that Indian religion prevented Indian development.<ref>"Hereditary neuralgia of the presumably strong tendency toward hysteria and autohypnosis of the Indian..." Max Weber, ''The Religion of India'' (1967), p. 387. This postulate is basic to Weber's analysis of Brahminism as prime cause for India's lack of development.</ref> He considered Africans to be genetically incapable of factory work.<ref>"[The] ... negroes long ago showed themselves unsuitable for factory work and the operation of machines; they have not seldom sunk into a cataleptic sleep. Here is one case in economic history where tangible racial distinctions are present" Weber, ''General Economic History'' (1981), p. 379. Although Weber says here that this is merely "one case" of racial influences, note that the case is crucial for Weber's analysis both of "rationality" and of modernization; the "racial distinctions" here separate out Africans in a fundamental way: a clear case of moderate yet crucial racism. In the same vein, "it was found that the American Indians were entirely unsuitable for plantation labor" (p. 299).</ref> Chinese have a "slowness in reacting to unusual [intellectual] stimuli," a "credulity" or "docility" that Weber thinks are wholly or partly hereditary traits.<ref>Weber, ''The Religion of China'' (1951), pp. 231-232. Weber considers these to be "racial qualities of the Chinese" (p. 230) although cultural factors may be involved.</ref> And Europe's greater "rationality" has a definite hereditary basis.<ref>Weber, ''The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism'' (1958), p. 30. Weber says here that "it would be natural to suspect that the most important reason" for the rationality of the Occident lies in "differences of heredity," and "the importance of biological heredity," he thinks, is "very great" (p. 30). But we do not yet know how to measure its influence, so our attention should focus mainly on the cultural factors (pp. 30-31). This was typical moderate racism (as I call it) for the time the work was published (1904-1905).</ref> But the fact remains that Weber gave much greater weight to nonracial factors. And Weber, for his time, was only a moderate racist.

Moderate racism is, today, a more serious problem in the world of scholars than is classical racism, because it is mainly an implicit theory. We noted that Weber believed in the significance of racial differences, but he referred to the matter very rarely; yet it must have been an unstated, perhaps implicit, part of many of his arguments about social evolution in general and the comparative evolution of Europe and non-Europe in particular. This was fairly typical of early twentieth-century scholarship, hence the racism in that scholarship often is too difficult to identify, and the arguments presented by scholars seem not to be racist when they do not explicitly mention race as a factor. But more serious still is the surviving influence of what I call very moderate racism. A great number, perhaps the majority, of mainstream scholars, in the period, say, of the 1920s, believed that racial differences were very slight and that the individual human being's capabilities and potentialities would not be predictable from his or her race, that race differences only appeared influential on a statistical basis for large groups: for instance, a slightly higher average "intelligence quotient" for whites as against blacks. This belief was consistent with militant opposition to racial discrimination. But it was not much better than classical racism when applied to questions of social evolution and comparison between European and non-European history. This is so because the historical arguments did not need to postulate large racial differences. If whites, on the average, held a tiny advantage over non-whites in, let us say, inventiveness, that tiny advantage, working out its influence over the centuries and millennia, would produce the result that whites built high civilization and nonwhites did not. In a sense, this very moderate racism was a more serious problem than ordinary racism, because it allowed scholars to take liberal positions in opposition to overt racial discrimination yet continue to believe that whites are superior genetically to nonwhites within the subject matter of their own fields—anthropology, geography, history, and so on. It did reduce the significance of race to that of one "factor" among many, but it did not eliminate racial explanations in the matter of Europe's supposed superiority.<ref>I have not discussed the question whether biological racism remains important today as a genuinely implicit theory, that is, one still accepted but not consciously so. I suspect that it does. Some Eurocentric historians hold to positions regarding individual differences between Europeans and non-Europeans that are so extreme, and so bigoted, that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that at least a few of them may hold to an implicitly racist infratheory, perhaps unconsciously believing, that is, that the inferiority of non-Europeans is genetically determined.</ref>

Probably it is unnecessary to say here that there is no credible evidence in support of the idea that races differ in genetic inheritance except in trivial matters like skin color. Even the idea of race is a vague abstraction and not really useful. For our purposes, the generalization that counts is this: racial differences explain nothing about culture or cultural evolution.<ref>Among many sources on the racism fallacy, see Franz Boas' classic book, ''Race, Language, and Culture'' (1948); also Blum, ''Pseudoscience and Mental Ability'' (1978); Gossett, ''Race'' (1965); Haller, ''Outcasts from Evolution'' (1971); Jackson, ''Race and Racism'' (1987); Magubane, ''The Ties that Bind: African-American Consciousness and Africa'' (1987); Gill and Levidow, ''Anti-Racist Science Teaching'' (1987).</ref>

=== Demography ===

Demographic behavior is usually considered the second important biological factor in explanations for the European miracle. Causality here is very murky. The specific form of theory with which I am concerned claims that Europeans, historically, controlled their population growth, whereas other peoples did not, so that Europe tended not to suffer overpopulation, and did not encounter what many historians call the "Malthusian disasters" that supposedly prevented forward progress in non-European societies. Malthusianism postulates, in its essence, that ordinary people do not control their sexual urges and so have more offspring than can be fed; a disaster of some sort ensues, with famine, pestilence, or war now reducing the population; and then people again breed more children than they should, and the cycle renews. Malthus considered this uncontrollable sexual urge to be general in the human species, although the educated classes could control themselves to some degree. Modern explanations for the "European miracle" modify this theory in a key respect: they assert that Europeans, historically, have had a cultural pattern of limiting the number of offspring whereas non-Europeans lacked this pattern; as a result, European population was maintained, throughout history, in rough long-term proportion to resources, in spite of periodic Malthusian crises, crises which were important in explaining various facts of European history but were vastly less significant than the supposed permanent grip of Malthusian forces—lack of demographic control and perennial overpopulation and misery—in non-European societies. Moreover, according to these historians, whenever technological advance or some other fortunate circumstance led to a rise in living standards, Europeans, unlike non-Europeans, did not allow their population to rise and thus eliminate the fruits of progress. We need to notice that this argument does not really center on the biology of reproduction but, again, on rationality: it is claimed or assumed that Europeans think about the problem of population and others do not. So demographic arguments for the superiority of Europe in history always return either to culture or to race: Europeans are more rational either because they have superior heredity or because they have superior culture. If non-Europeans have uncontrollable sexual urges, if they behave like the beasts in the field, this is either a sign of genetic inferiority or a cultural quirk. In the arguments most frequently encountered today, either culture is invoked or the matter is left ambiguous. Yet there is a paradox. Many historians believe that demography is an independent causal force in history. This belief is generally grounded in a quasi-biological argument: ordinary people have only partial success in controlling their sexual urges, and only partial success (or none at all) in controlling and spacing the birth of children.<ref>The idea that demographic behavior is not fully under social control, is a primordial biological fact or factor, seems to underlie the thinking of most Eurocentric historians (conspicuously Eric L. Jones, Michael Mann, and John Hall). The basic proposition seems to be that population will necessarily grow beyond the rational limits, and so overpopulation must result unless societies find nondemographic solutions, notably by increasing food supply to feed the inexorably increasing population. See, for instance, Michael Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'', vol. 1 (1986): If agricultural yields had not increased in medieval Europe, "the continent would ... have experienced a similar Malthusian cycle every century or so—and would not have generated capitalism" (p. 402). This view is even encountered, occasionally, in the radical and feminist movements. Note the following view put forward by a Marxist-feminist: "(We) assume (given the ubiquity of the sex drive ...) that the total number of conceptions in a population will tend to exceed those desired within a given incentive structure, and this unintended surplus will be greater, the more imperfect are the means at hand. ... A given fertility pattern then is taken to be 'rational' ... except for a small but variable excess (of births)," Seccombe, "Marxism and Demography," (1983), p. 31. The context is a discussion of European medieval social evolution, but the argument is given mainly in support of Brenner's theory about the strictly European rise of capitalism. Most radicals and feminists reject Malthusianism and would reject Seccombe's view as Malthusian.</ref> Many supporters of the miracle myth simply argue, then, that Europeans have greater, though still partial, success in controlling their behavior than do non-Europeans. For instance, Eric L. Jones claims that this is what he calls "the quality of Europeanness":

Europe did not spend the gifts of its environment as rapidly as it got them in a mere insensate multiplication of the common life.<ref>Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 3. Part of the passage is a quotation.</ref>

In other words, Europeans do not simply reproduce thoughtlessly, as non-Europeans do. Jones makes the same point in many different ways; for instance, he says of Chinese peasants that they preferred "breeding new people" to improving their economic and political circumstances.<ref>Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 219.</ref> John A. Hall makes a similar point:

The expansion of the European economy did not occur [through expansion of cultivated acreage], as in late traditional China, because improvements in output were not eaten up by a massive growth in population. The ratio between population and [cultivated] acreage in Europe remained favourable ultimately because of the relative continence of the European family.<ref>Hall, ''Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West'' (1985), p. 131. Italics added.</ref>

Europeans are sexually "continent." Europeans, therefore, do not suffer overpopulation.

Another point worthy of notice: the historians have no difficulty invoking population growth as a positive factor in European history, as an indication of progress—for instance, the growth of Europe's population in the eleventh century and thereafter is seen as proof that medieval Europe was healthily advancing—whereas population growth in non-European societies is seen as negative, as the working out of Malthusian laws of "overpopulation." We will encounter examples of this very one-sided form of argument as we proceed.

There is now abundant evidence that all societies practice population control.<ref>As F. Hassan points out, "Among human populations the practice of population control in one form or another is universal." ("Demographic Archeology," 1978, p. 71.)</ref> They seem to do so very effectively at the aggregate level: although individual family groups may or may not succeed in controlling the incidence of conception—because the methods of birth control are often rather hit or miss—the society as a whole seems able to encourage population growth or discourage it quite successfully.<ref>Some families will of course have more conceptions than desired, and others fewer, because birth control techniques are imperfect, but the average for the larger group will be broadly in line with the group's values and population targets. The techniques run the gamut from variable age of marriage and variable dowry or bride price, to complexity of marriage rules (defining who, in a kin system, is eligible to be one's spouse), to timing of sexual relations, to the use of antiterility and abortive devices, to infanticide, and other practices.</ref> It is most unlikely that population growth takes place when the society would, in the long run, suffer as a consequence; or, to put the matter more precisely, the members of a society change their demographic behavior in the space of a couple of generations when it becomes clear to them, as they observe changes around them in the probability of infants surviving to adulthood, and so on, that such change is desirable. The knowledge that all of this is indeed the case has only appeared recently.<ref>Much of the scholarship comes from India, where colonial ideology used to claim that poverty is a result of people having too many children. Now demographers and other social scientists have disproven this myth. See, for instance, Mamdani, ''The Myth of Population Control'' (1972), and Nag, "How Modernization Can Also Increase Fertility" (1980). For Africa, see, for example, Kitching, "Proto-Industrialization and Demographic Change" (1983); Swindell, "Domestic Production, Labor Mobility, and Population Change in West Africa, 1900-1980" (1981); Cordell and Gregory, the introduction to ''African Population and Capitalism'' (1987).</ref> But this accumulating evidence really cuts the ground from under all Malthusian theories, historical and contemporary, European and non-European. The argument that population growth is an automatic, biological process, which occurs whether or not there is food enough to feed additional mouths, is simply wrong.<ref>See, for instance, numerous studies showing the plasticity of birthrates, including Nag "How Modernization Can Also Increase Fertility" (1980), Collyer, ''Birth Rates in Latin America'' (1965), and Harewood, "Population Growth in Grenada" (1966).</ref>

When the evidence began to accumulate that historic European populations did indeed practice population control, some scholars decided, appropriately, that the old Malthusian models do not make sense in Europe: family size was kept small, births were controlled, and so forth, back in the Middle Ages. This called for rejection of one traditional theory, the idea that there is a general pattern for all so-called preindustrial societies (or "traditional societies," or "peasant societies"), involving high and uncontrolled birth rates, large families, etc., and thus, inevitably, a Malthusian trend toward overpopulation. Most historians today seem still to be wedded to the Malthusian theory, and still believe that medieval social change in Europe was mainly, or at least partly, produced by Malthusian cycles of overpopulation.<ref>See Aston and Philipn, eds., ''The Brenner Debate'' (1985), especially the introduction by R. Hilton.</ref> But some historians now reject this perspective: population, in essence, is viewed by them as a dependent variable, not an independent variable.

But only in Europe. This newer, essentially anti-Malthusian, theory was rapidly shaped into a new explanation for the European "miracle." It was simply asserted that European people, historically, controlled their population, and so, when they accumulated surpluses of food and commodities and wealth, these were not subsequently dissipated as population grew out of control and stole away the savings. This pattern, said these historians, was uniquely European and it was one important reason why Europeans were able to accumulate wealth and eventually rise into modernity and capitalism. Non-Europeans, by contrast, continued in their unmoden, traditional pattern, with overpopulation wiping out all benefits of forward progress. These Eurocentric historians, in a manner characteristic of tunnel history, did not notice that new scholarship on demography, some of it on historical demography—in various non-European parts of the world, from India to Barbados—was tending to overturn Malthusian notions as they apply to non-Europe just as readily as had been the case a decade earlier in European scholarship.<ref>Perhaps more readily, because the Malthusian explanation for poverty in Third World countries has been a rather troublesome issue for scholars and planners in these countries, and it has been important to show that poverty in their countries is not somehow caused by the demographic misbehavior of ordinary people.</ref>

We will take up a related matter, theories about the uniqueness of the European family, at a later point in this chapter. For now, it is enough to say, simply, that the demographic arguments in support of the European miracle are utterly unconvincing. This holds true both for the theories grounded in the belief in baleful Malthusian forces and for those which assert that Europeans, uniquely, know how to avoid those forces.

=== Environment ===

Environmental determinism, the theory that the natural environment strongly influences human affairs and human history, is no longer a popular doctrine, but it is still used quite regularly in explanations for the European "miracle." The point should, however, be qualified: Environmental determinism, in the form it is used in these arguments today, is a "determinism" in a limited sense only. It does not claim that the environment explains everything, or that the environment is the most important explanatory factor. It is deterministic in the sense that it treats the environment as a separate, simple cause or "factor" not mediated by culture: something external to culture and influencing it from the outside. One finds each Eurocentric historian adding one or a number of environmentalistic arguments or factors to the mix, which, as a whole, explains the superiority of Europe. Even the historians who want to build their case mainly on social or political or intellectual foundations nonetheless manage (I know of very few exceptions) to throw one or more environmentalistic arguments into the stewpot, to give it body or flavor.

Environmentalistic arguments can be stacked into two piles. One consists of the set of claims about the superior qualities of Europe's environment and how they help to explain the rise of Europe. The other pile consists of arguments as to why the nasty environments of other places have blocked development there. The two sorts of argument are—perhaps surprisingly—very different in form. Let us begin with the latter.

Two classical environmentalistic theories have been used over and over again, and still remain in use, to explain the (supposed) nondevelopment of Africa and Asia. The first theory argues that tropical regions are innately inferior to cooler regions. This theory is used, for the most part, to dispose of Africa. The second theory argues that peoples in arid regions are held back from development because aridity necessitates irrigation, and irrigation along with related features of irrigated river-valley life leads, again necessarily, to the kind of civilization that is historically stagnant. This theory disposes of Asian civilizations, along with Egypt. (Most of Asia is not, in fact, arid.) I will discuss both of these theories, and more briefly a few other environmentalistic explanations for the backwardness of Africa and Asia.

=== Nasty-Tropical Africa ===

The idea that tropical climates are nasty, and inhibit the forward march of civilization, is a very old one in European thought.<ref>For instance Montesquieu, in ''The Spirit of the Laws'' ((1748) 1949) "People are ... more vigorous in cold climates" (pt. xiv.2). "There are countries where the excess of heat enervates the body, and renders men ... slothful and dispirited" (pt. xv.7).</ref> During the nineteenth century this notion was widely used to show why Africans have (supposedly) remained uncivilized, and must naturally accept European colonial control; it was one of the core theories of classical diffusionism.<ref>"Africa" almost always refers to "Africa south of the Sahara" in the discourse I am criticizing, so I will use "Africa" in the same sense in the present discussion.</ref> It was routinely built in to theories about the uniqueness of Europe, the European miracle, although I must add that historians did not usually consider the reasons for Africa's nonrise worth bothering about: the matter was considered self-explanatory, and labors were devoted to the seemingly more important question why Asia (and North Africa) did not rise. And the tropical-nastiness theory is still quite regularly employed in historians' arguments. It is, for instance, crucial to Jones's argument in ''The European Miracle''. It is also significant in a special arena: the debates among historians about African slavery, the slave trade, and the slave plantation system. By contrast, geographers, who in general know something about the natural environment and have long grappled with the theories of environmental determinism, do not, today, take the nasty-tropics theory very seriously.<ref>Blaut, "The Ecology of Tropical Farming Systems" (1963).</ref>

The tropical-nastiness doctrine consists mainly of three distinct theories. The first concerns itself with the supposed negative effect of a hot, humid climate on the human mind and body; the second, with the supposed inferiority of tropical climates for food production; the third, with the supposed prevalence of disease in tropical regions. Down to the 1940s, or thereabouts, there was some ambivalence among Europeans as to the thesis that humans cannot labor as effectively in the humid tropics as in other climates. The majority opinion had been that Africans can labor under the hot sun—a convenient rationalization for plantation slavery—but that Europeans cannot do so, although some diffusionist arguments were built on the idea that tropical conditions induce sloth, indolence, etc., in everyone, and thus the need for control-at-a-distance from temperate-climate civilizations. Eventually it became clear, from many sources of evidence including physiological studies, that human bodies of all sorts can labor as effectively in the tropics as elsewhere if the bodies in question have had time to adjust to tropical conditions.<ref>See, for example, Collins and Roberts, eds., ''Capacity for Work in the Tropics'' (1988), which fails to find convincing evidence suggesting negative tropical effects.</ref> Although the claim that people in humid tropical regions cannot think as well as people in temperate regions—the tropical sun "boils the brain"—was almost universally accepted by Europeans in the last century and was incorporated into some well-known theories about European civilizational superiority put forward (for instance by Huntington and Markham) in the first half of the present century, this theory, never grounded in evidence, is now rejected across the board. Eric L. Jones is one of the few present-day European historians who is unaware that this theory of "climatic energy" (as it was called in the old days) has been exploded. Not only does Jones accept it as valid but he gives it some considerable significance:

Civilizations had long been rising and falling in warm latitudes, although they appear to have been springing up farther and farther north. Such explanation as the literature offers for this shift is essentially climatic (Gilfillan 1920; Lambert 1971). On the one hand it correlates mean temperature and the output of human energy, and on the other it claims that in warm regions man was subject to the build-up of endoparasitic infestation which caused each society there to reach a plateau of attainment and then stagnate.<ref>The two citations (Gilfillan, "The Coldward Course of Progress," 1920, and Lambert, "The Role of Climate in the Economic Development of Nations," 1971) are hardly indicative of modern scholarly literature.</ref>

It should be noted that "the literature" does not support any of this. The scholarly literature roundly rejects the theory of "climatic energy," which has not in fact been seriously defended since the 1950s. Climatic determinism as a whole is almost a dead letter. There has been no northward "shift" of civilization (ancient civilizations were located from the equator to 45° latitude). The notion that tropical regions are so parasite-infested that cultures stagnate is false (it will briefly claim our attention later). Jones's general belief that hot climates are "debilitating" has little if any scholarly support, and does not in turn support the idea that Europe's climate led to a European miracle.<ref>India's "debilitating climate" is one reason why India fell behind Europe, according to Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 198.</ref> There simply is no basis for arguing that midlatitude climates are superior to tropical climates in terms of psychological or physical effects on human beings.

The fruitfulness of tropical environments was much debated by nineteenth-century European scholars. Some argued that tropical regions are lush and bountiful, but used this proposition not as a basis for asserting high development potential but rather the contrary: tropical environments are too bountiful to offer what Arnold Toynbee might have called a sufficient challenge to humanity, and so progress did not take place except under colonial guidance. We deal with this thesis later in the chapter. Our concern now is with the exact opposite thesis, which asserts, quite simply, that tropical environments are miserably poor in their potential for agriculture and it is this that prevents tropical regions from developing. (The term "tropics," or more properly "humid tropics," refers to regions with no cold season and with moderate to high rainfall: roughly 750 mm. of rain or more per year. Most of sub-Saharan Africa falls within the humid tropics, as does most of southern and southeastern Asia and most of Middle and South America.) According to this thesis, little food can be produced on a given piece of land in the humid tropics.

Now this thesis—low agricultural productivity of tropical land—is hard to defend on the evidence, since population densities in the humid tropics range from very low (in parts of the Amazon Basin, for instance) to extraordinarily high (in Java, Bangladesh, El Salvador, Barbados, Rwanda, and many other regions). The argument is grounded, rather, in a theory about the nature of tropical soils. To put matters in perspective, the scientific study of tropical soils is a very young field; few contributions of any consequence can be dated earlier than World War II if we exclude highly particular studies about the soils used for plantation crops like sugar-cane.<ref>Among the pioneer works which have importance for peasant agriculture, we may mention Fred Hardy's "Some Aspects of Tropical Soils" (1936) and various of his articles in ''Tropical Agriculture'', and the work of Robert Pendleton (especially Pendleton, "Land Use in North-Eastern Thailand," 1943, and Prescott and Pendleton, ''Laterites and Lateritic Soils'', 1952), and G. Milne "A Soil Reconnaissance Journey Through Parts of Tanganyika Territory" (1947). The first comprehensive textbook on tropical soils embodying modern knowledge is Mohr and van Baren, ''Tropical Soils'' (1954).</ref> The really crucial information, relevant to the proof or disproof of the traditional theories, was obtained in research carried out in a number of experimental centers in the late 1940s and thereafter, and then slowly disseminated to the world scholarly community. The result is that some historians (including some current writers about the "miracle") can still, today, make use of quite fantastic theories about the supposedly evil nature of tropical soils. Some of these theories were refuted quite recently; others are now, today, very close to refutation; a few others, hardly defensible, nonetheless still lie around in the scholarly literature, unrefuted. A brief, only slightly technical, comment on these theories is necessary at this point of the discussion.

The old standard theory about tropical soils runs about as follows: Because of the high heat and abundant rainfall in the humid tropics, these soils cannot accumulate organic topsoil, since organic matter decomposes rapidly and is quickly leached out as rainwater seeps downward in the soil. Tropical soils, therefore, are low in plant nutrients. Also, they are subject to severe erosion, partly because tropical landforms tend to have high average slopes, partly because high rainfall means high runoff and therefore much surface erosion.

These two basic physical propositions, about infertility of the soil and erosion respectively, were then married to a cultural proposition, in the following argument. Because of the low fertility and erodibility of tropical soils, farmers must practice what is called "shifting agriculture." (This is a farming system in which a field is prepared by clearing a piece of forest with the use of fire, and then, after one or more years of cultivation, is abandoned, another field being then cleared in turn and in its turn abandoned, in a continuous process of shifting fields.) The standard theory (as it was argued before the 1950s or thereabouts) then makes a series of sweeping generalizations about the combined effects of infertile, erodible tropical soils and shifting agriculture. It was claimed that farmers cannot return to the original piece of land after it has been abandoned and left fallow for some time, since the soils are too poor to regenerate and since burning the piece of land permanently damages the soil. Even where the environment is lush enough so that farmers can return and re-use each field, the production from each field will be less and less as the cycles of use and abandonment continue, and the soil will become more and more infertile until finally it is unusable. All of this implied that peasant communities would be unable to remain in any one region permanently; that the villages themselves would have to be moved as large expanses of forest land were used and then abandoned and the people needed to move elsewhere to find fresh, cultivable lands. The result would be grave indeed: a very sparse and highly mobile population with little or no chance of developing large-scale trade, cities, and stable states.

The entire argument was inserted at this point into world history and world geography. Most of sub-Saharan Africa is tropical. Therefore, shifting agriculture must be used there and no civilization can develop there. Or if civilization manages somehow to evolve to one extent or another, it must sooner or later collapse. (The decline of the classical lowland Mayan civilization was regularly used as the type example of this historical outcome; it is still so used by a few scholars.)

This traditional model of tropical soils and shifting agriculture was gradually softened as more information became available to students of tropical soils and tropical agriculture. By the 1960s it was generally known to the specialist community (though not yet to the majority of historians and social scientists) that shifting agriculture does not damage the soil under normal—that is, typical and widespread—circumstances.<ref>See Nye and Greenland, ''The Soil Under Shifting Cultivation'' (1960); Blaut, "The Nature and Effects of Shifting Agriculture" (1962); Ahn, ''West African Soils'' (1970).</ref> Almost never do shifting cultivators move their villages because of soil exhaustion. (It became known, also, that shifting cultivation had been widespread for many centuries in Europe, and there it had not apparently done any damage to the environment.) From this emerged a softer cultural model: if population densities are low, so that farmers can leave each abandoned field for the many years required for soil and vegetation regeneration, then shifting agriculture will remain an equilibrium farming system, and there will be no long-term deterioration of the environment.

But even this modification would not much alter the historical judgment about Africa and some other tropical regions: historians might still believe that any civilization arising in such a tropical area cannot be very complex under ordinary circumstances, because a low population density of food producers would not seem to provide the basis for a substantial complex of urban centers, religious centers, states, and the like. (As to the lowland Mayan civilization, some scholars continued to claim that shifting agriculture had destroyed the subsistence base of that civilization, while others claimed that the decline and abandonment of cultural centers like Tikal had been due to other sorts of processes.) In any event, the prevailingly Malthusian view of peasants led to the general assumption that population would grow out of control and regions of tropical shifting agriculture would never rise very high in places like tropical Africa, anyway.

The model in this form is still current among historians. It is common in the European miracle literature, as the primary environmental basis for claiming that Africa could not have "risen" in the same way that Europe did. It is explicit in the work of some non-African Africanist historians.<ref>See Miller, ''Way of Death'' (1988); Curtin, ''The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex'' (1990). The view is echoed in many world history textbooks, for example, Roberts, ''The Hutchinson History of The World'' (1987), pp. 54-56; McNeill, ''A World History'' (1967), pp. 273-278.</ref>

Evidence is now available to reject this entire theory, the notion that tropical soils are bad for agriculture and therefore somehow inhibit human history. First of all, we now know that tropical soils are not inferior. They are different. Because of the higher rate of chemical and physical weathering under humid-tropical conditions, soil production from the underlying rock is much more rapid than is the case in cooler climates. Therefore, soils maintain their fertility in considerable degree from the dissolution of minerals, and much less from the accumulation of organic matter. Erosion tends to be more serious, but regeneration tends to be more rapid. Tropical soils that have developed on rocks that are rich in plant-nutrient minerals are exceptionally fertile. Those developed on rocks that are not nutrient-rich are exceptionally infertile. There is no basis for comparing tropical and temperate "averages": neither is better; they are different.

Evidence is also available now to reject the old view of shifting agriculture. Farmers practice it on poor soils, being careful not to let fires get out of control. They use a great number of techniques to assist the natural vegetation to regenerate, and to increase soil fertility in the cultivated fields, including green and animal manuring. When there is a land shortage, the shifting rotation is shortened, by the use of various techniques of intensification such as mounding or terracing, increased labor applied to such matters as weeding, adoption of different crops and different varieties, and many more.<ref>See Wilken, ''Good Farmers: Traditional Agricultural Resource Management in Mexico and Central America'' (1987); also Nye and Greenland, ''The Soil Under Shifting Agriculture'' (1960); Blaut, "The Ecology of Tropical Farming Systems" (1963).</ref> The correlation between shifting agriculture and low population density is a function of history, not ecology. In the Americas it reflects in part the post-Columbian depopulation. (The Amazon Basin, which today may have a farming population of perhaps one million, probably had seven times that number in 1492.<ref>Denevan, ''The Native Population of the Americas in 1492'' (1976).</ref>) In part also it reflects the often unnoticed fact that in most regions of the American tropics giant cattle ranches have pushed farmers off the better land, giving a statistical appearance of low population density: cattle have replaced people.<ref>Cockburn and Hecht, ''The Fate of the Forest'' (1989).</ref> The same process occurred in white-settled regions of southern Africa. Elsewhere in tropical Africa, most farmers practice forms of agriculture that should not be described as shifting agriculture except in marginal regions, like mountainsides and semi-arid wastes.<ref>These marginal areas often are regions in which agriculture is practiced, in preference to some less intensive system of land use, because human communities have been pushed off better land by historical forces, notably colonialism.</ref> Typically, they are sedentary or semisedentary farming systems, involving such things as semipermanent yam mounds and tree-crop farming, or irrigated farming, or mixed farming, or they are systems in which the period of cultivation exceeds the period of fallow, and fertility is maintained by many different cultural practices including the use of green and animal manure. But the most important generalization is this simple one: where there is soil degradation, and hunger, and poor farming, it reflects cultural causes from recent history or colonial history. It does not reflect inherent limitations of tropical agriculture and it does not reflect technological ignorance on the part of farmers.

A few variant theories about the low food production potential of the humid-tropical in general and Africa in particular are invoked by some historians. Some claim that Africans were unable even to farm in Africa's humid-tropical regions until new technology, invented by non-Africans, diffused into the continent. One form of this argument claims that ironworking was brought into Africa a little over 2,000 years ago, perhaps by the Romans, and only then were Africans able to tackle the tropical forests.<ref>For a typical instance, the Oxford historian J. M. Roberts, in his popular world history textbook, ''The Hutchinson History of the World'' (1987), makes the following quite ignorant statement: "Probably the greatest importance of (the) spread of iron-working (in tropical Africa) was the difference it made to agriculture. It made possible a new penetration of the forests, new tilling of the soil (which may be connected with the arrival of new food-crops from Asia ... This suggests once again the important limiting factor of the African environment. Most of the continent's history is the story of response to influences from the outside (including iron-working and new crops)" (pp. 511-512). African farmers, like farmers in Europe and many other regions, practiced agriculture with stone tools before iron arrived, and continued to do so afterward whenever and wherever iron was hard to obtain. On the age of ironworking in tropical Africa, see, for example, Wai-Andah, "West Africa Before the Seventh Century" (1981) and Sinclair, "Archeology in Eastern Africa" (1991).</ref> Since shifting agriculture was practiced with stone implements in ancient Europe, and since ironworking appeared in Africa—possibly after independent invention—around 800 B.C. or earlier, this theory is invalid.

An even more outlandish theory builds on the fact that some Southeast Asian crops diffused into East Africa two millennia ago. Some historians blandly assert that Africans could not farm in the tropical forests until these tropical crops, domesticated by non-Africans, became available for planting in the African forests.<ref>See, for example, Roberts (note 53 above); also Irwin, "Sub-Saharan Africa," in Garraty and Gay, eds. ''The Columbia History of the World'' (1981), p. 299.</ref> It has, in fact, been well known for a long time that Africans domesticated a great number of crops for humid-tropical regions, notably many varieties of the yam (''Dioscorea'' spp.) the prime staple food there.<ref>See for instance Irvine's classical work, ''A Textbook of West African Agriculture'' (1934); Coursey, ''Yams'' (1967).</ref> Both of these diffusionist myths seem to be connected to an important colonialist belief—now important as an excuse for apartheid in South Africa. The belief is that advanced African cultures, with agriculture, trade, and states, expanded southward through the continent only very late in history, mainly because of the forbidding nature of the tropical part of the continent which held back their southward movement. According to this myth of emptiness (see Chapter 1), they had not arrived in (most of) South Africa when the Europeans took over that region, and supporters of white supremacy in South Africa claim, on this basis, that whites, having arrived first, have political and economic rights to own the land of South Africa.<ref>According to Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), "the Negroid peoples ... were still pushing east and south into the territories of the pygmies and the bushmen when the Boers undertook the Great Trek north from the Cape in the 1830s," (p. 155). Also see Roberts ''The Hutchinson History of the World'' (1987), p. 178.</ref> In fact, the expansion of agricultural peoples in Africa occurred thousands of years ago; recent archaeology has shown that rain forest regions were settled by farmers at least 3,000 years ago, and whites did not arrive first in South Africa.

Another variant of the myth of tropical nastiness as applied to Africa is the notion that rainfall variability in tropical Africa is uniquely and devastatingly high, such that agriculture could not, in precolonial times, be dependably practiced and famines were frequent and widespread. This then leads into various arguments about African backwardness. For some historians (among them Philip Curtin) there was a basic tendency toward mobility of populations and internal slave trading; for others (notoriously Joseph Miller), there was savagery and cannibalism.<ref>Curtin, ''Economic Change in Pre-Colonial Africa'' (1975); Curtin, ''The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex'' (1990); Miller, ''Way of Death'' (1988).</ref> These historians belong to what I will call the "absolutionist" school of Eurocentric Africanist history, which absolves Europeans of most of the responsibility for slavery and the problems of modern Africa by finding explanations for such matters within Africa itself, often in the African environment. The European miracle historians make regular use of these arguments for purposes of comparison. It happens to be the case that rainfall variability is a serious problem in all semi-arid regions, including the Sahel zone south of the Sahara in Africa and also the Great Plains in the central United States, the steppes of Russia, and so on. Africa is not unique. The more humid parts of this continent do not have a peculiar problem of climatic uncertainty: this is a historians' myth, partly traditional, partly resurrected after the recent Sahelian-Sudanic famines. The latter did not reflect drought-proneness of the region. They reflected human problems, mostly inherited from the colonial period, which became disasters when ordinary rainfall cycles went through their dry phases.<ref>See Wisner and Mbithi, "Drought in Eastern Kenya" (1974); Wisner, ''Power and Need in Africa'' (1989); O'Keefe and Wisner, "African Drought: The State of the Game" (1975).</ref>

Much the same sort of argument applies to other parts of the tropics. In southern and southeastern Asia we tend, broadly, to find permanent, that is, sedentary, agriculture on lands with relatively high fertility, and shifting agriculture or tree crops on lands with low fertility. The experience of colonialism during the past two centuries or so has muddled that picture somewhat, since there have been major population movements and large population increases in some areas—with consequent distortions of farming systems in reaction to land shortage and other nonenvironmental pressures. Yet the generalization still holds in regard to the environment: tropical conditions do not carry the implication of poor agricultural potential.<ref>The same arguments apply, with no need for qualification, in Western Hemisphere agriculture. In relatively limited parts of the South American rain forest the ecosystem is so fragile, as a result of local geological conditions (rocks forming infertile kaolinitic clay soils in some areas, almost pure sands in other areas), that cropping systems must employ shifting agriculture (or tree crops). But such areas are the exception within the present-day distribution of rain forest environments. In general, the great sweep of Amazonian and Guianan rain forest is a zone of non-sedentary agriculture because of cultural-historical factors, notably depopulation and the massive increase in cattle ranching. It is in fact cattle ranching, and not shifting agriculture, that leads to agriculturally caused long-term environmental degradation in the rainforest region, because (1) ranchers burn forest to the maximum extent possible and without control, in order to expand the area of pasture, and (2) the resulting pasture leads to steady soil degradation because coarse pasture grasses do not maintain the soil ecosystem as does the original forest. Shifting cultivators, by contrast, burn only under controlled conditions, burn small areas only, and carefully encourage the regrowth of forest. If the forest disappears, their livelihood disappears. Shifting agriculturists should not be blamed for deforestation anywhere in the humid tropics. See Hecht and Cockburn, ''The Fate of the Forest'' (1989); Blaut, "The Nature and Effects of Shifting Agriculture" (1963).</ref>

What of the opposing theory, that the tropics are lush and bountiful? Down through the middle of the nineteenth century this theory was very widely accepted, and also this corollary: Since the fruits of the earth are so easily obtained in tropical climes, humans do not have to exert themselves to make a living. And so they do not progress. The argument was then woven into many different theories. Buckle put forward one such theory.<ref>Buckle, ''The History of Civilization in England'', 2nd ed., (1913), chap. 2. Also see Bowler, ''The Invention of Progress'' (1989), pp. 28-29.</ref> Marx put forward another, rather tersely, in a footnote in Volume 1 of ''Capital'', asserting without discussion that tropical regions do not develop toward capitalism because here "Nature is too lavish . . . She does not impose upon [man] any necessity to develop himself."<ref>Marx, ''Capital'', vol. 1 (1976), p. 513n.</ref> This brief comment seems to be the only occasion on which Marx raised the question why humid-tropical regions, including Africa, did not develop as Europe did.

The bountiful-tropics theory is still used today in some theories that try to explain the uniqueness of Europe's rise. I suppose that every European child of our own time has seen some version of the cartoon showing the native sitting under the coconut tree, waiting patiently for his food to drop into his hands. This is not merely a relic of oldtime thought or an implicit theory. Eric L. Jones uses the bountiful-tropics theory in ''The European Miracle''. (In West Africa "living was easy."<ref>Jones in fact manages to use both of the opposing theories toward the same end. In wetter regions of Africa "living was easy." In drier areas "agriculture was not productive." Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 154. Also see Jones, ''Growth Recuring: Economic Change in World History'' (1988).</ref>) John A. Hall uses it.<ref>"In Africa the bountifulness and extent of the land makes for a mobile peasantry, necessarily therefore poor material on which to build states. Something like this is probably true of all slash-and-burn agriculture," John Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 27. ("Slash-and-burn agriculture" is shifting agriculture.)</ref> Occasionally it is used by Marxists, faithful to the letter of Marx's comment quoted above.<ref>Laibman, "Modes of Production and Theories of Transition" (1984), p. 284. However, Laibman's overall argument is not at all Eurocentric.</ref> Probably there is no need to explain why these bountiful-tropics theories are unacceptable, since this—as we have seen—is done time and again by scholars who insist that tropical regions are not bountiful; rather, they are barren and nasty. Neither the one view nor the other makes sense. And note that both are used toward the same end: to show that tropical regions have inferior potential in history.

Finally, we come to the theory that tropical environments are so disease-ridden that historical progress there is slowed, stopped, or prevented. Some historians develop this argument specifically with reference to Africa. Some others apply it sweepingly to all tropical regions: for Eric L. Jones it is a major reason why both Asia and Africa remained backward by comparison to Europe. Like the tropical-nastiness theories discussed previously, this one is traditional in European thought, and this fact is critically important for an understanding of the survival of the theory down to the present and its use in the European miracle paradigm.

One of the axioms of classical diffusionism, as we have seen in Chapter 1, is the idea that diseases and other evil things naturally counterdiffuse into Europe from non-Europe. It was therefore assumed by many scholars (including, for instance, Buckle) that non-Europe is both the source and the natural home of many—and the worst—maladies.<ref>Buckle, ''History of Civilization in England'', vol. 1, 2nd ed. (1913), p. 93: "(The) great plagues by which Europe has at different periods been scourged, have, for the most part, proceeded from the East, which is their natural birthplace, and where they are most fatal. Indeed, of those cruel diseases now existing in Europe, scarcely one is indigenous; and the worst of them were imported from tropical countries in and after the first century of the Christian era."</ref> That axiomatic belief is still with us: plagues from the Black Death to AIDS are still assumed—for it is always an assumption, whether or not reinforced by evidence—to come from the non-European world.<ref>The theory that the HIV virus which causes AIDS in humans is another one of these African plagues descending upon the Western World may very well be just the newest myth in this old diffusionist tradition. Whether or not this virus originated in Africa, which has not been proven, the myth has already taken on ugly overtones, as in the completely unfounded (yet classical) belief that AIDS was transmitted from monkeys to humans because of some strange sexual practices in some obscure African tribes. (This myth is naively reported in Shannon and Pyle, "The Origin and Diffusion of AIDS," 1989. See the critique of this paper by Watts and Okello, "Medical Geography and AIDS," 1990. Also see R. C. and R. J. Chirimuuta, ''AIDS, Africa and racism'', 2nd ed., 1989.)</ref>

This foundation belief was reinforced during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the reports of upper-class European travelers about the, to them, dirty, disgusting, diseased communities they found outside of Europe. This was both a class phenomenon and a cultural one: alien lifeways necessarily seemed to be unhealthy. But the belief gained powerful reinforcement during the nineteenth century, when the growing wealth and modernization of (much of) Europe led to a dramatic improvement in health conditions, grounded in general improvement in living conditions, improved sanitation, and, finally, progress in medicine. Europe, therefore, seemed to be somehow healthy, non-Europe, somehow unhealthy. This error is still very widespread. Underdeveloped countries are poor. With poverty comes ill health. But the ill health is thought, incorrectly, to somehow stem from the natural environments of these regions or from the cultures of their inhabitants, not from poverty. However disease-ridden India, Africa, China, etc., may have been in this period, Europe itself had been just as disease-ridden a century or so earlier (a fact known in part from the demographic facts about life expectancy of ordinary Europeans down to the eighteenth century).

In this same period European colonial territories were expanding, and it became evident that Europeans living in colonies tended to fall prey to various kinds of exotic diseases. The most extreme case apparently was West Africa, which was called in those times "the white man's grave." Here the insecurity of the quite small coastal settlements—colonial territories in sub-Saharan Africa did not really expand until very late in the nineteenth century—combined with the massive effects of the movement of slaves (many of whom died in these settlements) produced peculiarly unhealthy conditions, though the Europeans thought the source of the problem was the innate unhealthfulness of Africa itself.

Most of the important diseases of humans and their domesticated animals are not peculiarly tropical. Smallpox, typhoid, pneumonia, diphtheria, measles, bubonic plague, anthrax, and many other diseases are found across many physical environments, and their severity from place to place tends to reflect, more than anything else, conditions of human poverty, crowding, and the like. To some extent this is true even of the supposedly "tropical diseases," such as malaria (which, in fact, used to plague extratropical areas, including New York). Some forms of malaria tend to be associated with stagnant water, and thus with irrigated agriculture, in a wide range of climates. Other forms, including some of the most serious ones, are associated with tropical forest conditions, the mosquito vector often breeding in bromeliad growths on the trees themselves. It is true that these forms of malaria are especially associated with shifting cultivation in the humid tropics. But farmers spend relatively little time in the forest, if indeed there is forest. And they develop immunities such that malaria does not ravage their communities (as it does ravage communities of foreigners in their midst: traders, colonial military personnel, and so on).

The question is: after all such matters have been taken into consideration, is there, then, a remainder that can be called "the innate unhealthiness of the tropics?" Probably the answer is no.

Although this generalization is now widely accepted, some historians cling tenaciously to the idea that Africa is and always has been a uniquely disease-ridden place. This is given as one reason for Africa's (supposed) marginal role in world history, at least in modern world history. (According to William McNeill, disease "more than anything else, is why Africa remained backward in the development of civilization when compared to temperate lands."<ref>McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976), p. 43.</ref>) In the view of some of the absolutonist historians, notably Curtin, the disease-ridden character of West and Central Africa in and after the sixteenth century is a key part of the explanation for the complementary facts that this region became the source of slaves for the Atlantic plantation economy and that this region, instead of "rising" with the growth of the Atlantic economy, instead remained undeveloped. It is important to put this theory into perspective in terms of the confrontation mentioned at the beginning of this chapter between traditional European historians and the Third-Worldist, revisionist school. Traditional scholars (at least those of the absolutonist school) claim that Africa in the sixteenth century had a rather small and mobile population, with little development of complex civilization and state organization, and with slave raiding and slave trading as important features of its society. Africa had not risen above this very low level of civilization mainly because of the prevalence of human and animal diseases—with other environmental factors of the sort previously discussed being added on as additional factors. Africa thus quite naturally became the prime source of plantation slaves; and, also naturally, the slave trade did not fundamentally alter the reality of African life.

Third World historians tend to dispute all of this. Africa was densely populated before the slave trade, and the slave trade utterly devastated the continent, destroying states and civilizations, depopulating vast regions, and leading, overall, to disastrous underdevelopment. The slave trade mainly reflected Europe's power relative to coastal African societies in the seventeenth century and thereafter, in consequence of the immensely profitable American plantations and—as we discuss in Chapter 4—the fact that militarily and commercially powerful West African states were mostly located some distance from the coast. Disease increased in intensity because of the devastation caused by the slave trade: depopulation, the abandonment of large areas formerly cultivated and grazed (now turned to forest and scrub), wars, economic decline, and so on. One crucial example of this devastation has to do with the tsetse fly and trypanosomiasis or African sleeping sickness. Traditional scholars claim that tsetse fly infestation prevented Africans from developing extensive cattle herding in earlier times and in many other ways contributed to historical stagnation. The response is that trypanosomiasis, like anthrax, is a disease with many mammalian hosts. Depopulation led to the massive expansion of wastelands, and of wild animal host populations, and thus to the spread of conditions in which the tsetse fly could flourish. This in turn changed trypanosomiasis from an endemic disease to which both humans and cattle had some immunity and exposure, which was kept in check by the relatively full occupation of lands, into a devastating disease that, since the end of the last century, has indeed prevented the development of animal husbandry in some areas of Africa. There is considerable evidence that the expansion of bushland led to the expansion of tsetse-fly-infested areas and thus to economic and social misery.<ref>See, for instance, Giblin, "Trypanosomiasis Control in African History: An Evaded Issue?" (1990); Turshen, "Population Growth and the Deterioration of Health: Mainland Tanzania, 1920-1960" (1987).</ref> Beyond this, there is little solid evidence either way about the history of health conditions in Africa and among Africans (not colonial visitors), and there are many reasons to doubt the inherited diffusionist assumptions and prejudices on this matter. In any event, one cannot make a case that disease was an independent force that "blocked" development in sub-Saharan Africa.

=== Arid, Despotic Asia ===

Asia is a large place and contains a large variety of environments. There is, understandably, a very long and varied list of traditional environmentalistic arguments, most of them particular to some one part of Asia and inapplicable to other parts. Back in the early nineteenth century, a pious form of environmental determinism prevailed in geography, and it seemed sensible to invoke a single explanation for all of this variety: God had placed different natural obstacles in the paths of different Asian peoples—heat in one place, cold in another, drought in a third. Today it is more common to find, among historians writing about the "European miracle," not a list of Asia's environmental infirmities but rather a set of separate comparative judgments, each centered on Europe, and each referring to a specific period in European history. Europe, or some part of Europe, at some particular time, was superior to all of Asia in environmental qualities X and Y and Z. Or, more typically, the comparison will invoke environmental obstacles for one Asian region, political obstacles for another, religious obstacles for a third, and so on, in a very eclectic sort of argument.

For these reasons I will not review all the environmentalistic theories as to why Asia supposedly remained backward in comparison to Europe. I will deal with the comparative judgments about climate, landforms, and so on, one by one, in the following section of this chapter ("Temperate Europe").

There is, however, one very large and coherent theory that is used today, much as it was in the last century, to deal with Asia as a whole in one grand and sweeping judgment of inferiority. This theory has a number of variants which are known by various names, among them "the Asiatic mode of production," "hydraulic society," and "Oriental despotism." The theory is not usually thought of as an example of environmental determinism, since it seems to start its argument with technology, claiming that irrigation-based ("hydraulic") societies have certain highly distinctive characteristics that inhibit historical development. But one of the roots of this argument is environmental. It is the claim that aridity in Asia made irrigation necessary. One can properly ask how a theory of this sort can be applied to parts of Asia that are not at all arid. (It has even been invoked as an explanation for Stalinism in wet, cold Russia.<ref>Wittfogel, ''Oriental Despotism'' (1957).</ref>) To understand this contradiction, and to understand accordingly why this theory is untenable in all its forms and variants, we must look briefly at the history of the doctrine.

European writers of the past half-millennium have tended to view Asia as a place where people are inherently unfree and society is inherently unchanging. It would take us far afield to go into the evolution of this belief, but by the eighteenth century it had become a significant part of the emerging doctrine of diffusionism.<ref>See Venturi "The History of the Concept of 'Oriental Despotism' in Europe" (1963); P. Anderson, ''Lineages of the Absolute State'' (1974); B. Chandra, "Karl Marx, His Theories of Asian Societies, and Colonial Rule" (1981).</ref> It was accepted as an axiomatic truth, rarely questioned, but efforts were made to explain this inherent "Oriental despotism" (as it came to be called) in terms of everything from theology to race to environment. The belief seems to have been applied mainly to the Ottoman Empire, which was in that period a political and military threat to some European societies and a commercial threat to others, until the late eighteenth-century expansion of direct European colonialism in India and Southeast Asia gave the theory new functions. Not only was the notion of Oriental despotism useful as a justification and rationalization for colonial expansion, but it became the basis for colonial legal doctrines that were being fashioned at that time. In Asia, it was decided, there is no private property in land because the ruler, despotically, owns everything. Therefore, when we Europeans depose the ruler, we own everything. And if we take over a despotic state, we acquire the rights of despotic rule over a people who were unfree to begin with. (But European rule, however despotic—colonies had no democracy—was described as bestowing "freedom.")

The modern form of Oriental despotism was often connected back to the biblical "Orient." When modern Asian societies were described as "stagnant," it seemed fair to assert that they basically retained the character described for them in the Old Testament. (The Old Testament, we recall, spoke of the existence of great cities, empires, agriculture, etc.) While it was necessary to explain modern wonders like the Taj Mahal and great modern Asian states, it was not difficult to view these as relatively minor advances over the original biblical civilization, and to find secondary explanations for the evident fact that Asian civilizations had advanced somewhat—but long ago they had ceased to advance, and so remained essentially biblical and essentially stagnant.<ref>Similar judgments are still commonly made by theoreticians of the European miracle. For instance, John Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 12: "Chinese society was stuck in the same stage for over two thousand years, while Europe, in comparison, progressed like a champion hurdler."</ref>

I think it likely that the geographical connection between aridity and "Orient" comes partly from this source, that is, from the biblical images of arid regions like Mesopotamia and Egypt. Partly, no doubt, it comes from the fact that early modern Europe, down through the mid-eighteenth century, thought mainly of the dry western Asian regions, the Ottoman realm and the Persian-Inner-Asian region, as "the Orient," because the farther Orient, from India to Japan, was still somewhat remote from European attention. In any event, early nineteenth-century geographers like the great Karl Ritter were describing one special type of geographical-cultural system, the type associated with Asian civilizations of the great river valleys of arid Asia and northeastern Africa, notably the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Indus, and smaller valleys of similar character, and ascribing the traditional Asiatic traits of despotism to regions of this type. They seem to have extended this model somehow to comprehend the river valleys of wetter parts of Asia, through a logical leap from the idea of irrigated river-valley civilizations in arid regions to irrigated river-valley civilizations in Asia as a whole.

The general association of Oriental despotism with river-valley civilizations, from Egypt to China, was commonplace in the nineteenth century.<ref>And also earlier. It is discussed for instance by Montesquieu, Bernier, Adam Smith, and Hegel (see, for instance, "Introduction," and "The Oriental World" in Hegel's ''Philosophy of History'', 1956). Also see the historical reviews in Venturi, "The History of the Concept of 'Oriental Despotism' in Europe" (1963); P. Anderson, ''Lineages of the Absolute State'' (1974); and B. Chandra, "Karl Marx, his Theories of Asian Societies, and Colonial Review" (1981).</ref> Marx and Engels, however, took the idea a definitive step forward by advancing a theory that derived Oriental despotism from propositions about aridity and irrigation.<ref>This idea, too, had its forerunners. Possibly Marx got the idea from Karl Ritter, his professor of geography at Berlin.</ref> In the 1850s Marx and Engels were, for the first time, seriously confronting the question of how their essential theory of historical evolution could be applied on a world scale. It needs to be said first that they were probably the most skeptical European thinkers of their time as regards all of the traditional and (as they insisted) elitist social theories then in vogue. But their skepticism had inevitable limits, since they were products of an elitist German education and since they knew almost nothing about the world outside of Europe apart from what they learned in the press, and in books and official papers presenting the colonial point of view with all its prejudices. Accordingly, Marx and Engels did not seriously question the prevailing doctrine that the Orient is in some sense despotic and to some degree historically stagnant and unprogressive. But their skepticism about European social theory, with its elitist foundations, immunized them from the usual explanations for Asian despotism and stagnation. Asians were no less rational than Europeans, and no less willing to struggle against economic exploitation. This reasoning led Marx and Engels to speculate that the cause of Asiatic despotism and unprogressiveness lay, not in human society, but in the natural environment. In Asia, it appeared, social evolution had not led to private property ownership: the ruler, despotically, owned the land, except where it remained as original communal property. Hence this speculation from Engels:

The absence of property in land is indeed the key to the whole of the East. Herein lies its political and religious history. But how does it come about that the Orientals did not arrive at landed property, even in its feudal form? I think it is mainly due to the climate, taken in connection with the nature of the soil, especially with the great stretches of desert which extend from the Sahara straight across Arabia, Persia, India and Tartary up to the highest Asian plateau. Artificial irrigation is here the first condition of agriculture. ... An Oriental government never had more than three departments: finance (plunder at home), war (plunder at home and abroad), and public works.<ref>Marx and Engels, ''Selected Correspondence'' (1975).</ref>

This theory was advanced very tentatively by Marx and Engels, and was modified in later writings; it appears that Engels rejected it altogether in his late writings.<ref>Marx and Engels considered other factors as well, and it is fair to say that their analysis remained speculative. I believe that Engels withdrew from the idea of "Oriental despotism" in late life. See the discussion of this topic in P. Anderson, ''Lineages of the Absolute State'' (1974); Blaut, "Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism" (1989); and B. Chandra, "Karl Marx, His Theories of Asian Societies, and Colonial Rule" (1981).</ref> Our interest lies in the fact that the environmentalistic component remains influential today, even though it is now obvious that Marx and Engels were mistaken in the notion that Asia is arid. The theory nonetheless has had an effect on recent Marxist discussions about the European rise of capitalism and the (supposed) nonrise of capitalism in Asia.<ref>See Laibman, "Modes of Production and Theories of Transition" (1984), and Bailey and Llobera, ''The Asiatic Mode of Production'' (1981).</ref> More crucially, it has been woven into the mainstream European miracle literature in an interesting intellectual sea change.

Max Weber, early in the present century, and Karl Wittfogel, at midcentury, are probably the key figures in the transformation of this rather archaic doctrine into a modern environmentalistic argument for the European miracle. Weber had little to say about the natural environment per se. Drawing on various scholarly ideas which were in circulation in turn-of-the-century Europe, including Marxian ideas, he argued that the development of private property in Europe's Antiquity and Middle Ages was indeed one of the primary features of social evolution toward capitalism. He stressed what he saw as a fundamental difference between the rise of feudal (seigneurial) property, which was close to, and moving toward, full private property, and a contrasting form that he associated with the Asian river-valley civilizations (and ancient Egypt). He saw that social form as being associated closely with the need to irrigate in such environments, hence associated, inferentially, with the environment. These latter societies were, he said, despotic and land was not, in general, passed fully into the hands of officials, but rather lent to them on temporary tenure, on condition of service, as a means of providing them with rental income, men for military levies, and so on. Irrigation required collective labor appropriation under despotic rule, for maintenance of canals and waterworks. In forested lands of Europe, such despotic rule over peasants had not been needed.<ref>Weber, ''The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations'' (1976), pp. 84, 131, 157, ''The Religion of China'' (1951), pp. 16, 21, 25, and "The Origin of Seigneurial Proprietorship," part 1, chap. 3, esp. pp. 56-57 in ''General Economic History'' (1981). Also see McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976), pp. 93, 207, 259.</ref> Thus in Greece and elsewhere in Europe yeoman farmers, individualists, became the signature of rural society. Cities, instead of being mainly the seat of despotic power, became truly urban. Thus, in general, there was a peculiarly western trajectory, toward modern urban and capitalist society.

The crucial factor which made Near Eastern development so different (from Greek development) was the need for irrigation systems, as a result of which the cities were closely connected with building canals and constant regulation of waters and rivers, all of which demanded the existence of a unified bureaucracy. There was an irreversible character to this development, and with it went subjugation of the individual. ... On the other hand in Greece ... the position of the monarchs declined ... and so began a development which ended ... with an army recruited from yeoman farmers who provided their own arms. Political power necessarily passed to this class, and therewith started to emerge that purely secular civilization which characterized Greek society and caused capitalist development in Greece to differ from that in the Near East.<ref>Weber, ''The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations'' (1976), pp. 157-158. Also, on p. 84: "The basis of the economy (in Egypt) was irrigation, for this was the crucial factor in all exploitation of land resources. Every new settlement demanded construction of a canal ... Now canal construction is necessarily a large-scale operation, demanding some sort of collective social organization; it is very different from the relatively individualistic activity of clearing virgin forest. Here then is the fundamental economic cause for the overwhelmingly dominant position of the monarchy in Mesopotamia (and) Egypt.</ref>

Weber's formulation of the difference between Oriental societies and Western societies has become one of the fundamental arguments of the miracle theory as it is put forward in our own time. But Weber did not put firmly in place one important part of the edifice. This is the matter of showing why irrigation societies acquired the special characteristics assigned to them: despotism and stagnation, and, beyond that, lack of private property, lack of full urban development, and so on. This essential technical and environmental elaboration of the theory was introduced in 1955 by Karl Wittfogel, in his book ''Oriental Despotism''.

Wittfogel, an ex-Marxist who started his argument with the Marxian proposition which we have discussed, tried to show that societies grounded in irrigation, "hydraulic societies" as he called them, are necessarily despotic and must necessarily have the kinds of social and political properties that earlier writers had associated with Oriental despotism. The same is true of societies that somehow acquire-at-a-distance the characteristics of hydraulic societies, by diffusion. (Hence, according to Wittfogel, nonhydraulic Soviet Russia became despotic.) Wittfogel's reasoning was environmentalistic, in a manner less ignorant of physical geography than Marx and Weber but nonetheless quite naive. Wittfogel believed that irrigating a tract of land necessarily, deterministically, increases its productivity. Some societies will thus choose to adopt irrigated agriculture, and so the great river valleys of Asia were occupied. But, according to Wittfogel, irrigation requires major public works for the creation and maintenance of canals, and hence requires a command-type political structure—he says this was the origin of the state as a political form—which also functions to control the distribution of water.

Thus hydraulic societies are necessarily despotic. There are a number of fallacies in this argument, as many scholars have pointed out. Three of the fallacies concern the environmental proposition, the idea that irrigation necessarily increases productivity massively, and therefore leads to the development of complex social stratification, the state, and so on. First fallacy: irrigation increases productivity substantially only when the ecologically limiting factor on crop growth is lack of water; but quite often—in Asia as elsewhere—this is not the case. This means that the elaboration of great irrigation systems is not a natural response to the environment. Rather, a small-scale irrigation system in a river-valley can become enlarged into the great system as an effect, not a cause, of political and social inequality: pressure to deliver surplus pushes the process, enlarges the irrigation network, and leads, logically, to ever greater inequality. In other words, the large irrigation systems are preceded by, and explained by, existing despotism or social complexity, not by environmental mandates. (Wittfogel argues in roughly the opposite direction: the need to irrigate in a dry region leads a society to develop coercive command structures to manage the irrigation system, and thence leads to class oppression and the state—and despotic Oriental civilization.) The one ecological generalization that makes undoubted sense is the correlation of land productivity with population size and density, which is basic to the elaboration of social hierarchies and such things as religious ceremonial centers and states. But irrigation does not, magically, make land productive. Some land is highly productive without it. In the classical Mesopotamian and Nile cases we do not know whether the ruling classes forced increases in productivity, and this created the large irrigation systems, or whether the process worked the other way around. The second fallacy is the belief that the irrigation of truly dry river valleys made these valleys immensely productive, overall. Irrigation allowed agriculture to be practiced in lands otherwise desertic, but water was always in short supply and we know very little about crop yields. What we do know is that the really high productivity, and large social entities (in terms of population size as well as density), were found in wetter regions, mainly rice-farming regions, where elaborate irrigation systems usually were unnecessary for agriculture (and sometimes rainwater alone filled the paddies, as on the lower Irrawaddy plain and part of northern Luzon). Third fallacy: There is good reason to believe that some of the oldest civilizations were grounded not in irrigation, but in drainage, an ecological response that does not ordinarily involve large-scale waterworks. Drainage systems seem to have preceded irrigation in the earliest Mesoamerican civilizations. It is quite possible that the earliest Eastern Hemisphere irrigation systems, in such places as the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Indus, the Wei, the Yellow, the Niger, etc., were originally drainage systems, opening up swampy riverine regions and perhaps elaborating polities long before the societies became committed to major engineering works and so became "hydraulic."<ref>See, for instance, Denevan, ''The Aboriginal Cultural Geography of the Llanos de Mojos of Bolivia'' (1966), and "Hydraulic Agriculture in the American Tropics" (1982), on ancient drained-field or raised-field agriculture in the tropics; Golson, "No Room at the Top: Agricultural Intensification in the New Guinea Highlands" (1977), on ancient drainage in highland New Guinea; Doolittle, ''Canal Irrigation in Prehistoric Mexico'' (1990), on drainage and early agriculture in Mexico; Harrison and Turner ''Pre-Hispanic Maya Agriculture'' (1978), on early drainage in the Maya lowlands.</ref>

Wittfogel's environmentalistic argument, bringing down to our own time the old ideas of Marx and Engels about aridity, irrigation, despotism, and stagnation, juxtaposed with Weber's arguments about the difference between Oriental despotism and the rest, is seminal for many present-day European miracle historians, although most of them modify Wittfogel's theory in important ways. The essential concept is the notion of hydraulic society, explicitly or implicitly seen as a natural product of arid Asian river valleys (and the Nile). The way this leads to "miracle" arguments in the writings of such historians as Eric L. Jones, Michael Mann, and John Hall deserves a moment's attention.

Eric L. Jones, in ''The European Miracle'', lays stress on what he conceives to be the fundamental difference between "rainfall-farming" societies of Europe and irrigating societies of Asia. Wittfogel, he says, was essentially right. Irrigating societies suffered the "political consequences of a society with a huge, manipulated peasant mass."

European agricultural society was able to avoid a comparable history of authoritarianism—a kind of political infantilism—by virtue of an open-ended productive environment of forest land and rainfall farming.<ref>Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), pp. 8-9.</ref>

Jones then adds to all of this his theory that farmers who work in warm standing water become diseased—a fallacy, as we saw above, that confuses the consequences of poverty with those of ecological settings.

The fairy tale (for it is that) which associates marvelous social consequences with "rainfall farming" of the European variety will claim our attention shortly. Here it should simply be noted that all of the supposedly dire effects that Jones—like Wittfogel before him—attributes to irrigation societies are, in point of fact, the normal attributes of ancient class society and ancient civilization. That is, when these civilizations emerge, we find, as part of the process, reduction in peasant freedom, recruiting of masses of people for various purposes, and the like. The romantic image of free peasants is an image drawn from preserfdom, prefeudal times. After Franco-Roman colonization European peasants were as unfree as any peasants of the Asian river valleys or anywhere else. And of course rainfall farming, along with forested frontiers, was characteristic of much of Asia.

John A. Hall, in ''Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West'', wants to distance himself from Wittfogel's "fantasy" (as he calls it) about the inherently despotic nature of Oriental society. He then promptly absorbs a good part of Wittfogel's theory into his own formulation of reasons for the European "miracle." Hall, like most miracle theorists, tries to make use of the greatest possible range of traditional arguments for the miracle, then pushes certain arguments forward as supposedly the most important ones. He thinks that political forces and Malthusian demographic forces are the most important, although he sees as a deeper force the Weberian notion of European "rationality." Hall does not accept the formula that leads to the generalization that Oriental states were despotic. No, he says, they were arbitrary, cruel, and unwilling or unable to encourage economic development, and they held Oriental society stagnant (or, much the same thing, going through repetitive cycles). But they were not despotic. By this he means that Oriental states were not truly strong, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. We will see, shortly, how he says that medieval European states had some sort of inner strength, an organic quality, with progressive change somehow teleologically prefigured in their medieval form. So, according to Hall, there was Oriental despotism but the despots were weak.<ref>Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), pp. 12-13, 27-28, 36, 42-3, 53, 59, 99, 102, 137.</ref> Hall then introduces irrigation as another independent factor.

[In Europe] there was no need for irrigation. It is quite likely that this encouraged, or at least allowed for, a decentred agricultural civilization based on individual initiative."<ref>Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 11. Also see pp. 41, 123, 132.</ref>

Thus a "need" for irrigation in Asia, which must have been an environmental need. Thus, the old Wittfogelian equation of irrigation with despotism (as against "individual initiative"). Then Hall moves to other factors on his very long list.

Michael Mann is another contemporary theorist of the "European miracle," and he too has a long laundry list of factors which, he thinks, contributed to the miracle.<ref>Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986). Also see his essay, "European Development: Approaching a Historical Explanation" (1988).</ref> He tends to emphasize the importance of ancient Europe's acquisition of political and especially military power. Mann takes pains to distance himself from Wittfogel, but in the end he incorporates most of Wittfogel's model—perhaps I should call it the Marx-Weber-Wittfogel model—into his own theory. Like Marx, Weber, Wittfogel, Jones, and Hall, he accepts the characterization of ancient Oriental societies (from Egypt to China) as unfree and unprogressive. But he points out that the despotisms did not extend to true large-scale political military power. And the ancient Oriental civilizations, although they were rooted in irrigation agriculture, also made use of other forms of resource use in areas adjoining the river valleys. Mainly for these reasons, Mann claims that Wittfogel "overextended his model."<ref>Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 94.</ref> Ancient irrigating societies were despotic but they were not powerful, and this, for Mann, is what counts. Mann then rephrases the model and puts it, more or less entire, into his own theory. The distinction that counts is indeed, he says, the one between "irrigating" and "rainfall" farming societies. Asian societies are sweepingly categorized as the former, European societies as the latter. According to Mann, the fact that European farmers, starting with the ancient Greeks, used iron plows and farmed unirrigated ("rainfall") land, is the one most fundamental reasons that Europe forged ahead of Asia and North Africa. This was the first great miracle. It put Europe ahead of all other areas, and Europe has remained ahead ever since.

Here, in brief, is Mann's argument. We start with the ancient Near Eastern civilizations, grounded mainly in irrigation. Conceding that irrigation was the innovation that caused these civilizations to rise in the first place, Mann argues that the irrigation base somehow "caged," or confined, the population; this metaphor is meant to convey the idea that these people are unfree, and also in some sense constrained from further social progress. (It is a metaphor and not an argument.) Around 1800 B.C., says Mann, "the Middle Eastern empires of domination were shaken by two immense challenges . . . from the north," from Indo-European invaders—this seems to be a version of the discredited "Aryan migrations" theory—who brought two revolutions with them, based in charioteer warfare and the use of iron tools and particularly iron plows. The "balance of power now shifted northward."<ref>Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 179.</ref> Mann concedes in passing that these northern folk did not actually invent chariot warfare and ironworking (which came perhaps from Anatolia), but he passes without pause (or logic) to the thesis that the northern peoples, Indo-Europeans, acquired dominance in politicomilitary terms and in terms of productive power. From this point forward, Mann contrasts two civilizations, the "irrigating" ones of the Middle East and the iron-plow-using, rainwater-farming peoples of the north—Greece and, broadly, Europe. Mainly because the Europeans were iron-plow-rainfall-farming peoples, they acquired, initially in Greece, modern civilization, including democracy, classes, private (more or less) property, science, and a respect for human reason.<ref>The fact that Mann attributes the ancient European takeoff mainly to chariot warfare and iron-plow rainfall-farming, yet concedes that both innovations were initiated by Middle Easterners themselves, suggests to me that Mann's fundamental causal reasoning centers on the notion of European rationality: regardless of who invented these things, the Europeans put the things to work. That this Weberian notion is indeed basic for Mann will be demonstrated later in this chapter.</ref> Why? The centerpiece of the model is the image of an individual peasant-farming family which is fundamentally independent. It gets its water from the skies, not from a despotically managed irrigation system. Iron, says Mann, is abundant, so the peasant farmer does not depend upon cities and long-distance trade networks to acquire iron for plows and axes. This independent peasant, a true yeoman farmer (as Weber also had said), is the prototypical democratic, civilized, energetic, forward-looking European.

None of this makes sense. To begin with, it is geographically absurd to imagine that the Middle East was a region without plow agriculture, one basically of irrigated river-valley populations. Plows were used in irrigated farming. Rainfall-based farming was dominant, not in Egypt and Mesopotamia, but in most of the Levant, Anatolia, Iran, and of course much of Asia farther east, not to mention Africa. Iron working was not invented by Europeans and was used as much by non-Europeans as by Europeans. The same is true of the iron plow, which was as important in early China, for instance, as in early Europe.<ref>Bray, ''Agriculture'', vol. 6, part 2, of Needham and collaborators, ''Science and Civilization in China'' (1984).</ref> (It is an old myth that Indo-European speakers, Aryans, spread the use of the plow to, and only to, the regions they settled or conquered.) Workable-grade iron ore deposits are not as abundant as Mann thinks they are (except in certain special regions, such as some of the laterite deposits of the humid tropics).

But the silliest part of Mann's thesis is the environmental determinism. We have an image of an arid region fit for nothing but irrigated farming, which is assumed to be a tether on the progress of civilization. We have an image of an open region of good soil, forested, in which iron-using peasant farmers not only produce an unmatched abundance but also acquire from their ecology a democratic, bold, bright, form of society which marches forward then to modernity. Let me add just a word about each of these images.

Irrigation, in the eyes of many miracle theorists, is somehow unproductive. Jones, Mann, and others make the assertion that more food is produced per worker on rain-watered lands. This is not true. In fact, irrigation was developed to increase food production, whether or not the source of the process was the aspirations of village people themselves or the surplus requirements of a political or religious superstructure. When an irrigated district has reached the point where there is serious land shortage, that is, late in its social and geographic evolution (along one possible line of development), the productivity per person declines. This is obvious. It means, first of all, that farm workers spend more time during the year producing and have less time for nonfarming activities, including village cultural life and work on such things as monumental structures. Eventually this situation may lead to the collapse of the farming system, with salinization, and so on, and finally, perhaps, starvation. Contrast this now with nonirrigated agriculture. Normally, there is poorer nutrient status of soil (irrigation brings dissolved nutrients in the water, and alluvial soils tend to have good nutrient status). Normally, there is greater moisture deficit, given the dependence on unpredictable rains. Thus natural fertility tends to be lower on nonirrigated land, all other things being equal (which they often are not). Now it is true that early iron-age farmers, clearing forested land and making new farms, achieved high production on this fresh land, but that phenomenon is transitory, and in any case it did not have much effect in the semi-arid valleys of Greece. Early European farmers tended in fact to settle on alluvial lands and lowland terraces, and quite early they were using irrigation and drainage—because it enhanced labor productivity.

The notion that European agriculture was somehow conducive to independent living in a way contrasted with Asian agriculture is another part of this myth. Early European farmers were not to any great extent, as Mann depicts them, living in isolation from one another, surrounded by forest. In the cases where they did live this way it was, again, a frontier phenomenon, in Asia as well as Europe. Farmers mostly lived in social aggregates, villages, large or small, compact or linear, depending upon many circumstances. There is no reason to doubt that the upland farming communities of Asia were quite similar to those in Europe. We return to this matter later in the chapter when we discuss the myth of the unique European family. For now I will simply categorize as mythic the idea that early European agricultural communities were somehow more individualistic, more independent-minded, more progressive than were communities elsewhere.

The most fundamental error made by the nineteenth-century thinkers and Weber and now mechanically repeated by historians such as Jones, Hall, and Mann, is to believe, or assume, that one type of environment produces a particular type of society and the latter then persists down through history. You simply cannot contrast the very ancient irrigating civilizations of Asia and North Africa with the later nonirrigating farming civilizations of Europe—or indeed of Asia—and then suppose that two contrasting civilizational types have been, thereby, created so as to remain in place down through history. Culture changes. Farmers move from one environment to another. In many places farmers practice both irrigation and nonirrigated agriculture on different soil types when appropriate land is available to them.<ref>Blaut, "Two Views of Diffusion" (1977).</ref> Thus the theory which asserts that arid Asian agricultural civilization produces a stagnant, despotic form of society down through later times, one which will not develop toward modernity, is purely a myth.

=== Temperate Europe ===

We have already seen how historians constructed a mythic model of "rainfall-farming" European society, supposing that rainfall brings benefits not associated with irrigation and that Europeans alone, in their hemisphere, practice "rainfall farming." Historians like Mann, Jones, and Hall carry the argument farther along. Europe's rainfall-based farming, combined with Europe's supposedly fine and fertile soils, produced an environmental basis for agricultural production unmatched elsewhere. Although these historians give a lot of credit to the supposedly uniquely rational, inventive, European mind, they give much of the credit to Europe's natural environment.

For example, Michael Mann draws a picture of a steady northwestward movement of European history—what we described in Chapter 1 as an Orient Express model—which he sees as an essential continuance down into the Middle Ages of the northwestern trajectory of that individualistic, creative, bumptious peasant society which, he thinks, emerged in the Iron Age with the uniquely European marriage of farming, iron, and rain-watered land. His model of the evolution of Europe's society (its "miracle") is much more complex than this, but a key part of that model is the inexorable, steady, historically pregnant geographical movement—what he calls a northwestern "drift," with a permanent northwest "leading edge." Eschewing philosophical determinism, he nonetheless gives the whole process a strongly Hegelian, teleological flavor.<ref>Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), pp. 247, 406, 408, 412, 504-510, 520, 530, 539-540.</ref> One of two main reasons for this northwestern movement is the beckoningly fine environment of northwest Europe. And the main reason why this environment is so fine is its "deeper, wetter, more fertile soils."<ref>Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 509.</ref>

John Hall, similarly, extols the "northern European clay soils,"<ref>Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 99.</ref> northwest Europe's "deep and productive clay soils fed by rainfall" ("There was no need for irrigation").<ref>Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 110.</ref> Eric L. Jones, in ''The European Miracle'', makes much the same claim, if slightly qualified. He writes of Europe's "open-ended productive environment of forest land and rainfall farming,"<ref>Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 10.</ref> of Europe's "High, even rainfall and passable summers."<ref>Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 47.</ref> Jones (unlike Mann and Hall) recognizes the fact that Asian land supports a higher farming population, with the implication that the land is more productive, but he merely notes that Europe's productive land comes in smaller, separated regions, and then he gives us one of the myths of Oriental despotism:

The very impracticability of hydraulic agriculture freed a fraction of European energies for other purposes. The rainfall farmers of Europe might be fewer in number than the farmers of China and India, but the former spent less time on all aspects of farmwork than the latter spent on water control work.<ref>Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 8. Jones makes the common error of assuming that productivity per worker is low in irrigated agriculture in comparison with unirrigated agriculture. This is not the case. Even with draft animals, medieval peasant production per worker was not high. And draft animals are used in irrigated farming, abundantly so in some Asian wet-rice farming systems.</ref>

The implication, of course, is that European peasant farmers didn't have to spend much time at farm work in order to satisfy their needs and their quota of surplus, whereas Asians worked much harder for the same product. This is plainly absurd unless we abandon historical method and try to compare Asian peasants under modern conditions of extreme land shortage with ancient European frontier conditions or modern European capitalist farmers. Stated differently, this makes no sense in terms of actual agricultural technique—irrigation is intended to increase productivity per worker, and usually does so—and in terms of any model of the historical European peasant as poor, oppressed, and overburdened.

The "wet soils" of which these historians speak are usually excessively wet: acidic podzols and gleys that are difficult to work and infertile until heavily manured. The "high, even rainfall and passable summers" are in fact a climate so wet that solar energy is often severely limited, grain crops sometimes cannot do well (recall how important was the post-1492 introduction of the potato), and soils do not dry out until late in spring, if at all. I do not want to caricature the situation. It is merely the case that northwest European soils, across their entire range of variability, are not superior to the soils of many other regions. In ecological terms, the lands of warmer, drier regions that have either good rainfall regimes or possibilities for irrigation or drainage tend to be rather higher in productivity. My point is more limited. There is nothing about Europe's agricultural environment that explains the so-called miracle, or that might lead one to believe (as the authors I have cited believe) that European history throughout its course has been favored over Asian history by the European agricultural environment.

Europe's supposed environmental superiority is by no means limited to farming. I will close our discussion of environmentalism by briefly commenting on four other comparative judgments which are routinely made by present historians of the European "miracle."

First is the classical "capes and bays" argument, familiar to most European and Anglo-American schoolchildren. Supposedly, Europe's configuration of peninsulas and bays, and Europe's possession of navigable rivers, gave this continent a natural basis for communication, trade, and accessibility denied to other continents. This, then, is supposed to have had a lot to do with the rise of markets and eventually capitalism in Europe.<ref>Mann, "European Development" (1988), p. 10, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 406; Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), pp. 90, 227; Crone, ''Pre-Industrial Societies'' (1989), p. 150; McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976), p. 295.</ref> Part of the argument, like the emperor's clothes, is transparently false when looked at directly. For instance, accessibility by sea along the coasts of the Indian Ocean and much of the South China Sea was considerably easier in the Middle Ages than it was in Atlantic Europe. (If monsoonal wind patterns posed a problem in the Indian Ocean, storms posed a greater problem in the North Atlantic.) Trading cities dotted the Indian coast, and trading vessels plied up and down this coast, and on to Indonesia and Arabia, carrying bulk commodities like rice and iron as well as high-value goods, long before Italian galleys inaugurated a regular commodity trade between the Mediterranean and the northwest Atlantic. I do not belittle the great seamanship of the Atlantic fishermen, the Iceland traders, and the Hanseatic League when I note, simply, that other regions were using the sea as effectively as the Europeans were at comparable times.

As to rivers, Europe's endowment of navigable rivers is impressive but not unique. It is not better than India's and China's. Interisland navigation in insular Southeast Asia was much easier than was navigation up and down the Rhine, say, or the Danube. Again it is a matter simply of reducing comparisons to reality. The "capes and bays" errors are normally followed by another error: the idea that Europe had, in early times, an advantage over civilizations that had to transport commodities overland. Many of the "miracle" historians repeat the theory that overland transport necessarily was much more costly than water transport. This is in fact a multiplicity of comparisons. When Mann and others quote the old formulas about draft animals consuming their weight in fodder over a limited distance (some say this takes place within 100-150 km), they ignore the fact that most draft animals graze or browse along the way: hence the great Inner-Asian Silk Road and the Sudanic caravans are easily comprehensible.<ref>Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986, chap. 5). Mann in fact builds a theory of ancient warfare upon the basis of this sort of calculation, here also ignoring the fact that armies then as now provision themselves and their animals on the route of march.</ref> Canals in China were much more effective than circuitous coastal shipping routes in Europe. And water transport—particularly upwind and upriver—may not have had advantages over land transport 1,000 or so years ago.

Eric L. Jones, in ''The European Miracle'', makes the large claim that Asia suffered so much more than Europe from natural disasters of all sorts that Asian development was strongly inhibited by this presumed fact.<ref>Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), chap. 2 and elsewhere. Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 132, makes the same claim, citing Jones.</ref> He carries the argument to the point of claiming that the risk of natural disaster was so high as to frighten ordinary people into unusual demographic behavior, to close off trade possibilities, and more. Setting aside the fact that we have very little historical data on this subject, the main error is a simple matter of scale. Jones's "Europe" is really West and Central Europe. This region is roughly the size of the Indian subcontinent and perhaps one-fourth the size of the settled portion of Asia. So it might well have one-fourth as many natural disasters, ceteris paribus. It is true that floods are more serious in regions where people farm river valleys, but populations make adjustments which keep this one risk small enough so that it does not affect long-term development, and I suspect that winter-weather dangers in rural Europe were as great as flood risk in Asia, on a per capita basis. Hurricanes are no worse than the worst North Atlantic winter storms. The theory as a whole is unsupported by evidence and empty of credibility as an argument for the European "miracle."

The miracle historians point repeatedly to Europe's environmental differentiation, claiming that this leads to a unique potential for interregional trade and thus, again, for capitalism.<ref>Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 111; Jones ''The European Miracle'' (1981), pp. 90, 105, 107, 226-227; Mann, "European Development: Approaching a Historical Explanation" (1988), p. 10; Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 406.</ref> One need merely note that Europe does not possess an unusually large range of environments, and natural products, by comparison with other regions of comparable size. China, for instance, has roughly the same range of midlatitude environments plus a tropical south coast.

The last environmentalistic fable to be discussed here is the claim that Europe's topographic differentiation into many small "core regions," separated by mountains and forests, somehow led to a number of supposedly unique features of ancient and medieval European society, including even the development of a unique trading system and a unique system of moderate-sized states and the many benefits supposedly deriving therefrom. Since this issue ties in with the parts of the "miracle" literature that concern Europe's supposed uniqueness in economic and political development, I will postpone discussing the geography of the matter until later in this chapter. Suffice it to say now that this idea of "cores" is partly a myth, and insofar as it is valid the same sorts of "cores" can be found in other continents.

=== Rationality ===

We turn now to the theories about Europe's historical superiority or priority—Europe's "miracle"—which ground themselves, not in biology, not in environment, but in culture. First I will deal with theories which start from a conception of the superior "rationality" of Europeans. "Rationality" in such theories embraces many psychological attributes, always including inventiveness and innovativeness (or progressiveness), usually a capacity for abstract thought, and often a certain ability to make moral or ethical judgments. The issue is not whether such things are or are not fundamental causes in history; the issue is whether Europeans had more rationality, or higher rationality, than every other human community, and whether this was the principal reason, or at any rate one of the principal reasons, for the unique rise of Europe. The plain assertion that Europeans are smarter than everyone else seems to have a certain antique or Victorian ring to it, but this is deceptive: theories about "Western rationality" and the like are just as important today as they were for prior generations of scholars. Sometimes they are difficult to identify as rationality theories because they display other plumage. An explanation may focus on, say, technology, arguing that European technological innovations produced various forward movements in European history; looked at closely, however, the technological explanation usually dissolves into a theory about the inventiveness of Europeans, that is, their rationality. By the same token, an explanation may start with the state, or free markets, or the family, but usually (not always) it derives such structures from the more basic trait, rationality. Sometimes it works the other way around. Classical racist theories were rationality theories: to be white is to be more intelligent. Some (not all) Marxist theories are rationality theories: the defeat of feudalism released creative energies which then led to technological innovation, etc. Another complication is that superior rationality may be posited just for one crucial period and place, a magic key that started the whole process: Periclean Athens, Gutenberg's workshop, etc. I will try to sort these matters out by dealing first with the category "rationality theories" as such, then turning to other sorts of theories, technological and institutional, some of which are also rooted in the idea of European rationality.

=== The Rationality Doctrine ===

At the beginning of this century most European scholars accepted the basic proposition that Europeans are more rational than non-Europeans. This was explained by a great variety of competing theories, biological racism being perhaps the most prominent, but I suspect that most Europeans accepted the proposition as indisputably correct regardless of the explanation. It was simply obvious that European countries had attained a higher level of wealth and civilization than other countries and had done so on their own, mainly through invention, innovation, and creativity. Europeans also now controlled the entire world and this, too, had to reflect some intellectual and probably also moral superiority. This was the heyday of the doctrine of classical diffusionism (discussed in Chapter 1), and few people doubted the doctrine's basic propositions: Europe develops; non-Europe does not develop or does so more slowly; Europe's development is based ultimately in some intellectual or spiritual principle; the normal and natural way for non-Europe to modernize and progress is by receiving the diffusion of rational European ideas, brought by European colonial administrators, settlers, planters, missionaries, and purveyors of commodities.

By this time most European thinkers had come to accept the doctrine of "the psychic unity of mankind," at least to the extent of agreeing that all of humanity shares a common ability to progress toward modernity. This doctrine crystallized into a theory, widely though not universally accepted in the early part of this century, that can be called the dualistic-developmental conception of human rationality. The elementary dualism was a distinction between the mentality of child and that of adult. The human mind has developed from a prehistoric condition which was mental childhood. European history is either to be explained as the fruit of human mental development or has been intimately accompanied by such mental development, in a process that was fundamentally the same as the psychological development from childhood to adulthood. Europeans became more rational as history progressed, just as children acquire rationality in the course of ontogenetic development. Ancient people had been not merely less intelligent but also much more governed by emotions and passions than by intellect, just as is the case with modern children. With some modification, the same was thought to be the case for modern European women, who were less intelligent and more governed by emotion than men, that is, they were less rational than men. But women, too, would experience mental development, and would eventually be rational enough to vote, hold public office, etc.

Non-Europeans, within the same theory, were seen as psychically undeveloped, as more or less childlike. But, given the psychic unity of mankind, non-Europeans could of course be brought to adulthood, to rationality, to modernity, through a set of learning experiences, mainly colonial. (The phrase "colonial tutelage" was a signature of the doctrine, and this conception is encountered in most history and geography textbooks of the time.) It was not simply a case of "the natives are like children." The idea of non-European nonrationality was a definite, putatively scientific principle, widely accepted: non-Europeans think somewhat like children, and will be led toward adulthood by Europeans. Non-Europeans were of course graded. "Savages" were mental children without qualification. Problematic peoples, like the Indians, Ottomans, and Chinese, were thought to be childlike in some respects and not in others. Indeed they were governed by emotion and passion much more than Europeans. (Colonial revolts were obviously irrational—were outbursts of childlike emotion.) As far as scientific and abstract philosophical thinking was concerned, the people of these cultures were clearly not up to full adult standards, but in some respects, notably in arts and crafts, they were perhaps gifted adolescents.

So we have a model which has, as its centerpiece, the Rational Modern Adult European Man. History is his progression to mental adulthood. He is contrasted with ancient European man; with modern European children; with modern European women; with modern non-Europeans. The contrast was often extended, also, to psychotics; in some schools of thought they were explicitly seen as having a developmentally arrested mentality and this was indeed used as a therapeutic principle.<ref>Occasionally "the criminal mind" was seen to reflect another dimension of contrast.</ref> What needs to be emphasized is the fact that this was considered to be a scientific theory. Thus it was valid to exchange principles across these various dimensions of contrast. For our purposes, the most important of these principles was the attribution of mental development to European history and the attribution of mental nondevelopment to non-Europe, past and present; hence Europeans had naturally acquired a unique rationality.

It would be wrong to reduce to caricature the scholarly theories of a few generations back, and the model I have just described looks, on the face of it, like a caricature. Most scholars did not literally believe, say, that the American Indian was a mental child, or that ontogenetic mental development exactly recapitulates the mental development of our species. But the model was a dominant force in European thought in certain precise ways. The equation of child, ancient, and non-European was explicitly accepted in nonscholarly discourse (newspapers, Tarzan novels, and so on). American educational policy toward Indians and other colonials was explicitly grounded in this model, even if it was a smoothed-down version of it. A very large number of writings in history, geography, and all of social science made use of one or another part of the model. And several very widely accepted theories were really forms of the same model. Three examples will be helpful.

Most anthropologists accepted the idea that there are two distinct mental types, one being the so-called "primitive mind," the mind of tribal peoples just about everywhere (some added: peasants everywhere). The "primitive mind" was very explicitly described—the most famous description is found in Lévy-Bruhl's influential book, ''How Natives Think''—as being incapable of higher theoretical and abstract ideas, as being emotion driven, and so on.<ref>Lévy-Bruhl, ''How Natives Think'' (1966).</ref> Some anthropologists opposed this notion (Boas, Radin, and Mead perhaps most notably<ref>See, for example, Boas, ''The Mind of Primitive Man'' (1938); Radin, ''Primitive Man as Philosopher'' (1927); M. Mead, ''Growing Up in New Guinea'' (1930).</ref>); most anthropologists accepted it with some qualifications; some accepted it literally. Lévy-Bruhl's rather stark form of the theory had great influence on psychologists and all of social science. Closely connected to this theory was the notion that there are "primitive languages," languages incapable of expressing higher theoretical and abstract thought. This old notion (which had been used in one form by William von Humboldt) was joined to the proposition that people cannot think beyond the limitations of their natural language, and so a primitive language entails a primitive mind.<ref>Stocking, ''Victorian Anthropology'' (1987), p. 59; Bowler, ''The Invention of Progress'' (1989), p. 66; Whitman "From Philology to Anthropology in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Germany" (1984); Bernal, ''Black Athena'', vol. 1 (1987); Said, ''Orientalism'' (1978). A recent expression of this theory came in a Soviet debate about "Oriental despotism" (Lelekov, "Round-Table: State and Law in the Ancient Orient," 1978). L. Lelekov, a historian, claimed that words meaning "freedom" and "right" were basic in the original Indo-European language or languages but not in Near Eastern languages, and asserted that this must have affected "social thinking" (p. 190). This contention was refuted by the philologist V. Ivanov (p. 193).</ref> Beyond that, the old philological theory about the innate superiority of Indo-European languages still had many adherents, and this theory extended the notion of primitive language to most of the non-European languages of the world. The third example is a broad family of theories in psychology that made use of the idea that mental development in the individual is homologous to mental development in the species, and that modern primitive peoples have the mentality of children and ancients, sometimes extending the concept to the putative psychological makeup (and limitations) of non-European peoples in general. In the twentieth century this theory received its most influential expression in the psychoanalytic viewpoint of Carl Jung and his followers. Jung swept broadly across non-Western cultures (Arabs, Indians, Africans, African-Americans, and others) declaring, basically, that only modern European man has fully developed an individual consciousness, an ego, an ability to think, even an ability to conceive of himself as an individual separate from the external world. Only European man is rational.<ref>See Dalal, "The Racism of Jung" (1988). In Jung's work, see in particular ''Psychological Types'' (1971) (for instance: "(If) we go right back to primitive psychology, we find absolutely no trace of the concept of the individual," p. 10); ''Memories, Dreams, Reflections'' (1963), and "The Dreamlike World of India," in ''Civilization in Transition'' (1927). See also the 1954 work by Jung's disciple Erich Neumann, ''The Origins and History of Consciousness'' (for instance: "The evolution of consciousness as a form of creative evolution is the peculiar achievement of Western man ... The creative character of consciousness is a central feature of the cultural canon of the West ... In stationary cultures, or in primitive societies where the original features of human culture are still preserved, the earliest stages of man's psychology predominate," pp. xviii-xxix).</ref>

The doctrine went through some important changes as it became absorbed into the "modernization" paradigm, the body of ideas which, as we have seen, came to dominate European social thought in the 1950s and still does so to some extent today. "Colonial tutelage" gave way to "diffusion of modernizing innovations." Non-Europeans no longer were "natives," and no longer were described as "childlike." In place of the notions of "primitive mind" and "primitive language" came the notion of traditional mentality. Non-Europeans are "traditional" in two senses: they lack "modern cognitive abilities," that is, the ability to think theoretically and scientifically, and they lack "modern attitudes" of the sort that push a person to achieve higher things, to reject the old, and so on.

This appears still to be the primitive mind, but there is an important difference. "Traditional minds" are simply waiting to be awakened, to be modernized. The larger picture was one of a vast landscape of traditional societies, containing people with traditional mentalities, and modernization would set the drama into motion. Mentalities would change. Social structure would change. New ideas and technology would diffuse into the modernizing societies from the already-modernized European societies, and so on. Recall that the modernization doctrine is not only a concept of the spatial spread of European ideas, attitudes, and the like, in the present-day postcolonial world. It is also a historical concept: modernization as history. "Traditional society" and "traditional mentality" came to be used to describe early Europe, the rise of Europe was now seen as a modernization process, and the start of that process was a much debated matter of deciding when Europe began its "takeoff"—its rise from the level of traditionalism and toward modernity. History is appealed to for the basic causal principle: Europe modernized, and now non-Europe will follow—though not slavishly—in its path. We will come back to this point in a moment. First I want to comment on the main causal principles that are thought to lead in the other direction. I will show that schools have arisen in psychology, sociology, and other disciplines that claim to provide scientific demonstrations as to what, exactly, is the nature of the "traditional mind," and the output from these scholars tends, then, to seep back into history, where it finds its way into the newer writings about the European miracle.

In psychology, the important figure is Jean Piaget. His basic theory of mental development postulated an invariant series of "stages" of development through which all children must progress. Piaget was influenced by Lévy-Bruhl and the primitive mind doctrine, and as late as 1971 he thought that

it is quite possible, and this is the impression we have from known ethnographical work, that in many societies, adult thought does not go beyond the level of "concrete" operations, and therefore does not reach that of propositional operations which develop between the ages of twelve and fifteen in our milieus.<ref>Piaget, ''Psychology and Epistemology'' (1971), p. 61.</ref>

"Propositional operations" means, roughly, logic. "Concrete" is childish prelogical thought, unable to deal with the abstract and the theoretical. Now Piaget was a great psychologist, but he did not have, or claim to have, direct knowledge of non-European psychology. He was arguing from the traditional dualistic-developmental model that equates the child and the primitive. (And he was about 30 years out of date as to ethnography.) But many of his disciples, seeking to connect their theory with the modernization doctrine, took up the theme and began to carry out research to find out whether non-Western people (particularly Africans) do, indeed, have inferior cognitive abilities. It is no oversimplification to say that virtually all of these studies made the same mistake and came up with the same, predictable conclusions. They used the tests of cognitive ability that Piaget had used with European children and, scarcely modifying them, administered these tests to non-European children and adults and found, predictably, that these people do not have full adult cognitive abilities. By now the error has become well known, and most present-day Piagetian psychologists do not seem to assert that non-Europeans are cognitively childlike. Along with the Piagetian studies of the 1960s and 1970s, there appeared, in this era, many studies carried out by psychologists from other schools of thought (like the Heinz Werner school) which took the old primitive-mind doctrine as fact,<ref>See, for example, Werner and Kaplan, ''Symbol Formation'' (1964).</ref> along with studies carried out by white South African psychologists comparing white and black subjects, other Europeans studying other African populations, and a few Israeli psychologists comparing the cognitive abilities of Arabs and Jews. With few exceptions, the European psychologists found the non-European subjects to be deficient in cognitive ability, and so to be "traditional."<ref>See the first 16 volumes (through 1985) of ''The Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology'' for a great many examples of this phenomenon. For this period something like one-tenth of all the empirical articles in this U.S. journal were studies by white Southern Africans purporting to show the cognitive inferiority of black Africans.</ref> In nearly all of these studies the testing was such that the "natives" didn't really stand a chance because the tests were European, administered by Europeans or their native assistants, in Europeanized settings. The error became so well known that the entire field of "cross-cultural psychology" gained a bad name—as an apologia for ethnocentrism—until, in the 1980s, it changed direction. The point is that while most cross-cultural psychologists today, apparently, deny that non-Europeans are less rational than Europeans, they established a body of publications that are still used by others to make the opposite point.

The rationality doctrine was perhaps most influential in those parts of sociology and economics that were closest to the modernization doctrine, particularly among academics who were involved in making and implementing the policies being put into place in the 1950s and 1960s to develop the underdeveloped countries. As we saw in Chapter 1, this sphere of ideas was crucial to the politics of modernization for at least three reasons: First and most basic was the need to validate diffusionism. Second, development of the sort that involved only the spread of new ideas and new techniques was much cheaper, in principle, than development involving massive flows of capital, industrial development, and the like. And third, along the same lines, development at the level of ideas, of research, extension, education, and so on, was not threatening; it would not produce the dangers of revolution and counterrevolution implicit in efforts to change the relation of power groups, to effectuate land reform, and the like. For these reasons, scholars were encouraged, indeed were given lavish grants and were well paid, to produce analyses of modernization that would lead to workable policies for bringing about development mainly through an influence at the level of ideas.

Everett Rogers, a rural sociologist; David McClelland, a social psychologist; and Everett Hagen, an economist, provided highly influential contributions that I will describe briefly and with some caricature. Rogers was one of the leaders in a movement to sort out peasant mentalities into those that are prodevelopment ("cosmopolitan") and those that are noninnovative and "laggard." The crucial notion was the idea of the diffusion of rationality into rural non-European communities. The key to development (with some qualification) was the transmittal of new ideas to innovative "adopters." The fact that most of the ideas were not, themselves, workable (thus were not rational), and that adoption of them would have required of peasants not more knowledge, but more power and landownership, was ignored. McClelland claimed that non-Western peoples in general have not modernized because they lack the proper "need-achievement" motivation. They will modernize when and if they acquire this need to achieve, which had been of crucial importance in earlier European development, from ancient Greece on up. Hagen produced an elaborate theory, based in no evidence whatever, that non-Western peoples, and particularly peasants, have a traditional mentality that resists change of all sorts. The model starts with a mythic peasant unconscious mind that is uncreative, submissive to paternal authority (and therefore oppressive of innovative children), and unwilling to change. All three of these scholars, and dozens of their acolytes, produced a general model of peasant mentality as defective in both cognitive and attitudinal (affective) characteristics, but, of course, not hopelessly so.<ref>Rogers, ''The Diffusion of Innovations'' (1962); Rogers and Shoemaker, ''Communication of Innovations'' (1971), pp. 187-191; McClelland, ''The Achieving Society'' (1961); Hagen, ''On the Theory of Social Change'' (1962) and "A Framework for Analyzing Economic and Political Change," in Brookings Institution, ed., ''Development of the Emerging Countries: An Agenda for Research'' (1962), pp. 1-39. I have cited only the initial statements: much literature emerged from these works.</ref> One of many recent outgrowths of this doctrine is Stephen Marglin's theory of the Western mental "episteme," a marriage of the old "primitive mind" idea and the newer ideas about traditionalism, which argues, in essence, that the Western mind is, and historically has been, scientific, rational, and intellectually hardheaded—the "episteme"—while the non-Western mind is traditionally given to technique and art ("techne") but not to science. Marglin's new twist on this old doctrine is to say that some of the non-Western "techne" should be incorporated in development along with the Western "episteme" because "techne," less intellectual but more feeling, is less likely to destroy the natural environment and causes less psychic damage to non-Western people, a distinction rather like the older duality between scientific thought and emotion-laden concrete thought.<ref>S. Marglin, "Losing Touch: The Cultural Conditions of Worker Accommodation and Resistance," in F. and S. Marglin, eds., ''Dominating knowledge: Development, Culture, and Resistance'' (1990).</ref> Marglin's ideas provide an example of much theorizing in the economic development world (like Hagen, he is a development economist) about non-Western nonrationality.

It would take us far afield to examine the parallel arguments in all the other fields of social thought. The following should suffice: In geography, the diffusion-of-innovative-ideas approach has been important since the 1960s and remains so today. The same old assumptions about peasant and non-Western traditionalism are still dominant. Some geographers claim even that non-Europeans are mentally not capable of using all available means of coping with natural hazards like drought and hurricane. One geographer, Robert Sack, has come up with a classically Eurocentric theory about spatial cognition: most non-Western people (primitives and most peasants) cannot think in spatial terms the way modern Western adults can. Among the authorities he uses—the argument is from authority, not evidence—are Lévy-Bruhl and Piaget.<ref>Sack, ''Conceptions of Space in Social Thought'' (1980). Geographers prominent in the diffusion paradigm discussed here are L. Brown (''The Diffusion of Innovations'', 1981) and P. Gould (''Spatial Diffusion'', 1969). On peasant traditionalism in relation to natural hazards, see G. White, ed., ''Natural Hazards'' (1974), as an example of the abundant literature. I criticize these and other arguments about non-Western nonrationality in Blaut, "Two Views of Diffusion" (1977), "Diffusionism: A Unitarian Critique" (1987a), and "Natural Mapping" (1991).</ref> In the field of education in the United States the newer forms of the dualistic-developmental theory of (Western) rationality are highly influential in many areas, including testing.<ref>In the field of education in the United States the dominant standardized college entrance tests (SAT and ACT) are skewed by culture-specific and sex-specific internal (as well as situational) characteristics, such that women do more poorly than men although they actually perform at higher levels in terms of university grades, while the ACT and SAT test scores of Latinos (African-Americans have not yet been studied in this way), which are very low, have no correlation whatever with their performance in college. Thus the tests effectively minimize female and minority college attendance. Why the tests are almost universally used, even so, is a fascinating question. The same biases are so prominent in IQ testing that such tests have been barred as diagnostic instruments in California schools. The "primitive mind" and "primitive languages" biases sometimes combine, as in U.S. debates about the so-called "English-only" issue and about the question whether non-European literature deserves to be included in the college curriculum along with European literature. In Boston not long ago, 30% of Hispanic children aged six to eight were not attending elementary school because their inability to speak English had been judged to be evidence of mental retardation, and Boston claimed not to have sufficient resources to educate these children in "special schools." Testing in general in U.S. education remains very racist.</ref> In the field of philosophy, there is a strong relationship between the stream of ideas about rationality, discussed above, and the resurgence of mind-body dualism, such as one finds in the Cartesian and Kantian traditions and particularly in the modern neo-Kantians.<ref>Rorty, ''Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature'' (1980), and earlier works by Dewey (for instance ''The Quest for Certainty'', 1929), Whitehead (for instance, ''Modes of Thought'', 1938), and G. H. Mead (for instance, ''Philosophy of the Act'', 1938).</ref>

I do not suggest that the doctrine of non-Western nonrationality is fully hegemonic in modern scholarship, or that the above formulations have not been challenged. In general, however, the doctrine remains somewhat dominant in all fields of thought except, perhaps, anthropology and economics. Anthropology in recent decades has, with some lapses, maintained quite firmly that primitive minds are not primitive.<ref>This is a general assessment. Some anthropologists continue to maintain either the "primitive mind" doctrine or the closely related "traditional mind" doctrine. An example of the latter is George Foster's well-known and influential book ''Traditional Cultures'' (1962), of the former, Hallpike's ''The Foundations of Primitive Thought'' (1979). For a critique, see Schweder, "Cultural Psychology: What Is It?" (1990).</ref> And some schools of economics need the principle of universal economic rationality so badly, as axioms for their theories, that they are willing to concede rationality to everyone.

=== Rationality and the European Miracle ===

The idea of European rationality is often called "Weberian," because Max Weber made important use of the idea in various explanations for European social evolution and various negative judgments about the lesser rationality of other societies. The rationality doctrine was, however, widely held in early twentieth-century Europe when Weber's important writings on this subject were published. But he codified the traditional doctrine and added something of his own to it, so the doctrine can indeed be called Weberian from the present-day perspective. It is also Weberian in another and perhaps more important sense: Weber placed European social evolution in a framework emphasizing the modernization process, and contrasting Europe's modernization with the "traditionalism," as he sometimes called it, of Asian civilizations. When the modernization paradigm locked into place among scholars just after World War II, Max Weber was the most obvious, and most logical, source of basic sociological doctrine for the paradigm. From that time on, scholars who wrote about the rise of Europe and chose to emphasize the individual trait of rationality, or social-level traits and institutions which Weber had treated as primary (and, in the main, as consequences of European rationality), were Weberians to one degree or another (even if they rejected some parts of Weber's model). The importance of Weber for our discussion of present-day theories about the "European miracle," is the fact that the most influential, probably dominant, school of thought concerning the "miracle" today is more or less Weberian. Weber's views about rationality therefore require at least brief discussion.

Weber analyzed Western capitalist society of the late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century epoch in meticulous detail and with great insight, although there were important limits to his insight. He held to the typical conceit of his time and place and class in thinking that contemporary European capitalism is the culmination of a process of social evolution that was, at root, an intellectual progression, an ascent of human "rationality," meaning intellect and ethics, from ancient to modern society. (He had doubts about the likelihood of further ascent in the future.) At each stage of that progression people invented new social forms, such as higher forms of the state, the legal system, the bureaucracy, the economy, the city, and so forth, but these forms were, basically, products of evolving rationality rather than primary causes of progress in their own right. But the march toward ever more rational society took place in Europe, among Europeans. Outside of the European tunnel of time, all societies were in varying degrees traditional and in varying degrees irrational.

Weber said rather little about the question of why Europeans came to display this rationality in the first place, that is, as a basal cause. He invoked several factors, one of which, as we noted previously, was race and another, the natural environment. Others seem to lie deep within culture. Yet Weber rarely discussed causality at this basal level, that is, attempting to explain why Europeans have unique rationality, and have had it since a long time before the Protestant Reformation and modernity.<ref>On the question of Weber's use of "rationality," its basal status in his theorizing, and yet its uncertain definition and provenance, see, for instance: Cohen's introduction to the 1981 ed. of Weber's ''General Economic History'' (1981), pp. xxv-xxvii; Löwith, ''Max Weber and Karl Marx'' (1982), pp. 40-42, 53-54, n. 49; Freund, ''The Sociology of Max Weber'' (1968), pp. 140-149. In Weber, see ''General Economic History'' (1981), chaps. 29, 30, ''The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism'' (1958), pp. 13-31, 59-60, 79, 118-120, 191, n. 19, 265, n. 31, ''The Religion of China'' (1951), chap. 8, ''The Religion of India'' (1967), p. 387, and other works.</ref> One reason seems to lie in his view of social causality, with ideas and values, and the evolution of ideas and values, treated as prime causes of social processes, social structures, and social change. Given this conception, he would not be expected to look for nonideological-level causes for ideas and values. Doubtless there were other reasons.

Whatever Weber considered to have been the basic cause of the differences between rational, progressive European society and irrational, traditional Asian society (Africa and America were scarcely noticed), he delineated these supposed differences very carefully. The most crucial arguments are found in his ''General Economic History'' and ''The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism''. The development of rationality among Europeans—however that had happened—led to a special sort of "economic ethic," a body of values, aspirations, and logical thought processes that emerged primarily in connection with the Reformation (and particularly Puritanism) but which, more fundamentally, produced capitalism. The important point here is that basal rationality produced both the "economic ethic" of capitalism and the Protestant movement: Weber is not (as some think) explaining capitalism and modernity in terms narrowly of religion. He does invoke religion to explain many aspects of the supposed traditionalism of Asians, but here too a primordial irrationality is seen as underlying religion. (He writes, for instance, of the "magical traditionalism" of Indians and Chinese.<ref>Weber, ''General Economic History'' (1981), p. 161. Also see pp. 339, 355-368. Weber makes a large number of comments about the irrationality of Asians.</ref>)

The superior rationality of Europeans produces other major historical differences between Europe and non-Europe. Europeans are basically freedom loving, not ground under by Oriental despotism; this devolves into a form of city that is much freer than the Asian city, the latter being conceived by Weber as (in essence) merely a physical entity wholly controlled by the overarching empire, and the former as a truly new form of society, emerging in the Middle Ages and inaugurating modernity.<ref>Weber, ''Economy and Society'', vol. 2 (1968), pp. 1212-1374.</ref> (As we discuss in Chapter 3, Asian cities were not as Weber described them. Some were free city-states, others were virtually free under a loose imperial umbrella. European cities, on the other hand, were much less independent than Weber thought.) Landholding systems were also different because of differences in rationality: only in Europe, says Weber (here putting forward a purely traditional European view) does the concept of private property truly emerge. The feudal estate is almost genuinely private property. The Asian estate is seen as merely a temporary assignment of land as a source of revenue for dignitaries, a form of salary given for service and ordinarily returned to the state. But European feudal estates were also, legally and actually, granted on service tenure, and in both continents these sorts of estates tended in general to become hereditary and thus eventually private property (see Chapter 3). Of course, Weber talks about other supposed differences between Europe and non-Europe, but the examples given here will suffice to show his overall approach.

Weber did not originate most of these arguments, although he codified them and developed them in a brilliant way. Yet Weber is given credit overall, and "Weberianism" is now the most important form of theory in explaining the European "miracle." The basic form can be summarized very simply. Rationality is the causal root. The effect of differential rationality is, in Europe, permanent progress, modernization, and capitalism. In non-Europe it is stagnation, traditionalism, and various irrational cultural attributes such as superstition. The model here is simple diffusionism: rationality and therefore modernization are permanent in Europe. Non-Europe does not modernize except by the diffusion of these traits from Europe.

The doctrine of "Western rationality" is widely used today in explanations for Europe's unique rise, its "miracle." No longer is the superior rationality of Europeans attributed, even implicitly, to racial superiority, but how the historians manage to assert the one without the other is not an easy question to answer. Generally, causality is consigned to the impenetrable mists of ancient history, with perhaps an occasional speculation about ancient free-living European peasants or the evils of Oriental despotism, or with a ritual citation of Max Weber. For many historians, I suspect, the idea of European rationality is simply axiomatic. Europeans, for whatever reason, are just built that way.

Eric L. Jones dwells very heavily on rationality as an explanation for Europe's historical superiority in ''The European Miracle''. His claim is that there is a fundamental lack of rationality among Asians and Africans. The assertions are laid on so thickly, and with so little attempt to account for this putative irrationality, that it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Jones, perhaps alone among modern "miracle" historians, holds some deep prejudices. Africans are dismissed, in a brief discussion, as having had no significance in history. They are characterized in a way that suggests, not very subtly, that they are closer to the beasts than are other humans.

In Africa man adapted himself to nature. The hunter felt part of the ecosystem, not outside it looking in with wonder, and definitely not above it and superior. After all, there were large carnivores who sought man as a prey. The most evocative symbol of this ecological oneness may be the honey guides ... birds commensal with man. They fly, chattering loudly, ahead of bands of hunters, leading them ... to the tree hives of wild bees and feeding on the wax after the men have broken open the hives. (154)<ref>Numbers in parentheses are page numbers in ''The European Miracle''.</ref>

This is a Tarzan image. Most Africans were farmers, not hunters (we discussed this previously). The scavenging house sparrow is also commensal with humans in the suburbs of London, but Jones speaks of "commensalism" only for Africans. (Ethology, as we will see, is evoked somewhat similarly for Asians.<ref>The ecologists' term "commensalism" refers to a form of tight interspecific cooperation between animal species, but hardly ever is it applied to humans.</ref>)

There was scant incentive or pressure for development or invention. ... Any pressure ... was apparently offset by the use of slaves instead of the improvement of methods. ... Otherwise wealth was spent on luxury items. ... [There was] pervasive insecurity as a result of conflict and slave-raiding. (155-156)

Africans thus were noninventive, were aggressive, were lovers of luxury, were slavers and slaves. And also hunters close to the beasts they hunted. So: it "is not clear what indigenous developments were possible" (156).

Asians do not think logically. There is "relative absence of the empirical enquiry and criticism of the Graeco-Judeo-Christian tradition" (161), and "lack of a crisp tradition of logical debate," which may explain the "failure" of Asian science" (162). "The notion of a consensus in interpreting nature may have seemed absurd" (162)—that is, Asians may not even have had an ability to conceptualize scientific verification, to distinguish empirical truth from falsity. They were uncreative: "Asian institutions suppressed creativity or diverted it into producing voluptuous luxuries" (231).

Asians have attitudes and values that inhibit progress. "Oriental philosophies [emphasize] emotions, values and cosmologies," at the expense of empirical thought (161). Orientals are lazy (163). They (like Africans) have a "love of luxury" (170), and they love to buy things like "kingfisher feathers ... precious stones ... drugs no modern pharmacopeia would own" (164). They have a "servile spirit," their armies lack "tough" petty officers (167). They are, as a rule, introverted, inward looking; they are "increasingly immobile societies undergoing 'curious experiences,'" given to self-imposed "isolation" (170), lacking an urge to explore (168, 177, 203, 231). They are given to senseless warfare (169, 188, 197), do not have a written legal system (164, 188, 197), and do not have a concept of political boundary (167, 194). There is much thievery and piracy (189, 199, 209, 229-30).

In most judgments of this type (of which I have given only a sample), Jones is referring to Asians in general and through all times in their history.<ref>Typical of Jones's method is to find some objectionable feature of very early Asian society, compare it with some pleasing feature of modern, post-industrial-revolution European society, and then treat both features as though they were permanent characteristics of the respective societies, giving a picture of awful primitiveness to Asians and marvelous modernity to Europeans thereby.</ref> Some judgments are more specific. Islamic society was for a time somewhat innovative, borrowing technology from other societies, and preserving ancient Greek sciences. (This is a standard Eurocentric belief: Arabs preserved Greek science during the Dark Ages and then handed it back to Europe for further development, something like an intellectual left-luggage office.) The Ottoman Empire (the single real example of Islamic culture discussed by Jones, with the imputation that it stands as symbol for Islam as a whole and at all times) stamped out original thought. It produced unreason, backwardness, and retrogression, a "mist of obscurantist thought" (183). Ottomans didn't even know "the elementary facts of geography" (184) and couldn't even make decent maps (179). (Jones himself doesn't know much about geography and maps.) Rulers were often "degenerates," "drunkards," "mental defectives," "lechers," ruling with despotism and terror (186-187), their "philosophy" being theft and despoilment, against which there was "no legal shield" (187-189).

Indian society was socially and psychologically "frozen" (192), with values that were deleterious to economic progress. Religion was invoked to sanction all acts, but the advice of religious counsellors was "malicious or random" (195). The Mughal rulers were, like the Ottomans, degenerates, running society for their own benefit, given to "voluptuous selfishness," harems, jewels, menageries, intrigues, treason (196). The state was purely predatory. Technology was "almost stagnant," not even copying from abroad (199). "No written legal code existed," says Jones in a quite bizarre misstatement (197).

China was technologically inventive and innovative until the early Middle Ages, when progress stopped. There was thereafter a "retreat" (203); some skills were even forgotten. Chinese became "inward-looking" (203, 216, 220). China "backed away" from technology, from trade, from exploration. Technological development stopped even in agriculture, and only the cultivation of new land, with irrational cutting of irreplaceable forests, and the fortunate, timely, arrival of New World crops such as maize and sweet potato, saved the Chinese temporarily from disaster, although cutting down these forests was "one of mankind's greatest acts of ecological stupidity," stupidity which led to "soil erosion, gullying, silting and floods" (213). (Apparently the deforestation of Europe and North American was not "stupid.") Peasants were given to "envy and suspicion" (206), were stupid as farmers (212-217), and were stupid also in preferring "maximal reproduction" over "affluence" (218). The state was despotic, a "revenue-pump" for the rulers, providing no services (206). There was (again) a love of luxury, an attitude of "empty cultural superiority" (205), a corrupt, venal, parasitic ruling class. Chinese had "anti-social customs" (7) and were diseased.

Ethology, the science of comparative animal behavior, is invoked repeatedly by Jones in his characterization of Asians and Africans. Oriental courts were given to displays of "the dominance relationship" (109, 209). Multiple wives had "ethological significance," as also, perhaps, did the "amassing" of slaves for "display purposes." "Great attention was paid to submission symbols, kneeling, prostration, the kotow" (209). In India, a "similar calculus ... underlay human demographic behavior and veneration of the cow" (19). Recall the "commensalism" in Africa.

These beliefs about the intellectual and moral inferiority of non-Europeans are old colonial-era prejudices, which Jones merely recites. The fact that ''The European Miracle'' is taken seriously by some historians is partly, I think, a reflection of the degree to which these old prejudices still lurk within our scholarship as implicit beliefs.

Many other historians of the "miracle" try to insert European rationality at or near the base of their explanatory theories. Michael Mann can be taken as a typical representative of the genre. We have already discussed his contrived little theory about the marvelous Iron Age Indo-Europeans of the northern forests, uniquely individualistic, aggressive, freedom loving (all notions from nineteenth-century and earlier scholarship, none grounded in solid evidence for Europe or, comparatively, for non-Europe). Mann moves smoothly to ancient Greece, which he sees as the product of this earlier Indo-European root rationalism. The Greeks invented most things rational, from science to democracy to ethics (a respect for humanity). Other Mediterranean peoples contributed rather little by comparison with the rational Indo-Europeans who swept down from the north. (Even the Roman influence, which subjugated the European peasant, is seen as vaguely "un-European."<ref>"Frankish feudalism, in many ways proto-typical of later feudalism, was ... a mixture of the very, very old, deep-rooted drift of 'European' peasant society and of the brand new the opportunistic, the 'un-European,'" Mann, "European Development" (1988), p. 16.</ref>) History then moves northwestward as northern Europeans clear the forest and move what Mann calls the "leading edge" of European society forward toward what seems to be its foreordained goal, Britain.<ref>Mann, "European Development" (1988), p. 17. Also see his ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), for instance pp. 190, 195, 213, 377, 404, 412, 510. ("At the end of all these processes stood one organic, medium-sized, wet-soil island state, perfectly situated for take-off: Great Britain," p. 510.)</ref> Early in the Middle Ages, around A.D. 800, a newer stage of rationality emerges, combining the old culture and the new Christianity. Europeans now demonstrate their "rational restlessness" and their unique inventiveness, producing a revolutionary agricultural system and much more. The explanation is the ancient rationality, the newer Christian rationality, and the marvelous European environment.<ref>Mann, "European Development" (1988), pp. 8-9, 11-12, 15-18 and ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), pp. 377-378, 397-398, 402-408, 412, 500-510. Also, on Europe's rationality and its historical significance, see McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976), pp. 41, 97, 106-107, 236, 238, 249, 256, 259, 264.</ref> This, for Mann, is the kernel of the European miracle. The only part of this construct that requires further comment is the theory of a medieval technological revolution; this we discuss in the following section.

Lynn White, Jr., contributed a very influential form of the rationality doctrine with his theory about the unique technological inventiveness of medieval Europeans, a theory we discuss in the next section. John Hall contributes another version, much like Mann's except for its emphasis on the invention of rational politics by Europeans and its tendency to follow Eric L. Jones in various negative judgments about Asian history. Space does not permit me to review the way some other present-day historians invoke, and use, the theory of Western rationality as grounding for their theories about the European miracle. I should simply note that some of them are Marxists and near-Marxists. Perry Anderson, for instance, argues from ancient Greek rationality to European medieval progress. So does M. I. Finley. Robert Brenner contributes a very different Marxist rationality theory: there was no rationality until, quite suddenly, capitalism appeared among the English yeoman farmers, who promptly became amazingly inventive and started a technological revolution that has not yet ended.<ref>See P. Anderson, ''Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism'' (1974), part 3; Finley, ''The Use and Abuse of History'' (1975), chap. 6; Aston and Philipn, ''The Brenner Debate'' (1985), pp. 32-33, 42-51, 59, 63n, 214-215, 234-236, 306-316.</ref>

=== Technology ===

Among all of the narrow-minded ways of looking at history, technological determinism is the one most congenial to Eurocentric tunnel vision. It has the appearance, the illusion, of cold-blooded scientific fact. "X was invented here, on this date, and produced these effects." In talking about matters of technology, one can deny that ethnocentrism enters the picture: "this is hard fact, indisputable." And the significance of technology seems equally indisputable: a new tool does produce more food, a new weapon more casualties, whereas a new social form might have historical significance; then again, it might not. But technological determinism gets its greatest strength from the error known as "telescoping history." When we travel, mentally, back to medieval Europe, we pass backward through the eras in which Europeans clearly were technologically superior to everyone else, and so we tend to expect that superiority to have been the state of things at all prior times. But Europe advanced technologically beyond Asia and Africa mainly after the beginning of the industrial revolution. Europe did not even begin to forge ahead of other civilizations in technology or science until the seventeenth century or even later. By telescoping history we imbue the Middle Ages with the marvelous technological attributes of modern Europe. It is then but a small step to the conclusion that, since technology is so obviously a powerful cause in history, and since Europe has always been so technological, here is the root of the European miracle.

But tools do not invent themselves or reproduce themselves. If you invoke technological determinism, you must not only show that the technology appeared and had such-and-such effects, you must also explain why it was invented, and by whom. In nearly all (I think) technologically deterministic arguments made as part of some explanation for Europe's historical progress, technological arguments end up being arguments about the inventors, not the inventions. They end up in some Weberian claim that Europeans are more inventive, innovative, "rational," than non-Europeans. Technological determinism then differs from other kinds of tunnel-historical theories mainly in its claim that rational Europeans moved their society forward by inventing new technology, rather than doing so by inventing new political systems, new forms of social organization, new religions, or whatever.

Claims are made by Eurocentric historians that technology was a prime mover in all epochs from the post-Neolithic on down. Nowadays it would be hard to ignore the evidence that in ancient times the greatest technological innovations, in agriculture, transportation, and other spheres, entered Europe from the south and east, so technological arguments tend to begin with the Middle Ages. There are, however, exceptions. Michael Mann, as we noted previously, has revived the old notion that the invention of iron somehow revolutionized European peasant society in a way it did not do elsewhere, that it produced a wondrously inventive, acquisitive (etc.) type of society, rooted in iron-plowing Indo-European-speaking peasants, and he claims, in parallel, that Oriental despotisms of the ancient Middle East held back technological inventiveness, where peasants were supposedly held in tight control by the political system that irrigation technology necessitated. But this theory is contradicted by a great deal of evidence. So much is known about technological progress in the Middle East during this period (from the late Neolithic to the "Iron Age" and beyond) that the notion of noninventiveness is unreasonable. But iron working was not invented in Europe. Probably it came from the Middle East, but there are hints from farther afield (including West Africa). Plows were used in Middle Eastern agriculture, irrigated and nonirrigated, as well as in European agriculture. Plows may have been used earlier in China than in Europe. So the technological argument put forward by Mann (and others) is unsound and the psychological and social deductions are fallacious.

Many other "miracle" historians are prepared to start with the ancient Greeks and define these folk as the original uniquely inventive Europeans, but the Greeks did not contribute more to technological progress than their neighbors did to the south and east, so arguments of this sort must revert to the abstract idea of "rationality," thus, of potentiality, not actuality, a point we have already discussed. The Romans, in turn, were moderately inventive, but so were their neighbors. In the European Dark Ages, as everyone agrees, technological progress was hardly impressive, and was in fact going on at a healthier pace in parts of Africa and Asia. I suspect that the majority of historians today are not willing to go along with Michael Mann and others who claim to find a unique technological progress in Europe prior to the Middle Ages, although this view was quite widespread until a few decades ago. Most would disagree with Eric L. Jones, in ''The European Miracle'', that Europe has always been "a mutant civilization in its uninterrupted amassing of knowledge about technology" (p. 45), since there is nothing unusual about this process in human society.

It is with the Middle Ages that technological arguments come to prominence. It is here that the notion of a technological "takeoff to modernity" is most frequently encountered among historians of the European "miracle." The common argument form is about as follows: Northern Europeans indeed were rather backward folk until late in the Dark Ages, the early Middle Ages, when a kind of awakening occurred, and northern Europeans now suddenly emerged as the people we know—the most dynamic, most progressive, most innovative, most rapidly rising (etc.) people in the world—and the key to this rise was a set of early medieval technological innovations, based mainly, these historians claim, on European inventions, neglecting non-Europe and thus presenting us with a typical sort of Eurocentric tunnel history.

Lynn White, Jr., is an American historian whose book ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' presents this kind of technologically deterministic tunnel-historical argument in perhaps its purest form. This book, published in 1962, has been highly influential; its arguments are built in to the theories of many "miracle" historians, including Mann, Jones, and Hall (who not only cite the book repeatedly in their writings but rely on it for many technological arguments they invoke in support of their theories). The book is an effort to show that technological invention and innovation was the central cause of the rise of Europe during the Middle Ages. White lists a series of supposedly European inventions, and shows, for each in turn, what marvelous effects it had on European history. Here, for starters, is an example. The early medieval invention of the iron stirrup had a "catalytic ... influence on history." It permitted a new form of mounted warfare, created the phenomenon of the medieval knight, and produced feudalism (knights became manorial lords). And so, "The Man on Horseback, as we have known him during the past millennium, was made possible by the stirrup."<ref>White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 38); also McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976), p. 234.</ref>

But White's crucial arguments concern productive technology, and particularly agricultural technology. He claims that an agricultural revolution occurred in Europe (or rather in northern Europe) in the early Middle Ages, and this quite revolutionized European society and became a large part of the explanation for modernization and the rise of capitalism. He believes that three European inventions were the crux of the matter: the heavy plow, the horse collar (and therefore the use of horsepower), and the three-field rotation.

The heavy plow, pulled by teams of (typically) eight oxen, is assigned, by White, a tentative central European origin in the sixth century; it then diffused quickly throughout northwestern Europe, and "does much to account for the bursting vitality of the Carolingian realm in the eighth century."<ref>White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 54.</ref> White is correct in calling attention, as others before him have done, to the importance of the heavy plow as an agricultural innovation in the wetter and colder parts of Europe. It was highly advantageous in opening the deep, heavy soils of the North European Plain and the deep-working of soil was critical in view of northern Europe's moist weather. It was in fact necessary for the areal spread of farming into some of the wetter soils. Therefore, the heavy plow had much to do with the overall increase in medieval agricultural production. But the heavy plow was not in fact invented in Europe in the Middle Ages. Plows pulled by teams of 24 oxen were used in northern India before the time of Christ.<ref>Kosambi, ''Ancient India'' (1969), p. 89; R. S. Sharma, ''Light on Early Indian Society and Economy'' (1966), p. 57.</ref> Southern Europe used lighter plows, because the soils were generally lighter and drier, but the technology was not significantly different. It seems certain that the heavy plow was either diffused into northern Europe from elsewhere or was a local adaptation of a widely used tool-form. So this is not a European technological revolution. And the effects of the innovation in northern Europe probably should be attributed to the social forces that led to the introduction of the heavy plow, not to the technology itself. We know, for instance, that the growth of feudalism led to massive expansion of cultivation, partly at the incentive of the lords, who wished to increase their wealth and power by expanding their demesnes, partly as a reaction by peasants to the persistently increased demands from the lords for surplus product, increments of demand which could not be met without endangering the subsistence of the peasant family unless the peasants found a way to increase their total production. It appears that whatever historical effects are attributed by White to the plow should rather be attributed to feudalism as a social system. And the effects claimed by him are indeed quite miraculous.

Thanks to the adoption of the heavy plow, says White, there was a tremendous growth in population. Then there was a changeover to the "open field" system of cultivation and this led, according to White, to the invention of "communal patterns" of human cooperation (as though communal life had not been known previously and was unknown elsewhere). This was a social revolution, a "reshaping of peasant society." It was "the essence of the manorial economy," ignoring the fact that the manors were owned by lords, not villagers.<ref>White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 44.</ref> More important still, there came then "a change [in] the northern peasants' attitude towards nature and thus our own" (my emphasis). Why? Because many families had to collaborate to mount one plow team, and so their allotments now were proportional to their social contribution, not to their needs. ("No more fundamental change in the idea of man's relation to the soil can be imagined: once man had been part of nature; now he became her exploiter."<ref>White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 56; McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976), p. 237.</ref>)

But all of this is nonsense. Neither the technical arguments nor the social deductions make any sense. The Domesday Book gives household-to-plow-team ratios of between 2:3 and 3:5.<ref>See C. T. Smith, ''An Historical Geography of Western Europe'' (1967), p. 203; Darby, ''The Domesday Geography of Eastern England'' (1952).</ref> The open-field system seems to be quite old and was widespread in Europe and known in Asia and North Africa in early times.<ref>Orwin and Orwin, ''The Open Fields'' (1967), chap. 3; C. T. Smith, ''An Historical Geography of Western Europe'' (1967), chap. 4.</ref> Northern villages, using big teams and heavy plows, were no more cooperative than southern villages, using light plows. Communal ownership of fields in some societies implied greater cooperation than that found in the European open field system. The manorial economy was a social system, not a technological invention. And so on.

White's second revolutionary advance is labelled "the discovery of horse-power."<ref>White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 57.</ref> Horses had been around for some time, of course. The essential innovation, for White, was the modern horse collar, which he thinks was probably developed in the Occident some time before the ninth century. According to White, the horse collar transformed agriculture and grain transport in northern Europe by permitting horses to replace oxen in pulling plows and wagons. Horses pull about the same weight as oxen but do so about 50% faster. From this fact White draws awesome conclusions. There was, he says, a large increase in agricultural production. Commerce became intensified because transport by horsepower was vastly cheaper than by ox power. Villages became much larger, almost townlike, because now there could be a larger radius of travel from home to field. The enlargement of villages yielded the "virtue of a more 'urban' life," permitting the village to have a church, tavern, school (now boys "could learn their letters").<ref>White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 67.</ref> And now there could be "news from distant parts." A transformation, overall, of profound importance. It "urbanized" the village, giving peasants the "psychological preparation" for "the change in Occidental culture from country to city."<ref>White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 68.</ref> All this and more from one innovation: the horse collar.

But the horse collar was widespread in Eurasia from an early date, and probably was invented for harnessing not horses but camels.<ref>Bray, ''Science and Civilization in China'', vol. 6, part 2, ''Agriculture'' (1984), pp. 304-328.</ref> And the presumption that horses held advantages over oxen in plowing and transport is widely disputed: the horse was more efficient, but more costly in upkeep, and generally required that cropland be devoted to feed crops. In England the horse did not replace the ox. Village size had nothing to do with horsepower. In many parts of the world where horses were not used, villages were much larger than they were in northern Europe. In countries like China, long-distance grain transport was often by canal, much more efficient than horse-drawn wagons. And so, again, neither the technical arguments nor the social deductions make any sense.

Finally, White attributes equally marvelous effects to the introduction of the three-field system. Part of this argument is familiar to every European schoolchild, who learned that the three-field rotation was a great advance over the older two-field system because (mainly) it reduced the proportion of the land in fallow from roughly 1/2 to 1/3. But White adds a cornucopia of additional blessings. Oats could now be planted widely, hence there was greater use of horsepower. In a section of ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'', "The Three-Field Rotation and Improved Nutrition," he claims that the three-field system somehow permitted farmers now to grow legumes, and this vastly improved the European diet, which, in turn, "goes far towards explaining ... the startling expansion of population, the growth and multiplication of cities, the rise of industrial production, the outreach of commerce, and the new exuberance of spirits which enlivened that age." In short, says Lynn White, Jr., "the Middle Ages were full of beans."<ref>White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 76.</ref>

But none of this (least of all the pun) can be taken seriously. There is no basis for White's argument that population was held down by an unbalanced diet (overloaded, he says, with carbohydrates, undersupplied with proteins). Farmers using the two-field system were not protein-starved, because legume cultivation long antedated the three-field system, grains also contained proteins, and fruits, animal products, and so on, were widely consumed. The three-field system was not a technological revolution. First of all, even more intensive rotations, including fallowless systems, were in use in many parts of the world long before the Middle Ages, and I suspect were common in parts of Europe (such as portions of the Po plain) where deep, nutrient-rich soils and good soil-water relations were found. Second, the two-field system was preferred, and was not supplanted, in many ecological situations, and in areas where fallow was needed for grazing. The picture is complex, but the generalization is clear: the three-field system was neither a technical revolution nor a fountainhead for social change. And it had close relatives in other continents, so it cannot be said to have been something uniquely European.

In ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'', White says little about the causes of the revolutionary technology. He does so elsewhere, however, and we find that his basic argument is really quite Weberian.<ref>White, ''Machina Ex Deo'' (1968). See in particular the essay—quite a famous one—called "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis" (chap. 5).</ref> Technological determinism dissolves into an ideological determinism, focused on the inventiveness—the rationality—of Europeans. This White attributes, basically, to religion: in part to "the Judeo-Christian teleology," and in larger part to "Western Christianity." The former underlies the European's unique "faith in perpetual progress," which leads to a faith in the virtues of inventiveness and technology.<ref>White, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis." In White, ''Machina Ex Deo'' (1967), p. 85.</ref> The latter produces "an Occidental, voluntarist realization of the Christian dogma of man's transcendence of, and rightful mastery over, nature"—that is, the separation of Man and Nature. To a Western Christian, nature is inert, valueless. It is blasphemy to "assume spirit in nature."<ref>White, ''Machina Ex Deo'' (1967), p. 90.</ref> This gives the Western Christian a desire and right to manipulate, use, transform nature—to invent new technology. The errors here are glaring. First, there is ignorance of the teachings of religions other than Christianity. Second, White resurrects the ethnocentric myth that ancient pagans and followers of modern non-Christian religions somehow are unable to fully separate Man from Nature and share the primitive view that spirits reside in all things. Actually, medieval Christians did perceive spirit in all things. (It was God's way.) They did not treat humans as absolutely separate from nature. This dualism is a product of modern times, mainly of the commoditization of nature with the rise of capitalism. Dualism is a doctrine of post-Cartesian thought, not something residing deep in "Western Christianity." Medieval Christians believed that the world is one, a plenum, an uninterrupted chain of being. Medieval folk did not, in general, believe, as White claims they did, in "perpetual progress": they believed in the Fall, and they believed, on the whole, that Creation had been perfect and complete. White is simply telescoping history in order to claim that modern European attitudes about technology and technological change are actually basic and ancient attributes of the culture of Europeans, and only Europeans. His central thesis is basic tunnel history: Europeans are uniquely inventive, so they create unique technology, so they progress.

I believe that all of the claims for European technological superiority in the Middle Ages can be countered, and eventually disproven, in much the same way. I think it will become clear that all of the civilizations of the hemisphere were inventing new technology and sharing it around; the "sharing" being the usual mechanisms of diffusion as they operated in two spheres of reality: agricultural techniques passed from farmer to farmer and other techniques (including some of those involved in commercial agriculture) moving through the mainly urban network of trade and transportation, or occasionally (as with some military technology) moving around the map along with conquest. Thus I see a rather even building up of technology in Europe, Africa, and Asia. It was only after 1492, with its utterly revolutionary consequences, that European technology acquired the beginning of an edge over Asian and African. Did medieval technological evolution produce, as cause, the major medieval social changes? I leave the answer to that question to others. My purpose in this book is not to defend any one theory of social change, merely to show that the processes were not uniquely European.

In Chapter 3 I will discuss this matter further, showing how technological and economic surfaces emerged in medieval Europe, Africa, and Asia, and that processes of change in all three continents were—as to technology and economy—quite similar.

Before we leave the subject of technology, something must be said about one fascinating issue: what I will call "the China formula." Since the end of World War II a great deal has become known about the history of technology in China, much of it through the work of Joseph Needham and his associates.<ref>Needham et al., ''Science and Civilization in China'' (1954-1984).</ref> In prior times, the European miracle theorists were prone to ignore Chinese technological achievements. (Weber did so less than most.<ref>Some historians today simply ignore this evidence and repeat the old notions about China's lack of technological prowess. See, for example, Roberts, ''The Hutchinson History of the World'' (1987), pp. 493-495, 502.</ref>) The usual pattern was to admit Chinese priority for some innovations but claim that, overall, the main technological advances took place in Europe and the Mediterranean. Where there were truly notable Chinese inventions, it was often claimed that the Chinese invented these things in a ludic vein whereas the Europeans put these things to work. (The paradigm, of course, is gunpowder, which the Chinese were supposed to have invented merely for fireworks.) One could bundle such propositions into a classical diffusionist model of the Chinese: they had, in prior ages, progressed somewhat, but then they slowed to a stop, starting up again only when Europeans brought new ideas.

As the information about Chinese technology increased, it was necessary to make somewhat more subtle arguments. Today, these arguments fit into a formula with two basic propositions.

1. "If indeed the development of technology in medieval China forces us to ask why China did not, then, have its own miracle, we can at least assert that China was the only civilization outside of Europe about which such questions arise." In other words, European superiority over everybody else is not put into doubt. This is convenient for those, for instance, who want to show that India, Africa, the Middle East, and so on, had no potential for development.

2. "Whatever technological advances took place in medieval China, the important point is that they stopped." In the formula, this argument is expressed in different ways for different spheres of technology, but the central argument is fairly standard: something characteristic of Chinese medieval culture forced it to cease developing and so to stagnate. In other words, what is plugged in here is the old doctrine of Oriental stagnation. Most typically, Weber is used to make this point: just about all of the Weberian claims about the reasons for Chinese lack of progress are regularly paraded at this point. Some historians balk at using Weber's thin argument about the stultifying effect of Confucianism. Others prefer not to notice Weber's ethnocentrism when he describes Chinese personality traits. But Weber's arguments about the city, landowning, bureaucracy, and empire are still quite regularly employed. The Chinese city was not "free" and did not have a real bourgeoisie. Chinese landowning was not close to private property. The Chinese bureaucracy and the Chinese imperial state were not "rational" and so held back the society from progress.

One can respond to this argument in two steps. First, as Purcell has pointed out, the important question really is how and why these Chinese advances happened, not how and why they stopped happening (if indeed they did stop). In other words, historians must explain how China came to be such a technologically innovative society that it outstripped other civilizations in many spheres of technology for many centuries. Weber doesn't help in this process one bit. The whole Weberian scheme is an explanation for stagnation, and what we are talking about is impressive progress, not stagnation.

The second step in the argument requires a focus on the precise period when, according to European miracle historians, the Chinese advance is supposed to have stopped. According to Elvin, broad-spectrum technical advances in China ended after the early fourteenth century. China at this time had perhaps the most advanced and most highly commercialized agriculture in the world. Chinese industrial technology was unexcelled in such fields as textile manufacture. Mechanical clocks were well known.<ref>Needham et al., ''Science and Civilization in China'', vol. 4, part 2 (1965), chap. 27.</ref> Chinese merchant ships were plying throughout Southeast Asia and into the Indian ocean. Chinese guns were unexcelled. Canal technology was impressive. And so on. Broadly, the changes associated with the rise and travails of the Ming dynasty are associated with the slowing of technical advance, although advances continued to take place in some spheres of technology (shipbuilding, cannons, printing with movable metal type—invented circa 1400, probably in Korea<ref>Needham et al., ''Science and Civilization in China'' vol. 4, part 2 (1965), p. 33). Arnold Pacey places the innovation in Korea. See Pacey's ''Technology in World History'' (1990), p. 56.</ref>—and much more). But Europe at this time was not experiencing a major technical advance either. After 1350 Europe stagnated both economically and technically. There is little evidence that European technology was advancing prior to 1492. The Renaissance was not a technological revolution, as historians have long realized.<ref>See, for example, Lopez, "Hard Times and Investment in Culture" (1953), Thorndyke, "Renaissance or Renaissance?" (1943).</ref> After 1492 important European advances began again in some technical spheres (notably shipbuilding). Whether truly revolutionary technological change really began before the eighteenth century is a matter of contention among European historians.

What does this say comparatively about China? It suggests that there is no problem of "stagnation." There was, instead, a slowing of progress during two centuries, in a scenario well known in all human cultures, because uneven progress is the norm. It suggests, rather, a problem that Third World historians focus some attention on but European historians tend to ignore. As a result of the European commercial expansion in the sixteenth century—we argue in this book that the year 1492 was the real birthdate of this process—aggressive European merchant communities began competing and trading with the Chinese in various places, notably Manila and some South China ports. Why did the Chinese merchant community not assert its dominance in this trade? Why did the commercial advantage steadily move in the direction of Europeans, not Chinese (and other Asians)? In other words, there is no stagnation to be explained. There is, rather, a problem as to how and why Europeans gained substantial control of long-distance trade in Asia after about 1600. Anticipating the discussion of later chapters, I will comment simply that this process does not reflect any internal cultural "blockages" in any Asian civilizations. Rather, it reflects the tremendously rapid increase in the profitability, scale, and organization of European enterprise overseas after 1492, which nobody else could really take advantage of, because of the constantly increasing flow of New World bullion into European mercantile coffers (a point we will discuss in some detail in Chapter 4).

During the first half of the fifteenth century, a number of Chinese fleets of combined military, diplomatic, and merchant character were sent into Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. Some of the ships held hundreds of men; some were so large that vegetable gardens were placed on the decks. We will discuss the significance of these great voyages in the next chapter; my point now is to notice the way European miracle historians try to accommodate these facts into their theories about Chinese nonprogress. The standard comment is: "But they stopped." In fact, the last voyage did end around 1440. But the purposes of the voyages had been accomplished. Chinese merchant ships continued to trade in Southeast Asia. Nothing stopped. It is true that the emperors banned Chinese shipping for a time (mainly the early sixteenth century), but such bans were a means of extracting bribes (in effect easements) and they were not, in any case, enforced. For the "miracle" historians, the fact of the imperial ban is proof that China had stopped progressing, and that only Europe contained the potential for the "miracle." This does not accord with the facts.

Chinese may have invented guns; in any case, they were as advanced in firearms technology as any other culture down to the end of the Middle Ages. Typical of the way European miracle historians deal with this sphere of technology (as with others) is Carlo Cipolla's account of the process in his well-known and influential book ''Guns, Sails, and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phase of European Expansion, 1400-1700''. He concedes, to begin with, that "Chinese guns were at least as good as Western guns, if not better, up to the beginning of the fifteenth century."<ref>Cipolla, ''Guns, Sails, Empires'' (1965), p. 106.</ref> But when the Portuguese appeared off Canton and fired off their cannon in salute a century later (1517), the Chinese had, magically, retrogressed:

The roar of European ordnance awoke Chinese ... to the frightening reality of a strange, alien people that unexpectedly had appeared along their coasts under the protection and with the menace of superior, formidable weapons. ... How to deal with the "foreign devils"? To fight them or to ignore them? To copy and adopt their techniques and give up local habits and traditions or to sever all contacts with them and seek refuge in a dream of isolation? To be or not to be? ... a dilemma that was tragically unanswerable.<ref>Cipolla, ''Guns, Sails, Empires'' (1965), pp. 108-109.</ref>

Thus does rhetoric replace fact in the mythology of Asian stagnation and the European miracle.

The "Chinese formula" seems to be losing credence. But I have no doubt that an "Indian formula," an "Islamic formula," an "African formula," and so on, will be contrived to shore up Eurocentric history as we learn more about Indian, Middle-Eastern, and African technological development prior to 1492.

=== Society ===

In Chapter 3 we will take a look at medieval European society and compare it to medieval Asian and African society in terms of those social categories that seem to be important in the process of change toward capitalism and modernity. Among these categories (forms, facts) are class, the state, landholding, trade, and urbanization. Our present task is the more modest one of criticizing theories that claim that one or another social category somehow led Europe to rise above all other civilizations before the end of the Middle Ages, before 1492. For this task we can select a few of the categories that present-day historians of the European miracle claim as favored candidates for this role of historical leadership, of causal motor propelling the so-called "takeoff to modernity." The favored ones seem to be the state, the church, class, and the family. Most frequently these categories are, themselves, explained in terms of supposedly more basic forces: European rationality, European technology, European demographic uniqueness, or European environmental superiority. These have been discussed at sufficient length already. The following discussion, therefore, will be brief.

=== State ===

A typical sort of argument begins with a model of the modern European nation-state, the kind of medium-sized, well-integrated, moderately democratic state that emerged after the rise of capitalism, after modernization, after the French and American revolutions. Nobody denies that this form is unique. But European miracle historians tend to make one of two claims about this state form: either it appeared very early in European history, early enough to play a causal role in modernization, or it was somehow immanent in European culture, a state form that was created, naturally and rationally, by freedom-loving, individualistic, antidyspotic Europeans of medieval or earlier times. Sometimes both claims are made: a reduction to European moral rationality and, at the same time, a holistic argument at the level of the state itself.

Eric L. Jones, for instance, does precisely that in ''The European Miracle''. Europe's medieval political system, says Jones, was near "the heart of the European miracle."<ref>Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 124.</ref> Here the argument combines the traditional prejudice about Europe's innate and unique love of freedom with some very odd environmentalistic arguments. First the latter. Jones takes the familiar argument that Europe in early times had a number of fertile core areas, each of which became the hearth of a regional culture, and he turns it into a curious argument to the effect that Europe's ecological core areas naturally led to a pattern of medium-sized states, unlike, he says, the "imperial" pattern of Asian societies. Empires, in Jones's view, are innately despotic, and innately given to interfering with the development of the economy. Europe's geography saved it from this fate. If a number of Europe's modern states have ecological "core areas," most do not, and rather few of these core areas became states. The model is environmentalistic and invalid. In any case, comparable core areas are found in many other parts of the world. Medium-sized, separate units of productive agricultural environments are, for instance, typical for Southeast Asia, including the rather discrete mainland cores, like the Irrawaddy and the Chao Phraya basins, the middle Mekong, and the Red River, and even more so the insular region, with cores in Sumatra (two or three), Java (three), Bali, Lombok, Sulawesi, Luzon, and so on. India and China too are moderately dissected in this way. Distinctive cores in Africa include the Middle Niger, Chad, and Congo, among others; in western Asia, Mesopotamia, the Iranian Plateau, and so on.<ref>Among the modern states that do not surround such simple ecological core areas: Spain, Italy, Germany, Poland, Greece, Sweden, Russia, etc. Prior to the 20th century, perhaps only parts of Great Britain (southern England) and France (the Paris Basin) came close to fitting this highly abstract model, a model that is useful for some purposes but not for the purpose of explaining the political history of the continent. Some of these core areas are nuclei of states; others are not. In modern Southeast Asia, Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia fit the model as well as any European case.</ref>

Next, Jones builds the image of these natural European Ur-states as somehow naturally forming into what he calls "a states system," a grid of roughly equal-sized independent states. These, in the Middle Ages, acted toward one another as though they were Hegelian individuals, competing yet cooperating, and marching forward, together, as a kind of members' club, toward modernity. Thus Jones discerns deep in the Middle Ages what amounts to the modern nation-state and the League of Nations. Telescoping history, he imbues the medieval European polities with all the virtues of the modern state: they provided public services, they encouraged the free development of the economy, they were incipiently democratic, and so on. All of this because of their environmental basis and because freedom-loving Europeans lived in them. In reality, the kind of state, and state system, that he describes does not appear until roughly the seventeenth century. Jones finds political characteristics of already-modernizing Europe, falsely claims that these were present long before—some, being environmental, were always present—and so claims to have proven that Europe's modern democratic political system was, somehow, always present in Europe (and nowhere else). In fact, medieval Europe was a hodge-podge of semisovereign feudal political units, a map so confused that states as such were not always identifiable, and with few of the modern state characteristics attributed to these polities by Jones.

But to understand the absurdity of this model of political history, we must notice the way Jones talks about the supposedly barbaric, despotic states of non-Europe. In non-Europe, a natural irrationality combines with environmental disadvantages to produce the opposite of the wonderful European state and system of states: the huge Oriental empire. Why did Asia not develop politically as Europe did? The political "infantilism" of Asia is explained by Jones in terms of (1) a psychological deficiency, consisting of irrationality in matters of intellectual vitality and innovativeness and a sort of moral failing in attitudes relating to the desire for progress, resistance to domination, will to forego animal pleasures, and the like, and (2) an inferior natural environment. The effects of these failings (and some lesser ones), and thus the effective reasons for Asia's political nondevelopment and nonprogress, are (1) uncontrolled population growth, and (2) bad government, "Oriental despotism" or, as Jones prefers to label it, empire. Throughout ''The European Miracle'', the main argument supporting the theory about how Europe's system of states favors development is Jones's countertheory about the evil nature of the Asian imperial state. Yet, in the end, the countertheory turns out to be as empty as the theory. Jones does not, in fact, give any credible explanation as to why such large empires exist in Asia and not in Europe. But neither does he give a credible argument as to why large states are worse for progress than medium-sized or small ones. (And he is blind to the very real progress that occurred in Asia, and to the many nonimperial states in Asia.) When we examine Jones's theory about Asian empires, then, we find that it has nothing to do with size or kind of state and everything to do with a conception about the basic nature of politics in non-European societies. This is nothing more than the old idea of "Oriental despotism." Asians, and indeed all non-Europeans, naturally suffer nasty, despotic, capricious, irresponsible, evil governments. Only Europeans understand and thus enjoy freedom.

This is not an atypical theory among historians who wish to argue that European political processes and forms were causal forces leading to a medieval "miracle." The basic form of the theory is traditional. It consists mainly of three propositions: Europeans have an old, deep-seated rationality that impels them toward modern, implicitly democratic, political forms (or, less directly, toward individualistic economic behavior and thus a preference for a minimalistic state); non-Europeans suffer gladly and naturally a despotic, imperial form of state, sometimes powerful but always arbitrary; and Europe's natural environment gives political modernization one or another sort of unique boost (ecological cores, fertile soil, capes-and-bays accessibility, or whatever). Other propositions figure in most arguments, but these three seem to be the most widely used.

They combine with a methodological principle of great significance: whatever causal forces were at work, they were at work early—that is, they set the process of modernization in motion long before the end of the Middle Ages. This, of course, is the crux of the matter. In the present book I argue that modernization (or whatever you want to call it) was indeed going on in medieval Europe, but not only in medieval Europe. Thus the events after 1492 did not start modernization but enabled European changes to increase in magnitude and effect and eventually produce a uniquely "rising" society. Therefore we argue from the uniformitarian hypothesis that Europe had no potential greater than that possessed by non-Europe during the Middle Ages. The fact that there were forces pushing toward democratization and the modern state in medieval Europe tells us nothing about European uniqueness.

John A. Hall uses the basic Jones model, emphasizing what he calls the "blockages" that prevented China, India, and the Islamic Middle East from developing modern state forms. In brief: China suffered under empire. India suffered under caste (and so had no politics whatever).<ref>In this connection, see Dirks, ''The Hollow Crown'' (1987).</ref> Islamic-region politics reflected tribalism. Hall describes very old and not really typical forms for each of these civilizations, assuming them to be frozen and permanent, contrasts these with late postmedieval European forms with the inference that these too have been present at least in embryo for a long time, and then builds an argument that non-Europe always lacked the potential for a "miracle," while Europe always had it.<ref>Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), "States and Societies: The Miracle in Historical Perspective" (1988).</ref>

Michael Mann addresses himself to the abstract entity "power" instead of the more visible "state," but his argument is not fundamentally different. Mann, like a number of other "miracle" historians, tries to interpret the political chaos of early medieval feudalism, with its fragmentation of polities and sovereignties, into an argument for incipient modernity. The smallness of these politicosocial units implies, somehow, that they were more "intensive," more meaningful, more pregnant with development potential, than the supposedly vast imperial polities of non-Europe. Mann's notion of "intensiveness" is basically a notion of value, not of fact.<ref>Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), "European Development" (1988).</ref> In this context we may recall the Magna Carta myth: devolution of power from king to barons is traditionally described as a movement toward democracy, even though the barons in those times were hardly democratic, and poor people preferred to be able to appeal above their heads to the king. (And later the rise of royal power is described as a further step toward democracy, except that you can't have it both ways.<ref>This is not the only example of the way arguments centering on the European state have a way of contradicting one another. The Roman state is said, on the one hand, by Hall among others, to have been a crucial innovation, the source of many political features characteristic of, and only of, Europe. On the other hand, the Roman state is dismissed by others (including Mann) as just another "imperial state," like the despotic Oriental states; Europe supposedly innovated politically by avoiding the imperial form of state and developing instead a kind of smaller and somehow more democratic state.</ref>) Jean Baechler uses roughly the same model—although, unlike Hall and Mann but rather like Jones, he downplays the role of Christianity in political evolution—with one additional argument: Baechler believes that the medieval European aristocracy (originally an Indo-European "warrior aristocracy") was itself the original source of democracy, claiming, in a curious reading of history, that aristocrats not only dealt democratically (respectfully) with one another, but they also respected the rights of their peasants.<ref>Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity: Caste and Feudality (India, Europe and Japan)" (1988).</ref>

Yet there was no democracy in the Middle Ages: European states were as despotic as any found anywhere else. Just as we noted with regard to the ancient Greeks, political forms found in Europe had counterparts elsewhere. If city-states were (perhaps) the closest to democracy—some of them were republican, and were in essence merchant-oligarchies—one need only note that city-states of many sorts lined the coasts of the Indian and Pacific oceans. Nor was the republican form unknown in Asia and Africa.

=== Church ===

Many theories assign one or another causal role to the church as a social institution in the modernization of Europe and the rise of capitalism.<ref>See, for instance, White, ''Machina Ex Deo'' (1968); Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), "European Development" (1988); Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985); Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988); K. F. Werner, "Political and Social Structures of the West" (1988); and Hallam, "The Medieval Social Picture" (1975).</ref> (Many other theories assign such a role to Christianity itself, but I will not comment on these.) Of course, the church did have such a role. The problems lie elsewhere. Most of them concern the question whether the church (or churches) provided Europe, and Europeans, with something that was not provided to non-Europeans by their own religious institutions or by other institutions in their own cultures. For instance, the claim has been made that the Catholic church in the Middle Ages unified Europe in cultural terms, to a degree not found elsewhere. But elsewhere comparable or parallel processes were at work. For instance, the much-maligned empires, such as the Chinese empire, provided unity in many ways, while the Islamic religion provided it in the Muslim world. It has also been argued that the medieval church compensated for the political fragmentation of Europe, allowing pan-European development to take place in spite of the lack of a clear pattern of strong states. True. The question is comparative: did the church thereby give Europe some developmental advantage over other civilizations, in which, quite often, there was political unity throughout most historical epochs? I think the answer must be that the church did not give Europe some special cultural quality, lacking in other civilizations, such that Europe could thereby leap into the forefront of social evolution.

Therefore I see no basis in fact for suggestions that the medieval church led to European historical superiority in a way that other religious institutions, in other civilizations, did not do. John A. Hall, for instance, asserts that "Christianity provided the best shell for the emergence of states."<ref>Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 135.</ref> Michael Mann claims that the medieval church "encouraged a drive for moral and social improvement even against worldly authority"—a statement that one might question not merely as a comparison, but also as a factual assertion about the role played by the church in Europe.<ref>Mann, "European Development" (1988), p. 12.</ref> For H. E. Hallam, "the medieval Latin church was the seed-bed of the early modern idea of capitalism."<ref>Hallam, "The Medieval Social Picture" (1975), p. 49.</ref> K. F. Werner maintains that "the 'European miracle' [took place] ... because of the existence of a Christian world dominated in the west by Catholic doctrines."<ref>K. F. Werner. "Political and Social Structures of the West" (1988), p. 172. This German medievalist argues that the central force underlying the "miracle" was Christianity. He refers here to the Catholic church, to the body of doctrine (Catholic and later also Protestant), to the social and political institutions that were influenced both by church and by doctrine, and to the faith of European people, which, in Werner's opinion, had much to do with their innovativeness, their sense of "restlessness," their rationality. Werner acknowledges that many causal factors were at work in bringing about the rise of Europe, and he does not hesitate to claim a role for the natural environment. But it is clear that his theory is primarily based on religion. And beyond this, one senses that this scholar himself may see the hand of a Christian god in the rise of Christian Europe.

Werner first of all makes a strong case to the effect that European history maintained a continuity of institutions, and of progress, from the time of the Roman Empire down through the Middle Ages, and that the late Empire established both ecclesiastical and lay institutions which continued down through the Middle Ages and gave that era its character. Chief among the institutions is the Catholic church. Werner wishes to depict the church as having a determining influence on history from the time of its founding. He sees the rise of Europe as a process that was guided throughout by the Christian religion, as institution and doctrine. If Werner were simply presenting a theory of history that accords religion a dominant role, I would not be discussing his views in this book. I would agree that its role has been underemphasized by historians, conservative no less than Marxist. The reason I deal with Werner's views is that he makes clear his belief that it is not religion in general but the Christian religion which played the historically efficacious role in the European "miracle." Werner's views are distinctly Eurocentric. Perhaps the key comment is the following:

(If) we had to choose one word that, by itself alone, were capable of expressing an essential factor in what we understand by the "European miracle," we would choose the philosophical term ... "unrest" ... "restlessness" ... Ruhelosigkeit ... Whilst Asia and its wisdom and, in its train, the great religions and philosophies, strive toward the art of ... seeking out the centre of the soul and of the world, and of resting in God, of having arrived, the European of the European miracle is a man who is always ready to take off once more, once he has arrived ... But where must be sought the causa causans of this mentality? The spur to anxiety is to be seen in the pangs of sin ... in the search for pardon and grace. The importance of the deliverance of the soul gave an hitherto unheard-of prominence to the individual, independent of his social rank, the individual who ... (does not abandon himself) to destiny ... (The) sense of responsibility seems to me to be one of the strengths of the Europeans that are to accomplish the "miracle" (p. 185).

Thus: Europe's religion, Christianity, instills a kind of mentality in "European man" which explains the basic source of the "European miracle."

The objection to this is the same one we put forward to all of the notions about Europe's supposedly unique "rationality." Whether that putative trait comes from religion (Werner) or from the post-Neolithic European tribes (Mann) or from any other source, the basic objection is: how can you really justify a statement that makes Europeans brighter, better, bolder than non-Europeans, if you accept the fundamental axiom that all human communities have the same ration of mind as all others? It is one thing, and indeed an unexceptionable thing, to credit the human mind with prime causality in culture change, through the innovation of social, technical, and purely intellectual things. But it is something quite different, and quite suspect, to credit the minds of human beings from some communities—and not others—with all of these qualities of innovativeness, restlessness, sense of responsibility, intellectual eagerness, respect for others, and so on, qualities usually summed up in the word "rationality." Europeans are rational but so too are non-Europeans.</ref> Such statements fail as comparisons with other religions, and other civilizations; but they also fail because the postulated rise of Europe did not take place in the Middle Ages but somewhat later. That Christianity helped in that eventual rise is not at all in question.

It is not necessary to discuss Max Weber's celebrated argument about the role of religion in the rise of Europe, or his celebrated argument about the special role of the Protestant Reformation in the rise of capitalism. Weber of course held the views that I criticized above. But the causal role of religion is not at issue in this book, the concern of which is a uniformitarian view of European and non-European civilizations and their dynamism.

=== Class ===

Three kinds of argument concerning class are relevant to our discussion. The first of these is a two-tiered argument for Europe's ancient and medieval historical superiority that can be summarized as follows: (1) Classless (or "preclass") regions and peoples are simply irrelevant in the matter of explaining Europe's superiority and the world's historical progress, because classless societies are necessarily both unprogressive and primitive. (2) Therefore, the real problems calling for explanation concern the question why some class-stratified societies (the European ones) are progressive while others (principally Asian) are stagnant and backward. Africa below the Sahara is then declared sweepingly to be classless and thus irrelevant to world history. This argument is still widely used, in some analytical works (among them Eric L. Jones's ''The European Miracle''), in some world-history textbooks (as we noted in Chapter 1), and in some (probably most) modern atlases of world history. (Many of these atlases have no maps of Africa for the whole of history from the Upper Paleolithic to 1492!<ref>See, for example, Palmer, ''Atlas of Modern History'' (1957); Bjørklund, Hølmhoe, Røhr, and Lie, ''Historical Atlas of the World'' (1970); and Kinder and Hilgemann, ''The Anchor Atlas of World History'', vol. 1 (1974).</ref>) In place of an extended discussion of this issue I will just offer these comments: Africa was not classless in 1492 (a point to which we return in Chapter 3), classless societies are not stagnant,<ref>I discuss this in ''The National Question'' (1987b).</ref> and the historians who make this sort of argument about classlessness quite regularly contradict themselves by declaring that the classless European peoples of ancient and medieval times—the "barbarian tribes," Germans, Celts, Slavs, etc.—were very progressive: after borrowing the idea of classes and a few other things from the Romans, these primitive but supposedly progressive, innovative, aggressive, inquisitive, achievement-oriented Europeans than surged forward to modernity.

It is customary and quite proper to examine the class structure of a society in history and ask how the different classes acted to favor or resist change, and in which directions. In the absence of such an examination, we usually get an analysis with a bias toward ascribing causality solely to kings and other sorts of elites. Eurocentrism becomes a problem only if the assertion is made that a given class did something historically efficacious in Europe but that this class did not exist in civilizations outside of Europe. This kind of argument is very common in the European miracle literature. Although especially favored among conservative historians, it is also found quite often among those Marxists who cling to the old formulas about the "stages of class society." Fairly representative of the latter is Padgug's argument that a slave mode of production, in its pure form—with slavery dominant in commodity production and with implications for economic progress, the development of private property, and class struggle—existed in ancient times only in Greece and Rome, and that lack of this feature in Asia accounts in part for the tendency of Asian societies to "stagnate."<ref>Padgug, "The Problem of the Theory of Slavery and Slave Society" (1976).</ref> (Roughly the same argument is then used by some Marxists to assert that the slave-plantation system of later times was not properly capitalist because the workers were slaves, not wage-earners. We deal with this point in Chapter 4.) This issue is important, but I will set it aside after one comment: I believe that those scholars who assert that the slave class was more important in the classical Mediterranean than Asia make a very elementary error, perhaps easiest to do if one is not a geographer. It may just be a question of geographical scale. The Athenian empire was perhaps one-hundredth the size of the Ch'in empire. In small, highly developed regions of China, slavery was very likely as important as it was in Attica or in the plantation regions of Roman Italy.

Jean Baechler, a French historical sociologist, has argued that one uniquely European class, the medieval aristocracy, was the central causal force in the European miracle.<ref>Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988).</ref> He dismisses Africa out of hand, then asks why it is that modernity arose in Europe and not in Asia.<ref>Baechler, in "The Origins of Modernity" (1988), p. 39, suggests that we should "juxtapose the barbarous Europe of the Halstatt period (about 600 B.C.) ... and Africa on the verge of colonization in the nineteenth century (A.D.)."</ref> Accepting many of the standard arguments as partial explanations, he argues that the most important reason the miracle occurred was the existence in Europe of a true aristocracy. Baechler describes an ancient Indo-European society characterized by its warrior aristocracy. In India, the aristocracy became corrupted, but not so in Europe.<ref>Baechler finds a true aristocracy also in Japan but believes that Japan failed to emulate Europe for various other reasons.</ref> He carefully defines the medieval aristocracy and its special social quality, "feudality," in such a way as to distinguish it from a mere landlord class, or a class of landlords with added seigneurial powers. The aristocracy was a band of comrades, equals joined by bonds of feudal loyalty, a democracy in its own right. It did not, he says, hold the political power in society, and this was a key to its unique character. Elsewhere, either the aristocracy was ground under by the (imperial, despotic) polity, or it became corrupted into a caste form, as in India; in such cases there was to be no modernization. The European aristocracy had a special sort of private power, one original source of capitalist power. (Baechler contradicts himself here, since in the feudal era the aristocracy was indeed the political power. He simply notes that there was a time of political chaos, and passes on to other matters.<ref>Baechler considers it quite unremarkable that the political chaos of the Dark Ages gave way smoothly to strong states in Europe. "Inevitably" there will be the "reconstitution of larger polities" (Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" 1988, p. 50). But it is equally inevitable for India that the political chaos of 1000 years ago will not be cured and permanently, thereafter, the "polity ... is not a reality in India" (p. 45).</ref>) In sum, the aristocracy invents democracy and incipient capitalist property. The European peasants are also incipient capitalists from early on. Baechler casts aside the idea that Europe's peasantry was an unfree, oppressed community in the Middle Ages and gives it quite remarkable qualities: The peasant village was self-governed, a kind of "republic," with characteristics reminiscent of urban life.<ref>Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988), p. 59.</ref> "A peasant is an entrepreneur in miniature."<ref>Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988), p. 53.</ref> By the fourteenth century this incipiently capitalist peasant is the real peasant of Europe. The peasant village is a little democracy. The peasants are autonomous decision-makers. Baechler simply ignores serfdom, ignores, likewise, the importance of the fact that the lords owned the land, exploited the peasants, and controlled their lives. Feudalism becomes a kind of democratic society in which the aristocrats play a democratic role and the peasants live as free people. Moreover, these peasants, deep in the Middle Ages, had all of the attributes of the capitalist farmer that we associate with the eighteenth century and thereafter: investment, profit orientation, capital accumulation. (And they were smart enough, Baechler says, to avoid the extended family.) All of this is fantasy. It is a simple telescoping of history, pushing the modern world (and particularly the modern capitalist farmer) back into the Middle Ages.

Baechler contrasts all of this with India. His depiction of India is bizarre. India had no aristocracy throughout history, as a result of the caste system, and this is the "deepest cause" for its failure to develop throughout history.<ref>Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988), p. 56.</ref> (India did have a very formidable aristocracy.) Indian society had no political dimension: "The polity ... is not a reality in India." Therefore "the sense of identity in India could never be political"—not to say democratic.<ref>Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988), p. 45.</ref> (Nonsense.) Caste was invented to take the place of the missing polity. (More nonsense.) India didn't have a peasantry, it merely had "agricultural workers."<ref>Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988), p. 53.</ref> How can this be true? Because real peasants were entrepreneurial decisionmakers, something supposedly absent in India (but in reality no more so than in Europe). Baechler thus uses a mythical India as a counterpoint to his basic argument: In Europe, aristocrats and the free society created by them (and their allies the peasants) were the principal source of the "miracle." But Europe's aristocracy and peasantry did not have these romanticized qualities, and, more crucially, comparable classes existed in many other regions in the same period, as we will see in Chapter 3.

In Marxist theory, the concept of class is part of a larger and more consequential notion, that of class struggle. For all class-stratified societies, said Marx and Engels, class struggle is the motor of progress. Most present-day Marxists consider cultural evolution to be very much more complex than this, but they continue to emphasize the idea, and process, of class struggle. Again we must notice that there is nothing inherently Eurocentric about this concept unless one argues that genuine class struggle, or some phase or form of it, occurs only in Europe. But many Marxists argue precisely that way. According to Maurice Godelier, for example, the West displays "the purest forms of class struggle" and "alone has created the conditions for transcending ... class organization."<ref>Godelier, ''Sobre el Modo de Producción Asiático'' (1969), p. 58.</ref> Probably the most influential recent formulation of this sort of argument is Robert Brenner's theory about the rise of capitalism.<ref>Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism" (1977); "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe" (1985, originally published 1976), and "The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism" (1985). After the 1976 article first appeared in the journal, ''Past and Present'', a series of critiques was published in that journal, and Brenner replied in 1982 with the article, "The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism." A volume, ''The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe'', containing the two ''Past and Present'' articles and several critiques, and edited by Aston and Philip, appeared in 1985.</ref> Brenner tries to demonstrate that the rise of capitalism prior to 1492 was a result of class struggle, but class struggle only in Europe. Then he uses this argument as evidence against what he calls "Third-Worldism," the belief that non-Europe has been of great importance historically and is so (politically) in the present. This conclusion has strongly influenced not only Marxist but also conservative thought in history, geography, sociology, and economic-development theory. Certainly the Brenner theory deserves our attention in this book. And it is not at all a complicated theory.

According to Brenner, class struggle between serfs and lords, influenced by depopulation, led to the decline of feudalism in northwestern Europe. (Brenner does not mention non-Europe and scarcely mentions southern Europe.) In most parts of northwestern Europe, the peasants won this class struggle and became in essence petty landowners, now satisfied with their bucolic existence and unwilling to innovate. Only in England did the lords maintain their grip on the land; peasants thus remained tenants. The peasantry then became differentiated, producing a class of landless laborers and a rising class of larger tenant farmers, wealthy enough to rent substantial holdings and forced (because they had to pay rent) to commercialize, innovate technologically, and thus become capitalists. (Brenner thinks that serfs, lords, and landowning peasants did not innovate, and that towns, even English towns, had only a minor role in the rise of capitalism.) English yeoman tenant farmers, therefore, were the founders of capitalism. Stated differently: capitalism arose because English peasants lost the class struggle. In reality, however, peasants were not predominantly landowners in the other countries of the region; capitalism grew more rapidly in and near the towns than in the rural countryside; and the technological innovativeness that Brenner attributes to fourteenth and fifteenth century English farmers really occurred much later, too late to fit into his theory. More importantly, commercial farming and indeed urban protocapitalism were developing during this period in southern Europe and (as I will argue) in other continents. Brenner's theory is simply wrong.<ref>In my opinion the popularity of this thin theory is due principally to two things. First, put forward as a Marxist view, grounded in class struggle, it proves to be, on inspection, a theory that is fairly conventional, if somewhat rural in bias. It seems to follows that class-struggle theories lead to conventional conclusions. And secondly, Brenner uses his theory ("The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism," 1977, pp. 77-92) to attack the unpopular "Third-Worldist" perspectives of dependency theory, underdevelopment theory, and in particular three other neo-Marxists—Sweezy, Frank, and Wallerstein—who argue that European colonialism had much to do with the later rise of capitalism. Brenner is a thoroughgoing Eurocentric tunnel historian: non-Europe had no important role in social evolution at any historical period. Unaware that colonialism involves capitalist relations of production—see Chapter 4 below—he claims that the extra-European world merely had commercial effects on Europe, whereas the rise of capitalism was in no way a product of commerce: it took place in the countryside of England and reflected class struggle, not trade. See critiques of Brenner collected in Aston and Philip (1985) by Hilton, Croot and Parker, Wunder, Leroy, Ladurie, Bois, Cooper, and others. Also see Torras, "Class struggle in Catalonia" (1980) and Hoyle, "Tenure and the land market in early modern England: Or a late contribution to the Brenner debate." (1990).</ref>

=== Family ===

There is nothing new about the belief that the European family is in some fundamental sense more rational and more civilized than the family types found elsewhere. When the modernization doctrine became dominant, this belief seems to have faded into the background; there was now a near-consensus among social scientists that differences in family type should be strung along the continuum from "traditional" to "modern" or, as a variation, from "folk" to "urban." Traditional families, it was argued, have tended to reflect strong kinship ties at a scale larger and wider than the nuclear family; they have tended to form large, extended-family households; and they have tended to be associated with high birthrates. In the absence of much evidence concerning the medieval European family and household, it was rather widely assumed that earlier European families had conformed to the traditional model, which was seen as the "preindustrial" family, contrasted with the modern, post-industrial-revolution nuclear family, forming a small household, with looser kin ties beyond the household, and with fewer children. This transformation was thought to be associated with what was called the "demographic transition," the process of change from a "traditional" demographic pattern, with high birthrate and high deathrate, characteristic of preindustrial conditions, to a "modern," postindustrial demographic pattern, with low birthrate and low deathrate.

In the modernization theory of the family, the non-European world of underdeveloped countries would go through essentially the same transformation as it modernized. Extended family households would be replaced by nuclear family households. This would instill modern prodevelopment attitudes: people would have fewer children (thus combating overpopulation), and they would tend, now, to think more individualistically and thus entrepreneurial.

All of this was a bundle of assumptions. There was no evidence of a causal link between birthrate and size of household (or strength of kin ties beyond the nuclear family); there was merely a correlation within rich, modern societies: both nuclear families and lower birthrates were characteristic of these societies. (One leading demographer pointed out that nuclear families might, in principle, be likely to have more children per couple than extended families.<ref>Taeuber, in Freedman, ''Family and Kinship in Chinese Society'' (1970).</ref>) In addition, the idea that an adult breadwinner would be more entrepreneurial, more prone to accumulate capital, more competitive, and so on, if he (assumed to be male) was working only for his wife and children and not for a large family including his parents, cousins, and other relations, was a tenuous assumption. Large, tightly knit families had proven to be powerful accumulators, for instance, among many immigrant groups engaged in commerce. Why, indeed, should an adult want to work harder only for spouse and children, and not for parents, sisters, and so on? (One can in fact construct an argument to the effect that an extended family with multiple working adults has definite economic advantages in a developing economy.<ref>(1) If only one family member is a wageworker, loss of employment is a disaster. If several are wageworkers, normally some will be earning an income when others are laid off. (2) If we assume an ability to save a certain percentage of income, multiple income earners will provide a larger absolute amount of savings, that is, capital; and the absolute amount of capital can be critical in entrepreneurship. (3) Having kin to borrow from is useful for small-scale entrepreneurship. (4) Kinfolk can supply unpaid labor. These principles are well known in Third World communities.</ref>) As the modernization doctrine itself developed, after about 1960, these ideas began to dissipate. It became clear that various forms of social organization can be equally modern, and that the root causes of change and nonchange do not lie in the family structure.

Rather dramatically, in the mid-1960s, the notion of a peculiarly European family pattern was reinserted into historians' common discourse, partly as a result of an influential paper by John Hajnal.<ref>Hajnal, "European Marriage Patterns in Perspective" (1965), pp. 101-146. This paper is one of the most widely cited publications on the subject of demography in the European miracle literature.</ref> As we noted at an earlier point in this chapter, in the discussion of demographic arguments for the "miracle," historical demography was at that time uncovering evidence that preindustrial Europe (or part of Europe) had a lower birthrate than one would expect of a "traditional society." It seemed that Europeans had been marrying later in life than would be expected in a traditional society with Malthusian controls and therefore maximum birthrate. Instead of scrapping the Malthusian model itself, and arguing instead that all human societies actively control their population dynamics by using such tactics as adjusting the age of marriage, these historians began to assert, simply, the uniqueness of Europe. Other preindustrial societies exhibited the "traditional" pattern, with high and uncontrolled birthrates (and therefore superrapid population growth when mortality declined in the "transition"). Preindustrial Europe, in complete contrast, had a rational family system, with rational population control. It was then argued, without evidence, that preindustrial Europe had a higher level of living and a lower mortality rate than non-Europe, from which it was deduced that Europe kept its birthrate down in proper, rational, adjustment to its lower deathrate, mainly using the mechanism of delayed marriage. Those who put forward this argument simply failed to consider the possibility that families in other societies have acted pretty much the same way. Evidence to this effect was beginning to appear from a number of non-European societies. Some societies had much lower birthrates than would be expected from the classic model. Other societies had demonstrated major shifts in birthrate, either upward or downward, in response to changes in economic and other conditions.<ref>See note 37 above.</ref>

Hajnal began his 1965 essay with this flat statement:

The marriage pattern of most of Europe as it existed for at least two centuries up to 1940 was, as far as we can tell, unique or almost unique in the world. There is no known example of a population of non-European civilization which has had a similar pattern. The distinctive marks of the "European pattern" are (1) a high age of marriage and (2) a high proportion of people who never marry at all.<ref>Hajnal, "European Marriage Patterns in Perspective" (1965), p. 101.</ref>

Hajnal's argument was in some ways very careful and in others very casual. He noted carefully that the evidence for late marriage and (somewhat) low marriage frequency in Europe for periods before the seventeenth century was inconclusive, and that the "fragmentary" evidence for the European Middle Ages suggested a "non-European pattern."<ref>Hajnal, "European Marriage Patterns in Perspective" (1965), p. 134.</ref> He introduced absolutely no historical data for non-European regions, casually comparing historical Europe with twentieth-century non-Europe. The theoretical constraint is very clear: non-European patterns are "traditional" and permanent, hence a comparison of seventeenth-century Europe with mid-twentieth-century Asia or Africa is perfectly acceptable.<ref>Hajnal concedes that he has only contemporary data for non-Europe, but merely suggests that historical data would prove his point even more clearly because modern non-European family patterns, in his view, are changing in the direction of European patterns: are being Europeanized. And when "all the qualifications about the data have been made, there can be no doubt that our original generalization remains" ("European Marriage Patterns in Perspective," 1965, p. 106).</ref>

This proposition about the unique European pattern of later marriages and lower marriage frequencies was widely and quickly incorporated into the broader theory of Europe's historical "miracle." Without much supporting evidence, the proposition was firmly pushed backward into the Middle Ages. According to Lawrence Stone, writing in 1977, "it has now been established beyond any doubt" that over most of northwest Europe the middle and lower classes "married remarkably late, certainly from the fifteenth century onward. ... This custom of delayed marriage is an extraordinary and unique feature of north-west European civilization."<ref>Stone, ''The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800'' (1977), p. 509.</ref> Here one notices particularly the word "remarkably." This is "remarkable" only if there is something to compare it with; yet non-European historical data are not given or even sought. Michael Mann derives the pattern from the Iron Age Indo-European peasant society. Patricia Crone speculates that it is perhaps an ancient Germanic trait. Eric L. Jones thinks that it goes back three or four thousand years. Alan Macfarlane thinks that it has its roots in "a particular amalgam of Christianity and Germanic customs."<ref>Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 408; Crone, ''Pre-Industrial Societies'' (1989), p. 152; Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), pp. 15-16; Macfarlane, ''Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300-1840'' (1986).</ref> And so on. In a word: the pattern is very old in Europe.

The matter of dates, or age, is certainly crucial. Western Europe was undergoing major transformations from the seventeenth century onward, and a delayed and lower marriage rate could well be explained by a number of the newer facts: mobility, loss of holdings due to enclosures, urbanization, and, later, the well-understood demographic and social effects of the industrial revolution. Even the sixteenth century was somewhat chaotic in western Europe. But if the marriage pattern emerged before 1492, a date before these disruptions began, then one can speak of a definite "European pattern," not merely a "preindustrial" or "traditional" pattern. And one can begin to build a general causal theory for the subsequent changes—the "European miracle."

Additional propositions were added. It had long been known that nuclear family households and neolocal residence (the married couple establishes a household well separated from those of the parents) have been characteristic of western Europe during recent centuries, and this is to be expected as a feature of modernization. It fits with standard modernization theory: the process is supposed to lead from extended family to nuclear family. But the European miracle historians now argue that nuclear families and neolocal residence are part of a unique "European familial system" (Laslett).<ref>Laslett, "The European Family and Early Industrialization" (1989).</ref> And again they locate its origin far back in history. And again they sweepingly assert that non-Europeans lack these patterns. In fact, there is good evidence that nuclear-family households were common in many parts of non-Europe. Taeuber, analyzing Buck's data, found that more than 60% of peasant households in China were nuclear in the early twentieth century.<ref>Taeuber, "The Families of Chinese Farmers" (1970), pp. 63-86.</ref> These are not historical data, but the point is that China is supposed, according to modernization theory, to be especially "traditional" as regards family and many other things; indeed, there is common confusion between the notion of the Chinese lineage or "sib"—made famous by Weber—and the idea of the extended family. Larger, extended families are uncommon in Latin America. In India, as well as in China, the notion of an extended family is ambiguous because of the ambiguity of the notion of "neolocal residence" (in a cramped village, house-building space can be a problem), and the association sometimes found between neolocality and available land upon which to begin a small holding. Further confusion is added over the association between extended (and/or joint) family and inheritance rights, power, mobility, and more.<ref>See Freedman, ''Chinese Lineage and Society'' (1966), p. 49.</ref> Meanwhile, back in Europe, the model of a supposedly characteristic nuclear-neolocal pattern is subject to very serious questions for the Middle Ages. (For even earlier times the idea of a unique pattern is speculative, and belongs with other old and suspect ideas—discussed earlier in this chapter—about the ancient Germanic tribes and their unique individualism, progressiveness, and the like.) Medieval marital residence patterns may sometimes have reflected manor rules (such as assignment of holdings) rather than cultural residence rules in circumstances of serfdom and insecure tenancy, and a distinction has to be made between different types of rural regions, such as the areas with off-farm employment (like woolen areas of southeastern England), those with "frontier" characteristics, and so on. There is even reason to question the notion of a persistent west European marriage pattern.<ref>See, for example, Handler "Review of Macfarlane, A., ''Marriage and love in England''" (1989); Hilton, "Individualism and the English Peasantry" (1980); Kertzer, "The Joint Family Household Revisited: Demographic Constraints and Household Complexity in the European Past" (1989); and Berkner, "The Use and Misuse of Census Data for the Historical Analysis of Family Structures" (1975), and "The Stem Family and the Developmental Cycle of the Peasant Household" (1989).</ref> But even granting the generalization about western Europe, there is no basis for considering the European pattern to have been, historically, unique.<ref>For instance, G. Lee, "Comparative Perspectives" (1987), p. 65, points out that "(Many) scholars contend that the majority of families in any society are and always have been nuclear, regardless of the cultural elements favoring extended families."</ref>

Finally, the model is embellished with some rather gaudy ornamentation. It is claimed that the unique European pattern is not merely a matter of neolocality, nuclear households, and age and frequency of marriage. West European marriages were grounded in love. Elsewhere, marriages were arranged. (But arranged marriages seem to have been the rule in premodern Europe, prior to the periods of high mobility and social disruption. The notion, regularly invoked here, that non-European couples are strangers to one another prior to their being shoved into marriage is colonial-era prejudice supported by a few unusual cultural situations. Romantic love in this argument is considered an attribute of European rationality. Non-European couples are certainly as loving as European couples.) It is claimed, next, that the unique European family, because it is nuclear, produces a unique European personality type. The theory is that the small (European) household leads inevitably to individualistic, competitive, acquisitive, yet caring behavior. Mann and Jones, as we saw earlier, put forward the image of an ancient peasant household, a Hansel and Gretel house deep in the forest, as the historical source of this individualistic pattern. Macfarlane, who presents perhaps the most extreme form of this theory (and is chided by some of his colleagues not for his theory but for his claim that it applies mainly to the English), argues that the early medieval English family produced a person with the psychological and behavioral traits of (in essence) Weber's capitalist personality, that the causal chain runs from tribal customs and religion to family, from family to personality, and from personality to the beginnings of capitalism (a point we return to below). This argument is advanced mainly by erecting a model of what Macfarlane considers to be "peasant society," with a peasant family and peasant mentality. Early English rural folk don't fit this model. Therefore they were not peasants, and did not have the traditional traits of peasantry, like a traditional family type and traditional mentality.<ref>Macfarlane, ''The Origins of English Individualism'' (1978), chap. 1 and "The Cradle of Capitalism" (1988), p. 344.</ref> As many have commented, Macfarlane's notion of "peasant" is a straw man, uncharacteristic of modern non-Europe, much less of historical non-Europe, and his view of the medieval English farm folk as nonpeasants is historically invalid.<ref>See, for example, Hilton, "Individualism and the English Peasantry" (1980) and Handler, "Review of Mcfarlane, A., ''Marriage and Love in England''" (1989).</ref>

The theory of the unique European family is an important part of the European miracle theory as it is being propagated today. It is used in two distinct arguments. The first of these combines the family theory with Malthusianism. The argument runs as follows: Humans in general are not rational enough to control their sexual behavior and limit the number of offspring to suit the prevailing conditions of food supply and the like. Therefore, ordinary humans experience permanent, or periodic, crises, in which overpopulation leads to famine and war and pestilence, after which the now-reduced population begins again to overproduce offspring. The root axiom is irrationality. People behave not intelligently, but (as Malthus said 200 years ago) rather like barnyard beasts.<ref>"(It) seems likely that (primitive peoples') patterns of behavior in ... respect (to fertility and mortality) bore a strong resemblance to those which can be observed in many animals," Wrigley, ''Population and History'' (1969), p. 37. Wrigley is writing about present-day hunting-gathering-fishing peoples. A "description of the relationship between animal social conventions and the regulation of animal population numbers" is "a convenient point of departure for the study of primitive man" (p. 37).</ref> The historical result of this process is to prevent development. Any improvement in, for instance, productive technology merely leads to population growth, to crisis, to depopulation, and thus back to the status quo ante—a cycle of stagnation. This is one and perhaps the crucial cause of the nondevelopment of non-European societies in general. Europeans, by contrast, have always (or perhaps for just a millennium or so) exhibited rational behavior in all matters relating to population. This includes decisions about marriage and about childbearing. The unique European late-marrying, nuclear, neolocal, companionate family is the crucial institution in which this rational decision-making process takes place. Thus the European family has permitted Europeans (or west Europeans, or northwest Europeans) to check population growth, and thereby accumulate material wealth that would otherwise be dissipated in the feeding of excess babies. This primordial accumulation underlies the permanent progress of Europe. This theory, in one form or another, is advanced by many of the historians whom we have been discussing, among them Crone, Hall, Jones, Laslett, Macfarlane, and Mann.<ref>Crone, ''Pre-Industrial Societies'' (1989), p. 153; Hall, ''Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West'' (1985), pp. 130-132; Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), pp. 3, 13-15, 217-19, 226-227, 231, and elsewhere; Laslett, "The European Family and Early Industrialization" (1989), pp. 235-240; Macfarlane, "The Cradle of Capitalism" (1988), chap. 14; Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 408.</ref> Hall expresses one form of the theory in the following comment (part of which we quoted earlier):

[The] European family has long been small, late marrying, nuclear and notably sensitive to Malthusian pressure. ... The expansion of the European economy did not occur laterally, as in late traditional China, because improvements in output were not eaten up by a massive growth in population. The ratio between population and acreage in Europe remained favourable ultimately because of the relative continence of the European family.<ref>Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), pp. 130-131.</ref>

The Malthusian theory reduces humans to beasts. But even for those scholars who accept Malthusianism, the notion that the European family staves off the Malthusian disasters is hardly credible.

The second way in which the "unique European family" theory is used in arguments for the European "miracle" is a matter of deducing ways that the European family produces various sorts of uniquely progressive attitudes and actions on the part of Europeans, attitudes and actions that then lead toward the miracle. A very widely used form of this argument is expressed thusly by Laslett:

[The] European familial system may have been responsible for a whole series of features conducive to economic progress, and perhaps innovation. The conditions laid down for marriage and procreation imposed on all individuals ... the necessity of saving, accumulating. ... [The] European familial system fostered the spirit of hoarding and parsimony.<ref>Laslett, "The European Family and Early Industrialization" (1989), p. 237.</ref>

The family thus generates the personality traits of an incipient capitalist, and does so deep in the Middle Ages. This, too, is hardly credible and hardly in accord with the realities of life (and psychology) before 1492. Laslett, like Macfarlane and many others, makes the false assumption that a typical medieval European family does, in fact, have choices permitting saving, hoarding, accumulating, and so on. This argument requires that the peasant family be a substantial landholder, or at least a tenant with firm security, such that capital accumulation can take place and not be bled off by master or landlord. There is much dispute about the degree of landownership in late-medieval western Europe, but it is certain that family behavior of the sort described by Laslett could not have been common under serfdom and, after the decline of serfdom, could not have been common in places where peasants did not own the land. And this seems to have been the rule, not the exception.<ref>See Croot and Parker, "Agrarian Class Structure and the Development of Capitalism: France and England Compared" (1985). This essay, and others in the Aston and Philipin book, ''The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe'' (1985), discuss in detail the low level of landownership in medieval Europe.</ref> It appears that this argument is, again, a telescoping of history. The entrepreneurial yeoman farmer of, say, the eighteenth century, is pushed back into the Middle Ages, and an effect becomes a cause.

Many other European-family-to-European-miracle arguments are common in present-day scholarly discourse, but space permits me to give only one additional example, from Lawrence Stone:

There are several consequences which must have followed from the late marriage pattern. ... [It] is reasonable to assume that for many young men this delay involved considerable sexual denial at a time of optimum male sexual drive. ... If one follows Freudian theory, this could lead to neuroses. ... [It] could help to explain the high level of group aggression, which lay behind the extraordinary expansionist violence of western nation-states at this time. It could also have been a stimulus to capitalist economic enterprise ... stimulating saving in order to marry, and generating activist social and economic dynamism.<ref>Stone, ''The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800'' (1977), pp. 53-54.</ref>

Again:

The sublimation of sex among young male adults may well account for the extraordinary military aggressiveness, the thrift, the passion for hard work, and the entrepreneurial and intellectual enterprise of modern Western man.<ref>Stone, ''The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800'' (1977), p. 652.</ref>

Europeans conquered the world because their young men were sexually frustrated.

Space does not permit us to list and discuss all of the other common or garden-variety explanations for the so-called European miracle. Some additional explanations will be mentioned in various contexts at later points in this book. But I hope that the discussion in this chapter has sufficiently made the point that no characteristic of Europe's environment, Europe's people, or Europe's culture, at any time prior to 1492, can be convincingly shown to have had anything to do with the fact that Europe developed while other civilizations did not do so.

I will try, in the next two chapters, to show that the whole question must be phrased in a different way and answered in a different way. Europe did not rise, relative to the other civilizations, prior to 1492. When Europe did rise, after 1492, this reflected, not some special quality of "Europeanness," but the immense wealth which came into Europe as a result of colonialism in the sixteenth century and thereafter.

== Notes ==

1. Although Eric L. Jones's 1981 book ''The European Miracle'' popularized the phrase "the European miracle," it had been in use for a long time with the same essential meaning: the unique rise of Europe before or during the Middle Ages. Not every historian would describe this as a "miracle," but the term has wide acceptance, as evidence the fact that an international symposium entitled "The European Miracle" was held at Cambridge University in 1985.

2. Apparently my 1976 article, "Where Was Capitalism Born?" was the first publication to reject the "miracle" theory absolutely, that is, without qualification. In 1990 Samir Amin, commenting on a later paper of mine, indicated his basic agreement with this rejectionist position. (Amin, "Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism: A Comment," 1990; Blaut, "Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism," 1989; also see Blaut, "Fourteen Ninety-Two," 1992; and Amin, "On Jim Blaut's 'Fourteen Ninety-Two,'" 1992.) A few other historians have taken positions approaching this one; their views are discussed later in this chapter.

3. Another seminal work was Cyril Black's ''The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History'' (1966). Other such works in various fields will be discussed later in this chapter.

4. Perhaps one reason was the maturation of the discipline of history itself. Another was the influence, not entirely salutary, of positivistic scientific method on history, which led to an attempt to specify variables and "factors," and, if possible, quantify each of them. Another reason was the loss of faith in the nineteenth-century idea of inevitable progress: after nearly a half century of chaos and war, progress definitely did not appear to be something natural and inevitable; it had to be explained and also produced. Still a third reason was the general secularization of European thought, including history, such that human events could not be assumed to reflect guidance of a higher power. Another reason, possibly a very important one, was the general development of academic disciplines, and their involvement in (and nutrition from) international and domestic policy. This implied that each discipline, seeing the world with some degree of bias in favor of its own subject-as-factor (for economists, the market factor; for psychologists, the motivation factor; for sociologists, the demographic factor and the social-structural factor; for geographers, the resource factor; etc.) tended to argue in favor of historical models that treated our factor as crucial and those of others as secondary. Since many social scientists wrote history in this process, this led to some special pleading.

5. I do not mean to imply that all of this was a dominant theory for the discipline of history as a whole. The great majority of historical scholars worked on smaller problems, carefully delving into events and developing limited explanations for those events. The modernization perspective influenced some of the smaller generalizations, for instance proffering explanations in which the factors most supportive of modernizationism were favored—factors like population, technology, and the like. And there were some areas of research where lack of attention to the history of non-Europe was a critical source of error (most notably, as we will see, in studies of the history of European technology). In addition, there were (and are) many different points of view in the vast and diverse field of professional history, so it would be questionable to characterize a particular historiographic period as being dominated by a particular governing theory (or "paradigm"). I suspect that my own concern with the body of literature relating to the "European miracle" problem probably leads me to overemphasize the significance of the modernization view on history as a whole. It should also be noticed that most of the prominent writers about the specific problem of explaining the unique rise of Europe were specialist historians—economic historians, historical sociologists, and so forth—and not historians of the standard breed.

6. Cabral, ''Unity and Struggle'' (1979).

7. As to the present and future, Third World intellectuals tended to make two arguments. Those who supported the idea of a capitalist form of development argued that economic development must consist of the defense of native capital against the corrosive diffusion into one's country of the economic and political dominance of European countries and corporations. For socialists, influence and dominance by international capitalism quite obviously had to be rejected. Both groups tended to adopt "dependency theory" or "underdevelopment theory," which was a theory both of history and of modern social processes and development. A relatively small minority of Third World intellectuals, usually reflecting the thinking and interests of the very wealthy and very right-wing sectors, welcomed the idea of economic domination by foreign capitalist interests. Since the wealthy social sectors dominated most Third World societies, this minority point of view often determined policy. Also, it received much more prominence than it deserved in the journals of the First World.

8. See James, ''A History of Pan-African Revolt'' (1938), ''The Black Jacobins'' (1938), "The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery" (1970); Williams, ''Capitalism and Slavery'' (1944). We discuss these matters in Chapter 4.

9. Amin, ''Accumulation on a World Scale'' (1974) and later works. My articles "Geographic Models of Imperialism" (1970) and "Where Was Capitalism Born?" (1976) laid out the skeleton of a general theory.

10. I deal with this matter in ''The National Question'' (1987b).

11. Duyvendak, ''Ma Huan Re-examined'' (1933); Needham and collaborators, ''Science and Civilization in China'', published in 6 volumes between 1965 and 1984; Wheatley, ''The Golden Khersonese'' (1961) and ''The Pivot of the Four Quarters'' (1971); Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1973).

12. Amin, ''Unequal Development'' (1976), ''Eurocentrism'' (1988), "Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism: A Comment" (1990).

13. Bernal, ''Black Athena'', vol. 1 (1987) and vol. 2 (1991).

14. Mention should also be made of Eric Wolf's 1982 book ''Europe and the Peoples Without History'' which provides a useful and important survey of the history of both European and non-European civilizations and shows how unconvincing is the theory that non-European civilizations, historically, were stagnant and unprogressive (that they were "peoples without history"). Wolf, however, stops short of questioning the truly crucial Eurocentric belief that Europeans were more progressive than non-Europeans in several ways that are crucial to the "European miracle" theory, and so he does not directly confront that theory. (It should be noted that most mainstream historians no longer argue that non-European civilizations are, or were, totally unprogressive, totally "unhistorical," arguing instead about slow rates of change, "blockages" inhibiting change, and the like—a difference of phrasing which, as we will see, is not always a difference of argument.)

15. It is always risky to try to explain broad changes of fashion in scholarship, especially when the changes are still underway, so this interpretation cannot be more than a hunch, or hypothesis. Scholarly attitudes toward the Third World were very positive in the period of anticolonial and civil rights struggles. After the late 1960s the mood changed. Not only did more conservative views come to dominate the Western world, but rather unexpected difficulties emerged in the Third World itself: national conflicts, failure of development programs, and more. Western scholarship had never really abandoned the traditional view of Europe and its relations to non-Europe, including the diffusionist view of colonialism, and it appears that this older paradigm, never abandoned, simply became, once again, thoroughly dominant. Certainly the attention that had been paid previously to dependency theory and related views fell away among mainstream scholars. Among Marxists the process was even more dramatic, because it was less expected. In brief, Eurocentric Marxists who dismissed the role of the Third World both historically and in the present now became virtually the only Marxists within the academic world to pronounce upon issues related to the Third World. It became quite fashionable to insist, once again, that only the working class of the advanced capitalist countries can bring about socialism because each stage of history commences in this part of the world (Inside) before it spreads to the rest of the world (Outside). In the conservative camp, not only did Eurocentric views regain their hegemony, but one began, now, to hear whispers of views not far distant from racism: views about Third World peoples not having the potential to develop.

16. See Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism" (1977), "Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe" (1985), "The Agrarian roots of European capitalism" (1985b); Anderson, ''Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism'' (1974), ''Lineages of the Absolute State'' (1974); Warren, ''Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism'' (1980).

17. I will discuss only the more important beliefs, perhaps neglecting a few of these. And I will give just enough evidence to show that these beliefs are not self-evidently true. Much fuller evidence is given, to dispute some of the beliefs, in Chapters 3 and 4.

18. See Chapter 1, note 2.

19. Bowler, ''The Invention of Progress'' (1989); Harris, ''The Rise of Anthropological Theory'' (1968); Gossett, ''Race: The History of an Idea in America'' (1963); Jackson, ''Race and Racism: Essays in Social Geography'' (1987); Stocking, ''Race, Culture, and Evolution'' (1968); Trigger, ''A History of Archeological Thought'' (1989).

20. See Bernal, ''Black Athena'', vol. 1 (1987).

21. See Gossett, ''Race'' (1963).

22. Blaut, "The Theory of Cultural Racism" (1992).

23. "Hereditary neuralgia of the presumably strong tendency toward hysteria and autohypnosis of the Indian..." Max Weber, ''The Religion of India'' (1967), p. 387. This postulate is basic to Weber's analysis of Brahminism as prime cause for India's lack of development.

24. "(The) ... negroes long ago showed themselves unsuitable for factory work and the operation of machines; they have not seldom sunk into a cataleptic sleep. Here is one case in economic history where tangible racial distinctions are present" Weber, ''General Economic History'' (1981), p. 379. Although Weber says here that this is merely "one case" of racial influences, note that the case is crucial for Weber's analysis both of "rationality" and of modernization; the "racial distinctions" here separate out Africans in a fundamental way: a clear case of moderate yet crucial racism. In the same vein, "it was found that the American Indians were entirely unsuitable for plantation labor" (p. 299).

25. Weber, ''The Religion of China'' (1951), pp. 231-232. Weber considers these to be "racial qualities of the Chinese" (p. 230) although cultural factors may be involved.

26. Weber, ''The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism'' (1958), p. 30. Weber says here that "it would be natural to suspect that the most important reason" for the rationality of the Occident lies in "differences of heredity," and "the importance of biological heredity," he thinks, is "very great" (p. 30). But we do not yet know how to measure its influence, so our attention should focus mainly on the cultural factors (pp. 30-31). This was typical moderate racism (as I call it) for the time the work was published (1904-1905).

27. I have not discussed the question whether biological racism remains important today as a genuinely implicit theory, that is, one still accepted but not consciously so. I suspect that it does. Some Eurocentric historians hold to positions regarding individual differences between Europeans and non-Europeans that are so extreme, and so bigoted, that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that at least a few of them may hold to an implicitly racist infratheory, perhaps unconsciously believing, that is, that the inferiority of non-Europeans is genetically determined.

28. Among many sources on the racism fallacy, see Franz Boas' classic book, ''Race, Language, and Culture'' (1948); also Blum, ''Pseudoscience and Mental Ability'' (1978); Gossett, ''Race'' (1965); Haller, ''Outcasts from Evolution'' (1971); Jackson, ''Race and Racism'' (1987); Magubane, ''The Ties that Bind: African-American Consciousness and Africa'' (1987); Gill and Levidow, ''Anti-Racist Science Teaching'' (1987).

29. The idea that demographic behavior is not fully under social control, is a primordial biological fact or factor, seems to underlie the thinking of most Eurocentric historians (conspicuously Eric L. Jones, Michael Mann, and John Hall). The basic proposition seems to be that population will necessarily grow beyond the rational limits, and so overpopulation must result unless societies find nondemographic solutions, notably by increasing food supply to feed the inexorably increasing population. See, for instance, Michael Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'', vol. 1 (1986): If agricultural yields had not increased in medieval Europe, "the continent would ... have experienced a similar Malthusian cycle every century or so—and would not have generated capitalism" (p. 402). This view is even encountered, occasionally, in the radical and feminist movements. Note the following view put forward by a Marxist-feminist: "(We) assume (given the ubiquity of the sex drive ...) that the total number of conceptions in a population will tend to exceed those desired within a given incentive structure, and this unintended surplus will be greater, the more imperfect are the means at hand. ... A given fertility pattern then is taken to be 'rational' ... except for a small but variable excess (of births)," Seccombe, "Marxism and Demography," (1983), p. 31. The context is a discussion of European medieval social evolution, but the argument is given mainly in support of Brenner's theory about the strictly European rise of capitalism. Most radicals and feminists reject Malthusianism and would reject Seccombe's view as Malthusian.

30. Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 3. Part of the passage is a quotation.

31. Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 219.

32. Hall, ''Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West'' (1985), p. 131. Italics added.

33. As F. Hassan points out, "Among human populations the practice of population control in one form or another is universal." ("Demographic Archeology," 1978, p. 71.)

34. Some families will of course have more conceptions than desired, and others fewer, because birth control techniques are imperfect, but the average for the larger group will be broadly in line with the group's values and population targets. The techniques run the gamut from variable age of marriage and variable dowry or bride price, to complexity of marriage rules (defining who, in a kin system, is eligible to be one's spouse), to timing of sexual relations, to the use of antiterility and abortive devices, to infanticide, and other practices.

35. Much of the scholarship comes from India, where colonial ideology used to claim that poverty is a result of people having too many children. Now demographers and other social scientists have disproven this myth. See, for instance, Mamdani, ''The Myth of Population Control'' (1972), and Nag, "How Modernization Can Also Increase Fertility" (1980). For Africa, see, for example, Kitching, "Proto-Industrialization and Demographic Change" (1983); Swindell, "Domestic Production, Labor Mobility, and Population Change in West Africa, 1900-1980" (1981); Cordell and Gregory, the introduction to ''African Population and Capitalism'' (1987).

36. See, for instance, numerous studies showing the plasticity of birthrates, including Nag "How Modernization Can Also Increase Fertility" (1980), Collyer, ''Birth Rates in Latin America'' (1965), and Harewood, "Population Growth in Grenada" (1966).

37. See Aston and Philipn, eds., ''The Brenner Debate'' (1985), especially the introduction by R. Hilton.

38. Perhaps more readily, because the Malthusian explanation for poverty in Third World countries has been a rather troublesome issue for scholars and planners in these countries, and it has been important to show that poverty in their countries is not somehow caused by the demographic misbehavior of ordinary people.

39. For instance Montesquieu, in ''The Spirit of the Laws'' ((1748) 1949) "People are ... more vigorous in cold climates" (pt. xiv.2). "There are countries where the excess of heat enervates the body, and renders men ... slothful and dispirited" (pt. xv.7).

40. "Africa" almost always refers to "Africa south of the Sahara" in the discourse I am criticizing, so I will use "Africa" in the same sense in the present discussion.

41. Blaut, "The Ecology of Tropical Farming Systems" (1963).

42. See, for example, Collins and Roberts, eds., ''Capacity for Work in the Tropics'' (1988), which fails to find convincing evidence suggesting negative tropical effects.

43. The two citations (Gilfillan, "The Coldward Course of Progress," 1920, and Lambert, "The Role of Climate in the Economic Development of Nations," 1971) are hardly indicative of modern scholarly literature.

44. India's "debilitating climate" is one reason why India fell behind Europe, according to Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 198.

45. Among the pioneer works which have importance for peasant agriculture, we may mention Fred Hardy's "Some Aspects of Tropical Soils" (1936) and various of his articles in ''Tropical Agriculture'', and the work of Robert Pendleton (especially Pendleton, "Land Use in North-Eastern Thailand," 1943, and Prescott and Pendleton, ''Laterites and Lateritic Soils'', 1952), and G. Milne "A Soil Reconnaissance Journey Through Parts of Tanganyika Territory" (1947). The first comprehensive textbook on tropical soils embodying modern knowledge is Mohr and van Baren, ''Tropical Soils'' (1954).

46. See Nye and Greenland, ''The Soil Under Shifting Cultivation'' (1960); Blaut, "The Nature and Effects of Shifting Agriculture" (1962); Ahn, ''West African Soils'' (1970).

47. See Miller, ''Way of Death'' (1988); Curtin, ''The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex'' (1990). The view is echoed in many world history textbooks, for example, Roberts, ''The Hutchinson History of The World'' (1987), pp. 54-56; McNeill, ''A World History'' (1967), pp. 273-278.

48. See Wilken, ''Good Farmers: Traditional Agricultural Resource Management in Mexico and Central America'' (1987); also Nye and Greenland, ''The Soil Under Shifting Agriculture'' (1960); Blaut, "The Ecology of Tropical Farming Systems" (1963).

49. Denevan, ''The Native Population of the Americas in 1492'' (1976).

50. Cockburn and Hecht, ''The Fate of the Forest'' (1989).

51. These marginal areas often are regions in which agriculture is practiced, in preference to some less intensive system of land use, because human communities have been pushed off better land by historical forces, notably colonialism.

52. For a typical instance, the Oxford historian J. M. Roberts, in his popular world history textbook, ''The Hutchinson History of the World'' (1987), makes the following quite ignorant statement: "Probably the greatest importance of (the) spread of iron-working (in tropical Africa) was the difference it made to agriculture. It made possible a new penetration of the forests, new tilling of the soil (which may be connected with the arrival of new food-crops from Asia ... This suggests once again the important limiting factor of the African environment. Most of the continent's history is the story of response to influences from the outside (including iron-working and new crops)" (pp. 511-512). African farmers, like farmers in Europe and many other regions, practiced agriculture with stone tools before iron arrived, and continued to do so afterward whenever and wherever iron was hard to obtain. On the age of ironworking in tropical Africa, see, for example, Wai-Andah, "West Africa Before the Seventh Century" (1981) and Sinclair, "Archeology in Eastern Africa" (1991).

53. See, for example, Roberts (note 53 above); also Irwin, "Sub-Saharan Africa," in Garraty and Gay, eds. ''The Columbia History of the World'' (1981), p. 299.

54. See for instance Irvine's classical work, ''A Textbook of West African Agriculture'' (1934); Coursey, ''Yams'' (1967).

55. According to Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), "the Negroid peoples ... were still pushing east and south into the territories of the pygmies and the bushmen when the Boers undertook the Great Trek north from the Cape in the 1830s," (p. 155). Also see Roberts ''The Hutchinson History of the World'' (1987), p. 178.

56. Curtin, ''Economic Change in Pre-Colonial Africa'' (1975); Curtin, ''The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex'' (1990); Miller, ''Way of Death'' (1988).

57. See Wisner and Mbithi, "Drought in Eastern Kenya" (1974); Wisner, ''Power and Need in Africa'' (1989); O'Keefe and Wisner, "African Drought: The State of the Game" (1975).

58. The same arguments apply, with no need for qualification, in Western Hemisphere agriculture. In relatively limited parts of the South American rain forest the ecosystem is so fragile, as a result of local geological conditions (rocks forming infertile kaolinitic clay soils in some areas, almost pure sands in other areas), that cropping systems must employ shifting agriculture (or tree crops). But such areas are the exception within the present-day distribution of rain forest environments. In general, the great sweep of Amazonian and Guianan rain forest is a zone of non-sedentary agriculture because of cultural-historical factors, notably depopulation and the massive increase in cattle ranching. It is in fact cattle ranching, and not shifting agriculture, that leads to agriculturally caused long-term environmental degradation in the rainforest region, because (1) ranchers burn forest to the maximum extent possible and without control, in order to expand the area of pasture, and (2) the resulting pasture leads to steady soil degradation because coarse pasture grasses do not maintain the soil ecosystem as does the original forest. Shifting cultivators, by contrast, burn only under controlled conditions, burn small areas only, and carefully encourage the regrowth of forest. If the forest disappears, their livelihood disappears. Shifting agriculturists should not be blamed for deforestation anywhere in the humid tropics. See Hecht and Cockburn, ''The Fate of the Forest'' (1989); Blaut, "The Nature and Effects of Shifting Agriculture" (1963).

59. Buckle, ''The History of Civilization in England'', 2nd ed., (1913), chap. 2. Also see Bowler, ''The Invention of Progress'' (1989), pp. 28-29.

60. Marx, ''Capital'', vol. 1 (1976), p. 513n.

61. Jones in fact manages to use both of the opposing theories toward the same end. In wetter regions of Africa "living was easy." In drier areas "agriculture was not productive." Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 154. Also see Jones, ''Growth Recuring: Economic Change in World History'' (1988).

62. "In Africa the bountifulness and extent of the land makes for a mobile peasantry, necessarily therefore poor material on which to build states. Something like this is probably true of all slash-and-burn agriculture," John Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 27. ("Slash-and-burn agriculture" is shifting agriculture.)

63. Laibman, "Modes of Production and Theories of Transition" (1984), p. 284. However, Laibman's overall argument is not at all Eurocentric.

64. Buckle, ''History of Civilization in England'', vol. 1, 2nd ed. (1913), p. 93: "(The) great plagues by which Europe has at different periods been scourged, have, for the most part, proceeded from the East, which is their natural birthplace, and where they are most fatal. Indeed, of those cruel diseases now existing in Europe, scarcely one is indigenous; and the worst of them were imported from tropical countries in and after the first century of the Christian era."

65. The theory that the HIV virus which causes AIDS in humans is another one of these African plagues descending upon the Western World may very well be just the newest myth in this old diffusionist tradition. Whether or not this virus originated in Africa, which has not been proven, the myth has already taken on ugly overtones, as in the completely unfounded (yet classical) belief that AIDS was transmitted from monkeys to humans because of some strange sexual practices in some obscure African tribes. (This myth is naively reported in Shannon and Pyle, "The Origin and Diffusion of AIDS," 1989. See the critique of this paper by Watts and Okello, "Medical Geography and AIDS," 1990. Also see R. C. and R. J. Chirimuuta, ''AIDS, Africa and racism'', 2nd ed., 1989.)

66. McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976), p. 43.

67. See, for instance, Giblin, "Trypanosomiasis Control in African History: An Evaded Issue?" (1990); Turshen, "Population Growth and the Deterioration of Health: Mainland Tanzania, 1920-1960" (1987).

68. See Venturi "The History of the Concept of 'Oriental Despotism' in Europe" (1963); P. Anderson, ''Lineages of the Absolute State'' (1974); B. Chandra, "Karl Marx, His Theories of Asian Societies, and Colonial Rule" (1981).

69. Similar judgments are still commonly made by theoreticians of the European miracle. For instance, John Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 12: "Chinese society was stuck in the same stage for over two thousand years, while Europe, in comparison, progressed like a champion hurdler."

70. And also earlier. It is discussed for instance by Montesquieu, Bernier, Adam Smith, and Hegel (see, for instance, "Introduction," and "The Oriental World" in Hegel's ''Philosophy of History'', 1956). Also see the historical reviews in Venturi, "The History of the Concept of 'Oriental Despotism' in Europe" (1963); P. Anderson, ''Lineages of the Absolute State'' (1974); and B. Chandra, "Karl Marx, his Theories of Asian Societies, and Colonial Review" (1981).

71. This idea, too, had its forerunners. Possibly Marx got the idea from Karl Ritter, his professor of geography at Berlin.

72. Marx and Engels, ''Selected Correspondence'' (1975).

73. Marx and Engels considered other factors as well, and it is fair to say that their analysis remained speculative. I believe that Engels withdrew from the idea of "Oriental despotism" in late life. See the discussion of this topic in P. Anderson, ''Lineages of the Absolute State'' (1974); Blaut, "Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism" (1989); and B. Chandra, "Karl Marx, His Theories of Asian Societies, and Colonial Rule" (1981).

74. See Laibman, "Modes of Production and Theories of Transition" (1984), and Bailey and Llobera, ''The Asiatic Mode of Production'' (1981).

75. Weber, ''The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations'' (1976), pp. 84, 131, 157, ''The Religion of China'' (1951), pp. 16, 21, 25, and "The Origin of Seigneurial Proprietorship," part 1, chap. 3, esp. pp. 56-57 in ''General Economic History'' (1981). Also see McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976), pp. 93, 207, 259.

76. Weber, ''The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations'' (1976), pp. 157-158. Also, on p. 84: "The basis of the economy (in Egypt) was irrigation, for this was the crucial factor in all exploitation of land resources. Every new settlement demanded construction of a canal ... Now canal construction is necessarily a large-scale operation, demanding some sort of collective social organization; it is very different from the relatively individualistic activity of clearing virgin forest. Here then is the fundamental economic cause for the overwhelmingly dominant position of the monarchy in Mesopotamia (and) Egypt."

77. Wittfogel, ''Oriental Despotism'' (1957).

78. See, for instance, Denevan, ''The Aboriginal Cultural Geography of the Llanos de Mojos of Bolivia'' (1966), and "Hydraulic Agriculture in the American Tropics" (1982), on ancient drained-field or raised-field agriculture in the tropics; Golson, "No Room at the Top: Agricultural Intensification in the New Guinea Highlands" (1977), on ancient drainage in highland New Guinea; Doolittle, ''Canal Irrigation in Prehistoric Mexico'' (1990), on drainage and early agriculture in Mexico; Harrison and Turner ''Pre-Hispanic Maya Agriculture'' (1978), on early drainage in the Maya lowlands.

79. Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), pp. 8-9.

80. Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), pp. 12-13, 27-28, 36, 42-3, 53, 59, 99, 102, 137.

81. Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 11. Also see pp. 41, 123, 132.

82. Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986). Also see his essay, "European Development: Approaching a Historical Explanation" (1988).

83. Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 94.

84. Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 179.

85. The fact that Mann attributes the ancient European takeoff mainly to chariot warfare and iron-plow rainfall-farming, yet concedes that both innovations were initiated by Middle Easterners themselves, suggests to me that Mann's fundamental causal reasoning centers on the notion of European rationality: regardless of who invented these things, the Europeans put the things to work. That this Weberian notion is indeed basic for Mann will be demonstrated later in this chapter.

86. Bray, ''Agriculture'', vol. 6, part 2, of Needham and collaborators, ''Science and Civilization in China'' (1984).

87. Blaut, "Two Views of Diffusion" (1977).

88. Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), pp. 247, 406, 408, 412, 504-510, 520, 530, 539-540.

89. Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 509.

90. Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 99.

91. Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 110.

92. Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 10.

93. Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 47.

94. Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), p. 8. Jones makes the common error of assuming that productivity per worker is low in irrigated agriculture in comparison with unirrigated agriculture. This is not the case. Even with draft animals, medieval peasant production per worker was not high. And draft animals are used in irrigated farming, abundantly so in some Asian wet-rice farming systems.

95. Mann, "European Development" (1988), p. 10, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 406; Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), pp. 90, 227; Crone, ''Pre-Industrial Societies'' (1989), p. 150; McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976), p. 295.

96. Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986, chap. 5). Mann in fact builds a theory of ancient warfare upon the basis of this sort of calculation, here also ignoring the fact that armies then as now provision themselves and their animals on the route of march.

97. Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), chap. 2 and elsewhere. Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 132, makes the same claim, citing Jones.

98. Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 111; Jones ''The European Miracle'' (1981), pp. 90, 105, 107, 226-227; Mann, "European Development: Approaching a Historical Explanation" (1988), p. 10; Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 406.

99. Levy-Bruhl, ''How Natives Think'' (1966).

100. See, for example, Boas, ''The Mind of Primitive Man'' (1938); Radin, ''Primitive Man as Philosopher'' (1927); M. Mead, ''Growing Up in New Guinea'' (1930).

101. Stocking, ''Victorian Anthropology'' (1987), p. 59; Bowler, ''The Invention of Progress'' (1989), p. 66; Whitman "From Philology to Anthropology in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Germany" (1984); Bernal, ''Black Athena'', vol. 1 (1987); Said, ''Orientalism'' (1978). A recent expression of this theory came in a Soviet debate about "Oriental despotism" (Lelekov, "Round-Table: State and Law in the Ancient Orient," 1978). L. Lelekov, a historian, claimed that words meaning "freedom" and "right" were basic in the original Indo-European language or languages but not in Near Eastern languages, and asserted that this must have affected "social thinking" (p. 190). This contention was refuted by the philologist V. Ivanov (p. 193).

102. See Dalal, "The Racism of Jung" (1988). In Jung's work, see in particular ''Psychological Types'' (1971) (for instance: "(If) we go right back to primitive psychology, we find absolutely no trace of the concept of the individual," p. 10); ''Memories, Dreams, Reflections'' (1963), and "The Dreamlike World of India," in ''Civilization in Transition'' (1927). See also the 1954 work by Jung's disciple Erich Neumann, ''The Origins and History of Consciousness'' (for instance: "The evolution of consciousness as a form of creative evolution is the peculiar achievement of Western man ... The creative character of consciousness is a central feature of the cultural canon of the West ... In stationary cultures, or in primitive societies where the original features of human culture are still preserved, the earliest stages of man's psychology predominate," pp. xviii-xxix).

103. Piaget, ''Psychology and Epistemology'' (1971), p. 61.

104. See, for example, Werner and Kaplan, ''Symbol Formation'' (1964).

105. See the first 16 volumes (through 1985) of ''The Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology'' for a great many examples of this phenomenon. For this period something like one-tenth of all the empirical articles in this U.S. journal were studies by white Southern Africans purporting to show the cognitive inferiority of black Africans.

106. Rogers, ''The Diffusion of Innovations'' (1962); Rogers and Shoemaker, ''Communication of Innovations'' (1971), pp. 187-191; McClelland, ''The Achieving Society'' (1961); Hagen, ''On the Theory of Social Change'' (1962) and "A Framework for Analyzing Economic and Political Change," in Brookings Institution, ed., ''Development of the Emerging Countries: An Agenda for Research'' (1962), pp. 1-39. I have cited only the initial statements: much literature emerged from these works.

107. S. Marglin, "Losing Touch: The Cultural Conditions of Worker Accommodation and Resistance," in F. and S. Marglin, eds., ''Dominating knowledge: Development, Culture, and Resistance'' (1990).

108. Sack, ''Conceptions of Space in Social Thought'' (1980). Geographers prominent in the diffusion paradigm discussed here are L. Brown (''The Diffusion of Innovations'', 1981) and P. Gould (''Spatial Diffusion'', 1969). On peasant traditionalism in relation to natural hazards, see G. White, ed., ''Natural Hazards'' (1974), as an example of the abundant literature. I criticize these and other arguments about non-Western nonrationality in Blaut, "Two Views of Diffusion" (1977), "Diffusionism: A Unitarian Critique" (1987a), and "Natural Mapping" (1991).

109. In the field of education in the United States the dominant standardized college entrance tests (SAT and ACT) are skewed by culture-specific and sex-specific internal (as well as situational) characteristics, such that women do more poorly than men although they actually perform at higher levels in terms of university grades, while the ACT and SAT test scores of Latinos (African-Americans have not yet been studied in this way), which are very low, have no correlation whatever with their performance in college. Thus the tests effectively minimize female and minority college attendance. Why the tests are almost universally used, even so, is a fascinating question. The same biases are so prominent in IQ testing that such tests have been barred as diagnostic instruments in California schools. The "primitive mind" and "primitive languages" biases sometimes combine, as in U.S. debates about the so-called "English-only" issue and about the question whether non-European literature deserves to be included in the college curriculum along with European literature. In Boston not long ago, 30% of Hispanic children aged six to eight were not attending elementary school because their inability to speak English had been judged to be evidence of mental retardation, and Boston claimed not to have sufficient resources to educate these children in "special schools." Testing in general in U.S. education remains very racist.

110. Rorty, ''Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature'' (1980), and earlier works by Dewey (for instance ''The Quest for Certainty'', 1929), Whitehead (for instance, ''Modes of Thought'', 1938), and G. H. Mead (for instance, ''Philosophy of the Act'', 1938).

111. This is a general assessment. Some anthropologists continue to maintain either the "primitive mind" doctrine or the closely related "traditional mind" doctrine. An example of the latter is George Foster's well-known and influential book ''Traditional Cultures'' (1962), of the former, Hallpike's ''The Foundations of Primitive Thought'' (1979). For a critique, see Schweder, "Cultural Psychology: What Is It?" (1990).

112. On the question of Weber's use of "rationality," its basal status in his theorizing, and yet its uncertain definition and provenance, see, for instance: Cohen's introduction to the 1981 ed. of Weber's ''General Economic History'' (1981), pp. xxv-xxvii; Löwith, ''Max Weber and Karl Marx'' (1982), pp. 40-42, 53-54, n. 49; Freund, ''The Sociology of Max Weber'' (1968), pp. 140-149. In Weber, see ''General Economic History'' (1981), chaps. 29, 30, ''The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism'' (1958), pp. 13-31, 59-60, 79, 118-120, 191, n. 19, 265, n. 31, ''The Religion of China'' (1951), chap. 8, ''The Religion of India'' (1967), p. 387, and other works.

113. Weber, ''General Economic History'' (1981), p. 161. Also see pp. 339, 355-368. Weber makes a large number of comments about the irrationality of Asians.

114. Weber, ''Economy and Society'', vol. 2 (1968), pp. 1212-1374.

115. Typical of Jones's method is to find some objectionable feature of very early Asian society, compare it with some pleasing feature of modern, post-industrial-revolution European society, and then treat both features as though they were permanent characteristics of the respective societies, giving a picture of awful primitiveness to Asians and marvelous modernity to Europeans thereby.

116. "Frankish feudalism, in many ways proto-typical of later feudalism, was ... a mixture of the very, very old, deep-rooted drift of 'European' peasant society and of the brand new the opportunistic, the 'un-European,'" Mann, "European Development" (1988), p. 16.

117. Mann, "European Development" (1988), p. 17. Also see his ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), for instance pp. 190, 195, 213, 377, 404, 412, 510. ("At the end of all these processes stood one organic, medium-sized, wet-soil island state, perfectly situated for take-off: Great Britain," p. 510.)

118. Mann, "European Development" (1988), pp. 8-9, 11-12, 15-18 and ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), pp. 377-378, 397-398, 402-408, 412, 500-510. Also, on Europe's rationality and its historical significance, see McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976), pp. 41, 97, 106-107, 236, 238, 249, 256, 259, 264.

119. See P. Anderson, ''Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism'' (1974), part 3; Finley, ''The Use and Abuse of History'' (1975), chap. 6; Aston and Philipn, ''The Brenner Debate'' (1985), pp. 32-33, 42-51, 59, 63n, 214-215, 234-236, 306-316.

120. White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 38); also McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976), p. 234.

121. White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 54.

122. Kosambi, ''Ancient India'' (1969), p. 89; R. S. Sharma, ''Light on Early Indian Society and Economy'' (1966), p. 57.

123. White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 44.

124. White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 56; McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976), p. 237.

125. See C. T. Smith, ''An Historical Geography of Western Europe'' (1967), p. 203; Darby, ''The Domesday Geography of Eastern England'' (1952).

126. Orwin and Orwin, ''The Open Fields'' (1967), chap. 3; C. T. Smith, ''An Historical Geography of Western Europe'' (1967), chap. 4.

127. White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 57.

128. White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 67.

129. White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 68.

130. Bray, ''Science and Civilization in China'', vol. 6, part 2, ''Agriculture'' (1984), pp. 304-328.

131. White, ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1962), p. 76.

132. White, ''Machina Ex Deo'' (1968). See in particular the essay—quite a famous one—called "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis" (chap. 5).

133. White, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis." In White, ''Machina Ex Deo'' (1967), p. 85.

134. White, ''Machina Ex Deo'' (1967), p. 90.

135. Needham et al., ''Science and Civilization in China'' (1954-1984).

136. Some historians today simply ignore this evidence and repeat the old notions about China's lack of technological prowess. See, for example, Roberts, ''The Hutchinson History of the World'' (1987), pp. 493-495, 502.

137. Needham et al., ''Science and Civilization in China'', vol. 4, part 2 (1965), chap. 27.

138. Needham et al., ''Science and Civilization in China'' vol. 4, part 2 (1965), p. 33). Arnold Pacey places the innovation in Korea. See Pacey's ''Technology in World History'' (1990), p. 56.

139. See, for example, Lopez, "Hard Times and Investment in Culture" (1953), Thorndyke, "Renaissance or Renaissance?" (1943).

140. Cipolla, ''Guns, Sails, Empires'' (1965), p. 106.

141. Cipolla, ''Guns, Sails, Empires'' (1965), pp. 108-109.

142. See, for instance, White, ''Machina Ex Deo'' (1968); Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), "European Development" (1988); Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985); Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988); K. F. Werner, "Political and Social Structures of the West" (1988); and Hallam, "The Medieval Social Picture" (1975).

143. Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), p. 135.

144. Mann, "European Development" (1988), p. 12.

145. Hallam, "The Medieval Social Picture" (1975), p. 49.

146. K. F. Werner. "Political and Social Structures of the West" (1988), p. 172. This German medievalist argues that the central force underlying the "miracle" was Christianity. He refers here to the Catholic church, to the body of doctrine (Catholic and later also Protestant), to the social and political institutions that were influenced both by church and by doctrine, and to the faith of European people, which, in Werner's opinion, had much to do with their innovativeness, their sense of "restlessness," their rationality. Werner acknowledges that many causal factors were at work in bringing about the rise of Europe, and he does not hesitate to claim a role for the natural environment. But it is clear that his theory is primarily based on religion. And beyond this, one senses that this scholar himself may see the hand of a Christian god in the rise of Christian Europe.

Werner first of all makes a strong case to the effect that European history maintained a continuity of institutions, and of progress, from the time of the Roman Empire down through the Middle Ages, and that the late Empire established both ecclesiastical and lay institutions which continued down through the Middle Ages and gave that era its character. Chief among the institutions is the Catholic church. Werner wishes to depict the church as having a determining influence on history from the time of its founding. He sees the rise of Europe as a process that was guided throughout by the Christian religion, as institution and doctrine. If Werner were simply presenting a theory of history that accords religion a dominant role, I would not be discussing his views in this book. I would agree that its role has been underemphasized by historians, conservative no less than Marxist. The reason I deal with Werner's views is that he makes clear his belief that it is not religion in general but the Christian religion which played the historically efficacious role in the European "miracle." Werner's views are distinctly Eurocentric. Perhaps the key comment is the following:

(If) we had to choose one word that, by itself alone, were capable of expressing an essential factor in what we understand by the "European miracle," we would choose the philosophical term ... "unrest" ... "restlessness" ... Ruhelosigkeit ... Whilst Asia and its wisdom and, in its train, the great religions and philosophies, strive toward the art of ... seeking out the centre of the soul and of the world, and of resting in God, of having arrived, the European of the European miracle is a man who is always ready to take off once more, once he has arrived ... But where must be sought the causa causans of this mentality? The spur to anxiety is to be seen in the pangs of sin ... in the search for pardon and grace. The importance of the deliverance of the soul gave an hitherto unheard-of prominence to the individual, independent of his social rank, the individual who ... (does not abandon himself) to destiny ... (The) sense of responsibility seems to me to be one of the strengths of the Europeans that are to accomplish the "miracle" (p. 185).

Thus: Europe's religion, Christianity, instills a kind of mentality in "European man" which explains the basic source of the "European miracle."

The objection to this is the same one we put forward to all of the notions about Europe's supposedly unique "rationality." Whether that putative trait comes from religion (Werner) or from the post-Neolithic European tribes (Mann) or from any other source, the basic objection is: how can you really justify a statement that makes Europeans brighter, better, bolder than non-Europeans, if you accept the fundamental axiom that all human communities have the same ration of mind as all others? It is one thing, and indeed an unexceptionable thing, to credit the human mind with prime causality in culture change, through the innovation of social, technical, and purely intellectual things. But it is something quite different, and quite suspect, to credit the minds of human beings from some communities—and not others—with all of these qualities of innovativeness, restlessness, sense of responsibility, intellectual eagerness, respect for others, and so on, qualities usually summed up in the word "rationality." Europeans are rational but so too are non-Europeans.

147. See, for example, Palmer, ''Atlas of Modern History'' (1957); Bjørklund, Hølmhoe, Røhr, and Lie, ''Historical Atlas of the World'' (1970); and Kinder and Hilgemann, ''The Anchor Atlas of World History'', vol. 1 (1974).

148. I discuss this in ''The National Question'' (1987b).

149. Padgug, "The Problem of the Theory of Slavery and Slave Society" (1976).

150. Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988).

151. Baechler, in "The Origins of Modernity" (1988), p. 39, suggests that we should "juxtapose the barbarous Europe of the Halstatt period (about 600 B.C.) ... and Africa on the verge of colonization in the nineteenth century (A.D.)."

152. Baechler finds a true aristocracy also in Japan but believes that Japan failed to emulate Europe for various other reasons.

153. Baechler considers it quite unremarkable that the political chaos of the Dark Ages gave way smoothly to strong states in Europe. "Inevitably" there will be the "reconstitution of larger polities" (Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" 1988, p. 50). But it is equally inevitable for India that the political chaos of 1000 years ago will not be cured and permanently, thereafter, the "polity ... is not a reality in India" (p. 45).

154. Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988), p. 59.

155. Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988), p. 53.

156. Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988), p. 56.

157. Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988), p. 45.

158. Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity" (1988), p. 53.

159. Godelier, ''Sobre el Modo de Producción Asiático'' (1969), p. 58.

160. Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism" (1977); "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe" (1985, originally published 1976), and "The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism" (1985). After the 1976 article first appeared in the journal, ''Past and Present'', a series of critiques was published in that journal, and Brenner replied in 1982 with the article, "The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism." A volume, ''The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe'', containing the two ''Past and Present'' articles and several critiques, and edited by Aston and Philip, appeared in 1985.

161. In my opinion the popularity of this thin theory is due principally to two things. First, put forward as a Marxist view, grounded in class struggle, it proves to be, on inspection, a theory that is fairly conventional, if somewhat rural in bias. It seems to follows that class-struggle theories lead to conventional conclusions. And secondly, Brenner uses his theory ("The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism," 1977, pp. 77-92) to attack the unpopular "Third-Worldist" perspectives of dependency theory, underdevelopment theory, and in particular three other neo-Marxists—Sweezy, Frank, and Wallerstein—who argue that European colonialism had much to do with the later rise of capitalism. Brenner is a thoroughgoing Eurocentric tunnel historian: non-Europe had no important role in social evolution at any historical period. Unaware that colonialism involves capitalist relations of production—see Chapter 4 below—he claims that the extra-European world merely had commercial effects on Europe, whereas the rise of capitalism was in no way a product of commerce: it took place in the countryside of England and reflected class struggle, not trade. See critiques of Brenner collected in Aston and Philip (1985) by Hilton, Croot and Parker, Wunder, Leroy, Ladurie, Bois, Cooper, and others. Also see Torras, "Class struggle in Catalonia" (1980) and Hoyle, "Tenure and the land market in early modern England: Or a late contribution to the Brenner debate." (1990).

162. (1) If only one family member is a wageworker, loss of employment is a disaster. If several are wageworkers, normally some will be earning an income when others are laid off. (2) If we assume an ability to save a certain percentage of income, multiple income earners will provide a larger absolute amount of savings, that is, capital; and the absolute amount of capital can be critical in entrepreneurship. (3) Having kin to borrow from is useful for small-scale entrepreneurship. (4) Kinfolk can supply unpaid labor. These principles are well known in Third World communities.

163. Hajnal, "European Marriage Patterns in Perspective" (1965), pp. 101-146. This paper is one of the most widely cited publications on the subject of demography in the European miracle literature.

164. Hajnal, "European Marriage Patterns in Perspective" (1965), p. 101.

165. Hajnal, "European Marriage Patterns in Perspective" (1965), p. 134.

166. Hajnal concedes that he has only contemporary data for non-Europe, but merely suggests that historical data would prove his point even more clearly because modern non-European family patterns, in his view, are changing in the direction of European patterns: are being Europeanized. And when "all the qualifications about the data have been made, there can be no doubt that our original generalization remains" ("European Marriage Patterns in Perspective," 1965, p. 106).

167. Stone, ''The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800'' (1977), p. 509.

168. Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 408; Crone, ''Pre-Industrial Societies'' (1989), p. 152; Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), pp. 15-16; Macfarlane, ''Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300-1840'' (1986).

169. Laslett, "The European Family and Early Industrialization" (1989).

170. Taeuber, "The Families of Chinese Farmers" (1970), pp. 63-86.

171. See Freedman, ''Chinese Lineage and Society'' (1966), p. 49.

172. See, for example, Handler "Review of Macfarlane, A., ''Marriage and love in England''" (1989); Hilton, "Individualism and the English Peasantry" (1980); Kertzer, "The Joint Family Household Revisited: Demographic Constraints and Household Complexity in the European Past" (1989); and Berkner, "The Use and Misuse of Census Data for the Historical Analysis of Family Structures" (1975), and "The Stem Family and the Developmental Cycle of the Peasant Household" (1989).

173. For instance, G. Lee, "Comparative Perspectives" (1987), p. 65, points out that "(Many) scholars contend that the majority of families in any society are and always have been nuclear, regardless of the cultural elements favoring extended families."

174. Macfarlane, ''The Origins of English Individualism'' (1978), chap. 1 and "The Cradle of Capitalism" (1988), p. 344.

175. See, for example, Hilton, "Individualism and the English Peasantry" (1980) and Handler, "Review of Mcfarlane, A., ''Marriage and Love in England''" (1989).

176. "(It) seems likely that (primitive peoples') patterns of behavior in ... respect (to fertility and mortality) bore a strong resemblance to those which can be observed in many animals," Wrigley, ''Population and History'' (1969), p. 37. Wrigley is writing about present-day hunting-gathering-fishing peoples. A "description of the relationship between animal social conventions and the regulation of animal population numbers" is "a convenient point of departure for the study of primitive man" (p. 37).

177. Crone, ''Pre-Industrial Societies'' (1989), p. 153; Hall, ''Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West'' (1985), pp. 130-132; Jones, ''The European Miracle'' (1981), pp. 3, 13-15, 217-19, 226-227, 231, and elsewhere; Laslett, "The European Family and Early Industrialization" (1989), pp. 235-240; Macfarlane, "The Cradle of Capitalism" (1988), chap. 14; Mann, ''The Sources of Social Power'' (1986), p. 408.

178. Hall, ''Powers and Liberties'' (1985), pp. 130-131.

179. Laslett, "The European Family and Early Industrialization" (1989), p. 237.

180. See Croot and Parker, "Agrarian Class Structure and the Development of Capitalism: France and England Compared" (1985). This essay, and others in the Aston and Philipin book, ''The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe'' (1985), discuss in detail the low level of landownership in medieval Europe.

181. Stone, ''The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800'' (1977), pp. 53-54.

182. Stone, ''The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800'' (1977), p. 652.

= CHAPTER 3: Before 1492 =

In this chapter and the following one I will argue three broad propositions.

1. Prior to 1492, the progress toward modernization and capitalism which was taking place in parts of Europe was also taking place in parts of Asia and Africa. The basic process was hemispheric in scale. It was a process of change out of a precapitalist, agrarian form of class-structured society and toward a primitive form of capitalism. There was nothing teleological about this process; it was not some sort of evolutionary striving toward a foreordained goal, capitalist society. Merely, I argue, whatever happened in Europe also happened in other parts of the Eastern Hemisphere. I will use the word "feudalism" to describe the class-structured agrarian societies of Africa and Asia as well as Europe (and will give my reasons for using this word in this way). The later, emerging formation I will call "protocapitalism." In 1492, it is likely that more than half of each continent in the Eastern Hemisphere was basically dominated by a feudal social formation. Protocapitalist centers were rising in various parts of all three continents, and were interconnected in a single web or network, stretching from western Europe to southern Africa to eastern Asia.

2. This hemisphere-wide system began to break apart shortly after 1492, because of the wealth and power acquired by Europeans in America. America was conquered by Europeans, not by Asians or Africans, because of Europe's location on the globe, not because of any European superiority in level or rate of development or "potential" for development.

3. The massive flow of wealth into Europe from colonial accumulation in America and later in Asia and Africa was the one basic force that explains the fact that Europe became transformed rapidly into a capitalist society, and the complementary fact that Asian and African protocapitalist centers began to decline first in relative and then in absolute importance. Development began in Europe and underdevelopment began elsewhere. Many processes internal to Europe were important causes of change, of development, in that continent, but the one basic process, which ignited and then continuously fueled the transformation, was the wealth from colonialism.

The first proposition is the topic of the present chapter; the second and third are the topics of Chapter 4.

I will not and cannot demonstrate the truth of these propositions. I will simply present a substantial amount of evidence that supports them, and will show that the propositions fit in with other known facts in a coherent theory—a theory that, I suggest, makes sense. That is as far toward "demonstration of truth" as I can go, given the evidence of which I have knowledge and the amount of detailed argumentation that can be squeezed into this chapter. Some parts of this argument (such as the pre-1492 development of Africa) will theorize well beyond the available evidence, because, in my view, the facts needed to confirm or disconfirm these parts of the argument have not yet been obtained, have not yet been sought with sufficient diligence by diffusionist scholarship. For the most part, however, the theorizing will be grounded in strong empirical evidence. In addition to this evidence, there is the weight of evidence presented in the last chapter against various opposing theories, those that deny the importance of non-Europe before and after 1492. This has given us, so to speak, a level playing field for considering the issues to be discussed below.

== Medieval Landscapes ==

Before 1492, the various civilizations of Asia, Africa, and Europe were very different from one another in many ways, but they were very like one another in other ways. I believe that the ways in which they were different did not have significance for cultural evolution. In Chapter 2 I outlined various theories that claim that particular differences between Europe and other civilizations do explain the unique rise of Europe, and I tried to show that these theories are unconvincing. In the following discussion I will deal with some parts of culture that clearly are crucial for cultural evolution, and I will try to show that the patterns found in medieval Europe were not significantly different from the patterns found in other civilizations. I will argue that modes of production, class structures, systems of spatial exchange, and urbanization were broadly similar across many civilizations, were evolving in much the same way, and to some extent were parts of a common hemisphere-wide process.

During the century or so preceding 1492, most of humanity lived in class-stratified agricultural societies. The great majority of people in these societies were peasant farmers, producing their own subsistence and forced to deliver a significant share of their output (or labor, or cash income) to an elite, or ruling class, a class that usually held claim to the land and almost always held both formal and real power over the peasants. What I have described here is a mode of production, that is, a complex of traits including material resources such as land, material culture (tools and the like), labor employed in production and distribution, social rules governing access to material resources and distribution of the output, and some related traits. For medieval Europe this mode of production is called "feudal." It is part of a larger concept, "feudal society." One of the important features of European feudal society was the nature of states and political power. Another was the culture of the landlord class, with its titles, its chivalry, and the rest. A third was the importance, in some regions and epochs, of serfdom. But underlying (or at any rate accompanying) these features was the general fact of feudalism as a mode of production, a landlord-peasant, class-stratified, agricultural society in which the landlord class was fed by surplus extracted (always with some degree of force) from peasant producers. This mode of production, with variations, was also a basic feature of almost all of the other class-stratified agricultural societies of the Eastern Hemisphere.<ref>The discussion in this section of the chapter mainly deals with the Eastern Hemisphere. The Western Hemisphere will be discussed separately in Chapter 4.</ref> I will therefore use the term "feudal mode of production" for all such societies.

Others have used the term in this way but have encountered various important objections. Those scholars who insist that the peculiarly European features are, indeed, the evolutionary engines of change will naturally reject the description of other sorts of society as "feudal." Max Weber, for instance, thought that European feudal estates were unique and were crucial causes (or conditions) of progress. Those Marxists who consider serfdom to be a crucial feature in evolutionary terms would not want to use the term "feudalism" for societies that did not have serfdom (although many outside of Europe did).<ref>Dobbs, ''Studies in the Development of Capitalism'' (1947).</ref> Samir Amin rejects this broad usage of the term "feudalism," on the grounds that it tends to require of us that we use European feudalism as a model against which to measure other similar societies in other continents. Therefore, he prefers the term "tributary" to the term "feudal," arguing, correctly, that the various forms of surplus extraction in this mode of production (tax and rent; cash, labor, and product) can be assimilated to the concept of tribute paying.<ref>Amin, ''Unequal Development'' (1976) and "Modes of Production: History and Unequal Development" (1985).</ref> My view is that Eurocentric historians do not have a copyright on the term "feudalism" and so it is not only valid but also in a sense just to use this term for the mode of production wherever we observe it, in any continent and any social formation. There remain other objections. What of the small urbanized societies found here and there across the map during this period? We will come to this matter in a later section of the chapter. How should we describe societies that are very aberrant from the basic landlord-peasant model? What about class-stratified pastoral societies? What about the class-stratified societies in which there is kinship linkage between producing class and ruling class? These matters of definition are important and I will try to deal with them in the context of the discussion.

There are many unanswered questions about the origins and evolution both of agriculture and of the feudal mode of production. Until recently most scholars believed that agriculture, class stratification, and many other attributes of civilization had originated in the ancient Near and Middle East. (We discussed this in Chapter 1.) Given this set of propositions, combined with explicit and implicit beliefs about the cultural backwardness and unprogressiveness of Asians and Africans, it was almost axiomatic that the agricultural landscapes of feudal Europe must have attained a qualitatively higher level of development—or, alternatively, must have had greater potential for rapid change—than those of many parts, and perhaps all parts, of medieval Asia and Africa. It seemed logical to believe that agriculture as such was still in the process of diffusing outward in some peripheral parts of the hemisphere during that period. For instance, as we noted in Chapter 2, historians tended to believe that most of southern Africa was "preeagricultural" even in early modern times. Scholars speculated, and legitimately so given the basic model, as to the dates when agriculture in general, and each form of domesticated plant and animal in particular, had first reached each peripheral region in the general diffusion process.

This model began to crumble fairly recently. Very early dates for the Agricultural (Neolithic) Revolution began to appear for parts of Southeast Asia, dates of perhaps 9,000 years ago (the generally accepted idea is that agriculture in the Middle East is 10-12,000 years old). Pottery seemed to be just about that old in northeastern Asia and Japan. Soon afterward, very early dates for agriculture emerged for India, New Guinea, and other regions. Today, although the majority view still seems to be that agriculture first arose in the Middle East, very many scholars believe otherwise. Many argue for independent and perhaps simultaneous origins in the Middle East and Southeast Asia; some would add West Africa. But it is also possible that the Agricultural Revolution occurred everywhere more or less at once. By this I mean that the complex of crops, animals, tools, and ideas was being developed in many societies simultaneously (probably over a very long period), and each new trait tended to diffuse rapidly to those other parts of the hemisphere in which such a trait was a useful innovation, in an overall process that I call "criss-cross diffusion." This process gradually built up an agricultural landscape over a vast region of the hemisphere, extending (with unimportant gaps) across the entire swathe of tropical and midlatitude lands possessing moderately favorably climate and soil.<ref>Kabaker, "A Radiocarbon Chronology Relevant to the Origins of Agriculture" (1977); Megaw, ''Hunters, Gatherers and First Farmers Beyond Europe'' (1977); Vishnu-Mittre, "Origin and History of Agriculture in the Indian Subcontinent" (1978). See the review in Blaut, "Diffusionism: A Uniformitarian Critique." (1987a).</ref><ref>Blaut, "Diffusionism" (1987a).</ref>

In any event, it is now generally accepted that the diffusion of agriculture took place fairly long ago and by the Middle Ages agriculture had reached most of those regions in the Eastern Hemisphere in which environmental conditions are favorable for farming. Agriculture was still spreading at this time, but it could no longer be considered the Agricultural Revolution. Farming had been pushed poleward to a point not far short of its present latitudinal limits. In the Western Hemisphere the northern limit of maize in 1492 was not far south of the present limit of grain cultivation in central Canada. In both hemispheres almost all of the crops and livestock types that are important today had already been domesticated, although varietal improvement was still going on. As a generalization, it can be argued that each agricultural region had by this time selected for itself, from the long list of hemispheric domesticates, the combination of crops and stock best suited to its environmental conditions and cultures; most groups of related domesticated crop forms in any one part of the hemisphere were also known in many other parts.

One very dramatic bit of evidence in this matter was the swift spread of Western Hemisphere crops through the Eastern Hemisphere after 1492. This extremely rapid diffusion of maize, cassava, tobacco, sweet potato, white potato, and other crops, and the rapid way in which these domesticates became culturally important, shows how rapidly the diffusion of domesticates would occur when the process was one of the diffusion of previously unknown innovations: we can assume that most Eastern Hemisphere domesticates were no longer diffusing very rapidly. Where agriculture was spreading, it was taking place mainly in peripheral zones such as highlands, some forested regions, and remote islands, as a result mainly of social processes like migration, conquest, and land shortage.<ref>Examples of this process include the eastward movement of the medieval agricultural frontier in the forests of eastern Europe and the reclaiming of swampland in Iraq. Cropland was being expanded in these and other ways in many regions. In addition, it seems certain that some societies that had not previously practiced agriculture were being pushed into smaller or less favorable regions and therefore were turning to agriculture as a means of increasing food production to meet the land shortage.</ref> In the years before 1492, agriculture was practiced, from southern Africa to northern Europe, northern Asia, southeastern Asia, and most regions of the Pacific Ocean, including Hawaii. For the most part, cultures we would describe as "nonagricultural" had chosen not to practice farming; they were not, therefore, "preeagricultural."<ref>See R. Lee, "Art, Science, or Politics? The Crisis in Hunter-Gatherer Studies" (1992).</ref>

Probably the same holds true for the more complex forms of agricultural technology. The knowledge of irrigation, the plow, the use of fertilizers, complex rotations (including fallowless rotations), and other features of intensive agriculture had probably diffused by this time to all those parts of the agricultural landscape where farmers found it desirable to use them, either to increase output, to reduce labor requirements, to meet the demand for surplus delivery, or for any cultural reason whatever.<ref>Water-control systems in farming, including irrigation, drainage, broad-based terracing, raised- or drained-field construction, and natural-levee adaptations are probably as old as agriculture itself, because (1) all farmers everywhere know the problem of moisture control (adding moisture when there is deficit; removing moisture when there is a surplus and a danger of root drowning); (2) all of these procedures are initially small-scale actions taken on an individual farm (recall our discussion in Chapter 2 of the fallacies of the "hydraulic theory"); and (3) there is direct archaeological evidence of very ancient (9,000-year-old) drainage systems in New Guinea (Golson, "No room at the top: Agricultural intensification in the New Guinea Highlands," 1977), and drained- or raised-field systems in tropical America (Denevan, "Hydraulic Agriculture in the American Tropics: Forms, Measures, and Recent Research," 1982). Thus we can infer the primitivity of irrigation and these other water-management systems: probably they are as old as the Neolithic, along with drainage and raised-field systems. All this shows that intensive technology had already diffused insofar as it was going to do so, and nonadoption reflected something other than lack of information. As we noted in Chapter 2, irrigation systems diffuse as a social process, associated with class society. Concerning the myth that the plow was not used in Africa, see Hopkins, ''An Economic History of West Africa'' (1973) and Onimode, ''Imperialism and Underdevelopment in Nigeria'' (1982). Note that plows are used in tropical agriculture very sparingly—mainly for some operations in rice paddies.</ref> I would take the argument even a step farther. Throughout most of this landscape the diffusion of significant innovations had gone so far that the productivity of human labor was hardly ever limited by lack of technical knowledge of a kind available to other farmers in some other part of the hemisphere.<ref>In classless societies, I speculate that the bundle of choices concerning crops, tools, field systems, labor input, and the like, led to roughly a common level of output per person, unaffected by differences in environmental quality over a great range of environments. In some areas very extensive systems like shifting cultivation would be used; in others, intensive systems, like wet-rice cultivation, would be used. But the productivity of labor in terms of product per hour input would tend to be about the same in this model for both intensive and extensive systems. This would hold true if two assumptions are accepted: (1) that rapid and thorough diffusion had taken place, and (2) that population was controlled by farming peoples so as to optimize the situation concerning output and leisure time. None of this would be true in a class society, where the constraints on technology and labor use are influenced profoundly by the demands and power of the ruling class.</ref> But this is speculation.

Agricultural societies are not always class stratified. But there is abundant evidence that most agricultural regions across the hemisphere displayed, in this period, a combination of agriculture and the landlord-peasant system of stratification, thus a mode of production I label "feudal." This point will be contested on two grounds. One of the objections, commonly heard from (some) Marxists, argues that medieval non-European agricultural modes of production were somehow lacking in the potential for change that we associate with the European feudal mode. This argument (the "Asiatic mode of production," "Oriental despotism," etc.) was discussed sufficiently in Chapter 2.

The second difficulty is a matter of the spatial pattern. Where, on the map of the medieval Eastern Hemisphere, do we find class-stratified agricultural societies, and where do we find classless agricultural societies? The answer must be given in two parts. First, we know beyond dispute that the class-stratified mode was dominant in nearly all agricultural regions of Asia, with clear patterns of landlord-peasant conflict. Arguments tend to focus on Africa. But there is little doubt that the landlord-peasant exploitative relation was dominant in much of northeastern Africa (for example, Ethiopia), the Sudanic zone from the Atlantic east beyond Lake Chad, some parts of the Lake Region of East Africa, southeastern Africa around the Zimbabwe imperial zone, and part of coastal East Africa. It is now known, also, that many of the forest-zone and dry-forest-zone states of West and Central Africa (Akan, Yoruba, Congo, and so forth), displayed this mode of production or something very like it, and research on the historical geography of this large region has just, in essence, begun.<ref>See, for example, Kea, ''Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth Century Gold Coast'' (1982); Isichei, ''A History of Nigeria'' (1983); Rodney, ''A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800'' (1970); A. Smith, "The Early States of the Central Sudan" (1971); Usman, ''The Transformation of Katsina (1400-1883)'' (1981).</ref> Therefore the map of the feudal mode of production in Africa is very extensive. Second, I would argue (following Samir Amin) that nearly all state-organized societies were class societies, that the medieval state functioned in a tight relationship to the exploitative process and ruling-class politics. More than half of medieval Africa, in terms of area and population, was state-organized and therefore, I reason, more or less class stratified. I conclude, from this very sketchy examination of the medieval spatial patterns of agriculture, technically complex agriculture, and class, that the feudal mode of production dominated more than half of Africa, Europe, and Asia, and some parts of Oceania, in this period.

The ruling class in feudal societies is, almost everywhere, a landlord class, although the control of land by this class may take any of several legal forms. Some members of this class are bedecked with titles, but the distinction between nobility and gentry is not crucial in evolutionary terms and both forms (as well as others) were widespread across the hemisphere.<ref>See Blaut, "Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism" (1989). It is also true that in all these societies there were parallel high-status groups, clergy, bureaucrats, military people, and so on, but there seems not to have been any case of a large, clearly feudal society—I exclude a few cases of small urbanized power centers in dry, pastoral regions, and a few large cities—in which wealth and status was clearly divorced from land ownership and from the surplus extracted from peasants.</ref> This class is, after all, self-perpetuating, and it may use inherited titles as a signal of class membership or it may use other devices to the same effect, or both. Indeed, membership in the nontitled gentry may, as in China at various times, improve a family's chances of retaining ruling-class status and wealth amid the changing winds of state politics. Nor is the distinction critical, in this context, between higher and lower grades of nobility, and between landlords and government officials (who likewise derive their wealth from land). As we discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, there is no substance to the traditional view that the European medieval landlord class somehow was closer to pure private land ownership than were the landlord classes of other places. Marx was wrong in accepting this traditional view, because he knew little about non-European class structures. Weber, likewise, was wrong in drawing a sharp distinction between the supposedly European pattern of seigneurial tenure, with land held firmly by the landlord under some sort of arrangement with higher-order lords and kings, and the "service tenures" which he thought to be characteristic of most other societies.

The distinction between hereditary and service tenures is very fuzzy. In Europe, service tenure was the typical form in strict terms (with grants conditional upon pledges of fealty, military support, etc.), but grants tended to become hereditary. Broadly, the same held true in other societies. Holders of fiefs or grants on service tenure might move from fief to fief (or hold a changing portfolio of fiefs), but the important point is that class membership permitted one to hold a fief, and to draw one's wealth from it (and its occupants), so long as one retained membership in the ruling class. In a crucial sense, property is private so long as an individual or kin group continues to hold valid control, and this was the case in many regions, in spite of periodic upheavals and replacements. But land can be called private in another sense, that of its value in a land market. But this implies a basically (or nearly) capitalist situation, found only in a few highly commercialized rural regions, European and non-European, before 1492.<ref>Apparently such private (saleable) ownership of agricultural land was found mainly near important urban areas, ports, mining areas, etc. See Rawski, ''Agricultural Change and the Peasant Economy of South China'' (1972); Das Gupta, ''Malabar in Asian Trade: 1740-1800'' (1967); Nicholas, "Town and Countryside: Social and Economic Tensions in 14th Century Flanders" (1967-1968); Kea, ''Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast'' (1982); Rodney, ''A History of the Upper Guinea Coast'' (1970); Usman, ''The Transformation of Katsina'' (1981); Sherif, ''Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar'' (1987).</ref> The Chinese gentry, the Hindu fief-holders, even the Mughal jagirdars who had been granted fiefs on service tenure and quickly farmed them out, or converted them into private, saleable property, were well along the road to private ownership, and had gone at least as far as their European counterparts.<ref>On the importance of hereditary fiefs and landed property in Asia, see, for example, Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1973); Sharma, ''Indian Feudalism, c. 300-1200'' (1965); Fei Hsiao-tung, ''China's Gentry'' (1953); Fu and Li, ''The Sprouts of Capitalistic Factors Within China's Feudal Society'' (1956); Rawski, ''Agricultural Change and the Peasant Economy of South China'' (1972); Tung, ''An Outline History of China'' (1979); Liceria, "Emergence of Brahmans as Landed Intermediaries in Karnataka, c. A.D. 1000-1300 (1974); Mahalingam, ''Economic Life in the Vijayanagar Empire'' (1951); Hasan, "The Position of the Zamindars in the Mughal Empire (1969); Raychaudhuri, "The Agrarian System of Mughal India" (1965); Yadav, "Secular Land Grants of the Post-Gupta Period and Some Aspects of the Growth of the Feudal Complex in Northern India" (1966). For Africa south of the Sahara (for which there is as yet only fragmentary evidence), see, for example, A. Smith, "The Early States of the Central Sudan" (1971); Mabogunji, "The Land and Peoples of West Africa" (1971); Kea, ''Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast'' (1982); Isichei, ''A History of Nigeria'' (1983); Onimode, ''Imperialism and Underdevelopment in Nigeria'' (1982); FRELIMO, ''Historia de Mozambique'' (1971); Rodney, ''A History of the Upper Guinea Coast'' (1970); and Usman, ''The Transformation of Katsina'' (1981).</ref> The European feudal-era landlord class was not more advanced, more ready (as it were) for capitalism and modernity, than the landlord classes in many other regions.

The so-called European manorial system is sometimes said to have been a distinguishing feature of feudalism, a peculiarly European giant step toward private ownership and large-scale labor use, something largely absent from non-European areas and critical in the evolution toward capitalism. Large estates were widespread across the hemisphere, but the special organizational form of demesne farming by unpaid peasant labor was found in fewer areas. The manorial system in the narrow sense of the term, including coordinated demesne farming with corvée labor in gangs as well as peasant holdings, and with some manufacture along with agricultural production on the manor, was found in several areas outside of Europe. It was important in China and in southern India.<ref>On the manorial system of China, see Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1973). For India, see Gopal, "Quasi-Manorial Rights in Ancient India" (1963); Mahalingam, ''Economic Life in the Vijayanagar Empire'' (1951); Yadav, "Secular Land Grants of the Post-Gupta Period" (1966); Yadav, "Immobility and Subjugation of Indian Peasantry in Early Medieval Complex" (1974). Indian historians recognize important differences between the Indian and European forms of the manor, however. In early Indian feudalism manorial labor had some of the characteristics of serfs, some of wage laborers, and some of tenant farmers. Early Indian feudal estates also seem to have been less autarkic and insulated than the stereotypical European manor.</ref> But demesne farming was not dominant throughout Europe (it was uncommon in the Mediterranean zone), bore no resemblance to capitalist agriculture, and in any case had nearly died out in western Europe by the fourteenth century. Hence the relatively stronger development of this trait in Europe than most other regions (such as northern India) cannot account for the transition, much later, to capitalism in one area and not the others.

Related to this question is the old European misdefinition of Indian villages, unfortunately accepted by Marx, as closed, corporate entities (hence, for Marx, as survivals of primitive communal society). The medieval Indian village did indeed have corporate characteristics; it did have communal control of usufruct (though not, apparently, communal ownership); and it did display the tight combination of farming and handicrafts which Marx found to be highly significant and seemed, to him, to explain the cohesiveness of the village, its ability to remain unchanged in the face of external shocks from colonial capitalism, yet, by the same token, to resist social transformation. But European villages also retained certain corporate characteristics, perhaps even more pronounced than those of Hindu villages, where caste communities correlated very poorly with village settlement patterns.<ref>Marx's view is set forth in "The British rule in India" (1979). Irfan Habib, in part following Kosambi (both are Marxists), writes of "the creation of the traditional Indian village, closed and self-sufficient" (my emphasis) between 200 B.C. and 650 A.D., in a process involving "ruralization of crafts" and somewhat planned settlement of landless people in villages: Habib, in "The Social Distribution of Landed Property in Pre-British India" (1965).</ref> In this matter we may be confronting the classic error of telescoping history, perceiving the breakup of the European village after the rise of capitalism, and assuming therefore that these villages had been dissolving as corporate entities many centuries earlier. Furthermore, communal land ownership was relatively unimportant in this period for both India and Europe; the villages normally held only delegated rights (including the right to common land), which could be and sometimes were violated by landlords. The true owners of most of the productive land, holders of hereditary and transferrable estates, were, in both areas, the ruling class. Finally, the combination of agriculture and handicrafts was also present in European villages.<ref>On the unity of agriculture and handicraft industry in medieval European villages, see, for example, Sylvia Thrupp, "Medieval Industry 1000-1500" (1972).</ref> Apparently it dissolved well after 1492 with the rise of capitalism. In sum, although Indian feudalism was in no sense identical to the European variety (or varieties), it bore the same general characteristics as a mode of production and the same potential for evolution toward capitalism. This argument can probably be made also for many regions of Asia and Africa. The medieval European village seems not to have been very unusual among the array of village settlement and social forms across the hemisphere.

The producing class in feudalism consists, usually, of peasants, who farm the landlord's estate in household-scale units and provide labor, produce, or cash as rent. Serfdom is often thought to be the characteristic labor form of feudalism, on the European model.<ref>Dobb, ''Studies in the Development of Capitalism'' (1947).</ref> Serfs of the basically European sort were indeed found here and there in Africa and Asia, although the specific history of enserfment in late-Roman Europe was unique and its legal form was rarely encountered elsewhere. What we find, rather, is a panorama of forms of unfree labor, that is, labor of peasants tied somehow to the landlord's estate, through all three continents.<ref>Serfdom was not characteristic of all parts of medieval Europe. On unfree labor in Asia and Africa, see, for example, Yadava, "Immobility and Subjugation of Indian Peasantry in Early Medieval Complex" (1974); Levitzion, "The Early States of the Western Sudan to 1500" (1972); Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1973).</ref> On the other hand, some scholars (among them Brenner, a Marxist, and Baechler, a conservative) rather idealize the European peasant of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in western Europe and see in that person a freehold farmer, imbued with the entrepreneurial spirit and so forth.<ref>See Brenner and critics in Aston and Philpin, ''The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe'' (1988); Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism." (1977); Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity: Caste and Feudality (India, Europe and Japan)." (1988). See comments on Brenner and Baechler in Chapter 2 above.</ref> This is again a telescoping of history. Those peasants were tenants, still tied to estates in manifold ways; not until later times, well after 1492, was there a strong emergence of an important freehold, capital-accumulating, kulak-style class, ready for rural capitalism. The European peasant was not particularly unusual. Peasants who were forced to give labor service, or product, or cash, as rent or tribute or tax (paid to the landlord), who were not free to move from the landlord's domain, and whose status was inherited by later generations, were found in many parts of medieval Asia and Africa as well as Europe.

There was a measure of interconnectedness among the feudal agricultural societies, enough to suggest that we should think of the whole hemisphere-wide zone of class-based agricultural societies not as separate social entities but as a single feudal landscape with regional variations that sometimes included sharp boundaries and sometimes did not. Clearly there was a great deal of criss-cross diffusion among these regions, as evidence, for instance, the commonality of agricultural techniques over large areas. (The claim made by some European historians,<ref>including Lynn White, Jr. in ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1968); Michael Mann, "European Development: Approaching a Historical Explanation" (1988); Perry Anderson, ''Lineages of the Absolute State'' (1974).</ref> that medieval European agriculture was unique in technological level and thus somehow ignited progress toward capitalism, is invalid, as we discussed in Chapter 2. European agriculture shared most traits with other regions and was not uniquely advanced or peculiarly pregnant with social change.) It seems likely that the evolution of feudalism over much of the hemispheric landscape involved a steady deepening of the oppression on peasants, as more and more surplus was demanded, and the response by peasants included technological development and borrowing (diffusion), as well as migration toward peripheral regions and toward towns. At the same time, the ruling classes, as they exhausted the potential of their own subjects to increase surplus delivery, tried to conquer and exploit other communities of producers, to acquire external as well as internal fields of exploitation, and this also led to further interconnectedness of regions.<ref>Blaut, ''The National Question'' (1987b), chap. 7.</ref> Yet, at the same time, feudal ruling class communities were united in webs of kinship, or bureaucracy, or caste, which sometimes extended over very large areas. We know that the neat parcelling of societies into nation-states did not exist in those times, that language regions were ill-defined and language barriers of little significance, even that religious differences did not set up barriers to the movement of ideas, things, and people. Thus we should think of all (or most) feudal societies as sharing a common space, through which social forces and pressures diffused in all directions, over great distances, easily crossing the boundaries of states. Given this conception, it is not difficult to understand why the general evolution of feudalism as a mode of production was proceeding in about the same way over much of the hemisphere.

In the late Middle Ages there were signs of profound change in many agricultural regions of all three continents. There were indications of two sorts: signs of decay, or even imminent collapse, in the feudal system, and signs of change toward commercialized agriculture and toward rural capitalism. Throughout much of the hemisphere, the mode of production appears to have been in a state of decay, and we find increasing exactions, peasant revolts, migrations to agricultural frontiers and towns, intense warfare among ruling classes for access to producer populations, and more. By the fourteenth century, feudalism had entered a stage of crisis—although not of collapse—in Europe, but it appears that there were similar crises in parts of Asia and probably—as we will doubtless learn from further research—Africa.<ref>For India, see, for example, A. Chicherov, "On the Multiplicity of Socio-Economic Structures in India in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century" (1976); I. Habib, "Problems of Marxist Historical Analysis" (1969); S. Gopal, Nobility and the Mercantile Community in India" (1972); Radhakamal Mukherjee, ''The Economic History of India, 1600-1800'' (1967); Ramkrishna Mukherjee, ''The Rise and Fall of the East India Company'' (1958); Jha, ''Studies in the Development of Capitalism in India'' (1963); Nurul Hasan, "The Silver Currency Output of the Mughal Empire and Prices in India During the 16th and 17th Centuries" (1969); Yadava, "Immobility and Subjugation of Indian Peasantry in Early Medieval Complex" (1974). For West Africa, see Kea, ''Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast'' (1982). For China, see Harrison, ''The Communists and Chinese Peasant Rebellions'' (1969); Parsons, ''Peasant Rebellions in the Late Ming Dynasty'' (1970); Fu and Li, ''The Sprouts of Capitalistic Factors Within China's Feudal Society'' (1956).</ref> In all three continents there was a movement of peasants to the towns, perhaps at roughly comparable rates. In no large region, European or non-European, could this have become a flood of rural-urban migrants, since urban population was still a small percentage of total population everywhere at the end of the fifteenth century. Still, it was an effect of crises in the rural areas. Whether these crises were indications that the mode of production was truly near collapse, and this from internal contradictions, perhaps cannot as yet be decided, but in any case feudalism in Europe was no closer to its final demise, prior to 1492, than were the feudalism of many extra-European regions.

At this point in the argument, a disclaimer and a speculation. I am not arguing that the landlord-peasant mode of production had somehow gone through its allotted historical span and was about to collapse, or to transform itself into capitalism. The question whether capitalism had its earliest growth in an urban setting or a rural setting is a very complex one indeed; I will discuss the matter further below but I do not propose any sort of general historical theory of causation. I will argue only that the transition, or decay, or whatever one wants to call it, was far from complete in 1492, and the wealth from America precipitated the rise of capitalism and, simultaneously, the final decay of the feudal mode of production in Europe.

I speculate as follows: Given our overall model of an extremely rapid criss-cross diffusion of the cultural traits of agriculture (crops, stock, tools, water-management systems, etc.), and given the parallel conception of tight and intricate interlacing among class-organized agricultural societies in the medieval Eastern Hemisphere, one would expect that the general growth and evolution of the class-stratified agricultural form of society would proceed in a relatively even manner from one region to the next, as traits diffused, as social pressures were transmitted in space by migration, conquest, and the like, as ruling-class alliances proliferated, and so on. Perhaps the evolution of this feudal mode of production was everywhere conditioned by one common social fact: the steady and unrelenting demand of the landlord class and its allies (merchants, nobility, etc.) for more and more wealth, a demand that translated into constant pressure on peasants to increase production so that they could increase delivery of surplus. I view this as a long-term secular trend that led to specific responses in the peasant sector, including technological development, criss-cross diffusion of technology, asserting and pioneering, peasant revolts, rural-urban migration, participation in ruling-class military adventures, and more. I speculate, then, that these mechanisms evened out the social tensions that were created in many places by the increasing ruling-class demand for delivery of surplus. This would allow us to argue that, if the mode of production was in decay or in crisis in one part of the hemisphere, very likely the same was the case in many other parts of the hemisphere. In a word: the mode of production rose and then ebbed on a hemispheric scale, and what was happening in Europe in 1492 was also happening in Africa and Asia.

But why would we expect the feudal mode of production to decay or decline? This is the final point of speculation. We cannot assert simply that feudalism is a "stage" of evolution, and must eventually give way to the next, higher "stage" of evolution (capitalism), as some mechanistic Marxists argue. Nor can we accept the conservative form of this argument, which sees feudalism giving way to a higher and more "modern" form of society (capitalism) as a result of humanity's inevitable forward progress, social, intellectual, and moral. Nor can we invoke a Malthusian force of inevitably heightening population pressure (a thesis which was shown to be false in Chapter 2, on grounds mainly that human cultures always control their demographic behavior, more or less rationally). I would propose the following explanatory model. There are two essential facts about this form of society: first, the fact of family-scale farming as a way of life; second, the fact of a landlord class extracting, or trying to extract, an ever-increasing absolute surplus from farmers. Peasant farmers respond to this pressure in many ways, as we noted above. They certainly try to increase their population so long as each additional human being in the community can produce the requisite surplus, that is, contribute labor which yields more production than is needed for consumption by the incremental member of the community and for that individual's contribution to surplus delivery. Certainly they try to add additional land for cultivation, and sometimes try to move to another location, seeking agricultural or other land. But mainly they intensify. That is, they increase agricultural productivity by continuously experimenting with new crop varieties, new tools, new techniques, and they are ever on the alert for news about innovations that have been tried successfully elsewhere—in the next village, the next valley, the next island.

The process of technological improvement has no limit, but a point will be reached when the rate of increase in labor productivity declines, generation by generation, century by century. Doubtless the rate was at its highest during the period when many new crops and stock types were being domesticated at a rapid rate, and when the main tools, and iron, were being brought into the system. By the Middle Ages, the rate of improvement overall would have declined to a level insufficient to permit farmers to meet the landlords' incremental demands for surplus. If we set aside some of the alternative responses, such as pioneering and rural-urban migration, which must have been available in some regions but not in others, we are left with the following situation: a general crisis in the feudal mode of production.

Now this discussion has been grounded in one assumption: that improvements in agricultural production are taking place through innovations mainly on the farm itself. This is largely the case for family-scale farming in medieval and premedieval times. Of course, production is also improved by importing water and nutrients into the farm through irrigation or drainage. And always there is some off-the-farm sale or other exchange of products, and sale or exchange of products from the farm for inputs like fertilizer, seed, and labor. So the individual peasant farm, or family farm, is a relatively but not absolutely self-contained microgeographic system. We know very well, and farmers in those days also knew very well, that the best strategy for engineering a dramatic increase in production from a microgeographic system like the peasant farm is to integrate it more fully into a larger, macrogeographic system. Mainly this involves increasing the input of water and fertility elements, like lime and manure, and changing the pattern of crops and stock from one which must primarily feed the farm family to one which can involve some specialization in products that are saleable and that are well-suited to the ecological conditions of the farm. (This would commonly mean some specialization in one or a few food products, which are both sold and consumed, or specialization in an industrial product, like cotton.) When, today, we speak of the "agricultural revolution" of recent centuries, we are describing a revolution at this macrogeographic level: modern family farms import huge amounts of fertility; they import (purchase) many tools, pesticides, and like elements which are produced elsewhere; they use substantial amounts of nonfamily labor; and they specialize in ways that (sometimes) involve ecological optimization. This list pretty much exhausts the revolutionary changes that occurred prior to the present century, and it suggests that internal, microgeographic improvements—which never ceased to take place—played a secondary role at this stage in the development of agriculture.

For these macrogeographic improvements to take place there must be a high level of commercialization of farming, because moving things into and out of the farm microsystem (or at any rate the village microsystem) is mainly a process of buying and selling. It would seem to follow that a general crisis of the feudal mode of production would have one of two possible outcomes. One of these is a relatively smooth transition to an economy in which there is massive off-the-farm cash demand for farm products and supply of purchasable inputs, along with cash payment of rent (or payment on shares to a landlord who then markets the share for cash). This scenario takes place in a landscape in which there is a large nonagricultural population, hence a landscape that is either urbanizing or participating in major long-distance trade. Stated differently: the crisis can be met if commercialization and urbanization are taking place. Alternatively, there can be revolutionary changes of another sort: peasant revolts, either mild (such as withholding of rent) or violent, major cultural transformation in social, political, or religious life, or something else equally revolutionary. Perhaps both alternatives must occur in some combination for the crisis to be resolved. I conclude that the rather clear pattern in which feudal contradictions intensify, as a result of increasing demands for surplus and decreasing ability of farm families to increase the level of surplus, must lead to a revolutionary change of some sort. Most of the changes that I have mentioned did, in fact, occur in Europe in the late Middle Ages and involved the overthrow of feudalism as a political and social system and its replacement by the modern system after the model of England's "Glorious Revolution." But I am not arguing that this rural set of processes explains the rise of capitalism. Certainly it contributed to the rise of capitalism, and specifically to the processes of increasing urbanization and increasing long-distance commodity movements which characterized the late Middle Ages throughout the hemisphere, processes which I label "protocapitalist," and which we discuss in the following section of this chapter.

== Protocapitalism in Asia, Africa, and Europe ==

I use the word "protocapitalism" not to introduce a technical term but to avoid the problem of defining another term, "capitalism." Obviously, the kind of economic system that we ordinarily think of as capitalist did not exist in the Middle Ages; we are dealing with its forebear, which (as I will argue) exhibited most of the basic traits of capitalism, but on a spatially and socially small scale, and generally within, or on the edge of, a much larger, dominant economic system associated with the feudal mode of production. Protocapitalism, therefore, is incipient capitalism, or near-capitalism, or adolescent capitalism. It is the system as it existed prior to the two revolutionary transformations which brought modern capitalism into existence. The first of these was the political transformation which is usually, and conventionally, called "the bourgeois revolution" or "bourgeois revolutions"—the creation of large polities that were dominated, not by the feudal landlord class, but by an elite of townsmen (burghers, bourgeoisie) and their entrepreneurial allies in the countryside. The most famous example, and in a way the defining case, was Britain's "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, and I will use the date 1688 as the symbol or token for the political triumph of capitalism. The second transformation was, of course, the Industrial Revolution, which did not really begin in a big way until the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In Chapter 4 we will examine the role played by colonialism and non-Europe in both of these transformations.

In all three continents we find relatively small rural regions (they were generally hinterlands of major port cities) along with a few highly commercialized agricultural and mining regions, which were clearly being penetrated by capitalism—were protocapitalist—in the period just prior to 1492. Among these were Flanders, southeastern England, northern Italy, sugar-planting regions of Morocco, the Nile valley, the Gold Coast, Kilwa, Sofala (and hypothetically part of Zimbabwe), Malabar, Coromandel, Bengal, northern Java, and south-coastal China. Land was owned by commerce-minded landlords or by urban protocapitalists.<ref>Appadorai, ''Economic Conditions in Southern India'' (1936); Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1974); Nicholas, "Town and Countryside: Social and Economic Tensions in 14th Century Flanders" (1967-1968), pp. 458-485; Rawski, ''Agricultural Change and the Peasant Economy of South China'' (1972); T. Raychaudhuri, ''Jan Company in Coromandel'' (1962).</ref> Rents were generally paid in cash except in those areas, like Fukien, where more money profit could be extracted by landlords if they collected the farm produce and sold it themselves.<ref>Rawski, ''Agricultural Change and the Peasant Economy of South China'' (1972).</ref> Agricultural production was organized in various ways, ranging from peasant-scale farming to plantations, and very significant quantities of a number of agricultural products were grown, sold, and exported: rice, cotton, sugar, pepper, etc. Industrial production was spreading out into the countryside in all three continents: the early putting-out system was actually de-urbanizing industry in northwestern Europe, as the control by guilds became loosened; probably the same was occurring in parts of Asia and Africa (where merchant and artisan guilds were also well developed and strong in the Middle Ages).<ref>See Appadorai, ''Economic Conditions in Southern India'' (1936); Gernet, ''Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion'' (1962); Habib, "Problems of Marxist Historical Analysis" (1969); Mahalingam, ''Economic Life in the Vijayanagar Empire'' (1951); K. Nilikanta Sastri, ''A History of South India'' (1966); Tung, ''An Outline History of China'' (1979); Kea, ''Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast'' (1982), Sherif, ''Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar'' (1987).</ref> Over a much broader area, commodity production had fully penetrated the agricultural economy, and it is extremely doubtful whether west European peasant agriculture was more highly commercialized than that of many parts of China and India, as well as some other extra-European regions. Probably we can assume that level of urbanization is a good comparative indicator of level of agricultural commercialization for this period, since it must represent the main off-the-farm demand for agricultural products. By this measure, Chinese and Indian agriculture would have been more highly commercialized than European agriculture, because a larger percentage of total population was urban in those regions.

Cities dotted the landscape from northern Europe to southern Africa to eastern Asia. Some of these cities were seats of power for major feudal societies. Others were socially and geographically marginal to these societies, and were usually to be found along sea coasts, where they had mainly an interstitial relationship to the larger feudal societies, moving and trading goods among them and producing manufactured commodities for them. Probably it would be incorrect to speak of two distinct classes of urban place, internal and marginal (or peripheral), because many variations and gradations existed, and also because the internal, seat-of-power cities were in many cases also major centers for intersocietal trade and for nonagricultural production. Nevertheless, we can distinguish a special group of cities that were strongly oriented toward manufacturing and trade, were more or less marginal to powerful feudal states (some were within these states; some were small city-dominated states or even city-states), and were heavily engaged in long-distance maritime trade. Cities of this sort stretched around all of the coasts of western Europe, the Mediterranean, East Africa, and South, Southeast, and East Asia. In these cities the mode of production could probably be best described as incipient capitalism, protocapitalism—certainly it was not feudalism—with wageworkers being, apparently, the largest working-class sector, merchants, merchant-landlords, or merchant-manufacturers the ruling class, and economic activity a mixture of trade (movement of commodities, banking, and so on), manufacture (both large- and small-scale), and commercial agriculture.

Some of these mercantile-maritime cities were quite small, others quite large, but it appears that most of them were at roughly the same level in the development of protocapitalist institutions, classes, and technology. This is not surprising since they were intimately connected to one another in a tight network of trade, along which ideas, techniques, goods, and people flowed in all directions, in constant criss-cross diffusion.<ref>Blaut, "Where Was Capitalism Born?" (1976).</ref> (For example: Malacca, when the Portuguese first arrived, was trading with the Mediterranean, Inner Asia, East Africa, the Middle East, India, China, and probably Japan as well as all of Southeast Asia. The chronicler Tome Pires assures us that, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, 84 different languages are spoken in that city, and, boosting its importance for the Portuguese, asserts that "whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice."<ref>Pires, ''The Suma Oriental'' (1944 edition).</ref> A second example from a much earlier period: the Tenasserim port of Kalah, in the tenth century, was trading with China and Arabia. According to Ibn al-Faqih, the parrots of Kalah talked in Persian, Arabic, Chinese, Indian, and Greek.<ref>Pires, ''The Suma Oriental'' (1944); Di Meglio, "Arab Trade with Indonesia and the Malay Peninsula from the 8th to the 16th Century" (1970). The location of Kalah is tentatively placed in the Mergui region: see Wheatley, ''The Golden Khersonese'' (1961).</ref>)

The network of mercantile-maritime centers stretched, like a string of pearls, from the Baltic to the eastern Mediterranean, and from there southward to Sofala (or beyond—the history of East and southern Africa is still buried in colonial slumber) and eastward to Japan. The network also extended inland in all three continents, but the mercantile-maritime cities and oceanic routes were eventually of greater evolutionary importance in the rise of capitalism than were the inland centers. This was true for two (main) reasons.

First, foreign trade was the most peripheral of protocapitalist activities; it was literally beyond the reach of the law. (Inland cities that bordered on deserts would also have had this peripheral quality to some extent.) Thus, a protocapitalist port city could move products to and from any other oceanic port without having to pass through state-organized territories, and thereby avoid paying tolls, being forced to buy and sell goods to foreign merchants at intermediate trading centers, or perhaps even being denied permission to enter a state. It is worth noting, in this regard, that a substantial part of the high cost of Asian spices in European markets before 1492 resulted from the fact that shipments coming from India via overland routes ordinarily had to be passed from merchant to merchant at several trading points enroute, with profit taken at each intermediate market. The cheapness of Asian spices carried by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century therefore reflected, to a considerable extent, the fact that the spices could be on-loaded at an Asian port, and then transported direct to a European port with no intermediate transactions; perhaps this factor was more important than the generally lower cost of sea transport over land transport (a factor that is often overemphasized).

Second, long-distance commodity movement by sea, involving as it did the transport of vital staples as well as luxuries, was, among protocapitalist activities of the late Middle Ages, perhaps the closest we get to industrial capitalism in the urban economy of that time. It involved not merely an exchange of commodities but the production of many commodities including ships, and incorporated sophisticated technology, a large work force, complex transactions, and massive capital accumulation. This matter brings us back, inescapably, to the problem of defining "protocapitalism."

There is a widespread tendency, often encountered among Marxists but by no means confined to that school of thought, which argues the following position. Money, cash exchange, and trade have been going on for millennia but they do not signify capitalism or even the seeds of capitalism. This is so because capitalism is a matter of production, not exchange. "Real" capitalism requires the application of wage labor and the production of commodities. Exchange is merely buying and selling; it does not add value. For Marx, it produces wealth mainly as a result of unequal exchange (higher prices in one market than another, and the like), not as a result of labor input and the production of use-value.

From this model come a series of highly important theses. One is the argument that medieval European towns were not central to the rise of capitalism because their main activity was trade, exchange, not production. Therefore the rise of capitalism must have occurred, not in medieval towns but in medieval agriculture.<ref>This thesis is central to the famous debate over the role of urbanization in the medieval rise of capitalism; in Marxist literature this view is associated with Maurice Dobb (who in fact presented it very cautiously), and its opposition—emphasis on the role of towns in the rise of capitalism—is associated with Paul Sweezy. See Dobb, ''Studies in the Development of Capitalism'' (1947), Sweezy, "A Critique" (1976). The thesis is also central to the debates over "dependency theory." For instance, Robert Brenner argues that towns and trade were essentially irrelevant precisely because the issue is production, not exchange, and Brenner believes (wrongly) that towns were not really important points of production in the medieval world. See Brenner, "The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism" (1985), pp. 38-39. Also see Chapter 2, note 172, above.</ref> But a second thesis is more crucial for the issues discussed here. This is the argument that starts out by conceding that the great medieval trading cities and trading routes of Asia were much more impressive in scale than those of Europe and the Mediterranean, but this did not make them more significant for the rise of capitalism—because it was production, not exchange (trade, commerce), that was the crucial process. No matter how highly developed the trading routes and cities of Asia were, Europe's feudal agricultural production (in this argument) was closer to capitalism than either the rural or urban production systems of non-Europe and it is this fact—the nature of European rural society as contrasted with non-European rural society—that is crucial in explaining why capitalism arose in Europe, not in Asia (or Africa). The fallacy regarding rural production was discussed previously. But equally fallacious is the idea that Asian (and African) port cities, mercantile-maritime centers, were somehow purely or largely concerned with exchange, with "commerce." Here there are in fact three errors. First, production involves not merely change of form but also change of place. It is metaphysical to argue that there is something ontologically distinctive about the process of shaping nature into a "thing," a commodity. When a farmer produces an agricultural "thing," he or she must not only grow it but also transport it from field to farmstead and then to market, and must also transport inputs of water or fertilizer or labor from outside the farm. Farm production, therefore, involves both change of form and change of place. An automobile assembly line is a process of change both of form and of place. Thus, overall, spatial movement is part of production. It has nothing whatever to do with the entirely distinct process by which commodities are purchased and sold. Indeed, the farmer's crop can be subject to exchange right on the farm as well as in an off-the-farm market. Therefore, the medieval activities involved in moving commodities over long distances were not, ontologically, "exchange"; they were spatial transport. They involved huge labor forces, massive capital investment, major technologies—of navigation, ship construction, banking and insurance, and more—and significant tonnages. They produced use-value at the destination from commodities that had none, or less, at the point of departure. In a word, what is called "medieval trade" was a complex process in which production and manufacture played as great a role as did exchange.

The second error is the idea, very widely held today among historians, that the cities, the commodity movement, and the rest of the complex, was somehow a trivial process involving only the moving of a few luxury items to a tiny ruling class. In fact, most of the medieval seaborne trade was a matter of staple commodities, things like crude textiles, iron implements, rice, wheat, lumber, ships (which often were sailed from the place of construction to some other port where they were sold), and the like. But beyond that, the tonnage and value of products that would not be considered staples, things like pepper, sugar, finer textiles, pottery, and so forth, was, in and of itself, immensely important, because the market for such products was very large: the medieval elites were by no means insignificant.

The third error is a failure to perceive how important industrial production was in these medieval cities and their hinterlands. Thus, I conclude that the medieval mercantile-maritime system was very much a nursery bed of capitalism, in Asia and Africa as well as Europe.

The protocapitalist port cities of Europe were not more highly developed than those of Africa and Asia in the fifteenth century. This holds true regardless of the kinds of criteria chosen as measures. European cities, first, were not larger in absolute or relative population. In fact, urbanization in Europe was probably less advanced than urbanization in China, India, the Arab region, and no doubt many other non-European areas. The urban population in early Ming China was perhaps 10% of the total population.<ref>Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1973).</ref> In the Vijayanagar Empire of southern India it must have been at least as high: the inland capital alone held about 3% of the population—comparable centers in Europe, such as Paris, may have had half that percentage—and the coastal port cities were both numerous and large.<ref>Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1973); Mahalingam, ''Economic Life in the Vijayanagar Empire'' (1951); Naqvi, ''Urban Centres in Upper India, 1556-1803'' (1968); Satish Chandra, "Commerce and Industry in the Medieval Period" (1964).</ref> Second, the development of the techniques of business was fully as advanced, fully as complex, and fully as wideflung in space among the merchants and bankers of Asia and Africa as among those of Europe. (Tome Pires said of Gujarati businessmen in 1515: "They are men who understand merchandise; they are ... properly steeped in the sound and harmony of it" and "those of our people who want to be clerks and factors ought to go there and learn, because the business of trade is a science."<ref>Pires, ''The Suma Oriental'' (1944). Also see K. N. Chaudhuri, ''Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean'' (1985); Chan-Cheung, "The Smuggling Trade Between China and Southeast Asia During the Ming Dynasty (1967); Di Meglio, "Arab Trade with Indonesia and the Malay Peninsula from the 8th to the 16th Century" (1970); Elvin, "China as a Counterfactual" (1988); Gupta, ''Industrial Structure of India During Medieval Period'' (1970); I. Habib, "Usury in Medieval India" (1964); Jha, ''Studies in the Development of Capitalism in India'' (1963); Pires, ''The Suma Oriental'' (1944); Prakash, "Organization of Industrial Production in Urban Centres in India During the Seventeenth Century with Special Reference to Textiles" (1964); Victor Purcell, ''The Chinese in Southeast Asia'', 2nd ed. (1965); Jan Qaisar, "The Role of Brokers in Medieval India" (1974); Simkin, ''The Traditional Trade of Asia'' (1968); Toyoda, ''History of Pre-Meiji Commerce in Japan'' (1969); Udovitch, "Commercial Techniques in Early Medieval Islamic Trade" (1974).</ref>) Third, the technical and material means of production seem to have been at about the same level of development in many mercantile-maritime centers of all three continents, allowing for differences in the volume of production and trade, the kinds of merchandise, and the like. Maritime techniques were also comparable across the hemisphere: though they differed from ocean to ocean, it cannot be said that ships of one ocean were technologically more advanced than those of the others.<ref>Needham and collaborators, ''Science and Civilization in China'' (1954-1984), vol. 4, part 3; Lewis, "Maritime Skills in the Indian Ocean, 1368-1500" (1973); Lo, "China as a Sea Power" (1955); Ma Huan, ''The Overall Survey of the Ocean's Shores'' (1970); Purcell, ''The Chinese in Southeast Asia'', 2d ed. (1965).</ref> Manufactures in port cities and other industrial centers of Europe, Africa, and Asia were also roughly comparable in gross scale and level of development.<ref>S. Chaudhuri, "Textile Trade and Industry in Bengal Suba, 1650-1720" (1974); Elvin, "China as a Counterfactual" (1988); Gernet, ''Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion'' (1962); Jha, ''Studies in the Development of Capitalism in India'' (1963); Naqvi, ''Urban Centres in Upper India, 1556-1803'' (1968); Needham and collaborators, ''Science and Civilization in China'' (1965-1984); Jan Qaisar, "The Role of Brokers in Medieval India" (1974); Rodinson, "Le Marchand Musulman" (1974); Rodinson, ''Islam and Capitalism'' (1973); Bodo Wiethoff, ''Die Chinesische Seeverbotspolitik und der Private Überseehandel von 1368 bis 1567'' (1963); Yang, "Government Control of Urban Merchants in Traditional China" (1970).</ref> Fourth, the urban class composition of Asian and African centers appears to have been similar to that of European centers: in all regions there existed a powerful class of protocapitalists and a wage-earning class of workers, with or without involvement also of other classes such as feudal landlords, slaves, and so on. And finally, the old European myth, codified by Weber—that European cities were somehow more free than non-European cities, which were under the tight control of the surrounding polity—is essentially an inheritance from classical Eurocentric diffusionism, which imagined that everything important in early Europe was imbued with freedom while everything important in Asia (not to mention Africa) was ground under a stultifying "Oriental despotism" until the Europeans arrived there and brought freedom. The so-called "free cities" of central Europe were hardly the norm and were not central to the rise of capitalism. The partial autonomy of many mercantile-maritime port cities of Europe, from Italy to the Baltic, was of course a reality, and usually reflected either the dominance by the city of a relatively small polity (often a city-state) or the gradual accommodation of feudal states to their urban sectors, allowing the latter considerable autonomy for reasons of profit or power. But all of this held true also in various parts of Africa and Asia. Small city-states were common around the shores of the Indian Ocean, in the Maghreb, and in Southeast Asia; also common were quasi-independent cities, giving loose allegiance to larger states. This point was discussed in the previous chapter.

The preceding discussion was not a theory of the rise of capitalism. My aim was simply to show that all of the theories that claim causal superiority for Europe on the basis of Asia and Africa's supposed lack of progressive urbanization or because extra-European urban processes were not important since urban processes in general were of minor importance compared to rural processes—European rural feudalism—are very unconvincing.

It is not an exaggeration to describe this entire network of mercantile-maritime cities as a single protocapitalist system.<ref>I proposed this idea in Blaut, "Where Was Capitalism Born?" (1976). Janet Abu-Lughod's important book ''Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350'' (1989) is the first effort to show in precise detail how this system worked in the fourteenth century. Also see S. Chaudhuri, "Textile Trade and Industry in Bengal Suba" (1985); Simkin, ''The Traditional Trade of Asia'' (1968); Amin, ''Accumulation on a World Scale'' (1974) and ''Unequal Development'' (1976).</ref> The surrounding space of class-organized agricultural societies was, as I argued previously, made up of separate societies and polities in separate regions but was, nonetheless, integrated enough so that persistent criss-cross diffusion and other movements led to a degree of unity; perhaps even a degree of intercontinental equilibrium. The unity was very much more intense for the network of protocapitalist cities. The image I have in mind for this is a network of strings of electric lights of various sizes and colors illuminating a garden party. The current, so to speak, which flowed among those port cities consisted of human beings (sailors, workers, merchants, etc.), material things (commodities, ships, fertile seeds and cuttings of crops, musical instruments, and much more), and ideas—technological ideas, innovative social, economic, and religious ideas, and so on.

All of this is well known in qualitative terms but not fully so in terms of its intensity, its spatial extent, and, most critically, its unity. The entire system can be viewed as a single entity, so tightly integrated that there must have been rapid, almost instantaneous, criss-cross diffusion throughout the system of essentially every material or immaterial culture trait that is relevant to the economic and technical and ecological progress of this form of society. I believe it is an error, built into our way of conceptualizing cultures and cultural differences, to believe that the very profound differences of culture among the various societies that comprised this system would, somehow, have been reflected in a lack of integration across cultural boundaries in matters concerning the technical-economic-ecological dimension of culture. (Recall our discussion above concerning the distinction between evolutionary and nonevolutionary or partly non-evolutionary aspects of culture, in the theoretical tradition of anthropologists like Steward.<ref>Steward, ''Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution'' (1955). See note 1.</ref>) In those times, differences of language did not seem to interfere with the quest for profit among merchants and other participants in this system. (Recall the Greek-speaking parrots of Kalah, the 84 languages spoken in Malacca.) Nor were differences of religion any great impediment (as has been amply documented for Muslim-Christian-Jewish trade in the medieval Mediterranean<ref>Braudel, ''The Mediterranean'' (1972); Goitein, ''A Mediterranean Society'' (1967); Lane, ''Venice: A Maritime Republic'' (1973).</ref>). Certainly there were limited social networks, membership in which was a matter of religion or nationality or even kinship. Abu-Lughod has shown that the pattern of connections and distinctions produced a set of eight overlapping social regions—she writes of "The Eight Circuits of the Thirteenth-Century World System"—although her data and argument are consistent with my present thesis that all regions were in fact subregions of one protocapitalist system.<ref>Abu-Lughod, ''Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350'' (1989), fig. 1, p. 34. One of the eight regions is the nonmaritime circuit extending from China through Central Asia to the Black Sea.</ref> State boundaries do not seem to have played an important inhibiting role in the flows across the system, except in certain fairly limited periods when either political conflict or specific imperial policies and practices did, indeed, disrupt trade through one or another political partition; the truly nationalistic forms of capitalist enterprise become important much later; in fact, after 1492.<ref>Blaut, ''The National Question'' (1987b).</ref>

The network, or system, seems to have evolved over a period of several centuries, mainly from the tenth to the fifteenth. Without attributing cause, I would emphasize the fact that the period during which this system grew most rapidly in scale and intensity was the period during which the technology of oceangoing shipping increased explosively, in what may be thought of as a (or the) Spatial Revolution. In the Agricultural Revolution, we do not know whether the technical-ecological transformation was cause, or effect, or both, in relation to social transformation, although most scholars tend to treat agriculture as cause and social change as effect, rightly or wrongly. In the case of the medieval Spatial Revolution, it is most likely that the technological-ecological aspect was more a reflection of the economic and social processes associated with emergent protocapitalism and urban development than a cause of the latter. Nevertheless, the medieval Spatial Revolution was in one critical way a sequel to the Agricultural Revolution: it intensified spatial flows much as the earlier revolution intensified in situ production. This is not to say that earlier boat technology and earlier long-distance sailing out of sight of land was insignificant: the question is one of intensity.

Perhaps, as a final speculation, we might think of the Spatial Revolution as part of a larger process which was responding to the maturation and decline of the feudal mode of production. Certainly it is true that increasing commodity demand by elites was a major stimulus, but it is also possible that the emerging crisis of feudalism—the decreasing rate at which an absolute increase in surplus could be extracted from peasant producers, and the resulting stresses and strains—had much to do with the rise of the intercontinental protocapitalist system. In any case, the dramatic long-distance voyages of discovery of the later Middle Ages, voyages by Chinese, Indians, Polynesians, Europeans, and others, should be conceptualized as moments in a genuine Spatial Revolution.

Much of this is speculation beyond the empirical data. But we have important data about the parallels of development from one urban system to another, and from one trading region to another. We also have dramatic cases of almost instantaneous diffusion: for instance, the appearance of the cannon in the Mediterranean region and in China almost simultaneously; perhaps in the same decade.<ref>Needham and collaborators, ''Science and Civilization in China'' (1965-1984), Vol. 5, part 7; Needham, ''Gunpowder as the Fourth Power, East and West'' (1985).</ref> For the argument of this book, the one crucial generalization is the following: It is not surprising that the processes that I have called protocapitalist were going on across the Eastern Hemisphere in the later Middle Ages. Africa, Asia, and Europe were about equally close to—or distant from—capitalism and modernity in 1492. After 1492, the pace of development quickened for Europe and slowed for Africa and Asia, because of the wealth brought to Europe from America.

== Notes ==

1. Concerning my use of the term "cultural evolution," see Chapter 1, note 14.

2. The discussion in this section of the chapter mainly deals with the Eastern Hemisphere. The Western Hemisphere will be discussed separately in Chapter 4.

3. See Dobbs, ''Studies in the Development of Capitalism'' (1947).

4. Amin, ''Unequal Development'' (1976) and "Modes of Production: History and Unequal Development" (1985).

5. Kabaker, "A Radiocarbon Chronology Relevant to the Origins of Agriculture" (1977); Megaw, ''Hunters, Gatherers and First Farmers Beyond Europe'' (1977); Vishnu-Mittre, "Origin and History of Agriculture in the Indian Subcontinent" (1978). See the review in Blaut, "Diffusionism: A Uniformitarian Critique." (1987a).

6. Blaut, "Diffusionism" (1987a).

7. The assumption here is that agriculture itself was evolving because it was useful, but there is the corollary assumption that humanity realized this not just in one favored place but in many places and among many peoples. This should not be surprising, given the fact that agriculture is useful nearly everywhere today. But it is definitely contradictory to the assumptions of Eurocentric diffusionism.

8. Examples of this process include the eastward movement of the medieval agricultural frontier in the forests of eastern Europe and the reclaiming of swampland in Iraq. Cropland was being expanded in these and other ways in many regions. In addition, it seems certain that some societies that had not previously practiced agriculture were being pushed into smaller or less favorable regions and therefore were turning to agriculture as a means of increasing food production to meet the land shortage.

9. See R. Lee, "Art, Science, or Politics? The Crisis in Hunter-Gatherer Studies" (1992).

10. Water-control systems in farming, including irrigation, drainage, broad-based terracing, raised- or drained-field construction, and natural-levee adaptations are probably as old as agriculture itself, because (1) all farmers everywhere know the problem of moisture control (adding moisture when there is deficit; removing moisture when there is a surplus and a danger of root drowning); (2) all of these procedures are initially small-scale actions taken on an individual farm (recall our discussion in Chapter 2 of the fallacies of the "hydraulic theory"); and (3) there is direct archaeological evidence of very ancient (9,000-year-old) drainage systems in New Guinea (Golson, "No room at the top: Agricultural intensification in the New Guinea Highlands," 1977), and drained- or raised-field systems in tropical America (Denevan, "Hydraulic Agriculture in the American Tropics: Forms, Measures, and Recent Research," 1982). Thus we can infer the primitivity of irrigation and these other water-management systems: probably they are as old as the Neolithic, along with drainage and raised-field systems. All this shows that intensive technology had already diffused insofar as it was going to do so, and nonadoption reflected something other than lack of information. As we noted in Chapter 2, irrigation systems diffuse as a social process, associated with class society. Concerning the myth that the plow was not used in Africa, see Hopkins, ''An Economic History of West Africa'' (1973) and Onimode, ''Imperialism and Underdevelopment in Nigeria'' (1982). Note that plows are used in tropical agriculture very sparingly—mainly for some operations in rice paddies.

11. In classless societies, I speculate that the bundle of choices concerning crops, tools, field systems, labor input, and the like, led to roughly a common level of output per person, unaffected by differences in environmental quality over a great range of environments. In some areas very extensive systems like shifting cultivation would be used; in others, intensive systems, like wet-rice cultivation, would be used. But the productivity of labor in terms of product per hour input would tend to be about the same in this model for both intensive and extensive systems. This would hold true if two assumptions are accepted: (1) that rapid and thorough diffusion had taken place, and (2) that population was controlled by farming peoples so as to optimize the situation concerning output and leisure time. None of this would be true in a class society, where the constraints on technology and labor use are influenced profoundly by the demands and power of the ruling class.

12. See, for example, Kea, ''Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth Century Gold Coast'' (1982); Isichei, ''A History of Nigeria'' (1983); Rodney, ''A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800'' (1970); A. Smith, "The Early States of the Central Sudan" (1971); Usman, ''The Transformation of Katsina (1400-1883)'' (1981).

13. See Blaut, "Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism" (1989). It is also true that in all these societies there were parallel high-status groups, clergy, bureaucrats, military people, and so on, but there seems not to have been any case of a large, clearly feudal society—I exclude a few cases of small urbanized power centers in dry, pastoral regions, and a few large cities—in which wealth and status was clearly divorced from land ownership and from the surplus extracted from peasants.

14. Apparently such private (saleable) ownership of agricultural land was found mainly near important urban areas, ports, mining areas, etc. See Rawski, ''Agricultural Change and the Peasant Economy of South China'' (1972); Das Gupta, ''Malabar in Asian Trade: 1740-1800'' (1967); Nicholas, "Town and Countryside: Social and Economic Tensions in 14th Century Flanders" (1967-1968); Kea, ''Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast'' (1982); Rodney, ''A History of the Upper Guinea Coast'' (1970); Usman, ''The Transformation of Katsina'' (1981); Sherif, ''Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar'' (1987).

15. On the importance of hereditary fiefs and landed property in Asia, see, for example, Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1973); Sharma, ''Indian Feudalism, c. 300-1200'' (1965); Fei Hsiao-tung, ''China's Gentry'' (1953); Fu and Li, ''The Sprouts of Capitalistic Factors Within China's Feudal Society'' (1956); Rawski, ''Agricultural Change and the Peasant Economy of South China'' (1972); Tung, ''An Outline History of China'' (1979); Liceria, "Emergence of Brahmans as Landed Intermediaries in Karnataka, c. A.D. 1000-1300 (1974); Mahalingam, ''Economic Life in the Vijayanagar Empire'' (1951); Hasan, "The Position of the Zamindars in the Mughal Empire (1969); Raychaudhuri, "The Agrarian System of Mughal India" (1965); Yadav, "Secular Land Grants of the Post-Gupta Period and Some Aspects of the Growth of the Feudal Complex in Northern India" (1966). For Africa south of the Sahara (for which there is as yet only fragmentary evidence), see, for example, A. Smith, "The Early States of the Central Sudan" (1971); Mabogunji, "The Land and Peoples of West Africa" (1971); Kea, ''Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast'' (1982); Isichei, ''A History of Nigeria'' (1983); Onimode, ''Imperialism and Underdevelopment in Nigeria'' (1982); FRELIMO, ''Historia de Mozambique'' (1971); Rodney, ''A History of the Upper Guinea Coast'' (1970); and Usman, ''The Transformation of Katsina'' (1981).

16. On the manorial system of China, see Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1973). For India, see Gopal, "Quasi-Manorial Rights in Ancient India" (1963); Mahalingam, ''Economic Life in the Vijayanagar Empire'' (1951); Yadav, "Secular Land Grants of the Post-Gupta Period" (1966); Yadav, "Immobility and Subjugation of Indian Peasantry in Early Medieval Complex" (1974). Indian historians recognize important differences between the Indian and European forms of the manor, however. In early Indian feudalism manorial labor had some of the characteristics of serfs, some of wage laborers, and some of tenant farmers. Early Indian feudal estates also seem to have been less autarkic and insulated than the stereotypical European manor.

17. Marx's view is set forth in "The British rule in India" (1979). Irfan Habib, in part following Kosambi (both are Marxists), writes of "the creation of the traditional Indian village, closed and self-sufficient" (my emphasis) between 200 B.C. and 650 A.D., in a process involving "ruralization of crafts" and somewhat planned settlement of landless people in villages: Habib, in "The Social Distribution of Landed Property in Pre-British India" (1965).

18. On the unity of agriculture and handicraft industry in medieval European villages, see, for example, Sylvia Thrupp, "Medieval Industry 1000-1500" (1972).

19. Dobb, ''Studies in the Development of Capitalism'' (1947).

20. Serfdom was not characteristic of all parts of medieval Europe. On unfree labor in Asia and Africa, see, for example, Yadava, "Immobility and Subjugation of Indian Peasantry in Early Medieval Complex" (1974); Levitzion, "The Early States of the Western Sudan to 1500" (1972); Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1973).

21. See Brenner and critics in Aston and Philpin, ''The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe'' (1988); Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism." (1977); Baechler, "The Origins of Modernity: Caste and Feudality (India, Europe and Japan)." (1988). See comments on Brenner and Baechler in Chapter 2 above.

22. including Lynn White, Jr. in ''Medieval Technology and Social Change'' (1968); Michael Mann, "European Development: Approaching a Historical Explanation" (1988); Perry Anderson, ''Lineages of the Absolute State'' (1974).

23. Blaut, ''The National Question'' (1987b), chap. 7.

24. For India, see, for example, A. Chicherov, "On the Multiplicity of Socio-Economic Structures in India in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century" (1976); I. Habib, "Problems of Marxist Historical Analysis" (1969); S. Gopal, Nobility and the Mercantile Community in India" (1972); Radhakamal Mukherjee, ''The Economic History of India, 1600-1800'' (1967); Ramkrishna Mukherjee, ''The Rise and Fall of the East India Company'' (1958); Jha, ''Studies in the Development of Capitalism in India'' (1963); Nurul Hasan, "The Silver Currency Output of the Mughal Empire and Prices in India During the 16th and 17th Centuries" (1969); Yadava, "Immobility and Subjugation of Indian Peasantry in Early Medieval Complex" (1974). For West Africa, see Kea, ''Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast'' (1982). For China, see Harrison, ''The Communists and Chinese Peasant Rebellions'' (1969); Parsons, ''Peasant Rebellions in the Late Ming Dynasty'' (1970); Fu and Li, ''The Sprouts of Capitalistic Factors Within China's Feudal Society'' (1956).

25. Appadorai, ''Economic Conditions in Southern India'' (1936); Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1974); Nicholas, "Town and Countryside: Social and Economic Tensions in 14th Century Flanders" (1967-1968), pp. 458-485; Rawski, ''Agricultural Change and the Peasant Economy of South China'' (1972); T. Raychaudhuri, ''Jan Company in Coromandel'' (1962).

26. Rawski, ''Agricultural Change and the Peasant Economy of South China'' (1972).

27. See Appadorai, ''Economic Conditions in Southern India'' (1936); Gernet, ''Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion'' (1962); Habib, "Problems of Marxist Historical Analysis" (1969); Mahalingam, ''Economic Life in the Vijayanagar Empire'' (1951); K. Nilikanta Sastri, ''A History of South India'' (1966); Tung, ''An Outline History of China'' (1979); Kea, ''Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast'' (1982), Sherif, ''Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar'' (1987).

28. Blaut, "Where Was Capitalism Born?" (1976).

29. Pires, ''The Suma Oriental'' (1944 edition).

30. Pires, ''The Suma Oriental'' (1944); Di Meglio, "Arab Trade with Indonesia and the Malay Peninsula from the 8th to the 16th Century" (1970). The location of Kalah is tentatively placed in the Mergui region: see Wheatley, ''The Golden Khersonese'' (1961).

31. This thesis is central to the famous debate over the role of urbanization in the medieval rise of capitalism; in Marxist literature this view is associated with Maurice Dobb (who in fact presented it very cautiously), and its opposition—emphasis on the role of towns in the rise of capitalism—is associated with Paul Sweezy. See Dobb, ''Studies in the Development of Capitalism'' (1947), Sweezy, "A Critique" (1976). The thesis is also central to the debates over "dependency theory." For instance, Robert Brenner argues that towns and trade were essentially irrelevant precisely because the issue is production, not exchange, and Brenner believes (wrongly) that towns were not really important points of production in the medieval world. See Brenner, "The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism" (1985), pp. 38-39. Also see Chapter 2, note 172, above.

32. Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1973).

33. Elvin, ''The Pattern of the Chinese Past'' (1973); Mahalingam, ''Economic Life in the Vijayanagar Empire'' (1951); Naqvi, ''Urban Centres in Upper India, 1556-1803'' (1968); Satish Chandra, "Commerce and Industry in the Medieval Period" (1964).

34. Pires, ''The Suma Oriental'' (1944). Also see K. N. Chaudhuri, ''Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean'' (1985); Chan-Cheung, "The Smuggling Trade Between China and Southeast Asia During the Ming Dynasty (1967); Di Meglio, "Arab Trade with Indonesia and the Malay Peninsula from the 8th to the 16th Century" (1970); Elvin, "China as a Counterfactual" (1988); Gupta, ''Industrial Structure of India During Medieval Period'' (1970); I. Habib, "Usury in Medieval India" (1964); Jha, ''Studies in the Development of Capitalism in India'' (1963); Pires, ''The Suma Oriental'' (1944); Prakash, "Organization of Industrial Production in Urban Centres in India During the Seventeenth Century with Special Reference to Textiles" (1964); Victor Purcell, ''The Chinese in Southeast Asia'', 2nd ed. (1965); Jan Qaisar, "The Role of Brokers in Medieval India" (1974); Simkin, ''The Traditional Trade of Asia'' (1968); Toyoda, ''History of Pre-Meiji Commerce in Japan'' (1969); Udovitch, "Commercial Techniques in Early Medieval Islamic Trade" (1974).

35. Needham and collaborators, ''Science and Civilization in China'' (1954-1984), vol. 4, part 3; Lewis, "Maritime Skills in the Indian Ocean, 1368-1500" (1973); Lo, "China as a Sea Power" (1955); Ma Huan, ''The Overall Survey of the Ocean's Shores'' (1970); Purcell, ''The Chinese in Southeast Asia'', 2d ed. (1965).

36. S. Chaudhuri, "Textile Trade and Industry in Bengal Suba, 1650-1720" (1974); Elvin, "China as a Counterfactual" (1988); Gernet, ''Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion'' (1962); Jha, ''Studies in the Development of Capitalism in India'' (1963); Naqvi, ''Urban Centres in Upper India, 1556-1803'' (1968); Needham and collaborators, ''Science and Civilization in China'' (1965-1984); Jan Qaisar, "The Role of Brokers in Medieval India" (1974); Rodinson, "Le Marchand Musulman" (1974); Rodinson, ''Islam and Capitalism'' (1973); Bodo Wiethoff, ''Die Chinesische Seeverbotspolitik und der Private Überseehandel von 1368 bis 1567'' (1963); Yang, "Government Control of Urban Merchants in Traditional China" (1970).

37. I proposed this idea in Blaut, "Where Was Capitalism Born?" (1976). Janet Abu-Lughod's important book ''Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350'' (1989) is the first effort to show in precise detail how this system worked in the fourteenth century. Also see S. Chaudhuri, "Textile Trade and Industry in Bengal Suba" (1985); Simkin, ''The Traditional Trade of Asia'' (1968); Amin, ''Accumulation on a World Scale'' (1974) and ''Unequal Development'' (1976).

38. Steward, ''Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution'' (1955). See note 1.

39. Braudel, ''The Mediterranean'' (1972); Goitein, ''A Mediterranean Society'' (1967); Lane, ''Venice: A Maritime Republic'' (1973).

40. Abu-Lughod, ''Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350'' (1989), fig. 1, p. 34. One of the eight regions is the nonmaritime circuit extending from China through Central Asia to the Black Sea.

41. Blaut, ''The National Question'' (1987b).

42. Needham and collaborators, ''Science and Civilization in China'' (1965-1984), Vol. 5, part 7; Needham, ''Gunpowder as the Fourth Power, East and West'' (1985).

= CHAPTER 4: After 1492 =

== EXPLAINING 1492 ==

In 1492, as we have seen, capitalism was slowly emerging in many parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe. In that year there would have been no reason whatever to predict that capitalism would triumph in Europe, and would triumph only two centuries later.

By "the triumph of capitalism" I mean, in the present context, the political revolution that transferred power from the old feudal landlord elite to the bourgeoisie (the burghers, the capital-accumulating new elite): the bourgeois revolution. This was really a revolutionary epoch, not a single brief event, but I will follow convention by dating it to 1688, the year of England's "Glorious Revolution." In that year (minor qualifications aside) the bourgeoisie definitively took power in England. This class already held power in Holland and in some small states of southern Europe, while in some other parts of Europe (like France) the bourgeoisie was vigorously "rising" in certain regions although the conflict with feudal polities had not yet been won at the level of state power. It should be emphasized that the capitalism that triumphed was not industrial capitalism. How this preindustrial capitalism should be conceptualized is a difficult question because it is something much larger than the "simple commodity production" and "merchant capital" of earlier times. But the Industrial Revolution did not really begin until a century later, in the late eighteenth century, and those who conceptualize the Industrial Revolution as simply a continuation of the bourgeois revolution are neglecting a large and important block of history, both inside and outside of Europe.

The explanation for the rise of capitalism to political power in Europe in the (symbolic) year 1688 requires an understanding of (1) the reasons Europeans, not Africans and Asians, reached and conquered America, and thus garnered the first fruits of colonialism; (2) the reasons the conquest was successful; (3) the direct and indirect effects of the sixteenth-century plunder of American resources and exploitation of American workers on the transformation of Europe; and (4) the direct and indirect effects of seventeenth-century colonial and semicolonial European enterprise in America, Africa, and Asia on the further transformation of Europe and eventually the political triumph of capitalism in the bourgeois revolution.

In the following paragraphs we will summarize each of these processes in turn, and thus, so to speak, "explain 1492." Then we will turn to the problem of explaining the rise of capitalism to political power in Europe—or more properly, part of Europe—in the period 1492–1688, in the sense of trying to sort out the significance of colonialism and the extra-European world in this epochal transformation. Finally, we will look at the significance of colonialism, and the role of non-Europe, in the initial stages of the Industrial Revolution, roughly, in the period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and will look at the complementary process: the beginnings of underdevelopment in Africa and Asia.

This inquiry should lead to an explanation for the fundamental fact that capitalism became centrated in Europe. I use the verb "centrate" to emphasize one crucial theoretical argument of this book: the rise of a more-or-less capitalist system had been going on in many parts of the world prior to 1492; after 1492, new forces entered which slowed, then stopped, its evolution outside of Europe and quickened it inside. Thus the rise of capitalism after 1492 was as much a matter of shifting its main headquarters to Europe as it was a matter of "rising" in a simple evolutionary sense.

=== Why America Was Conquered by Europeans and Not by Africans or Asians ===

One of the core myths of Eurocentric diffusionism concerns the discovery (so-called) of America.<ref>Europeans did not "discover" America: the hemisphere was settled millennia earlier by people who migrated in from Siberia and the Arctic. So I prefer not to conceptualize the European arrival as a "discovery." Likewise, the idea that the Western Hemisphere is a "New World" is false since it was hardly new to those who lived there and greeted Columbus on his arrival in 1492. It is, however, very difficult to avoid using the phrase "New World" in certain contexts, and I will occasionally have to do so.</ref> Typically it goes something like this: Europeans, being more progressive, venturesome, achievement-oriented, and modern than Africans and Asians in the late Middle Ages, and with superior technology as well as a more advanced economy, went forth to explore and conquer the world. And so they set sail down the African coast in the middle of the fifteenth century and out across the Atlantic to America in 1492. This myth is crucial for diffusionist ideology for two reasons: it explains the modern expansion of Europe in terms of internal, immanent forces, and it permits one to acknowledge that the conquest and its aftermath (Mexican mines, West Indian plantations, North American settler colonies, and the rest) had profound significance for European history without at the same time requiring one to give any credit in that process to non-Europeans.

In reality, the Europeans were doing what everyone else was doing across the hemisphere-wide network of protocapitalist, mercantile-maritime centers, and Europeans had no special qualities or advantages, no peculiar venturesomeness, no peculiarly advanced maritime technology, and so on. What they did have was opportunity: a matter of locational advantage in the broad sense of accessibility. The point deserves to be put very strongly. If the Western Hemisphere had been more accessible, say, to South Indian centers than to European centers, then very likely India would have become the home of capitalism, the site of the bourgeois revolution, and the ruler of the world.

In the late Middle Ages long-distance oceanic voyaging was being undertaken by mercantile-maritime communities everywhere. In the fifteenth century Africans were sailing to Southeast Asia, Indians to Africa, Arabs to China, Chinese to Africa, and so on. Much of this voyaging was across open ocean and much of it involved exploration. Two non-European examples are well known: Cheng Ho's voyages to India and Africa between 1417 and 1433, and an Indian voyage around the Cape of Good Hope and apparently some 2,000 miles westward into the Atlantic circa 1420. In this period the radii of travel were becoming longer, as a function of the general evolution of protocapitalism, the expansion of trade, and the development of maritime technology. Maritime technology differed from region to region but no one region could be considered to have superiority in any sense implying evolutionary advantage, and novel ideas and techniques were being spread in all directions by rapid criss-cross diffusion. The entire hemisphere was participating and sharing in a Spatial Revolution.

Certainly the growth of Europe's commercial economy led to the Portuguese and Spanish voyages of discovery. But the essence of the process was a matter of catching up with Asian and African protocapitalist communities by European communities, which were at the margin of the hemisphere-wide system and were emerging from a period of downturn relative to some other parts of the system. Iberian Christian states were in conflict with Maghreb states and European merchant communities were having commercial difficulties both there and in the eastern Mediterranean. The opening of a sea route to West African gold mining regions, along a sailing route known since antiquity, and using maritime technology known to non-Europeans as well as Europeans, was an obvious strategy. By the late fifteenth century the radii of travel had lengthened so that a sea route to India was found to be feasible (with piloting help from African and Indian sailors). The leap across the Atlantic in 1492 was certainly one of the great adventures of human history, but it has been in a context of shared technological and geographical knowledge, high potential for commercial success, and other factors that place it, in a hemispheric perspective, as something that could have been undertaken by non-Europeans just as easily as by Europeans.

Europeans had one advantage. America was vastly more accessible from Iberian ports than from any extra-European mercantile-maritime centers that had the capacity for long-distance sea voyages. Accessibility was in part a matter of sailing distance. Sofala, which is presumed to have been the southernmost major seaport in East Africa in that period (there may have been others farther south), is roughly 3,000 miles farther away from an American landfall than are the Canary Islands (Columbus's jumping-off point) and 5,000 miles farther from any densely populated coast with possibilities for trade or plunder. The distance from China to America's northwest coast was even greater, and greater still to the rich societies of Mexico.

To all of this we must add the sailing conditions on these various routes. Sailing from the Indian Ocean into the Atlantic one sails against prevailing winds. The North Pacific is somewhat stormy and winds are not reliable. From the Canaries to the West Indies, on the other hand, there blow the trade winds, and the return voyage is made northward into the westerlies. Obviously an explorer does not have this information at hand at the time of the voyage into unknown seas. The extent of the geographical knowledge possessed by Atlantic fishing communities in the fifteenth century remains, however, an unanswered and intriguing question, and there is speculation that these people fished around Newfoundland and the Grand Banks before 1492. More concretely, the Iberian sailors going to and from the Canaries, Madeira, and the Azores made use of the same basic wind circulation as did Columbus in crossing the entire ocean; Columbus knew that the trade winds (or easterlies) would assist him outbound and had good reason to believe that the westerlies would assist the return voyage. The point here is a matter of strong probabilities. Overall, it is vastly more probable that an Iberian ship would effect a passage (round trip) to America than would an African or Asian ship in the late fifteenth century, and, even if such a voyage were made by the latter, it is vastly more probable that Columbus's landfall in the West Indies would initiate historical consequences than would have been the case for an African ship reaching Brazil or a Chinese ship reaching California.

Is this environmental determinism? There is no more environmentalism here than there is in, say, some statement about the effect of oilfields on societies of the Middle East. I am asserting only the environmental conditions that support and hinder long-distance oceanic travel. In any case, if the choice were between an environmentalistic explanation and one that claimed superiority of one group over all others, as Eurocentric diffusionism does, we would certainly settle for environmentalism.

Before we leave this topic, two important questions remain to be asked. First, why did not West Africans "discover" America since they were even closer to it than the Iberians were? The answer seems to be that mercantile, protocapitalist centers in West and Central Africa were not oriented to commerce by sea (as were those of East Africa). The great long-distance trade routes led across the Sudan to the Nile and the Middle East, across the Sahara to the Maghreb and the Mediterranean, and so forth. Sea trade existed all along the western coast, but it was not large in scale, given that civilizations were mainly inland and trading partners lay northward and eastward. Second, why did the trading cities of the Maghreb fail to reach America? This region (as Ibn Khaldun noted not long before) was in a political and commercial slump. In 1492 it was under pressure from the Iberians and the Turks. Just at that historical conjuncture, this region lacked a capacity for major long-distance oceanic expeditions. Also, these cities, which traded directly with the Sudan and the gold regions, did not have the economic incentive that Europeans had to bypass the Saharan land routes in search of a new—that is, cheaper—source of gold.

=== Why the Conquest Was Successful ===

America became significant in the rise of Europe, and the rise of capitalism, soon after the first contact in 1492. Immediately a process began, and explosively enlarged, involving the destruction of American states and civilizations, the plunder of precious metals, the exploitation of labor, and the occupation of American lands by Europeans. If we are to understand the impact of all of this on Europe (and capitalism), we have to understand how it occurred and why it happened so quickly—why, in a word, the conquest was successful.

There is a second crucial reason we need to understand the causality of the conquest. A nondiffusionist history starts all causal arguments with the working assumption that Europeans had no innate superiority, in any dimension of culture, over non-Europeans, no a priori "higher potential" for progress. This leads first to a recognition that Europeans in 1492 had no special advantage over Asians and Africans, ideological, social, or material. But it demands that we make the same working hypothesis about all human communities. Why, then, did Europeans discover America instead of Americans discovering Europe (or Africa, or Asia)? And why, after the first contact, did Europeans conquer the American civilizations instead of being defeated and driven from America's shores? The working assumption of cultural uniformitarianism—or, if you prefer, the psychic unity of humankind—here confronts the diffusionist tendency to dismiss the peoples of America as primitive and irrelevant.<ref>Blaut, "Diffusionism: A Uniformitarian Critique" (1987).</ref>

There were several immediate reasons why American civilizations succumbed, but one of these is of paramount importance and probably constitutes a sufficient cause in and of itself. This is the massive depopulation caused by the pandemics of Eastern Hemisphere diseases that were introduced to America by Europeans.<ref>For general reviews, see Crosby, ''The Columbian Exchange'' (1972) and McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976). See Borah and Cooke, "La Demografía Histórica de América Latina: Necesidades y Perspectivas" (1972); Whitmore, "A Simulation of Sixteenth-Century Population Collapse in the Basin of Mexico" (1991); Alchon, ''Native Society and Disease in Colonial Ecuador'' (1991); Lovell, "'Heavy Shadows and Black Night': Disease and Depopulation in Colonial America" (1992).</ref> A second factor was the considerable advantage Europeans held in military technology, but this advantage has to be kept in perspective. The technological gap was not so great that it could by itself bring military victory—after the initial battles—against American armies that were vastly larger and would sooner or later have adopted the enemy's technology. America is a vast territory, and in 1492 it had a very large population, numbering at least 50 million people and conceivably as many as 200 million, a goodly proportion of these people living in state-organized societies with significant military capability.<ref>See Denevan, ''The Native Population of the Americas in 1492'' (1976), for a review of the disputes concerning the American population at the time of the conquest.</ref> Military technology tends, historically, to diffuse from one camp to the opposing camp in a relatively short time. Moreover, the superiority of the Spaniards' primitive guns was not really very great when compared with the Americans' bows and arrows. I think it is, therefore, certain that the tide would have turned against the Europeans had the matter been merely one of military capability. There would have been no conquest, or the conquest would have embraced only a limited territory, and certainly would not have swept south as far as the great civilizations of the central Andes. The point is that history went in a different direction because of the incredibly severe and incredibly rapid impact of introduced diseases. Resistance collapsed because the Americans were dying in epidemics even before the battles were joined.<ref>Crosby, ''The Columbian Exchange'' (1972); Alchon, ''Native Society and Disease in Colonial Ecuador'' (1991).</ref> Probably 90% of the population of central Mexico was wiped out during the sixteenth century; the majority of these deaths occurred early enough to assist the political conquest. Parallel processes took place in other parts of the hemisphere, especially where there were major concentrations of population, these in most cases being areas of state organization and high civilization. Perhaps three-quarters of the entire population of America was wiped out during that century.<ref>For a discussion of the various calculations, see Denevan, ''The Native Population of the Americas in 1492'' (1976); Denevan, "The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492" (1992); Lovell, "'Heavy Shadows and Black Night'" (1992); and Whitmore, "A Simulation of Sixteenth-Century Population Collapse in the Basin of Mexico" (1991).</ref> Millions died in battle with the Spaniards and Portuguese and in forced-labor centers such as the mines of Mexico and Peru, but much greater numbers died in epidemics, and this was the reason that resistance to the conquest was rapidly overcome in most areas.

Both the susceptibility of American populations to Eastern Hemisphere diseases and the lower level of military technology among Western Hemisphere peoples can be explained in fairly straightforward cultural evolutionary terms, although evidence bearing on the matter is partly indirect. The Western Hemisphere was not occupied by humans until very late in the Paleolithic period; there is dispute about the first arrivals, but most scholars do not believe that the Americas were occupied before 30,000 B.P. The first immigrants did not possess agriculture. The earliest migrations preceded the Agricultural Revolution in the Eastern Hemisphere; in addition, the source area for the migrations, northeastern Siberia, is generally too cold for agriculture, even for present-day agriculture, and we would not expect to find that these cultures were experimenting with incipient agriculture 20,000 years or so ago although some low-latitude cultures were doing so. Migrants to America were paleolithic hunters, gatherers, fishers, and shellfishers. They came in small numbers, apparently in a widely spaced series of relatively small population movements, and spread throughout both North and South America. Only after some millennia had passed was the stock of resources for hunting, fishing, gathering, and shellfishing under any significant pressure from humans. One assumes that population growth was slow but—this is of course speculative—that population growth eventually did reach the point where conditions were favorable to an Agricultural Revolution.<ref>The assumption here is that population continued to grow so long as food resources for hunting, gathering, fishing, and shellfishing were abundant. At a certain purely hypothetical time, it is likely that people who had certainly already experimented with crop cultivation, found that a better supply of food (and fiber, etc.) would be obtained through agriculture, and so began the transformation. Note that this argument is in no way Malthusian.</ref> In the Eastern Hemisphere the Agricultural Revolution seems to have occurred (as a qualitative change) roughly 10,000–12,000 years ago. In the Western Hemisphere that point may have been reached about 4,000 years later.<ref>See Fiedel, ''Prehistory of the Americas'' (1987).</ref> Thereafter, cultural evolution in the Western Hemisphere proceeded along lines somewhat parallel to those of Eastern Hemisphere evolution: the development of agricultural societies, of monumental ceremonial centers, science, writing, cities, feudal class structures, and mercantile trade. It seems, indeed, that the Western Hemisphere societies were closing the gap. But in 1492, military technology in the most advanced and powerful states was still well behind that of Eastern Hemisphere states. Metal was just coming into use in this arena, and guns had not been invented. Hence the superiority of Cortes's armies over Moctezuma's and Pizarro's over the Incas'. (When Cortes arrived at Tenochtitlán the Aztecs were already dying in great numbers from European diseases which, apparently, had been carried by American traders from Cuba to Mexico. Likewise, the Incas apparently were succumbing to these diseases before Pizarro arrived.<ref>See Crosby, ''The Columbian Exchange'' (1972), Lovell, "'Heavy Shadows and Black Night,'" and Alchon, ''Native Society and Disease in Colonial Ecuador'' (1991).</ref>)

The susceptibility of American populations to Eastern Hemisphere diseases, and the consequent devastation of American settlements, collapse of states, and defeat and subjugation by the Europeans, is explained within the same general model. Small populations entered America and probably bore with them only a small subset of the diseases that existed in the Eastern Hemisphere at the time of their departure. They came, in addition, from a rather isolated, thinly populated part of the hemisphere, and a part which, having a cold climate, would have lacked some diseases characteristic of warm regions. Perhaps more important is the history of the diseases themselves. Many diseases originated or became epidemiologically significant during or after the Agricultural Revolution, and have ecological connections to agriculture, to urbanization, to zoological and botanical changes in the ecosystems strongly modified by human land use, and so on. In the Eastern Hemisphere humanity entered these ecological situations after the initial migrations to the Western Hemisphere, hence these migrants to America would not have carried these diseases with them. Later migrants may have done so (although this is again unlikely because they came from a cold and isolated part of Asia, and came in small numbers). But we can assume that the sparse settlement, the hunting-gathering-fishing-shellfishing way of life, and the absence of agricultural settlements and urbanization in the Americas during many millennia, would have caused a disappearance of some of the Eastern Hemisphere diseases that had been carried across to the Americas by migrants. After a time the American populations would have lost their physiological immunities to diseases no longer present in these populations, and they would of course lack immunities to diseases never before encountered. It is known, in this regard, that utter devastation was produced in the Americas from diseases to which Eastern Hemisphere populations had such high levels of immunity that they experienced these diseases as minor maladies only.

Hence there is no need to take seriously any longer the various myths that explain the defeat of the Americans in terms of imputed irrationality or superstitiousness or any of the other classical, often racist, myths about American civilizations in 1492. (The most widely known of these myths is the idea that Mexicans imagined that Cortés and his troops were gods, and fell down before them in awe instead of fighting. This did not happen.) The relatively minor difference in technology between the two communities, and the impact of Eastern Hemisphere diseases upon Western Hemisphere communities, can be explained in terms of the settlement history of the Western Hemisphere and its consequences. The Americans were not conquered: they were infected.

=== Europe in 1492 ===

In 1492, European society was rather sluggishly moving out of feudalism and toward capitalism. Nothing in the landscape would suggest that a revolutionary transformation was imminent, or even that the social and economic changes taking place were very rapid. The growth of the English woolen trade in the fifteenth century was not (as it is often depicted) a sign of revolutionary economic change: it was complemented by a decline in competing woolen industries in southern Europe.<ref>Miskimin, ''The Economy of Early Renaissance Europe, 1300-1460'' (1969).</ref> Rural growth in this century reflected mainly population recovery (in some areas) after the great plagues of the preceding century, and the commercialization of agriculture that was then taking place had been doing so for some time.<ref>Abel, ''Agricultural Fluctuations in Europe from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Centuries'' (1980).</ref> Towns were growing, but only slowly, and the urban population was still only a small fraction of total population (except in Italy and the Low Countries); and the urban population of Europe was smaller than it was in many non-European areas.<ref>de Vries, ''European Urbanization, 1500-1800'' (1984).</ref> There were strong signs even of economic contraction instead of growth.<ref>Hodgett, ''A Social and Economic History of Medieval Europe'' (1972) ("[The] 200 years after c.1320 may be said to be a period of down-turn in the [European] economy as a whole," p. 212); Lopez and Miskimin, "The Economic Depression of the Renaissance," (1961-1962); C. T. Smith, ''An Historical Geography of Western Europe Before 1800'' (1969).</ref> The Italian Renaissance, in economic terms, did not raise the Italian centers above the level of many non-European centers, including those in nearby Islamic countries (for instance, Cairo), and the Renaissance was not at all a technological revolution.<ref>Lopez, "Hard Times and Investment in Culture" (1953); Thorndyke, "Renaissance or Prenaissance?" (1943).</ref> All of this needs to be said by way of setting the stage. Before 1492 there was slow growth in Europe, perhaps even a downturn. Certainly—and this is accepted by the majority of European historians—no truly revolutionary transformation was underway in 1492.

Within a few decades after 1492 the rate of growth and change speeded up dramatically, and Europe clearly entered a period of rapid metamorphosis. There is no dispute about this fact, which is seen in the known statistics relating to prices, urban growth, and much more beside.<ref>Braudel, "Prices in Europe from 1450 to 1750" (1967); de Vries, ''European Urbanization'' (1984). On the rapid impact of these changes on Asia, see, for example, Atwell, "International Bullion Flows and the Chinese Economy circa 1530-1650" (1982); Aziza Hasan, "The Silver Currency Output of the Mughal Empire and Prices in India during the 16th and 17th centuries" (1969).</ref> What is disputable is the causal connection between these explosive sixteenth-century changes and the beginnings of economic exploitation in America (and, significantly but secondarily, in Africa and Asia). There is agreement that the effect was profound. But did it truly generate a qualitative transformation in Europe's economy? Or did it suddenly quicken a process already well underway? Or did it merely modify this process slightly with effects such as inflation? This question cannot be answered unless we break out of the European historical tunnel and look at what was going on in America, Asia, and Africa between 1492 and 1688, the symbolic date for Europe's bourgeois revolution.

== COLONIALISM AND THE RISE OF EUROPE, 1492-1688 ==

=== Colonialism and Capitalism in the Sixteenth Century ===

Enterprise in the Americas was from the start a matter of capital accumulation: of profit. No matter if some elements of medieval law were incorporated in legal and land-granting systems in (for Europeans) the New World, and if the Iberian governments took a substantial, though usually overestimated, portion of the profits. The goal of all European individuals and groups involved in the enterprise, clergy apart, was to make money, for oneself or one's country (usually the former).

The leading group, almost everywhere, was the European protocapitalist class, not only merchants but also industrialists and profit-oriented landlords—not only Iberian but also Italian, Flemish, Dutch, German, English, and so on. This class community took its profit from American enterprise and invested part of it in Europe, buying land and developing commercial agriculture, developing industries (like shipbuilding, sugar refining, and so on) that were associated with the growing colonial enterprise, developing profitable businesses in spheres of activity which served the growing European economy (for instance, the burgeoning Atlantic fisheries), building urban structures, and the like. Part of the profit was plowed back into additional colonial risk enterprise, in America and in the new trading enterprises in southern Asia, Africa, and the Levant. One of the deceptively subtle aspects of the process was the immense increase in purchases of all sorts by European merchants in all markets, inside and outside of Europe, growing out of the fact that these merchants now had incredible amounts of precious metals or metal-based money at their command and could offer previously unheard-of prices. Perhaps half the gold and silver brought back from America in the sixteenth century was contraband, hence available directly for this kind of enterprise, but the remainder, after passing through the great customs houses, quickly entered circulation as the Iberian governments paid out gold and silver for goods and services.<ref>Céspedes, ''Latin America: The Early Years'' (1974); McAlister, ''Spain and Portugal in the New World, 1492-1700'' (1984).</ref>

Colonial enterprise in the sixteenth century produced capital in a number of ways. One was gold and silver mining. A second was plantation agriculture, principally in Brazil. A third was the trade with Asia in spices, cloth, and the like. A fourth and by no means minor element was the profit returned to European investors from a variety of productive and commercial enterprises in the Americas, including profit on production for local use in Mexico, Peru, and elsewhere; profit on sale of goods imported from Europe; profit on a variety of secondary exports from America (leather, dyestuffs, etc.); profit on land sales in America; profit returned to Europe by families and corporations holding land grants in Mexico and other areas. A fifth was slaving. A sixth, piracy. Notice that all of this is normal capital accumulation; none of it is the mysterious thing called "primitive accumulation."<ref>In classical political economy, and in some of modern Marxist economics, the idea of "primitive accumulation" serves as a kind of catchall for ways of accumulating capital that did not involve—in essence—capitalist enterprise. Pirate treasures and the like were "primitive accumulation," and, in general, the kind of wealth brought from the American colonies in the sixteenth century was considered primitive accumulation. (According to Marx, "The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement and murder flowed back to the mother-country and were turned into capital there": Marx, ''Capital'', 1976, vol. 1, p. 918). But "primitive accumulation" cannot really be defined with any precision. I will argue here that the wealth accumulated in the Americas was primitive only in the sense that it was part of a preindustrial-capitalist economy. In other respects, notably in the involvement of labor and value produced by labor, it was regular accumulation. The distinction is very fundamental, as we will see, because, if what transpired in the colonies was not "real" or "ordinary" accumulation, scholars can claim that the colonial economy was backward and "feudal," rather than a primitive sort of capitalism.</ref> (Value from wage labor, not to mention forced labor, was involved, and much of it was value from production, not simply from trade.) Accumulation from these sources was massive. It was massive enough so that the process cannot be dismissed as a minor adjunct of protocapitalist accumulation in Europe itself, and it was massive enough, I believe, to fuel a major transformation in Europe, the rise to power of the bourgeoisie and the immense efflorescence of preindustrial capitalism, in ways that we will discuss.

==== Precious Metals ====

We notice first the export of gold and silver from the Americas and its insertion within the circuits of an Eastern Hemispheric market economy in which gold and silver already provide the common measure of value, directly or indirectly, in almost all markets. The flow of precious metals began immediately after the European discovery of America, and by 1640 at least 180 tons of gold and 17,000 tons of silver are known to have reached Europe.<ref>E. J. Hamilton, ''American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501-1650'' (1934); Brading and Cross, "Colonial Silver Mining: Mexico and Peru" (1972); H. and P. Chaunu, ''Séville et l'Atlantique (1504-1650)'', vol. 6, pt. 1 (1956); Cross, "American Bullion Production and Export 1550-1750" (1983).</ref> (The real figures must be at least double these amounts, since records were poor for some areas and periods and since contraband was immensely important.<ref>See note 19 above.</ref>) Additional quantities of gold came from colonial activities in Africa. In the period 1561 to 1580 about 85% of the entire world's production of silver came from the Americas. The simple quantity of gold and silver in circulation in the Eastern Hemisphere economy as a whole was profoundly affected: hemispheric silver stock may have been tripled and gold stock increased by 20% during the course of the sixteenth century as a result of bullion brought from America.<ref>Vicens Vives, ''An Economic History of Spain'' (1969).</ref> The fact that much of the pre-existing stock must have been frozen in uses not permitting direct or indirect conversion to money suggests to me that American bullion may have as much as doubled the gold- and silver-based money supply of the Eastern Hemisphere as a whole. (In Europe, the circulation of metal coins increased eight- or ten-fold in the course of the century.<ref>Vilar, ''A History of Gold and Money, 1450-1920'' (1976).</ref>) This process must be seen in perspective: it is money flowing constantly and in massive amounts into Europe, through Europe, and from Europe to Asia and Africa, constantly replenished at the entry points (Seville, Antwerp, Genoa, etc.) with more American supplies, and constantly permitting those who hold it to offer better prices for all goods—as well as labor and land—in all markets, than anyone else had ever been able to offer in prior times.

The importance of these flows of gold and silver is routinely underestimated by scholars, mainly for three reasons (apart from implicit diffusionism, the simple tendency to undervalue causal events in non-Europe). First, the process is seen somehow as purely primitive accumulation. But the metals were mined by workers and transported by workers; the enterprise overall involved risk capital and all of the other familiar traits of the sorts of protocapitalist productive enterprises which were characteristic of that time (that it was partly state-controlled does not alter this argument, nor does the fact that some of the labor was unfree); and very major economic and social systems were built around the mines themselves in Mexico, Peru, and other parts of America.

Second, the argument that precious metal flows significantly affected the European economy is dismissed by some scholars as "monetarism" (roughly, the theory that changes in money alone are very significant for changes in the economy overall). The error in this charge is a failure to see the sixteenth-century economy in its own, appropriate, geographical and social context, and to impute to the economy of that time the liquidity of exchange and the relative lack of spatial friction that characterizes the capitalist economy of our own time. Two facts here are basic. First of all, the possession of precious metal was highly localized in space. European merchants, as a community, obtained it and set it in motion outward, toward rural Europe and toward markets outside of Europe. Second of all, the supply of precious metal was essentially continuous, and therefore the advantage held by European protocapitalists in terms of prices they could offer for commodities, labor, and land was persistently higher than the prices which competitors anywhere could offer. So the protocapitalist community very steadily undermined the competition in all markets across the Eastern Hemisphere, within Europe and without, eventually gaining control of most international seaborne trade in most of the mercantile-maritime centers from Sofala to Calicut to Malacca.<ref>There remained, nonetheless, a very large trade carried on by non-European merchants in the China Seas and the Indian Ocean.</ref> The penetration of these markets, the acquisition of trading bases, and the control of a few small but important producing areas (like some islands of the Moluccas), was not a matter of European rationality or venturesomeness, but rather reflected the availability to Europeans of American gold and silver, trans-shipped through Lisbon, Antwerp, Acapulco (in the "Manila galleons"), and so on.

A third sort of doubt about the importance of American gold and silver is associated with the critique of Earl Hamilton's classic theory that the precious metal supply produced an imbalance between factors of production in the European economy, produced thereby a windfall of profits, and thus in effect destabilized the economy and moved it toward capitalism.<ref>E. J. Hamilton, "American Treasure and the Rise of Capitalism" (1929), and ''American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain'' (1934). Also see the important book by Walter Prescott Webb, ''The Great Frontier'' (1951), which builds in part on Hamilton's theory to argue for the great importance of the Americas in the rise of Europe during this period and later.</ref> Hamilton was one of the few economic historians to perceive that American gold and silver was a crucial, central cause of change in Europe, although he was (partly) wrong about the mechanisms that brought about this change. The metals did not transform the economy in any direct sense. Rather, they enriched the protocapitalist class and thereby gave them the power to immensely accelerate the transformation that was already underway—not only in Europe—toward capitalism as a political and social system, and to prevent non-European capitalists from sharing in the process. American bullion hastened the rise of capitalism and was crucial in the process by which it became centrated in Europe.

==== Plantations ====

The impact of the slave plantation system on Europe's economy was felt mainly in the seventeenth century and thereafter. But part of the general undervaluing of the significance of early colonialism—of the world outside of Europe—is a tendency not to notice that the plantation system was of considerable importance even in the sixteenth century. Moreover, the early history of the Atlantic sugar plantation economy gives a revealing picture of the way in which the protocapitalist colonial economy was eroding the feudal economy. Sugar planting was not a new enterprise; sugar (contrary to myth) was not a rare commodity, and sugar planting (also contrary to myth) was not an insignificant economic curiosity at the fringe of capitalist development. Commercial and feudal cane sugar production was found throughout the Mediterranean in the fifteenth century.<ref>Galloway, ''The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from its Origins to 1914'' (1989); Deerr, ''The History of Sugar'' (1949-1950).</ref> Although little is known about the way planting was organized, it is known that commercial sugar production was important in India 2,000 years ago (apparently it was a Mauryan state industry), and in the Middle Ages commercial sugar planting under various feudal and probably protocapitalist systems of organization was found in East Africa, part of West Africa, Morocco, Egypt, Cyprus, the Levant, various parts of Mediterranean Europe, and other regions.<ref>See, for example, Galloway, ''The Sugar Cane Industry'' (1989); Deerr, ''The History of Sugar'' (1949-1950); Watson, ''Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 700-1100'' (1983); N. S. Gupta, ''Industrial Structure of India During the Medieval Period'' (1970); Niane, ed., ''UNESCO General History of Africa, Vol. 4'' (1984); Bray, ''Science and Civilization in China, Vol. 6, Part 2, Agriculture'' (1984).</ref> If cane sugar was not an important commodity in northern Europe this was because of its price, as against that of sweeteners like honey. Europeans first moved the commercial plantation system out into the newly settled Atlantic islands from Madeira to São Tomé and then vastly expanded production in the Americas. But throughout the sixteenth century the new plantations merely supplanted the older Mediterranean sugar-producing regions; total production for the Europe-Mediterranean market did not rise until later.<ref>Deerr, ''The History of Sugar'' (1949-1950).</ref> This was capitalist production displacing feudal and semifeudal plantation production, using the twin advantages of colonialism: empty land and cheap labor. No other industry was as significant as the plantation system for the rise of capitalism before the nineteenth century.

In 1600 Brazil exported about 30,000 tons of sugar with a gross sale value of £2,000,000. This is about double the total annual value of all exports from England to all of the world in that period.<ref>Simonsen, ''Historia Económica do Brasil, 1500-1820'' (1944); Furtado, ''The Economic Growth of Brazil'' (1963); Minchinton, ''The Growth of English Overseas Trade'' (1969). Also see the more general, but extremely important, works of I. Wallerstein, A. G. Frank, and S. Amin, particularly Wallerstein's ''The Modern World System'', 3 vols. (1974-1988), Frank's ''Capitalism and underdevelopment in Latin America'' (1968) and his ''World Accumulation, 1492-1789'' (1978), and Amin's ''Accumulation on a World Scale'' (1974) as well as his ''Unequal Development'' (1976).</ref> It will be recalled that British exports in that period, principally of wool, are sometimes considered paradigmatic for the "awakening," indeed the "rise," of early-modern Europe. Also in 1600, per capita earnings from sugar in Brazil, for all except Indians, was about equal to per capita income in Britain later in that century.<ref>Edel, "The Brazilian Sugar Cycle of the 17th Century and the Rise of West Indian Competition" (1969).</ref> The rate of accumulation in the Brazilian plantation industry was so high at the end of the sixteenth century that it was able to generate enough capital to finance a doubling of its capacity every two years.<ref>Furtado, ''Economic Growth of Brazil'' (1963).</ref> Early in the seventeenth century the Dutch protocapitalist community (which was heavily involved in the Brazilian sugar enterprise, mainly in the shipping and sales dimensions) calculated that profit rates in the industry were 56% per year, totalling nearly £1,000,000 per year. The rate of profit was higher still a bit earlier, at the close of the sixteenth century, when production costs, including the cost of purchasing slaves, amounted to only one-fifth of income from sugar sales. These statistics should be seen against the background of an industry that was not responding to some novel demand for some novel product in an already-rising Europe, but was merely (in essence) undercutting the precapitalist Mediterranean producers of Spain, Italy, Morocco, Egypt, and elsewhere, in the supply of a highly important commercial product.

Sugar is of course the centerpiece of the plantation system down to the late eighteenth century. But other kinds of colonial production, mainly but not only agricultural, and fully as close to capitalism as was the Brazil plantation system, were of some significance even before the end of the sixteenth century. There was, for instance, some direct production of spices in the Moluccas and some European involvement with Indian merchant capitalists in the organization pepper production in South India. Dyes, tobacco, and other commercially valuable products were flowing from America to Europe. A very large agricultural economy existed in parts of America to supply food, fiber, leather, and other necessities to the mining settlements and other settlements. Immediately after 1492 (or before?) west European fishermen and whalers developed an immense industry in Newfoundland and elsewhere on the North American coast.

To all of this must be added the profits from other sorts of colonial and semicolonial activities in the Eastern Hemisphere.<ref>See K. N. Chaudhuri, ''Trade and civilization in the Indian Ocean'' (1985); Satish Chandra, ''The Indian Ocean: Explorations in History, Commerce and Politics'' (1987); Magalhães-Godinho, ''L'Economie de L'Empire Portugais aux XV et XVI Siècles'' (1969).</ref> The slave trade was highly profitable even in the sixteenth century. European merchant capitalists of all nations profited greatly from the Lisbon trade with Asia and East Africa in textiles and particularly spices (the Asian spices carried by the Portuguese and sold mainly through Antwerp did not replace the traditional Mediterranean flow but rather added to it, hence providing a novel and important source of accumulation). There was, in addition, considerable profit from the within-Asia trade resulting from the domination of long-distance oceanic trade in East Africa, India, and Southeast Asia by Portugal (with participation also by Spain and later Holland). Broadly speaking, however, accumulation deriving from Western Hemisphere colonial activities far outweighed that from Eastern Hemisphere activities, colonial and semicolonial, in the sixteenth century. Overall, both the quantitative significance, in that century, of production and trade in colonial and semicolonial areas and the immense profitability of the enterprise, that is, the rapid capital accumulation which it fostered directly and (in Europe) indirectly, add up to a significant vector force, easily able to change the process of economic transformation in Europe from sluggish evolution to rapid revolution.

==== Effects ====

There seem to be two particularly good ways to assess the real significance for the rise of capitalism of sixteenth-century colonial production in America, and some other areas, along with trading, piracy, and the like, in Asia and Africa. One way is to trace the direct and indirect effects of colonialism on European society, looking for movements of goods and capital, tracing labor flows into industries and regions stimulated or created by colonial enterprise, and looking at the way urbanization flourished in those cities that were engaged in colonial (and more generally extra-European) enterprise or closely connected to it, and the like. This processes overall would then be examined in relation to the totality of changes taking place in Europe in that century, to determine whether, in Europe itself, changes clearly resulting from the direct and indirect impact of extra-European activities were the prime movers for economic and social change. This task still remains undone. The second way is to attempt to arrive at a global calculation of the amount of labor (free and unfree) that was employed in European enterprises in America, Africa, and Asia, along with the amount of labor in Europe itself which was employed in activities derived from extra-European enterprise, and then to look at these quantities in relation to the total labor market in Europe for economic activities that can be thought of as connected to the rise of capitalism. This task has not been done either; indeed, as far as I know little research has been done on sixteenth-century labor forces and labor markets in American settlements or indeed in Europe. So the proposition which I am arguing here, concerning the significance of sixteenth-century colonialism (and related extra-European activities) for the rise of capitalism in Europe, perhaps cannot be tested as yet.

Still, there are suggestive indications. Some of these have been mentioned already: matters of assessing the quantities and values of colonial exports to Europe. We can also speculate about labor. One approach is through population. The population of Spain and Portugal in the mid-sixteenth century may have been around nine million.<ref>de Vries, ''European Urbanization'' (1984).</ref> Estimates of sixteenth-century populations for America vary widely and there is much controversy about population levels and rates of decline,<ref>William Denevan, "Introduction," in Denevan, ed., ''The Native Population of the Americas in 1492'' (1976), and "The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492" (1992); Lovell, "'Heavy Shadows and Black Night'" (1992).</ref> but for the present, highly speculative, and essentially methodological, argument, I will ignore the controversies and play with global estimates. The population of Mexico at midcentury may have been around six million, a population that was undergoing continuous decline from its preconquest level of perhaps 30 million down to one-tenth of that figure (or perhaps less) in 1600.<ref>See Borah and Cook, "La demografía histórica de América Latina: necesidades y perspectivas" (1972); Whitmore, "A Simulation of Sixteenth-Century Population Collapse in the Basin of Mexico" (1991).</ref> Populations in the Andean regions involved in mineral and textile production for the Spaniards may (I am speculating) have totalled five million in the late sixteenth century. Perhaps we can add an additional two million for the population of other parts of Ibero-America that were within regions of European control and presumably involved, more or less, in the European-dominated economy. Let us, then, use a ball-park estimate of 13 million for the American population that was potentially yielding surplus value to Europeans in the mid-to-late sixteenth century. The population seems larger than that of Iberia. Granted, the comparison should be made with a larger part of Europe, certainly including the Low Countries, which were intimately involved in the exploitation of America (and Asia) at this period, along with parts of Italy and other countries. Assume then a figure of 20 million for Europe as against 13 million for America.

I see no reason to argue that the European populations were more intimately involved in the rise of capitalism than the American populations—that is, the 13 million people who we assume were in European-dominated regions. It is likely that the proportion of the American population that was engaged in labor for Europeans, as wage work, as forced labor including slave labor, and as the labor of farmers delivering goods as tribute or rent in kind, was no lower than the proportion of Iberian people engaged in labor for commercialized sectors of the Spanish and Portuguese economy. Moreover, the level of exploitation for Indian labor must have been much higher than that for Iberian labor because portions of the Indian labor force were worked literally to death in this period—depopulation was due in part to forced labor—and so the capital generated by each American worker must have been higher than that generated by a European worker. (We need to remind ourselves again that we are dealing with a preindustrial, basically medieval economy in Europe. It cannot be argued, for instance, that technology or fixed capital in production was more advanced in the utilization of European than in that of American labor, so exploitation was in the last analysis a function of human effort.)

We must next take into account the fact that the capital accumulated from the labor of Americans went directly to the economic sectors in Europe that were building capitalism, whereas most workers and peasants in Europe were still connected to essentially medieval sectors of the economy. Then we must add the labor of Africans and Asians. And finally, we must take into account the European workers, in Europe and elsewhere, whose labor must be considered part of the extra-European economy. By this admittedly speculative reasoning, free and unfree workers in the colonial and semicolonial economy of the late sixteenth century were providing as much or more surplus value and accumulated capital for European protocapitalism, the rising bourgeoisie, as were the workers of Europe itself.

Little is known about the American work force in the sixteenth century, but, again, some speculations are possible. Las Casas asserted that three million or more Indians had been enslaved by the Spaniards in the northern part of Spanish America during the first half of the sixteenth century, and this figure, once dismissed, is now taken seriously.<ref>Semo, ''Historia del Capitalismo en México: Los Orígenes, 1521-1763'' (1982).</ref> It is known that more than 400,000 were enslaved in Nicaragua alone.<ref>Radell, "The Indian Slave Trade and Population of Nicaragua During the Sixteenth Century" (1976).</ref> It is realized also that Indian slave labor was extremely important in the European economy of America in that period, in Brazilian sugar planting, Mesoamerican and Antillean mining, and elsewhere. Let us speculate that 100,000 Indians were working as slaves for Spaniards in a given year in the mid-sixteenth century. Perhaps 20,000 Indians were working at free and forced labor in the mines of Mexico and the Andes in the latter part of the century,<ref>Bakewell, "Mining in Colonial Spanish America" (1984).</ref> and it is safe to assume that five times that number were involved in the mining economy overall. Potosí, the great Andean silver-mining city, had a population of 120,000 in the 1570s (larger than Paris, Rome, Madrid, Seville). A much greater but unknown number of Indians were workers on haciendas and other European enterprises, or provided periodic forced labor, or provided tribute and rent in kind. (The Cortés encomienda in Mexico included 50,000 Indians.<ref>Semo, ''Historia del Capitalismo'' (1982).</ref>) There may have been 100,000 African slaves in America and on the island of São Tomé in the closing years of the century.<ref>For various calculations, see Curtin, ''The Atlantic Slave Trade'' (1969); Furtado, ''Economic Growth of Brazil'' (1963); Deerr, ''History of Sugar'' (1949-1950); Florescano, "The Formation and Economic Structure of the Hacienda in New Spain"; Inikori, ''The African Slave Trade from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century'' (1979), esp. pp. 57 and 248; McAlister, ''Spain and Portugal in the New World'' (1984).</ref> There may have been 300,000 Europeans, Mulattos, and Mestizos in the Americas in 1570,<ref>McAlister, ''Spain and Portugal in the New World'' (1984).</ref> of whom conceivably as many as 250,000 were workers.

Perhaps it would not be unreasonable to estimate that one million people were working in the European economy of the Western Hemisphere in the closing years of the sixteenth century, perhaps half of them engaged in productive labor in distinctly capitalist enterprises. Can this have been more than the European protocapitalist work force of the time? All of this is somewhat speculative, but it points toward the conclusion that American labor was a truly massive part of the total labor, and the surplus value it produced, that fueled the rise of capitalism in Europe in the early modern period. To this we must add three additional quantities: labor involved in the slave trade within continental Africa;<ref>In the present discussion I am giving far too little attention to Africa and particularly to the effects of the slave trade in Africa. See Chapter 2.</ref> labor in other extra-European regions (São Tomé, Ternate, Calicut, and so on) that was incorporated into the European economy or produced goods for trade to Europeans; and labor of Europeans, inside and outside of Europe, which was part of the extra-European economy—sailors, soldiers, stevedores, teamsters, clerks, foremen, and the rest.

By the end of the sixteenth century the rise of Europe had well begun. As capital flowed into Europe, and as other effects of colonial enterprise also flowed into the European system or region, secondary causation appeared, including agricultural expansion and transformation, primitive manufacturing, urbanization, and expansion of rural settlements and the commercial economy. These latter have been looked at carefully but in a mainly tunnel-historical framework; as a result, the rise of Europe in the sixteenth century has appeared to be a process taking place wholly within the European spatial system, and caused wholly (or mainly) by autochthonous forces. As we have seen, this is an inaccurate picture and an incomplete one. Urbanization was taking place, but mainly in areas connected to the extra-European economy. Inflation was also (with some qualifications) most severe in these areas.<ref>Fisher, "The Price Revolution: A Monetary Interpretation" (1989).</ref> Among the sectors of the European economy that were growing in the sixteenth century, some, like piracy and shipbuilding, were tied directly to the extra-European economy, while others, like wheat production and North Atlantic fishing, were stimulated directly and indirectly by that economy.<ref>Dunn, ''Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713'' (1972), pp. 10-11.</ref>

I would generalize as follows. The initiating condition, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, is a west and central European economy that is undergoing slow but definite change toward capitalism—as are many regions of Asia and Africa at that same time. Novel forces intrude into the European system, as impinging boundary processes, because of the conquest of America and the other extra-European events, intruding processes which consist mainly of capital and material products (and of course the labor embedded in these things). These then intersect with the ongoing evolving economic, technological, demographic, and other changes. Many new changes appear, as a result not of direct stimulus from the extra-European world but from the changes already underway, which themselves are mainly results of those extra-European boundary processes. The internal European changes of course feed forward to produce intensification of the processes going on in America, Asia, etc., and these, in turn, produce still more changes within Europe.

We can see a geographical pattern in all of this. There is a tendency for major economic changes to occur first near the mercantile-maritime centers that participate in the extra-European processes. Obviously, not all of the centers that existed in 1492 were equal participants in that process, with some of the Iberian, Italian, and Flemish port cities taking the lead. But the network was sufficiently tight so that Hanseatic and English ports were early participants, as were inland cities with special economic characteristics, like Augsburg and Paris. From these many centers, the process spread into the interior of Europe, first into areas that supplied basic staple goods like wheat—the growth at that time of the Baltic wheat trade and manorial production of wheat in parts of central and east Europe is well known—and then elsewhere. At any given time we see a broad and irregular spatial pattern (of the type which geographers call "distance decay") of descending levels of urbanization and commercial production as we move across the landscape toward interior Europe.

Other processes were underway as well, and so the pattern that I have mapped out here is much too simple. Population growth in some areas reflected sixteenth-century economic changes associated with extra-European events but in other areas it signified recovery from the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century population declines. Other changes, such as peasant revolts, reflected the general crisis of the late feudal economy, but the sixteenth-century rise of prices and (at least in some areas) rents was a contributing force in the unrest. As to the Reformation, I would argue in the Tawneyan tradition that it was broadly an effect, not an independent cause, of the economic changes that were taking place in Europe in the sixteenth century.<ref>Tawney, ''Religion and the Rise of Capitalism'' (1952 edition).</ref> But which changes? The internal crumbling of feudalism? The forces impinging from the extra-European world? Both? Probably the spatial diffusion of the Reformation in the sixteenth century reflected mainly intra-European forces,<ref>Hannemann, ''The Diffusion of the Reformation in Southwestern Germany, 1518-1534'' (1975).</ref> but by the time of the seventeenth-century bourgeois revolutions, the areas most deeply involved in extra-European activities tended to be centers also of Protestantism. In short: the spatial patterns of change in sixteenth-century Europe reflect to some extent the integration of Europe with America, and secondarily Africa and Asia, but the pattern is still somewhat unclear.

Overall, the processes of transformation and modernization in sixteenth-century Europe were terribly complex, varying in time and place throughout most of that continent. But the generalization is nonetheless fairly straightforward. The extra-European component, after 1492, led to an immense stimulation of changes in Europe, those that produced on the one hand an increase in the rate of European economic change and growth, and on the other hand the beginnings of a centration of capitalism in Europe (a process discussed further below). By the end of the sixteenth century these extra-European forces had laid the foundation for the political and social triumph of (preindustrial) capitalism, or rather for the fact that the Glorious Revolution occurred in 1688, instead of much later, and in England, instead of Egypt or Zimbabwe or India or China (or all of these at once).

=== Colonialism and Capitalism in the Seventeenth Century ===

By the middle of the seventeenth century, changes were taking place in Europe at a rapid rate and on a massive scale, and the problem of sorting out the internal and external causes and effects for this period is a very complex matter. In this same period there occurred a massive expansion, in location and intensity, of formal and informal colonialism in the Americas and around the coasts of Africa and Asia, and for these extra-European processes the problem of complexity is compounded by a lack of quantitative data regarding volume of production, numbers in the labor forces, capital accumulation, and other information that would help us to judge the role of colonialism (as a broad concept) in the changes that were taking place within Europe. These matters are far too complex to permit us to discuss them satisfactorily here. I will limit myself to a rather sketchy intervention or (if you prefer to call it that) a model.

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Netherlands and England had emerged as the centers (or center) of capitalist development in Europe.<ref>There is debate as to why the center shifted from Iberia to the lower Rhine-southern England region. Perhaps the same forces which had made this northern region a mercantile-maritime center in the Middle Ages permitted it to gain control of the overseas enterprise: namely, large population, abundant nearby fertile land and forest resources, access to many markets (the Rhine, the Baltic, etc.). Vis-à-vis Italy, it held most of these same advantages plus that of location on the Atlantic and possession of the requirements for rapid growth of oceanic shipping and fishing fleets.</ref> Although Spain continued to feed huge quantities of silver and some gold into Europe in the first half of this century, and Portuguese plantations in Brazil and trading activities in Asia continued to be important fountains of accumulation, the main expansion of colonial enterprise after 1600 was Dutch and English. The crucial component was the West Indian plantation system, which expanded explosively after about 1640. (Fifty thousand slaves were imported into Barbados alone in the following 50 years. Probably two million slaves were imported into America in the course of the seventeenth century.<ref>See Deerr, ''The History of Sugar'' (1949-1950); Curtin, ''The Atlantic Slave Trade'' (1969); and Inikori, ''The African Slave Trade from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century'' (1979). The question whether slave labor is or is not proletarian—a serious issue in discussions of the slave plantation system (see Mintz, ''Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History'', 1985)—will be taken up later in this chapter. In any event there is no disagreement about the contribution of slave (and other forced) labor to capital accumulation, hence to surplus value generation, using "surplus value" in a sense appropriate to modes of production different from industrial capitalism.</ref>) If we place the Dutch and British sugar colonies in the same economic space as the metropolitan countries themselves, it seems likely that the sugar plantation economy was the single largest productive sector in this expanded European economy (or "Atlantic economy," as it is often called) aside from family farming, and by far the largest single generator of value. (Brazilian plantations, producing partly for Dutch capital, were still, in the mid-seventeenth century, more massive than the West Indian.) But British and Dutch enterprise in the Eastern Hemisphere was also expanding very rapidly; the East India companies were formed around 1600, and by 1650 the Dutch and British together controlled most of the intercontinental trade—unequal trade, and in a sense semicolonial trade—with Asia, as well as the slave trade in Africa. Meanwhile, Spanish enterprise was yielding substantial accumulation in America (whether or not there was a "seventeenth-century depression"). And we must not ignore the great variety of additional extra-European sources of accumulation: a now massive fishing industry in the northwestern Atlantic, resource extraction and the beginnings of European settlement in North America, the slave trade, piracy, Russian enterprise in Siberia, and much more.

The key question is this: How central was the role played by colonial and semicolonial enterprise in the seventeenth-century rise of Europe and of capitalism within Europe? The model I would build involves two elements. The first is a continuation and enlargement of the sixteenth-century processes, which, as I argued, involved a sluggishly growing European economy quickened into rapid development by extra-European forces after 1492. By the middle of the next century the European bourgeoisie had strengthened their class position and (in the key locations) had enticed much of the feudal aristocracy into joining bourgeois enterprise,<ref>However, a good share of the old landowning elite joined in the new enterprise. It is not correct to assume that the new protocapitalist elite was in simple opposition to the old elite. There is much confusion on this matter, some of it occasioned by literal acceptance of Marx's idea that merchants are somehow not the class that evolves into the early capitalist, entrepreneurial, accumulating class. On the role of medieval merchants in protocapitalism, see Thrupp, ''The Merchant Class of Medieval London (1300-1500)'' (1948); Carus-Wilson, ''Medieval Merchant Venturers'' (1967).</ref> and had well begun the process of destroying protocapitalist enterprise outside of Europe, as a result of the inflowing capital from America (and secondarily in that period, Africa and Asia).

Now, apart from stocks of precious metal, it is improbable that capital accumulated from extra-European enterprise in 1500-1650 amounted to a sizeable share of total invested capital in Europe, even in the more advanced regions of Europe, even in the economic sectors in which capital was more or less fluid. What it did do was provide a critical increment: everywhere it allowed the merchant-entrepreneurial community to offer higher prices for products, labor, and land; everywhere it put investment capital in the hands of classes and communities other than the traditional elite, the group less likely to accumulate beyond its social needs and less likely to reinvest profits in new ventures. Colonial capital, in a word, was new capital. Without it, the sluggish late-medieval economy of pre-1492 days would have continued its slow progress out of feudalism and toward capitalism (or something like capitalism), but there would have been no Seventeenth-Century Bourgeois Revolution.

Perhaps the essence of capitalism, at a level of aggregation above the worker-capitalist class relation, is the reinvestment of profits to enlarge productive capacity. Capitalist enterprise can be technologically primitive or advanced but always, to survive, it must accumulate capital. It is never in equilibrium. This point leads us to focus on the conditions that permitted continued growth, exponential growth, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This growth did not involve technological change in any important way: production increases were mainly matters of drawing more workers and more productive materials into traditional productive processes to yield more output. Given the fact that capital for expansion was available because of the extra-European enterprises and other, related developments, the key problem in the seventeenth century must have been markets, or demand. The capitalist had access to capital, had access to labor—at the levels of production then prevailing a truly massive proletarianization was not necessary—and had access to raw materials (some European, some colonial). The growth of a capitalist enterprise in that period was perhaps constrained most seriously by the need to open up new markets: to sell more of the product so that more could be produced, more capital generated, and so on.

Some of these markets were in Europe itself, reflecting at first the ability of capitalist enterprise to sell traditional products (like sugar) at lower costs than prevailed under the feudal economy, but gradually the urbanization and commercialization of the continent brought in feedback loops so that the newer way of life, generated by the rise of capitalism, itself generated more internal markets for capitalism. But probably the main growth of markets for protocapitalist enterprise in the seventeenth century, and thus the main stimulus for the rise of capitalism, was outside the system. This is well known in the case of trade with eastern Europe. It is known in the case of markets in America, Africa, and Asia, but the quantitative significance of these extra-European markets has not been fully evaluated. In the case of the English bourgeoisie, the main markets for capitalist enterprise, including agricultural and nonagricultural products from England and re-exported products from abroad, were in America, Africa, and Asia, along with nontraditional markets in the Baltic. For the Dutch, extra-European commerce was even more important. Italian communities continued to depend considerably on the eastern Mediterranean.

In the seventeenth century, then, the crucial role of the extra-European world, added on to and perhaps more significant than its sixteenth-century role as provider of bullion and some other products, was to permit an expansion of demand—including forced demand, as on the slave plantations—for capitalist products, a demand sufficiently great so that productive capacity and output of capitalist enterprises could continue to grow at an incredibly fast rate. This growth in output was one of the two essential seventeenth-century forces involved in the rise of capitalism. The second force was, simply, the political triumph itself, the bourgeois revolution. This provided the bourgeoisie with the legal and political power to rip apart the fabric of the society in its quest for accumulation. Forced proletarianization thereby became possible, as did government support for almost any strategy that the new accumulating elite had in mind. And an Industrial Revolution, a transformation of the methods of production so that output could increase at an even greater rate, became (one might say) inevitable.

== THE CENTRATION OF CAPITALISM ==

The phrase "the rise of capitalism" generally evokes an image of factories, steam engines, masses of wage workers, cities grimy with coal dust: industrial capitalism. Our discussion thus far has not dealt with the rise of industrial capitalism—the Industrial Revolution—but with the precursors to that momentous event. But let me, for a moment, review some of these precursors.

Before 1492, most of the preconditions that would be critical for the eventual rise of industrial capitalism were present not merely in parts of Europe but also in parts of Asia and Africa. After 1492, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europe acquired three additional preconditions. One was the very considerable accumulation of wealth from the mines and plantations of America and from trade in Asia and Africa. The second, closely related to the first, was the huge enlargement of markets outside of western Europe for products either produced in western Europe or imported and then reexported; that is, a very great and almost constantly growing demand. Third, and most important of all, the social sectors involved with capitalism took political power on a wide scale in western Europe, something that had not happened elsewhere except on very small terrains. This, the bourgeois revolution, allowed the emerging capitalist class-community to mobilize state power toward its further rise, such that the entire society contributed to the underwriting of colonial adventures and to the preparation of infrastructure such as cities and roads, while the state's police and military power could now be mobilized to force people off the land and into wage work, and to conscript people and resources for advantageous wars abroad. All three of these precursors, as I have argued, appeared because of—or would not have appeared had it not been for—colonialism.

Historians engage in fierce debates about the causes of the Industrial Revolution. Most of the candidate causes, or "factors," are theories within the "European miracle" category which we discussed and tried to refute in Chapter 2. Propositions about, for instance, general medieval modernization of the European economy and polity, medieval technological revolutions, "rationality" in medieval and later times, and the like, are built into the most common explanations for the later emergence of an Industrial Revolution. We showed, I hope, that all of these processes were at work outside of Europe as well as inside, so that they cannot be enlisted as causes of an event that happened only in Europe.

This is a problem where the sequence and dating of events is extremely important. The concept of the Industrial Revolution is usually bound up with two more specific transformations: the development of steam power and generally novel technology in industrial production, and the development of wage labor in industrial production. But the timing is wrong. The technological part of the Industrial Revolution became important very late in the process, too late to explain the revolution itself. It is certainly true that technological advances were taking place in European manufacturing during the period from 1492 to, say, 1750, but very little of this technology was unique to Europe, as we have seen, and, most crucially, the technological advances that eventually became important in increasing manufacturing production and increasing labor efficiency in that production occurred much later: in the last decades of the eighteenth century and, much more profusely, in the nineteenth century. In agriculture, the main technological advances were matters of increasing areal productivity in an environment of declining agricultural labor, but all of the essential technological changes that were involved in this process were traditional and were known outside of Europe. (A few scholars give great weight to newer crops like turnips, but such matters were of very minor importance—setting aside the much earlier introduction of the potato—compared to such things as the increased use of capital and purchased input nutrients. The fact that farmers in western Europe learned how to increase their production while decreasing labor inputs is not at all novel in the history and geography of agriculture. Thus the agricultural revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be considered an effect, not a cause, in the industrializing and urbanizing process.) So the technological side of the Industrial Revolution was not primary cause except as it may have been primary cause for a hemisphere-wide and very slow transformation, as we discussed previously. It appeared too late.

A somewhat similar argument can be given in response to the thesis that the development, by capitalism, of mass wage labor in manufacturing production was primary cause of the Industrial Revolution. This argument is most commonly put forth by those Marxist economists who hold to a strict construction of one of the arguments in Marx's ''Capital''. It is indisputable that you cannot have fully mature industrial capitalism without basing it in a wage-labor setting that is also a (relatively) free labor market, one in which workers can go from employer to employer. But these conditions did not exist prior to the late eighteenth century. Wage labor was predominant, but little of it was employed in manufacturing, and hardly ever did a worker confront a really free labor market, with real choices as to place of employment. These were features of industrial capitalism as it emerged after the Industrial Revolution really got rolling.

All such theories about the causes of the Industrial Revolution are diffusionist in the sense, and to the degree, that they see the process as an internal evolution within European history and society. As we noted in Chapter 2, an antidiffusionist, anti-Eurocentric body of historical theory has been developing over the past 50-odd years, a body of theory developed mainly, but not solely, by scholars from the extra-European world. In no other arena of historical discussion has this emerging critical school had as great an impact as it has had on the debates about the origins of the Industrial Revolution.

The thesis that industrial development in Europe depended in many ways on colonial processes was widely accepted in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.<ref>See R. W. Bailey, "Africa, the Slave Trade, and the Rise of Industrial Capitalism in Europe and the United States: A Historiographic Review" (1986); W. Darity, Jr., "British Industry and the West Indies Plantations" (1990).</ref> Later, perhaps because of the growth of diffusionist ideology with its guiding proposition that Europe is the autonomous source of progress, this thesis fell into disfavor among European historians.<ref>There were, of course, exceptions. Brooks Adams, in his 1895 work ''The Law of Civilization and Decay'', argued (pp. 259-260) that the British victory at Plassey in 1757, which immediately gave Britain access to cheap Indian cotton (and other Indian "plunder") set into motion the explosive industrialization of Britain's cotton textile industry, leading directly and immediately to the major inventions of that industry: the spinning jenny in 1764, the mule in 1776, and Watt's steam engine in 1768.</ref> It was forcefully advanced by a number of colonial scholars in the 1930s and 1940s. Perhaps understandably it was Indian scholars who emphasized the fact that a highly developed Indian cotton textile industry not only provided some of the new technology for Britain's industry, particularly in dyeing, but also had to be forcibly suppressed by Britain—in a process which some Indian scholars call "the de-industrialization of India"—in order to allow the British industry to develop in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.<ref>See Palme Dutt, ''The Problem of India'' (1943); Alavi et al., ''Capitalism and Colonial Production'' (1982).</ref> (The cotton textile industry was the leading sector in the early Industrial Revolution.) Also in the 1930s, West Indian scholars, notably C. L. R. James and Eric Williams, began to advance the thesis that slave-based industry and the slave trade were crucial causal forces in British and French industrialization. This general argument evolved into a broad theory which is now widely argued both by Caribbean scholars—it is sometimes called "the Caribbean school of history," rather too narrowly—and by others, many of whom are African-American and African scholars. This theory is of great importance, and I will try to summarize it briefly, ignoring a number of secondary disagreements among some of its proponents.

The most basic and general argument, advanced first by C. L. R. James and Eric Williams, was the proposition that the West Indian slave-based plantation system in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a highly advanced form of industrial system, implicitly the most advanced form in existence at that time. They, and later writers in the same scholarly tradition, showed that the plantation system involved very heavy capitalization, complex business organization, very advanced industrial technology (in milling, rum manufacture, transport, and so on), a large labor force in the sugar factory as well as in the fields, a considerable force of free workers and supervisors as well as slaves, and, most important of all, immense profits—profits not only from the plantation and its production but also from the slave trade and many ancillary components of what Williams called "the triangular trade."<ref>C. L. R. James, ''The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution'' (1938) and ''A History of Negro Revolt'' (1938); Eric Williams, ''Capitalism and Slavery'' (1944). Also see the later work by James, "The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery: Some Interpretations of their Significance in the Development of the United States and the Western World" (1970); and the later work by Williams, ''British Historians and the West Indies'' (1966). Important recent contributions include: R. W. Bailey, "The Slave(ry) Trade and the Development of Capitalism in the United States: The Textile Industry of New England" (1990); W. Darity, "British Industry and the West Indian Plantations" (1990); J. Inikori, "Slavery and the Revolution in Cotton Textile Production in England" (1989). Also see note 60 below.</ref> (Said James in his classic history of the Haitian revolution, ''The Black Jacobins'', "the slave-trade and slavery were the economic basis of the French revolution ... Nearly all the industries which developed in France during the eighteenth century had their origin in goods or commodities destined either for the coast of Guinea or for the Americas."<ref>''The Black Jacobins'' (1938), pp. 47-48.</ref>) I would extend this argument to a slightly more general proposition: Within the overall economic space which the Europeans controlled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they found it possible to advance the capitalist industrial production system—large-scale, organized, semimechanized—to its highest level, for that era, mainly in the plantation system, using slave labor, until the evolution of industrial production as an overall system had evolved sufficiently so that profits could be made even when the labor force was paid a living wage, a wage permitting subsistence and reproduction of the working class, and the system could then be centrated, imported into Europe itself.<ref>I have argued elsewhere (Blaut, ''The National Question'', 1987b, chap. 7) that the level of oppression and exploitation associated with slave labor as it was used in the plantations could not have been applied to members of the European cultural community itself. (This was indeed tried, but quickly abandoned in favor of slave labor.) Generally, cultural rules and practices limit the level of exploitation of producers within a society—a matter of maintaining social peace in a society—but no such rules apply to external or foreign workers.</ref> Stated differently, the earliest phase of the Industrial Revolution was so crude, undeveloped, and indeed barbaric that free labor could not be used, if the output was to be profitable. Therefore, the capture and forced labor of slaves was necessary for production, or, alternatively, colonial rule elsewhere (as in India) was needed to force the delivery of commodities at very low prices.

Both James and Williams argued that the profits from this complex were crucial in providing much, perhaps most, of the capital required in the early phase of the Industrial Revolution. Williams's book, ''Capitalism and Slavery'', provided the classic statement of and argument for this thesis. He showed in great detail how the profits from the slave trade, the slave plantation, and the ancillary economic sectors flowed into England and then into the forms of investment that fueled the Industrial Revolution and its infrastructure (canals, ports, and the like). Most of the mainstream (European) community of scholars has rejected this theoretical position. The general view is that the industrial revolution was an almost entirely intra-European phenomenon, and such matters as the slave trade, the slave plantation, and the profits from all of this had to be merely a detail or footnote.<ref>See the excellent review by C. Robinson, "Capitalism, Slavery and Bourgeois Historiography" (1987). Also excellent is Bailey, "The Slave(ry) Trade and the Development of Capitalism in the United States" (1990).</ref> Periodically, efforts have been made to refute the theory, but the only part of the theory which has really been subjected to empirical critique is the most limited and in a way least crucial part. Engerman and some others tried to show that, if various assumptions of neoclassical economics are made about the eighteenth-century British economy, and if traditionally low calculations are used as regards the number of slaves brought to America, then it would appear that the slave trade was not really very profitable. But in fact the slave trade itself was only a part of the overall complex that Williams and others were looking at; in fact, the plantation as an industrial system was much closer to the center of their attention because it was here that labor was put to use in generating mass commodities. Inikori and others have shown that the numbers of slave transported to the Americas has been underestimated. Finally, the neoclassical assumptions (among them the argument that there were "normal" profits in an eighteenth-century industry, as though the Industrial Revolution and factor and product markets had already matured) are widely questioned.

Another stream of criticism has come from some Marxists, among them Brenner and Laclau, who share the Eurocentric-diffusionist views of the conventional historical school just discussed.<ref>See Brenner's "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism" (1977); E. Laclau, ''Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory'' (1977).</ref> Their positions tend to be grounded in two arguments, one of which is dogmatic and the other fallacious. First, they claim that unfree labor cannot, by definition, be considered part of capitalism. This has been answered by C. L. R. James who showed that the error is that of trying to judge a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century labor system by the standards of the mid-nineteenth century, the era of mature competitive capitalism as described by Marx. Even more effective has been the demonstration by Immanuel Wallerstein that capitalism uses a range of alternative labor systems under alternative production conditions, and forced labor is one of these alternative systems.<ref>Wallerstein, ''The Modern World System'' (1974-1988).</ref> Second, the Marxist critics claim that processes that occurred outside of Europe and involved then the import of commodities and capital into Europe, must be denominated "exchange" rather than "production," and so cannot be considered crucial for industrial development or capitalism. This thesis is simply false: production on a slave plantation is just as much production as is production in a Birmingham needle factory.

Scholars such as Bailey, Beckles, Darity, Mintz, Sheridan, Solow, Robinson, and Rodney, and (on a world-scale canvas) Amin, Wallerstein, and Frank, have, in recent years, given strong backing to the critical theory I have outlined here.<ref>See Bailey, "The Slave(ry) Trade and the Development of Capitalism in the United States" (1990), Darity, "British Industry and the West Indian Plantations" (1990), Mintz, ''Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History'' (1985), and Robinson, "Capitalism, Slavery and Bourgeois Historiography" (1987); also see Beckles, "'The Williams Effect': Eric Williams' Capitalism and Slavery and the Growth of West Indian Political Economy" (1987); Sheridan, ''Sugar and Slavery'' (1973), and his "Eric Williams and Capitalism and Slavery: A Biographical and Historiographical Essay" (1987); Solow, "Capitalism and Slavery in the Exceedingly Long Run" (1987); Inikori, "Slavery and the Development of Industrial Capitalism" (1989); Rodney, ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa'' (1972).</ref> Conventional historians sometimes label it "the Williams thesis." My point is that this "thesis" is something much larger: it is the current state of the body of theory that pays adequate attention to the role played by colonialism in the Industrial Revolution.

One other point of contention concerns the significance of demand. All parties concede that the decisions to increase productive capacity, decisions which, in aggregate, led to the Industrial Revolution, were made on the basis of judgments that additional commodities, if produced, could be sold. The conventional historians generally treat the increase in demand as a somehow natural product of the modernization of Europe.<ref>Some Marxists treat it this way, too: "(What) distinguished the English industrial development of the early modern period was its continuous character, its ability to sustain itself and to provide its own self-perpetuating dynamic. Here ... the key was to be found in the capitalist structure of (English) agriculture" (Brenner, "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe," 1985, p. 53).</ref> The critical historians insist, rather, that colonialism was itself required in order to increase the level of demand such that industrialists would make efforts to increase capacity, efforts which, when the revolution got truly underway, involved the use of powerful new productive technology. The critical historians have indeed shown that an immense amount of demand was generated by the slave trade, by the plantations (demand for food, clothing, machinery, ships, and so on), and by the overall expansion of the trading sphere in which European commodities moved in the eighteenth century and thereafter. I would generalize the case as follows: there would not have been an Industrial Revolution had it not been for the immense demand that Europeans were able to generate in the colonies, and it was this fact that, more than anything else, pushed the Industrial Revolution forward.

Capitalism arose as a world-scale process: as a world system. Capitalism became centrated in Europe because colonialism gave Europeans the power both to develop their own society and to prevent development from occurring elsewhere. It is this dynamic of development and underdevelopment which mainly explains the modern world.

In this chapter and the two preceding ones I have tried to show, with empirical evidence, that there was no "European miracle." Africa, Asia, and Europe shared equally in the rise of capitalism prior to 1492. After that date, Europe took the lead. This happened, as I have tried to demonstrate in this chapter, because of Europe's location near America and because of the immense wealth obtained by Europeans in America and later in Asia and Africa—not because Europeans were brighter or bolder or better than non-Europeans, or more modern, more advanced, more progressive, more rational. These are myths of Eurocentric diffusionism and are best forgotten.

== NOTES ==

1. Europeans did not "discover" America: the hemisphere was settled millennia earlier by people who migrated in from Siberia and the Arctic. So I prefer not to conceptualize the European arrival as a "discovery." Likewise, the idea that the Western Hemisphere is a "New World" is false since it was hardly new to those who lived there and greeted Columbus on his arrival in 1492. It is, however, very difficult to avoid using the phrase "New World" in certain contexts, and I will occasionally have to do so.

2. See K. N. Chaudhuri, ''Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean'' (1985); Simkin, ''The Traditional Trade of Asia'' (1968); Sherif, ''Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar'' (1987). It is highly likely that West Africans sailed across to the Americas before 1492. (See DeVisse and Labib, "Africa in Intercontinental Relations," 1984.) However, because there seem not to have been major mercantile-maritime port cities in West Africa—unlike East Africa—it is not likely that transatlantic voyages before 1492 had significant impact on Africa or on America. This is probable for several reasons. First, in the absence of such major port cities and large-volume long-distance sea commerce, it is likely that ships along the coast were rather small. They would easily have been capable of a westward voyage to America, given the strong and steady trade winds blowing westward, but a return voyage would have to have been made far to the north or the south, in the zone of the westerlies—roughly as far north as the latitude of southern Europe or as far south as the latitude of Namibia. Therefore the round trip would have been a very formidable undertaking. On the other hand, we may indeed learn from future scholarship that West African sailors, Moroccan sailors, and West European sailors all were fishing and whaling quite regularly off the coast of America (perhaps on the Grand Banks) before 1492; if strong evidence for this emerges, then we would consider it likely that West Africans were familiar with the round-trip voyage and with some parts of the American coast. But we do not have such evidence at present, and we have to consider it more likely that any West African ships that reached America were blown off course, in which case a return voyage would have been very difficult. It would have to have been made without prior knowledge of the long, circuitous route (unless American sailors knew the route and gave navigational information to the African sailors—but we do not have convincing evidence at present that Americans crossed the Atlantic before 1492). Secondly, the portion of the American coast that is closest to Africa, roughly the Brazilian coast south of the mouth of the Amazon, seems not to have had major population concentrations and abundant gold and silver artifacts inviting trade or plunder. (Granted, if West Africans reached the West Indies, they would have found such artifacts in abundance, as did Columbus.) And thirdly, the complex of historical conditions that would turn a single voyage into the beginning of a massive conquest seem unlikely to have been present in coastal West Africa. Large-scale trade, a class of merchant-capitalists, banking and other institutions of capitalism, and the like, were found in interior West African urban centers, but not, it seems, in the urban centers along the coast: these were not important as mercantile-maritime centers. For the interior cities, major long-distance trade went northward and eastward overland, and it is unlikely that attempts would have been made to develop large-scale oceanic travel from a coastal harbor.

Some scholars maintain the truth of two propositions about West African transatlantic voyaging that I cannot accept. The first of these asserts that Africans exerted an important influence on American cultures before 1492. The second asserts that West Africans crossed the Atlantic in much the same way as did Columbus, but they had different values than the Europeans, and did not choose to murder, plunder, enslave, and enrich themselves at the expense of Americans as did the Europeans; and therefore they did not attempt conquest. Most of the evidence offered in support of important precolumbian diffusion from Africa to America is taken from the old arguments of European scholars of the "extreme diffusionism" school we discussed in Chapter 1. The extreme diffusionists claimed that ancient Egyptians or Phoenicians crossed the Atlantic, and, in essence, brought civilization to the Americans. Some modern scholars modify this mainly by insisting that because Egypt was a clearly African civilization—this I am certain is true—it was an African people, not a putatively European people, who brought civilization to the Americas. A second source of evidence is the apparently African facial features of the great Olmec head sculptures of southern Mexico. But some precolumbian Americans must have had these features, too: they are not rare among modern Latin American Indians. But the most serious objection to this theory is the following: The Olmec civilization is the oldest known civilization in the Americas. If Olmec civilization came from Africa, and was not developed indigenously by people of America, then we would have to say that Americans simply did not have the ability to civilize themselves; civilization had to be something brought in from elsewhere, by diffusion. This is viewed as a deep insult by Latin Americans, who maintain, I am sure correctly, that Western Hemisphere peoples developed civilization on their own. Perhaps they acquired a few domesticates from sailors arriving from across the Atlantic or the Pacific. But the real cultural development was a matter of independent invention, not diffusion. Again we notice that the form of argument comes from classical diffusionism: some human communities are inventive and others merely imitative. Based only on the thin and questionable evidence that has been presented thus far that Africans brought major cultural advances to America, this thesis is not persuasive.

Somewhat more troublesome to me is the argument that when Africans crossed the Atlantic before or at the same time as Columbus did, they did not have the savage values of the Europeans, and so did not try to conquer, loot, and enslave. To accept this, one would have to believe that there is something absolutely fundamental in European culture, something very old, and very deeply embedded, that makes Europeans different from other humans. This admits a good part of the Eurocentric claim that Europeans are unique among humans; it merely inverts the argument and claims that their uniqueness lies not in progressiveness but in aggressiveness, predatoriness, and cupidity. I am much more comfortable with an argument that begins with the idea of a common basal human mentality ("psychic unity"). It then explains the bloodthirstiness of the European conquistadors as an effect of the kind of civilization they represented: its development of an oppressive class structure in feudalism, and its further development of protocapitalism, a system in which wealth is obtained at all cost and in any way possible. Bloodthirsty protocapitalist communities, ready and anxious to conquer, loot, and enslave wherever this brought a profit, were found in many parts of the Eastern Hemisphere, in all three continents. My argument in this book is that the key factor favoring European moves of conquest in the Americas, and not favoring West African moves of this sort, was the existence of major mercantile-maritime centers in coastal Europe, protocapitalist centers of the sort found in the interior of Africa but with the added features associated with long-distance oceanic trade. Sofala and Kilwa in East Africa had these features but Sofala and Kilwa were—as we note in this chapter—very much farther from the American looting grounds than were the Iberian ports and the Canary outports. (I have not cited specific scholars who hold these views that I criticize because a full and fair review of their theories is not possible in the space of a single long footnote. Obviously, I do not agree with the theory of Ivan Van Sertima, as presented in his important work ''They Came Before Columbus'' [1976], concerning the precolumbian diffusion of major civilizing traits from Africa to America, although he is very probably correct in his view that Africans did come to America before Columbus did.)

3. Filesi, ''China and Africa in the Middle Ages'' (1972); Ma Huan, ''The Overall Survey of the Ocean's Shores'' (1970); Panikkar, ''Asia and Western Influence'' (1959).

4. I have not learned of documented evidence that North Africans or West Africans regularly sailed up and down the coast past Cape Bojador. (See DeVisse and Labib, "Africa in Intercontinental Relations," 1984.) Apparently medieval sailing techniques—European and non-European—had difficulty with the passage prior to the time when Portuguese voyages began in the fifteenth century. However, there was no question of "discovery." The sea route was known in antiquity. Important land routes paralleled the entire length of the coast, from Fez south to Takrur (near modern Dakar) and beyond (see Niane, "Mali and the Second Mandingo Expansion," 1984, and Levitzion, "The Early States of the Western Sudan to 1500," 1971), and there were medieval-era settlements in the Canaries and along the coast itself. Basically, it was much cheaper to travel overland, and probably faster. What the Portuguese "discovered" was a method of outflanking the competing merchant interests of North and West Africa, by applying sailing technology known to Europeans and East Africans but not known (or at any rate used, or at any rate known to have been used) by West Africans in that period. It should be noted also that the Portuguese navigational strategy in passing Bojador was basically the same strategy used for voyages to the Atlantic islands, and probably known to Moroccan sailors as well as Europeans.

5. Blaut, "Diffusionism: A Uniformitarian Critique" (1987).

6. For general reviews, see Crosby, ''The Columbian Exchange'' (1972) and McNeill, ''Plagues and Peoples'' (1976). See Borah and Cooke, "La Demografía Histórica de América Latina: Necesidades y Perspectivas" (1972); Whitmore, "A Simulation of Sixteenth-Century Population Collapse in the Basin of Mexico" (1991); Alchon, ''Native Society and Disease in Colonial Ecuador'' (1991); Lovell, "'Heavy Shadows and Black Night': Disease and Depopulation in Colonial America" (1992).

7. See Denevan, ''The Native Population of the Americas in 1492'' (1976), for a review of the disputes concerning the American population at the time of the conquest.

8. Crosby, ''The Columbian Exchange'' (1972); Alchon, ''Native Society and Disease in Colonial Ecuador'' (1991).

9. For a discussion of the various calculations, see Denevan, ''The Native Population of the Americas in 1492'' (1976); Denevan, "The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492" (1992); Lovell, "'Heavy Shadows and Black Night'" (1992); and Whitmore, "A Simulation of Sixteenth-Century Population Collapse in the Basin of Mexico" (1991).

10. The assumption here is that population continued to grow so long as food resources for hunting, gathering, fishing, and shellfishing were abundant. At a certain purely hypothetical time, it is likely that people who had certainly already experimented with crop cultivation, found that a better supply of food (and fiber, etc.) would be obtained through agriculture, and so began the transformation. Note that this argument is in no way Malthusian.

11. See Fiedel, ''Prehistory of the Americas'' (1987).

12. See Crosby, ''The Columbian Exchange'' (1972), Lovell, "'Heavy Shadows and Black Night,'" and Alchon, ''Native Society and Disease in Colonial Ecuador'' (1991).

13. Miskimin, ''The Economy of Early Renaissance Europe, 1300-1460'' (1969).

14. Abel, ''Agricultural Fluctuations in Europe from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Centuries'' (1980).

15. de Vries, ''European Urbanization, 1500-1800'' (1984).

16. Hodgett, ''A Social and Economic History of Medieval Europe'' (1972) ("[The] 200 years after c.1320 may be said to be a period of down-turn in the [European] economy as a whole," p. 212); Lopez and Miskimin, "The Economic Depression of the Renaissance," (1961-1962); C. T. Smith, ''An Historical Geography of Western Europe Before 1800'' (1969).

17. Lopez, "Hard Times and Investment in Culture" (1953); Thorndyke, "Renaissance or Prenaissance?" (1943).

18. Braudel, "Prices in Europe from 1450 to 1750" (1967); de Vries, ''European Urbanization'' (1984). On the rapid impact of these changes on Asia, see, for example, Atwell, "International Bullion Flows and the Chinese Economy circa 1530-1650" (1982); Aziza Hasan, "The Silver Currency Output of the Mughal Empire and Prices in India during the 16th and 17th centuries" (1969).

19. Céspedes, ''Latin America: The Early Years'' (1974); McAlister, ''Spain and Portugal in the New World, 1492-1700'' (1984).

20. In classical political economy, and in some of modern Marxist economics, the idea of "primitive accumulation" serves as a kind of catchall for ways of accumulating capital that did not involve—in essence—capitalist enterprise. Pirate treasures and the like were "primitive accumulation," and, in general, the kind of wealth brought from the American colonies in the sixteenth century was considered primitive accumulation. (According to Marx, "The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement and murder flowed back to the mother-country and were turned into capital there": Marx, ''Capital'', 1976, vol. 1, p. 918). But "primitive accumulation" cannot really be defined with any precision. I will argue here that the wealth accumulated in the Americas was primitive only in the sense that it was part of a preindustrial-capitalist economy. In other respects, notably in the involvement of labor and value produced by labor, it was regular accumulation. The distinction is very fundamental, as we will see, because, if what transpired in the colonies was not "real" or "ordinary" accumulation, scholars can claim that the colonial economy was backward and "feudal," rather than a primitive sort of capitalism.

21. E. J. Hamilton, ''American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501-1650'' (1934); Brading and Cross, "Colonial Silver Mining: Mexico and Peru" (1972); H. and P. Chaunu, ''Séville et l'Atlantique (1504-1650)'', vol. 6, pt. 1 (1956); Cross, "American Bullion Production and Export 1550-1750" (1983).

22. See note 19 above.

23. Vicens Vives, ''An Economic History of Spain'' (1969).

24. Vilar, ''A History of Gold and Money, 1450-1920'' (1976).

25. There remained, nonetheless, a very large trade carried on by non-European merchants in the China Seas and the Indian Ocean.

26. E. J. Hamilton, "American Treasure and the Rise of Capitalism" (1929), and ''American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain'' (1934). Also see the important book by Walter Prescott Webb, ''The Great Frontier'' (1951), which builds in part on Hamilton's theory to argue for the great importance of the Americas in the rise of Europe during this period and later.

27. Galloway, ''The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from its Origins to 1914'' (1989); Deerr, ''The History of Sugar'' (1949-1950).

28. See, for example, Galloway, ''The Sugar Cane Industry'' (1989); Deerr, ''The History of Sugar'' (1949-1950); Watson, ''Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 700-1100'' (1983); N. S. Gupta, ''Industrial Structure of India During the Medieval Period'' (1970); Niane, ed., ''UNESCO General History of Africa, Vol. 4'' (1984); Bray, ''Science and Civilization in China, Vol. 6, Part 2, Agriculture'' (1984).

29. Deerr, ''The History of Sugar'' (1949-1950).

30. Simonsen, ''Historia Económica do Brasil, 1500-1820'' (1944); Furtado, ''The Economic Growth of Brazil'' (1963); Minchinton, ''The Growth of English Overseas Trade'' (1969). Also see the more general, but extremely important, works of I. Wallerstein, A. G. Frank, and S. Amin, particularly Wallerstein's ''The Modern World System'', 3 vols. (1974-1988), Frank's ''Capitalism and underdevelopment in Latin America'' (1968) and his ''World Accumulation, 1492-1789'' (1978), and Amin's ''Accumulation on a World Scale'' (1974) as well as his ''Unequal Development'' (1976).

31. Edel, "The Brazilian Sugar Cycle of the 17th Century and the Rise of West Indian Competition" (1969).

32. Furtado, ''Economic Growth of Brazil'' (1963).

33. See K. N. Chaudhuri, ''Trade and civilization in the Indian Ocean'' (1985); Satish Chandra, ''The Indian Ocean: Explorations in History, Commerce and Politics'' (1987); Magalhães-Godinho, ''L'Economie de L'Empire Portugais aux XV et XVI Siècles'' (1969).

34. de Vries, ''European Urbanization'' (1984).

35. William Denevan, "Introduction," in Denevan, ed., ''The Native Population of the Americas in 1492'' (1976), and "The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492" (1992); Lovell, "'Heavy Shadows and Black Night'" (1992).

36. See Borah and Cook, "La demografía histórica de América Latina: necesidades y perspectivas" (1972); Whitmore, "A Simulation of Sixteenth-Century Population Collapse in the Basin of Mexico" (1991).

37. Semo, ''Historia del Capitalismo en México: Los Orígenes, 1521-1763'' (1982).

38. Radell, "The Indian Slave Trade and Population of Nicaragua During the Sixteenth Century" (1976).

39. Bakewell, "Mining in Colonial Spanish America" (1984).

40. Semo, ''Historia del Capitalismo'' (1982).

41. For various calculations, see Curtin, ''The Atlantic Slave Trade'' (1969); Furtado, ''Economic Growth of Brazil'' (1963); Deerr, ''History of Sugar'' (1949-1950); Florescano, "The Formation and Economic Structure of the Hacienda in New Spain"; Inikori, ''The African Slave Trade from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century'' (1979), esp. pp. 57 and 248; McAlister, ''Spain and Portugal in the New World'' (1984).

42. McAlister, ''Spain and Portugal in the New World'' (1984).

43. In the present discussion I am giving far too little attention to Africa and particularly to the effects of the slave trade in Africa. See Chapter 2.

44. Fisher, "The Price Revolution: A Monetary Interpretation" (1989).

45. Dunn, ''Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713'' (1972), pp. 10-11.

46. Tawney, ''Religion and the Rise of Capitalism'' (1952 edition).

47. Hannemann, ''The Diffusion of the Reformation in Southwestern Germany, 1518-1534'' (1975).

48. There is debate as to why the center shifted from Iberia to the lower Rhine-southern England region. Perhaps the same forces which had made this northern region a mercantile-maritime center in the Middle Ages permitted it to gain control of the overseas enterprise: namely, large population, abundant nearby fertile land and forest resources, access to many markets (the Rhine, the Baltic, etc.). Vis-à-vis Italy, it held most of these same advantages plus that of location on the Atlantic and possession of the requirements for rapid growth of oceanic shipping and fishing fleets.

49. See Deerr, ''The History of Sugar'' (1949-1950); Curtin, ''The Atlantic Slave Trade'' (1969); and Inikori, ''The African Slave Trade from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century'' (1979). The question whether slave labor is or is not proletarian—a serious issue in discussions of the slave plantation system (see Mintz, ''Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History'', 1985)—will be taken up later in this chapter. In any event there is no disagreement about the contribution of slave (and other forced) labor to capital accumulation, hence to surplus value generation, using "surplus value" in a sense appropriate to modes of production different from industrial capitalism.

50. However, a good share of the old landowning elite joined in the new enterprise. It is not correct to assume that the new protocapitalist elite was in simple opposition to the old elite. There is much confusion on this matter, some of it occasioned by literal acceptance of Marx's idea that merchants are somehow not the class that evolves into the early capitalist, entrepreneurial, accumulating class. On the role of medieval merchants in protocapitalism, see Thrupp, ''The Merchant Class of Medieval London (1300-1500)'' (1948); Carus-Wilson, ''Medieval Merchant Venturers'' (1967).

51. See R. W. Bailey, "Africa, the Slave Trade, and the Rise of Industrial Capitalism in Europe and the United States: A Historiographic Review" (1986); W. Darity, Jr., "British Industry and the West Indies Plantations" (1990).

52. There were, of course, exceptions. Brooks Adams, in his 1895 work ''The Law of Civilization and Decay'', argued (pp. 259-260) that the British victory at Plassey in 1757, which immediately gave Britain access to cheap Indian cotton (and other Indian "plunder") set into motion the explosive industrialization of Britain's cotton textile industry, leading directly and immediately to the major inventions of that industry: the spinning jenny in 1764, the mule in 1776, and Watt's steam engine in 1768.

53. See Palme Dutt, ''The Problem of India'' (1943); Alavi et al., ''Capitalism and Colonial Production'' (1982).

54. C. L. R. James, ''The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution'' (1938) and ''A History of Negro Revolt'' (1938); Eric Williams, ''Capitalism and Slavery'' (1944). Also see the later work by James, "The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery: Some Interpretations of their Significance in the Development of the United States and the Western World" (1970); and the later work by Williams, ''British Historians and the West Indies'' (1966). Important recent contributions include: R. W. Bailey, "The Slave(ry) Trade and the Development of Capitalism in the United States: The Textile Industry of New England" (1990); W. Darity, "British Industry and the West Indian Plantations" (1990); J. Inikori, "Slavery and the Revolution in Cotton Textile Production in England" (1989). Also see note 60 below.

55. ''The Black Jacobins'' (1938), pp. 47-48.

56. I have argued elsewhere (Blaut, ''The National Question'', 1987b, chap. 7) that the level of oppression and exploitation associated with slave labor as it was used in the plantations could not have been applied to members of the European cultural community itself. (This was indeed tried, but quickly abandoned in favor of slave labor.) Generally, cultural rules and practices limit the level of exploitation of producers within a society—a matter of maintaining social peace in a society—but no such rules apply to external or foreign workers.

57. See the excellent review by C. Robinson, "Capitalism, Slavery and Bourgeois Historiography" (1987). Also excellent is Bailey, "The Slave(ry) Trade and the Development of Capitalism in the United States" (1990).

58. See Brenner's "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism" (1977); E. Laclau, ''Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory'' (1977).

59. Wallerstein, ''The Modern World System'' (1974-1988).

60. See Bailey, "The Slave(ry) Trade and the Development of Capitalism in the United States" (1990), Darity, "British Industry and the West Indian Plantations" (1990), Mintz, ''Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History'' (1985), and Robinson, "Capitalism, Slavery and Bourgeois Historiography" (1987); also see Beckles, "'The Williams Effect': Eric Williams' Capitalism and Slavery and the Growth of West Indian Political Economy" (1987); Sheridan, ''Sugar and Slavery'' (1973), and his "Eric Williams and Capitalism and Slavery: A Biographical and Historiographical Essay" (1987); Solow, "Capitalism and Slavery in the Exceedingly Long Run" (1987); Inikori, "Slavery and the Development of Industrial Capitalism" (1989); Rodney, ''How Europe Underdeveloped Africa'' (1972).

61. Some Marxists treat it this way, too: "(What) distinguished the English industrial development of the early modern period was its continuous character, its ability to sustain itself and to provide its own self-perpetuating dynamic. Here ... the key was to be found in the capitalist structure of (English) agriculture" (Brenner, "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe," 1985, p. 53).

= CHAPTER 5: Conclusion =

This book has two basic themes or arguments. First, in Chapter 1, I try to explain what Eurocentric diffusionism is as a body of ideas, and to show how this theory—or supertheory, or world model—came to dominate European scholarship long ago and why it still does so to a considerable extent today. And second, in Chapters 2 through 4, I carefully examine the single most important part of diffusionism, the theory of Europe's historical superiority or priority, the theory of "the European miracle," and I try to refute it.

Diffusionism needs to be analyzed much more thoroughly than I have been able to do in this book. Many diffusionist theories and programs that, today, exert an important and unfortunate influence on many fields of thought and action have not been discussed here. In other writings I have explored the influence of diffusionism on theory and practice concerning the national question, or nationalism,<ref>Blaut, ''The National Question'' (1987b); Blaut and Figueroa, ''Aspectos de la cuestion nacional en Puerto Rico'' (1988).</ref> and on theory and practice concerning the development of peasant agriculture.<ref>Blaut, "Two Views of Diffusion" (1977) and "Diffusionism: A Uniformitarian Critique" (1987a).</ref> Other writers have, of course, examined many aspects of diffusionism and problems caused by diffusionism.<ref>Reference has been made to this work in Chapters 2, 3, and 4.</ref> But, overall, the critique of diffusionism has barely begun.

The critique will have to range across many fields of scholarship and practice. Here—just to make this point clear—are four examples.

1. Philosophical dualism, the body of epistemological and ontological doctrine developed in European thought from Descartes to Kant and the neo-Kantians, appears to be, in part, a projection of the dualism of Inside and Outside. Reason is Inside. Mere matter, mere sensuousness, is Outside—the non-European world and the irrational mentation of its inhabitants.

2. The so-called Big Bang Theory, the theory that everything began at one space-time point and this point was here, seems to be diffusionism on the largest canvas of all. Big Bang cosmogony appears to be fortified less by empirical evidence than by a hunch that the whole idea is "reasonable"—the essential judgment (as we noticed in Chapter 1) by which culture projects its prejudices into science.<ref>See Talkington, "But the Editor Looks at the Universe from a Different Frame of Reference" (1986); Frankel, "Marxism and Physics: A New Look" (1991).</ref>

3. The theory that AIDS diffused out of Africa is very reminiscent of a historical chain of theories, each explaining some plague as a counterdiffusion from non-Europe to Europe. (We discussed aspects of this question in Chapters 1 and 2.) A recent book entitled ''AIDS, Africa and Racism'' gives important evidence that the AIDS-out-of-Africa doctrine may, indeed, be simply a new incarnation of this diffusionist view of human disease.<ref>Chirimuuta and Chirimuuta, ''AIDS, Africa and Racism'' (1989). A naively diffusionist view of AIDS is given in Shannon and Pyle, "The Origin and Diffusion of AIDS" (1989); see the critique of this view in Watts, Okello, and Watts, "Medical Geography and AIDS" (1990).</ref> If this is the case, the matter of causality of HIV-retrovirus-caused disease may have to be rethought. The forms found outside of Africa may be more relevant for explanation and cure than those inside Africa.

4. Many theories about economic history since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and about economic development today, seem to be steeped in diffusionism. The Industrial Revolution has not diffused outward from Europe to non-Europe. Not only does it have origins in non-Europe as well as Europe (we discussed this matter in Chapter 4), but the notion that industrialization has been spreading to the non-European world is largely a false (conformal) idea. The diffusion of maquiladora-style assembly-plant activities in the Third World is not genuine industrialization but rather a kind of world-scale putting-out system: Outside provides cheap labor, Inside provides most of the raw materials and most of the consumption, and garners nearly all of the profit as well as the permanent infrastructure. The industrialization of Japan began long ago and was not an effect of diffusion.<ref>Japan became industrialized precisely because of a lack of diffusion. It was the only major non-European country that managed to avoid European domination, and this resulted from its inaccessibility. It was, among major societies, the farthest and most inaccessible from the standpoint of Europeans, and by the time European power had subdued China, in the nineteenth century, Japan had been able to begin its military modernization; hence the victory over Russia, the beginnings of colonial expansion, and the onset of an industrial revolution around 1900.</ref> The industrialization of Korea and one or two East Asian ministates in recent decades has not been imitated elsewhere.<ref>At the other end of the scale, giant countries like India and Brazil have a great deal of industry but in proportion to their size—and on a per capita measurement—they are no more industrialized than are smaller Third world countries. See Amin, ''Delinking: Toward a Polycentric World'' (1990).</ref> The diffusion of industrialization, therefore, is not a simple and natural diffusion process, but a political agenda. And an agenda for scholarly inquiry.

This book, therefore, has no real conclusion. The book itself is an introduction: an introduction to the study, to the diagnosis and treatment, of a serious malady of the mind.

== Notes ==

1. Blaut, ''The National Question'' (1987b); Blaut and Figueroa, ''Aspectos de la cuestion nacional en Puerto Rico'' (1988).

2. Blaut, "Two Views of Diffusion" (1977) and "Diffusionism: A Uniformitarian Critique" (1987a).

3. Reference has been made to this work in Chapters 2, 3, and 4.

4. See Talkington, "But the Editor Looks at the Universe from a Different Frame of Reference" (1986); Frankel, "Marxism and Physics: A New Look" (1991).

5. Chirimuuta and Chirimuuta, ''AIDS, Africa and Racism'' (1989). A naively diffusionist view of AIDS is given in Shannon and Pyle, "The Origin and Diffusion of AIDS" (1989); see the critique of this view in Watts, Okello, and Watts, "Medical Geography and AIDS" (1990).

6. Japan became industrialized precisely because of a lack of diffusion. It was the only major non-European country that managed to avoid European domination, and this resulted from its inaccessibility. It was, among major societies, the farthest and most inaccessible from the standpoint of Europeans, and by the time European power had subdued China, in the nineteenth century, Japan had been able to begin its military modernization; hence the victory over Russia, the beginnings of colonial expansion, and the onset of an industrial revolution around 1900.

7. At the other end of the scale, giant countries like India and Brazil have a great deal of industry but in proportion to their size—and on a per capita measurement—they are no more industrialized than are smaller Third world countries. See Amin, ''Delinking: Toward a Polycentric World'' (1990).

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= Index =

Abel, W., 209
Abu-Lughod, J., 51, 57, 172, 177, 178
Acapulco, 190
Accessibility. See Location
Accumulation, 129, 152, 187, 189, 192, 195, 199, 204-206, 212
primitive, 188, 189, 210
Adams, B., 212
Adulthood, 17, 95-98
Africa, Africans, 4, 15, 20-22, 45, 51, 57, 62, 64, 98-99, 103, 105-107, 109, 116, 119, 120, 123-124, 138, 140, 149, 153, 155-158, 160, 162, 166, 168-169, 171, 173-174, 180, 183, 187, 188, 189, 193, 195, 196, 197, 200, 201, 203, 206, 209
East, 167, 182-183, 191, 192, 207-209
South, 89, 141, 144, 152, 155-157, 166-167
apartheid in, 75, 141, 144
myth of emptiness in, 75
North, 3, 46, 82-90, 157, 209
tropical, 69-80, 140, 141
West, 79, 155, 181-183, 191, 204, 207-209
African-Americans, 98
Agriculture, 29, 44-45, 117, 154-165, 169
aridity and, 80-90, 143
drainage, 85-86, 143, 164, 174
and industrial revolution, 213
intensification and commercialization, 157-158, 161, 163-164, 166
irrigated, 74-78, 80-90, 109-110, 143, 162, 164, 174
labor productivity in, 89, 91, 143, 157, 174
medieval, 110-115, 157-165, 168
origins. See Agricultural revolution
peasant. See Peasants
plantation. See Plantations
rain-fed (dry field), 74-76, 84, 86, 88-91
sedentary, 74-76
shifting, 72-76, 141-142, 174
tropical, 70-77, 140, 174
Agricultural revolution, 4, 7, 23, 44-45, 155-157, 164, 172, 174, 185-186, 209
Ahn, P., 140
AIDS, 77, 215-216
and Africa, 142, 215-216
Ajayi, J., 176
Akan, 157
Alavi, H., 212
Alchon, S., 209
Alliance for Progress, 49
Amazon river and basin, 71, 74, 207
America, 51, 103, 152, 162, 173, 180, 183-184, 187, 200, 204, 206, 208-209
Latin, 22, 76, 131
North, 180
South, 141
Americans, Native, 97, 138, 194, 195
Amin, S., 51, 56, 57, 47, 135, 136, 137, 154, 173, 177, 205, 211
Andean region, 20, 184, 194, 195
Anderson, J., 44
Anderson, P., 58, 108, 138, 142, 146, 176
Angola, 49
Anthrax, 78
Anthropology, 23-24, 30-33, 65, 97, 102
and primitive mind, 97, 102
Antilles. See West Indies, Antilles
Antwerp, 189-190, 192
Appadorai, A., 176
Arabia, 92, 167
Arabs, 98, 99, 181
Aristocracy, medieval, 123, 125-127
Armenia, 43
Aryan theory, 12, 84, 89
Asad, T., 48
Asia, 21-22, 77, 80-90, 103-107, 123, 155-158, 160, 162, 165-166, 171, 173, 180, 183, 187-189, 193, 195, 196, 197, 200, 206
aridity in, 80-90
East, 30, 46, 152, 167
South, 46, 56, 76, 167
Southeast, 21, 56, 76, 117-120, 167, 171, 181
Asiatic mode of production, 81-83, 125, 157
Aston, T., 140, 149, 150
Athenian empire, 125
Atlantic Ocean, 181-182, 211
crossing, 14, 181, 207-209
Atwell, W., 210
Augsburg, 197
Australians, 45
Azores Islands, 182
Aztecs, 185

Baechler, J., 122-123, 125-127, 147, 149, 160, 176
Bailey, A., 142
Bailey, R., 205, 212, 213
Bakewell, P., 211
Bali, 120
Baltic Sea, 167, 171, 197, 200, 211
Bangladesh, 71
Barbados, 68, 71, 197
Barbarism, zone of, 14
Barnes, H. E., 44
Beckles, H., 205, 213
Belief-value matrix, 38
Beliefs, 30-43
compatibility of, 34-37
conformality and binding of, 35-41
ethnography of, 30-41
explicit and implicit, 36, 40-41, 65
truth and, 30-32
Bengal, 166
Berkner, L., 150
Bernal, M., 44, 55, 57, 137, 138, 144
Bernier, F., 142
Bible Lands, 3, 5, 7, 29, 43-45, 81
Big Bang Theory, 214-216
Birth
conception and, 67, 139
control, 66-67, 129, 139
rates, 128-130, 140
Bjørklund, O., 149
Black, C., 136
Black death, 46, 77
Black magic, 16
Blaut, J., 48, 49, 136, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 149, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 209, 212, 215
Blockages, historical, 69, 80, 117, 137
Blow-gun, 11
Blum, J., 139
Boas, F., 97, 139, 144
Bogeyman, 16, 47
Bois, G., 150
Bojador, Cape, 209
Borah, W., 209, 211
Bourgeois revolutions, 165, 179-180, 187, 199, 200
Bourgeoisie, 179, 195
Bowler, P., 48, 138, 141, 144
Brading, D., 210
Brantlinger, P., 48
Braudel, F., 178, 210
Bray, Francesca, 143, 146, 211
Brazil, 20, 182, 188, 191-192, 195, 197, 216
Brenner, R., 58, 108, 127-128, 138, 146, 149, 150, 151, 160, 176, 177, 205, 213
Britain, 108, 146-147, 150, 166, 179, 187-188, 191-192, 197, 203, 211, 213
Brown, L., 145
Buck, J. L., 131
Buckle, H. T., 76, 77, 141, 142
Burghers. See Bourgeoisie
Burma, 147

Cabral, A., 54, 136
Cairo, 187
Calicut, 190, 196
Cambodia, 147
Cambridge University, 135
Canada, 43, 156
Canals, in China, 93, 113
Canary Islands, 182, 208, 209
Cape Bojador, 209
Cape of Good Hope, 181
Capes and bays theory, 92, 122
Capitalism, 8, 51, 102, 152, 161-163, 165, 167, 169-170, 179-180, 187-206, 210
centration of, 180, 191, 197, 201-206
in colonial America, 55
origins and rise, 55, 102, 127-128, 150
triumph of, 179
Caribbean. See under West Indies
Carter, G., 47
Carus-Wilson, E., 212
Cassava, 156
Caucasus, 11, 43
Center-periphery model, 14
Centration of capitalism. See Capitalism, centration of
Céspedes, G., 210
Ch'in empire, 125
Chad, Lake and region, 120, 157
Chambers, M., 46
Chan-Cheung, J., 177
Chandra, B., 48, 142
Chandra, S., 177, 211
Chao Phraya Basin, 120
Chariots, 143
Chaudhuri, K. N., 177, 207, 211
Chaudhuri, S., 177
Chaunu, H. and P., 210
Cheng Ho, 181, 182, 207
Chicherov, A., 176
Childhood, 17, 95-98
China, 15, 21, 29, 46-47, 56-57, 78, 82, 87, 94, 96, 110, 113, 115-120, 122-123, 125, 131, 158-159, 166-167, 169-170, 173, 181-182, 198, 216
Jones on, 67, 106-107
Weber on, 64, 103, 116
Chirimuuta, R. C. and R. J., 142, 216
Christendom, 18
Christianity, 123-124
and diffusionism, 18-19, 21, 60-61, 108
Western (L. White, Jr.), 114-115
Church, 119, 123-124, 147-149
Cipolla, C., 118-119, 147
Cities, 153, 161, 167, 196, 207
ancient, 84
European, 84, 128, 188, 193
medieval, 113, 167, 175, 177
mercantile-maritime, 167-173, 181, 196, 207
Weber on, 84, 103-104, 116
City-states, 104, 123, 167, 171
Civil Rights movement, 5, 137
Civilization, zone of, 14
Class, 33-34, 41, 57, 88, 119, 123-128, 154, 157-158, 170
Baechler on, 125-127
Brenner on, 127-128, 150
Godelier on, 127
in precolonial Africa, 124-125
Class struggle, 8, 53, 127, 149, 150
Classless society, 123-125
Climate and personality, 70-71
Climatic determinism or energy, 70-71, 140
Clocks, in China, 117
Cockburn, A., 140, 141
Cognition, 98
of environmental hazards, 93, 101
of space, 101
Cohen, I., 145
Collier, W., 43, 44
Collins, K., 140
Collyer, O., 140
Colonial Development and Welfare, 49
Colonial Office, British, 24
Colonialism, 2, 4, 10, 18-30, 41, 49, 53-57, 62, 70-71, 75, 81, 96, 135, 140, 150, 152-153, 179, 187-206
and diffusionism, 16, 18-30, 53-58
classical, 21-25
modern, 26-30
and rise of Europe, 2, 17-29, 187-205
settler, 15, 21-22, 25, 183
Colonizer's model, 10, 17-30, 41-42
Columbus, C., 209
Congo, 157
Conklin, H., 49
Conquest of America, 179-186
disease and, 183-186
technology and, 182-184
Consciousness, 98, 100-101, 144
Contemporary ancestors, theory of, 16
Continence, European sexual, 66-68, 121, 133-135
Hall on, 134
Jones on, 67, 121
Cook, S. F., 209, 211
Cooper, J., 150
Cordell, D., 139
Core areas, ecological and political, 93-97, 120, 122
Coromandel, 166
Cortés, H., 185, 186
Cotton, cotton textile industry, 164, 166, 212
in Britain and India, 203
Counterdiffusion, 17, 77. See also Black magic; Dracula; AIDS; Plagues
Coursey, D., 141
Cro-Magnon, 4
Crone, P., 131, 133, 144, 150, 151
Croot, P., 150, 151
Crosby, A., 209
Cross, H. C., 210
Crowder, M., 176
Cuba, 29, 53, 185
Culture, 11, 27, 32-33, 94, 123, 172, 183, 208, 212
Curtin, P., 76, 79, 140, 141, 211, 212
Cyprus, 191

Dalai, F., 144
Danube R., 93
Darby, H., 146
Darity, W., Jr., 205, 212, 213
Darwin, C., 4, 23
Das Gupta, A., 175
Decolonization, 28-30, 49, 55, 137
Deerr, Noel, 210, 211, 212
Degeneration, 44-45
Demesnes, farming, 112, 159
Democracy, 8, 88, 107, 120-121, 126
Demography, and diffusionism, 42, 53, 66-68, 93, 119, 139
Denevan, W., 140, 143, 174, 209, 211
Dependency theory, 55, 137, 149, 177
Depopulation
of America, 141, 184-186, 194
of Mexico, 184, 194
of West Africa, 76, 78-79
Development, 27-30, 53-55, 100-101, 105, 129, 133, 136, 152-153, 214-215
even and uneven, 152-153, 162
DeVisse, J., 207, 209
Dew, T., 44
Dewey, J., 38, 49, 145
Di Meglio, R., 176, 177
Diffusion, 11, 47, 98, 100-101, 115, 136, 145, 155-157, 161-162, 171, 173-174, 215
criss-cross, 115, 156, 160-162, 167, 171, 173
Diffusionism, 11-30, 52-54, 70, 100, 104, 137, 142, 180, 183, 189, 203, 205, 208, 214-215
as a belief system, 41-43
classical, 21-26, 81, 95-98, 170
extreme, 11-12, 27, 47, 49
modern, 26-30
origins of, 18-21
Dirks, N., 147
Disasters, natural, 93, 145
Disease, 60, 107, 142. See also Plagues
and conquest of America, 184-186
and Africa, 77-80, 142
and Europe, 77-78
and tropics, 77-80, 142
Dobb, M., 173, 176, 177
Doolittle, W., 143
Dracula, 16, 21, 47
Dualism, 95-97
Man and Nature, 112
mind-body, 101
philosophical, 101, 145, 214
Dualistic-developmental theory of rationality, 95-98
DuBois, W. E. B., 55
Dunn, R. S., 211
Duruy, V., 44
Dutt, R. P., 55, 212
Duyvendak, J., 56, 137

East India companies, 24, 197
East Indies, Dutch, 49
Edel, M., 211
Eden, Garden of, 3, 43-44
Edmonson, M., 47
Education, U. S., 101, 145
Egypt, 12, 47, 82-83, 87, 143, 191-192, 197, 208
El Salvador, 71
Eliot Smith, G., 47, 49
Elvin, M., 57, 117, 137, 175, 176, 177
Empires, 120, 147
Chinese, 123
Oriental. See Oriental despotism
Roman, 147
Emptiness, myth of, 15, 25, 75
Engels, F., 48, 82-84, 86, 127, 142
Engerman, S., 205
England. See Britain
Environment, 69-94, 119
arid, 80-90
European, 90-94
humid-tropical, 69-80, 141
Environmentalism, environmental determinism, 69, 140, 141, 182, 183
Episteme, Western (Marglin), 101
Equilibrium theories, 27-28
Ethiopia, 157
Ethnogeography, 23, 32
Ethnography of beliefs. See Beliefs
Ethnohistory, 32
Ethnoscience, 2, 32-43, 49
Ethology, 105, 107, 151
Eurocentrism, 1-2, 7-11, 47. See also Diffusionism
Europe, 43, 45, 51, 90-94, 152, 186-187
Greater, 3-8, 14, 46
European intellect, 1, 15-17, 20, 95-108, 121
mind, 58
miracle, myth of, 2, 50-151, 214
personality, 132-135, 144
rationality. See Rationality, European
spirit, 1, 15-17, 20, 103-104, 121
Evolution, cultural, 11, 16-17, 22-26, 47, 57, 65, 85, 127, 152-153, 172, 174, 185, 209
Evolutionism, 12, 24, 47
Exploitation, internal and external, 161

Family, 58, 68, 119, 128-135
extended and nuclear, 128-134, 150
European, 90, 126, 128-135
Hajnal on, 129-130
Macfarlane on, 131-134
modern, 128
preindustrial, traditional, 68, 128
Stone on, 130-135
Fei Hsiao-tung, 175
Feminism, 139
Feudal mode of production, 154, 157-165, 171, 173
Feudal property and tenure, 83, 104, 158
Feudalism, 8, 46, 51, 95, 110, 112, 126-128, 146, 152-154, 158-165, 197, 210
in Africa, 157-158
in India, 55, 158, 160, 175
Fez, 209
Fiedel, S., 209
Fiefs, 158, 175
Figueroa, L., 215
Filesi, T., 209
Finley, M., 108, 146
Fisher, D., 211
Fisher, G., 44
Fisheries, Atlantic, 92, 182, 188, 192, 196-197, 207
Flanders, 166, 188, 197
Fleck, L., 49
Florescano, E., 211
Forests, 89, 106, 140, 143
and ancient Europeans, 84, 107
European, 89-90, 94, 108
tropical, 71-76
Foster, G., 145
Frake, C., 49
France, 147, 179, 203, 204
Frank, A. G., 51, 149, 205, 211
Frankel, H., 216
Freedman, M., 150
Freedom, love of, in Europe, 26, 107, 119, 120-121, 171
Freeman, E., 44
FRELIMO, 175
Freund, J., 145
Fu Chu-fu, 175, 176
Fukien, 166
Functionalism, 27
Furtado, C., 211

Galloway, J. H., 210
Garraty, J., 141
Gay, P., 141
Genesis, Book of, 23, 43-45
Genoa, 189
Gentry and nobility, 158
Geography, 1, 3-8, 17, 23-24, 31-32, 45, 47, 65, 96-97, 101, 125, 127, 136
in 19th-century education, 3-7, 96
Germanic culture, ancient, 25, 131-132
Germany, 147
Gernet, J., 176, 177
Giblin, J., 142
Gilfillan, S., 71, 140
Gill, D., 139
Gilman, A., 44
Glorious revolution (English), 165, 197
Godelier, M., 127, 149
Goitein, S., 178
Gold, 183, 188-191
American production, 188-191
and Asian trade, 118, 190
stock in E. Hemisphere, 189
Gold Coast, 166
Golson, J., 143, 174
Goodfield, J., 48
Gopal, L., 175
Gopal, S., 176
Gossett, T., 48, 138, 139
Gould, P., 145
Grand Banks, 182, 207
Greece, 4, 8, 50, 88, 107-108, 123, 147
Greenland, D., 140
Gregory, J., 139
Grosvenor, E., 44
Guilds, medieval, 166
Gunpowder, 115, 117
Guns, cannon, in China, 117-119, 173
Gupta, N. S., 177, 210

Habib, I., 55, 175, 176, 177
Hagen, E., 100-101, 144
Haitian revolution, 204
Hajnal, J., 129-130, 150
Hall, J. A., 59, 67, 77, 86-87, 91, 108, 122-124, 139, 141, 143, 144, 147, 151
Hallam, H., 124, 147
Haller, J., 139
Hallpike, C., 145
Ham, 44
Hamilton, E. J., 190-191, 210
Handler, R., 150, 151
Hannemann, M., 211
Hanseatic League and cities, 197
Hardy, F., 140
Harewood, J., 140
Harris, M., 44, 47, 49, 138
Harrison, P., 143, 176
Hasan, A., 175, 210
Haskel, D., 48
Hassan, F., 139
Hawaii, 156
Hecht, S., 140, 141
Hegel, G. W. F., 53, 142
Hegelianism, 43, 48, 91, 120
Hilgemann, W., 149
Hilton, R., 140, 150
Historians, 52-59, 65, 136
absolutionist, 76, 79-80
Historical and ahistorical societies, 137
Historical atlases, 124
Historiography, modernization and, 53-59
History, 1, 3-8, 97, 127
in 19th-century education, 3-7, 43-46
march of (Mann), 91, 108
textbooks, 3-7, 43-46, 96, 124
Western, 46
world, 46
Hodgett, A. J., 210
Holism and reductionism, 22, 33, 41, 48, 119
Hølmhoe, H., 149
Hopkins, A., 174
Horse-collar, horse power, 111, 112-114
Household, extended-family and nuclear-family, 128-129
Hoyle, R., 150
Huddleston, L., 48
Hudson, B., 45
Hulme, P., 48
Humboldt, W. von, 97
Huntington, E., 70
Hydraulic society. See Agriculture, irrigated; Asiatic mode of production; Oriental despotism

Iberia, 181-182, 183-184, 188, 197, 211
Ibn al-Faqih, 167
Ibn Khaldun, 183
Iceland, 93
India, 21, 47, 69, 82, 96, 98, 103, 106, 111, 116, 119-120, 122, 131
caste in, 122, 126, 161
classes, 126
de-industrialization of, 203
medieval polity, 122
personality (Weber), 64, 103, 138
Indian Ocean, 92, 117-118, 171, 182
Individual(ism), 25, 87, 90-91, 119, 132, 135, 144
English, 132
European, 87, 90-91, 107, 109, 132-133
Indo-European peoples, languages, 44, 50, 88, 97, 109, 131
Indo-European warrior aristocracy (Baechler), 123, 126
Indochina, French, 49
Indonesia, 92
Indus valley, 82
Industrial revolution, 8, 55, 107, 165, 179, 180, 201-206, 213, 215-216
and mechanization, 202
Industrial production, medieval, 110-115
Inflation, 16th-century,
in Asia, 210
in Europe, 187, 196
Inikori, J., 212, 213
Inner Asia, 93
Innovation, 15, 110-115, 116, 128, 149, 163
Insanity. See Sanity
Inside and Outside, 1, 5, 12-17, 30, 42, 138, 214
Interests and values, 30-31, 37-41
Invention, independent, 11-12, 47, 208
Inventiveness, 12-14, 17, 105, 108-109, 110-115, 208
Iron, 88-89, 169
early use, 7, 75, 88-89, 109, 141
iron age, 7, 50, 88-89, 91, 107, 109, 131
Irrawaddy plain, 85
Irvine, F., 141
Irwin, G., 141
Isichei, E., 175
Islam, 119, 122, 123
Italy, 166, 171, 187, 192, 197, 211
Ivanov, V., 144

Jackson, P., 138, 139
Jagirdars, 158
James, C. L. R., 55, 137, 203-206, 212
Japan, 5, 30, 82, 149, 155, 167, 216
Japheth, 44
Java, 71, 120, 166
Jett, S. C., 47
Jews, 99
Jha, S. C., 176, 177
Joly, N., 45
Jones, E. L., 50, 58, 67, 70-71, 77, 86-87, 89, 91, 93, 104-108, 110, 120-121, 123-124, 131-133, 135, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 147, 150, 151
Judeo-Christian teleology, 114
Jung, C., 98, 144

Kabaker, A., 173
Kagan, D., 46
Kalah, 167, 172, 277
Kant, I., 214
Kantianism, Neo-Kantianism, 48, 101, 214
Kaplan, B., 144
Kea, R., 174, 175, 176
Keightley, T., 43, 44, 48
Kenya, 49
Kertzer, D., 150
Keynesianism, 27
Kilwa, 166, 208
Kinder, H., 149
Kitching, G., 139
Koepping, K.-P., 47
Korea, 147
Kosambi, D. D., 146, 175
Kuhn, T., 37, 49

Labib, S., 207, 209
Labor,
counterdiffusion of, 16
colonial, 193-196
Labor force, colonial Americas and Europe, 193, 195, 196
Laclau, E., 205, 213
Laibman, D., 142
Lambert, D., 71, 140
Landlords, 158-160, 162, 170
Landownership,
medieval European, 104, 159, 160
peasant, 127, 160
Lane, F., 178
Languages, primitive, 97, 145
Las Casas, B., 195
Laslett, P., 131, 133-134, 150, 151
Le Roy Ladurie, E., 150
Lee, G., 150
Lee, R., 174
Lelekov, L., 144
Levant, 191
Levidow, L., 139
Levitzion, N., 176, 209
Lévy-Bruhl, L., 97, 101, 144
Lewis, A., 177
Lewis, W. A., 48
Li Ching-neng, 175, 176
Liceria, M. A. C., 175
Lie, B., 149
Lisbon, 190
Livingstone, D., 23
Llobera, J., 142
Lo Jung-pang, 177
Location, accessibility, 2, 157, 161-162, 169-173, 181, 182, 197
Lombok, 120
Lopez, R., 147, 210
Love and marriage, in Europe, 132-133
Lovell, W. G., 209, 211
Lowie, R., 49
Löwith, K., 145
Luzon, 85, 120

Ma Huan, 177, 209
Mabogunji, A., 175
Macauley, T., 48
Macfarlane, A., 131-133, 150, 151
Madeira, 182, 191
Madrid, 195
Magalhães-Godinho, V., 211
Maghreb, 171, 181, 183
Magna Carta, 122
Magubane, B., 139
Mahalingam, T., 175, 176, 177
Maize, 107, 156
Malabar, 166
Malacca, 167, 172, 190
Malaria, 78
Malthus, T., 48, 66-68, 133
Malthusian theory, 66-68, 73, 87, 129, 133-134, 139-140, 162, 209
Mamdani, M., 139
Mandelbaum, M., 48
Manila Galleons, 190
Manila, 117
Mann, M., 59, 86-91, 93, 107-110, 122-124, 131-133, 139, 143, 144, 146, 147, 148, 150, 151, 176
Manorial system, 159-160
Maquiladora plants, 215
Marglin, F., 145
Marglin, S., 101, 145
Mariana Islands, 49
Markets, 17th-century, 199-201
Markham, S., 70
Marriage pattern, European and non-European, 129-135, 139
Marx, K., 25, 39, 48, 76, 82-84, 86, 127, 141, 142, 158, 159, 175, 202, 205, 210, 212
Marxism, 46, 55-57, 77, 94-95, 137, 148, 168, 177, 202, 210, 212
Marxists, Eurocentric, 46, 56, 58, 83, 108, 125, 137-138, 149, 157, 162, 205, 213
Maya civilization, 72-73
Mbithi, P., 141
McAlister, L., 210, 211
McClelland, D., 100, 144
McCurdy, D., 49
McKay, D., 45
McNeill, W., 45, 46, 79, 140, 142, 143, 144, 146, 209
Mead, G. H., 48, 145
Mead, M., 97, 144
Mediterranean, 43-44, 92, 159, 167-168, 172, 181, 183, 200
Megaw, J., 173
Mekong valley, 120
Merchant capital, 179, 188, 192, 207-208, 212
Mesoamerica, 86, 195
Mesopotamia, 82, 85, 120, 143
Metals
age of, 7
precious. See Gold; Silver
Mexico, 20, 180, 182, 185-186, 188, 190, 194-195, 208
Middle East, 4, 7-8, 45-46, 63, 82-90, 109, 110, 116, 155, 156, 167, 170, 183
Migration, rural-urban, 161-162
Mill, J. S., 48
Miller, J., 76, 140, 141
Milne, G., 140
Minchinton, W., 211
Mind
criminal, 144
European. See European mind
female, 96
and matter. See Dualism
primitive, 17, 95-102, 144-145, 148, 151, 206
traditional, 15, 98-102, 145
Mintz, S. W., 205, 212, 213
Miskimin, H., 209, 210
Moctezuma, 185
Modernization, 2, 27-30, 52-54, 59, 98-102, 206
as history, 53-54, 136
theory, 27-30, 98, 128-129, 131
Mohr, E., 140
Moluccas, 190, 192
Montesquieu, 140, 142
Morocco, 166, 191-192, 207, 209
Motivation, need-achievement (McClelland), 100, 125
Mozambique, 49
Mukherjee, Radhakamal, 176
Mukherjee, Ramkrishna, 176
Müller, J., 43
Myth, 59

Nag, M., 139, 140
Naqvi, H. K., 177
Nationalism, nation-state, 119-120, 172, 214
Nazism, 27, 63-64
Needham, J., 56, 115, 137, 143, 146, 147, 177, 178
Neocolonialism, 26-30
Neo-Kantianism. See Kantianism
Neolithic revolution. See Agricultural revolution
Neolocality, 131-133
Netherlands, Holland, 187-188, 194, 197
Neumann, E., 144
New Guinea, 155
New World (term), 207
Newfoundland, 192
Niane, D., 209, 211
Nicaragua, 195
Nicholas, D., 175, 176
Niger Valley, 86
Nile river and valley, 82, 86, 166, 183
Nisbet, R., 48
Noah, 43, 44, 48
Nurul Hasan, S., 176
Nye, P., 140

O'Keefe, P., 141
Oceania, 158
Okello, R., 142, 216
Olmec civilization, 208
Onimode, B., 174, 175
Operation Bootstrap, 49
Orient Express model, 4, 45, 91
Oriental despotism, 3, 4, 25, 80-92, 120, 142, 157, 171, 174
Hall on, 87, 147
Jones on, 86-87, 120
Mann on, 87-89, 109, 147
Marx and Engels on, 81-82
Weber on, 83-84, 86, 103-104
Wittfogel on, 84-88
Orwin, C. S., 146
Ottoman empire, region, 20, 45, 81, 96
Outside. See Inside
Overpopulation, 66-68, 121, 129, 133, 139. See also Demography; Malthusianism

Pacey, A., 147
Padgug, R., 125, 149
Padmore, G., 55
Paleolithic, 124
Palmer, R., 149
Panikkar, K. M., 55, 209
Paris Basin, 170, 195, 197
Parker, D., 150, 151
Parsons, J. B., 176
Peace Corps, 49
Peasants, 100-101, 107, 109, 112, 133-134, 154, 161-162, 214
Chinese, 166
European, 104
Indian, 127, 166, 175
Pendleton, R., 140
Pepper, 166, 169
Perry, W., 47, 49
Peru, 184-185, 188, 190
Philosophy, 26, 101, 106, 145, 214
Philpin, C., 140, 149, 150
Phoenicians, 47, 208
Piaget, J., 99, 101, 144
Piracy, 188, 196-197
Pires, T., 167, 170, 176, 177
Pizarro, F., 185
Plagues, 78, 142. See also AIDS; Disease, Black death
counterdiffusion from non-Europe, 16, 77
Plantations, 166, 188, 191-193, 197-201, 204-205, 212. See also Slave plantation
Brazil, 191-193
Caribbean, 198-201
Ploetz, C., 44
Plow, 88-89, 110-112, 174
Poland, 147
Polygenesis, theory of, 3, 23, 43-45, 61
Portugal, 181, 188, 192, 194, 197, 209
Potato, 156
in Europe, 92, 201
Potosí, 195
Powell, J., 23
Prakash, I., 177
Precious metals. See Gold; Silver
Prescott, J., 140
Printing, in China, Korea, 117
Production versus exchange, 168-170, 177, 205
Progress, 1, 14, 16, 19, 20, 22, 24, 48, 53-54, 60, 102, 114, 132, 136, 155, 180, 206
Progressiveness. See Progress
Property, private, 15, 25-26, 83-84, 88, 104, 116, 158
concept of, 15, 25-26
in medieval Europe, 83-84, 104, 127
in non-Europe, 25-26, 83-84, 116, 158, 175
Protocapitalism, 152, 165-173, 181
in Asia and Africa, 153, 165-173, 190, 195, 197
Protocapitalist system, network, 168-173, 177
Psychic Unity of Mankind, 12, 47, 94-96, 184, 208
Psychology, 17, 94-100. See also Mind, Reasoning
cross-cultural, 98-100, 144
primitive. See Mind, primitive
Puerto Rico, 49
Putting-out system, 166, 215
Purcell, V., 116, 177
Pyle, G., 142, 216

Qaisar, A. J., 177
Quackenbos, J., 44

Racism, 27, 29, 43-44, 61-65, 138
cultural, 64
moderate, 64-65
and myth of European miracle, 1, 4, 29, 61-65, 186
Weber and, 64-65, 138
Radell, D. R., 211
Radin, P., 49, 97, 144
Rain forest, 72-76, 141
Rational Modern Adult European Man, 96-97
Rationality, 15, 17, 19, 21, 94-109, 145, 149, 186, 214
and diffusionism, 17, 60, 94-108, 214
European, 15, 17, 19, 27, 30, 47, 88, 94-108, 110, 114, 120, 129, 135, 139, 143, 149, 206
Hall on, 87
Indo-European, 107, 109
Jones on, 58, 104-107, 120
Jung on, 98
Lévy-Bruhl on, 97
Mann on, 107-110
Piaget on, 99, 101
Weber on, 102-104, 145
Rawski, E., 175, 176
Raychaudhuri, T., 175, 176
Reasoning. See also Thought, abstract and concrete
theoretical vs. empirical, 17, 96-101, 105
Reclus, E., 45
Red R. (Vietnam), 120
Reductionism. See Holism
Reformation, Protestant, 103, 124, 197
Regionalism, 27
Relativism, cultural, 27
Religion and rise of Europe, 8, 18-19, 29, 60-61
Renaissance, 117, 187
Restlessness, of Europeans, 108
Rhine R., 93, 211
Rice
wet, agriculture, 85, 143, 166, 169, 174
Ritter, K., 82, 142
Robbins, R., 43
Roberts, D., 140
Roberts, J., 45, 46, 140, 141, 147
Robinson, C., 205, 212, 213
Rodinson, M., 177
Rodney, W., 175, 205, 213
Rogers, E., 100, 144
Røhr, A., 149
Roman land law, 25
Rome, 4, 8, 25, 50, 107, 110, 125, 147, 195
Rorty, R., 145
Rostow, W., 53
Rotation, 74, 111, 113-114
fallowless, 114
shifting, 74
three-field, 111, 113-114
two-field, 113-114
Roy, M. N., 55
Rules, cultural, and exploitation, 212
Russia, 147
Rwanda, 71

Sack, R., 102, 145
Sahara, 76, 183
Sahel, 76
Said, E., 48, 58, 144
Sanderson, E., 44
Sanity, insanity, 17, 96
São Tomé, 191, 195-196
Sastri, K. N., 176
Savagery, zone of, 14, 44
Savages, 4, 60, 96
Schmidt, W., 49
Schweder, R., 145
Science, social, 31, 37, 38-41, 54, 97
Seccombe, W., 139
Semitic peoples, 44, 63
Semo, E., 211
Serfs, 127-128, 134, 154, 160, 175-176
Service tenure, 158
Seville, 189, 195
Sexual frustration, and rise of Europe (Stone), 134-135
Shannon, G., 142, 216
Sharma, R. S., 55, 146, 175
Shem, 44
Sheridan, R., 205, 213
Sherif, A., 175, 176, 207
Shipping, 169-170, 181, 196
African and Asian, 117-118, 170, 181
medieval, 117-118, 169-170
Shoemaker, F., 144
Siberia, 199
Silver, 183, 188-191
American production, 188-191
and Asian trade, 118, 190
stock in E. Hemisphere, 189
Simkin, C., 177
Simonsen, R., 211
Sinclair, P., 141
Slave plantation, 70, 125, 191-198, 204-205
Slave trade, 70, 79, 188, 192, 199, 203-205
Slavery, 62, 70, 79, 107, 125, 170, 192, 195, 197, 203-205, 208, 212
Smallpox, 78
Smith, Abdullahi, 175
Smith, Adam, 142
Smith, C. T., 146, 210
Sofala, 166, 208
Soils. See also Agriculture
fertility, 72-77, 85, 89, 91
gley, in Europe, 92
podzolic, in Europe, 92
temperate, 90-92
tropical, 42, 71-76, 140
waterlogged, 92
Solow, B., 205, 213
South China Sea, 92
Sovereignty, concept of, 15, 25
Soviet Union, Russia, 29, 76, 81, 84
Spain, 181, 188, 192, 194, 197
Spatial revolution, medieval, 169-173, 181
Spatial transport of commodities. See Location; Spatial revolution
Spencer, H., 22, 48
Spices, 168, 192
Spradley, J., 49
Stages, evolutionary, 125
Stagnation, cultural, 6, 17, 84, 90, 116, 124-125
Stagnation of Chinese society, theory of, 115-119, 142, 147
Stalinism, and theory of Oriental despotism, 81
State, 8, 58, 81, 85, 87, 94, 119-123, 141, 147, 157, 161, 172
in Asia, 123, 126. See also Empire; Oriental despotism
medieval European, 122
modern, 120-122
size of, 94, 119-122
Steele, E., 44
Steele, J., 44
Steward, J., 47, 172, 178
Stirrup, iron, 111
Stocking, G., 47, 48, 138, 144
Stone, L., 130, 134-135, 150, 151
Sudan, 157, 183
Sudanic caravans, 93
Sugar, 166, 169, 191, 200
Sugar-cane. See Sugar
Sulawesi, 120
Sumatra, 120
Swai, B., 48
Sweden, 147
Sweet potato, 107, 156
Sweezy, P., 149, 177
Swindell, K., 139
Swinton, W., 44

Taeuber, I., 131, 150
Takrur, 209
Talkington, L., 216
Tarzan, 97, 105
Tawney, R. H., 211
Taylor, G., 47, 49
Technological determinism, 108-109
Technology, 29, 57, 94, 108-119, 161, 184, 186, 202
ancient, 109-110
Chinese medieval, 116-119
European medieval, 110-115, 128, 160-161, 163
Temu, A., 48
Tenochtitlán, 185
Ternate, 196
Testing (ACT, SAT, IQ), 101, 145
Textbooks, as cultural windows, 6, 43-46
Textiles, 169, 192, 203. See also Cotton
Thackeray, W., 48
Thailand, 147
Thalheimer, M., 44
Thapar, R., 48
Theory, scientific, 17, 24, 31-32, 34
Third World, 54
Third Worldism, 79, 125, 149
Thorndyke, L., 147, 210
Thought, abstract and concrete, 17, 96-99, 103. See also Reasoning
Thrupp, S., 176, 212
Tigris-Euphrates valley, 82, 86
Tillinghast, W., 44
Tobacco, 156, 192
Tolman, E., 38, 49
Torras, J., 150
Toulmin, S., 48
Toynbee, A., 71
Toyoda, T., 177
Trade winds, 182
Traditional society, 6, 68, 98, 128
Traditionalism, 15, 98-102, 145
Transoceanic diffusion, 11, 14, 207-209
Travel, radii, 181
Tributary mode of production, 154
Trigger, B., 138
Tropical soils. See Soils
Tropical-nastiness theory, 69-80
Tropics, humid (term), 71
Trypanosomiasis, 79-80
Tung, C., 176
Tunnel history, 3-8, 103, 109-110, 115, 150, 180, 187
Turkey, 45, 183
Turner, B. L., 143
Turshen, M., 142
Tytler, A., 43

Udovitch, A., 177
Underdevelopment, 153, 180
Underdevelopment theory, 55-56, 137, 149
Uniformitarianism, cultural, 42, 47, 122, 124, 184, 208
United Nations, 28
United States, 28, 43
Urbanization. See Cities
Usman, Y. B., 175

Validation of belief, 34
Values, 15, 30-31, 37-41, 103, 207
Vampires, 16, 21, 47
Van Baren, F., 140
Van Leur, J. C., 55, 56, 137
Van Sertima, I., 208-209
Venice, 167
Venturi, F., 142
Verifiability, 34, 36, 40
Verification of belief. See Verifiability
Vijayanagar, 170
Vilar, P., 210
Village, 90
European, 159-160, 176
Indian, 127, 159-160, 175-176
Virgin Islands, US, 49
Vishnu-Mittre, 173
Vives, J. Vicens, 210
de Vries, J., 209, 210, 211

Wage labor, 167, 202-205
and slave labor, 203-206, 212
in post-Conquest America, 189
Wai Andah, B., 141
Wallerstein, I., 51, 149, 205, 211, 213
Warren, B., 58, 138
Watson, A., 210
Watts, S., 142, 216
Watts, S. J., 216
Webb, W. P., 210
Weber, G., 43
Weber, M., 15, 47, 59, 64-65, 83-84, 86-90, 102-104, 115-116, 124, 131, 138, 142, 143, 145, 158, 170
Weberianism, 54, 64-65, 87, 102-104, 114, 117
Wei R., 86
Werner, H., 99, 144
Werner, K. F., 61, 124, 147-149
West, the, 1, 46, 94
West Indies, 20, 55, 180, 182, 203, 207. See also under specific topics
and industrial revolution in Britain, 203-206
Whaling, 207, 192
Wheat, 169, 197
Wheatley, P., 57, 137, 177
Whelpley, S., 43
White, G., 145
White, Lynn, Jr., 61, 108, 110-115, 146, 147, 176
White man's grave, 78
Whitehead, A. N., 37, 49, 145
Whitman, J., 144
Whitmore, T., 209, 211
Wiethoff, B., 177
Wilken, G., 140
Willard, E., 43
Williams, E., 48, 137, 203-206, 212, 213
Williams, R., 48
Williams thesis, 55, 205
Wisner, B., 141
Wittfogel, K., 83-88, 142
Wolf, E., 137
Women, and rationality, 96-97
Woolen trade, English, 191-192
World models, 30-31, 41-43, 214
World system, capitalist, 206
Wrigley, E., 151
Wunder, H., 150

Yadava, B., 175, 176
Yam, 74-75
Yang Lien-sheng, 177
Yellow R., 86

Zamindars, 24, 175
Zimbabwe, 157, 166, 197
Zwernemann, J., 47