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The Theft of History JACK GOODY.Pdf This page intentionally left blank The Theft of History Jack Goody is one of the pre-eminent social scientists in the world. Over the past half century his pioneering writings at the intersections of anthropology, history, and social and cultural studies have made him one of the most widely read, most widely cited, and most widely translated scholars working today. In The Theft of History Goody builds on his own previous work (notably The East in the West)toextend further his highly influential critique of what he sees as the pervasive Eurocentric, or Occidental- ist, biases of so much western historical writing, and the consequent ‘theft’ by the west of the achievements of other cultures in the inven- tion of (notably) democracy, capitalism, individualism, and love. This argument will generate passionate debate, as his previous works have done, and many will dissent from Goody’s perceptive conclusions. Few, however, will be able to ignore the force of his thought, or the breadth of knowledge brought to the discussion. The Theft of History discusses a number of theorists in detail, includ- ing Marx, Weber, and Norbert Elias, and engages with critical admira- tion western historians like Fernand Braudel, Moses Finley, and Perry Anderson. Many questions of method are raised in these discussions, and Goody proposes a new comparative methodology for cross-cultural analysis, one that gives a much more sophisticated basis for assessing divergent historical outcomes, and replaces outmoded simple differ- ences between, for example, the ‘backward East’ and the ‘inventive West’. Historians, anthropologists, social theorists, and cultural critics will all find something of real value in The Theft of History. It will be a cat- alyst for discussion of some of the most important conceptual issues confronting western historians today, at a time when notions of ‘global history’ are filtering into the historical mainstream for the first time. is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John’s College. Recently knighted by Her Majesty The Queen for services to anthropology, Pro- fessor Goody has researched and taught all over the world, is a Fellow of the British Academy, and in 1980 was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2004 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and he was elected Commandeur des Arts et Lettres in 2006. The Theft of History Jack Goody cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridg e.org /9780521870696 © Jack Goody 2006 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2006 isbn-13 978-0-511-26039-1 eBook (EBL) isbn-10 0-511-26039-3 eBook (EBL) isbn-13 978-0-521-87069-6 hardback isbn-10 0-521-87069-0 hardback isbn-13 978-0-521-69105-5paperback isbn-10 0-521-69105-2 paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. To Juliet To o often the generalizations of social science – and this is as true in Asia as it is in the West – rest on the belief that the West occupies the normative starting position for constructing general knowledge. Almost all our categories – politics and economy, state and society, feudalism and capitalism – have been conceptualized primarily on the basis of Western historical experience. (Blue and Brook 1999) The Euro-American domination of world scholarship has to be accepted, for the moment, as an unfortunate but ineluctable counter- part of the parallel development of the material power and intellectual resources of the western world. But its dangers need to be recognized and constant attempts made to transcend them. Anthropology is a suit- able vehicle for such an effect . (Southall 1998) Contents Acknowledgements page x Introduction1 Part One: A socio-cultural genealogy 1 Who stole what? Time and space 13 2 The invention of Antiquity 26 3Feudalism: a transition to capitalism or the collapse of Europe and the domination of Asia? 68 4 Asiatic despots, in Turkey or elsewhere? 99 Part Two: Three scholarly perspectives 5 Science and civilization in Renaissance Europe 125 6 The theft of ‘civilization’: Elias and Absolutist Europe 154 7 The theft of ‘capitalism’: Braudel and global comparison 180 Part Three: Three institutions and values 8 The theft of institutions, towns, and universities 215 9 The appropriation of values: humanism, democracy, and individualism 240 10 Stolen love: European claims to the emotions 267 11 Last words 286 References 307 Index 324 ix Acknowledgements Ihave presented versions of chapters of this book at conferences: on Nor- bert Elias in Mainz, in Montreal and in Berlin on Braudel (and Weber), on values at a UNESCO conference in Alexandria, more generally on the topic of world history at the Comparative History Seminar in London, on love to one organized by Luisa Passerini, to the Indian Section of the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, at the American University in Beirut, the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, and extensively at the Cultural Studies Programme of Bilgi University in Istanbul. In this enterprise, certainly one where angels might well fear to tread, a product of la pens´ee sauvage rather than la pens´ee domestiqu´ee,but which touches upon many of my earlier interests, I have been much stimu- lated by the support and help of friends, especially Juliet Mitchell (not only for intellectual reasons but also for morale), Peter Burke, Chris Hann, Richard Fisher, Joe McDermott, Dick Whittaker, and many oth- ers including my son Lokamitra. I’m also most grateful for the assistance provided by Susan Mansfield (organizing), Melanie Hale (computing), Mark Offord (computing, editing), Manuela Wedgwood (editing), and Peter Hutton (library). x Introduction The ‘theft of history’ of the title refers to the take-over of history by the west. That is, the past is conceptualized and presented according to what happened on the provincial scale of Europe, often western Europe, and then imposed upon the rest of the world. That continent makes many claims to having invented a range of value-laden institutions such as ‘democracy’, mercantile ‘capitalism’, freedom, individualism. However, these institutions are found over a much more widespread range of human societies. I argue that the same is true of certain emotions such as love (or romantic love) which have often been seen as having appeared in Europe alone in the twelfth century and as being intrinsic to the modernization of the west (the urban family, for example). That is clear if we look at the account by the distinguished historian Trevor-Roper in his book, The rise of Christian Europe.Herecognizes Europe’s outstanding achievement since the Renaissance (though some comparative historians would put its advantage as dating only from the nineteenth century). But those achievements he regards as being pro- duced uniquely by that continent. The advantage may be temporary but he argues: The new rulers of the world, whoever they may be, will inherit a position that has been built up by Europe, and by Europe alone. It is European techniques, European examples, European ideas which have shaken the non-European world out of its past – out of barbarism in Africa, out of a far older, slower, more majestic civilisation in Asia; and the history of the world, for the last five centuries, in so farasithas significance, has been European history. I do not think that we need to make any apology if our study of history is European-centric.1 Ye theargues that the job of the historian is ‘To test it [his philosophy], a historian must start to travel abroad, even in hostile country.’ Trevor- Roper I suggest has not travelled far outside Europe either conceptually or empirically. Moreover, while accepting that concrete advantages began 1 Trevor-Roper 1965: 11. 1 2 Introduction with the Renaissance, he adopts an essentialist approach that attributes its achievements to the fact that Christendom had ‘in itself the springs of a new and enormous vitality’.2 Some historians might regard Trevor- Roper as an extreme case, but as I intend to show there are many other more sensitive versions of similar tendencies which encumber the history of both continents, and of the world. After several years’ residence among African ‘tribes’ as well as in a sim- ple kingdom in Ghana, I came to question a number of the claims Euro- peans make to have ‘invented’ forms of government (such as democracy), forms of kinship (such as the nuclear family), forms of exchange (such as the market), forms of justice, when embryonically at least these were widely present elsewhere. These claims are embodied in history, both as an academic discipline and in folk discourse. Obviously there have been many great European achievements in recent times, and these have to be accounted for. But they often owed much to other urban cultures such as China. Indeed the divergence of the west from the east, both economically and intellectually, has been shown to be relatively recent and may prove rather temporary. Yet at the hands of many European historians the tra- jectory of the Asian continent, and indeed that of the rest of the world, has been seen as marked by a very different process of development (charac- terized by ‘Asiatic despotism’ in the extreme view) which ran against my understanding of other cultures and of earlier archaeology (both before writing and after).
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