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The Challenge of Eurocentrism the Challenge of Eurocentrism: Global Perspectives, Policy, and Prospects

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The Challenge of Eurocentrism the Challenge of Eurocentrism: Global Perspectives, Policy, and Prospects The Challenge of Eurocentrism The Challenge of Eurocentrism: Global Perspectives, Policy, and Prospects Edited by Rajani Kannepalli Kanth (with the assistance of Amit Basole) THE CHALLENGE OF EUROCENTRISM: GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES, POLICY, AND PROSPECTS Copyright © Rajani Kannepalli Kanth, 2009. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-61227-3 All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-37705-3 ISBN 978-0-230-62089-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230620896 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rajani Kannepalli Kanth. The challenge of Eurocentrism : global perspectives, policy, and prospects / edited by Rajani Kannepalli Kanth. p. cm. 1. Eurocentrism. 2. Civilization, Modern—European influences. 3. Postcolonialism. I. Title. CB430.R27 2009 909.82—dc22 2008039126 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: May 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For my Daughters: Antara, Indrina, Malini, and Anjana— who will live, I hope, in the promise of a Polycentric, i.e., a De-centered World. CONTENTS List of Figures and Tables ix Foreword xi Acknowledgments xxi Rajani K. Kanth and Eurocentrism: A Critique xxiii Nick Hostettler Introduction Challenging Eurocentrism: 45 Theses 1 Rajani Kannepalli Kanth Part 1 Received Theory, Science, and Eurocentrism One Eurocentric Roots of the Clash of Civilizations: A Perspective from the History of Science 9 Arun Bala Two Mathematics and Eurocentrism 25 George Gheverghese Joseph Three Official Corruption and Poverty: A Challenge to the Eurocentric View 45 Ravi Batra Part 2 Perspectives on Africa, West, South, and East Asia Four Pan-African and Afro-Asian Alternatives [to] and Critiques [of Eurocentrism] 63 Mathew Forstater Five Economic Development and the Fabrication of the Middle East as a Eurocentric Project 77 Fırat Demir and Fadhel Kaboub Six The Phantom of Liberty: Mo(der)nism and Postcolonial Imaginations in India 97 Rajesh Bhattacharya and Amit Basole viii Contents Seven Eurocentrism, Modernity, and the Postcolonial Predicament in East Asia 121 Kho Tung-Yi Part 3 Perspectives on the West: Europe and the Americas Eight On Cultural Bondage: From Eurocentrism to Americocentrism 147 Ali A. Mazrui Nine American Exceptionalism and the Myth of the Frontiers 171 Rajiv Malhotra Ten What Have the Muslims Ever Done for Us? Islamic Origins of Western Civilization 217 John M. Hobson Part 4 Eurocentrism: Policy and Prospects Eleven Beyond Eurocentrism: The Next Frontier 239 Rajani Kannepalli Kanth Postface: Eurocentrism—Whither Now? 245 Rajani Kannepalli Kanth Contributors 249 Index 253 FIGURES AND TABLES Figures 2.1 The “Classical” Eurocentric Trajectory 31 2.2 The “Modified” Eurocentric Trajectory 31 2.3 An Alternative Trajectory for the Period from Eighth to Fifteenth Centuries 31 9.1 Stereotypes of Civilized and Savage Peoples 202 9.2 Encounters That Shaped National Character 206 Tables 3.1 World Oil Consumption and Price: 1983–2007 48 9.1 History of the Frontiers 209 FOREWORD The Seven Biases of Eurocentrism: A Diagnostic Introduction Ali A. Mazrui This volume originated as a Festschrift celebration of the Life and Work of Rajani Kannepalli Kanth, a Special Event held at the Chicago Meetings of the American Economic Association, in 2007. Many of the contributors at the event, other than George Joseph, Arun Bala, Ravi Batra, and Nick Hostettler, made presentations there that are edited and reproduced here. I consider the event a historic one that generated this book, and I would hope, the stimulus for the kind of fundamental rethinking that is essential for our troubled times. Eurocentrism in the study of world history rests on seven pillars. In other words, an approach to the study of world history may be described as “Eurocentric” if it betrays the following biases: The bias of Euro-heroism: This is a tendency toward giving dispropor- tionate attention to European and Western achievements in the arts, phi- losophy, science, technology, and governance. This includes European voyages of exploration and claims of how certain European adventur- ers “discovered” Victoria Falls or Mt. Kilimanjaro, or the source of the Nile—or whether Christopher Columbus discovered America. In the ancient world there was no such thing as Europe. Europe’s incorporation of Ancient Greece into its own body politic—and its hijacking of the achievements of Ancient Greece, Western and Northern Europe to define themselves to incorporate the miracles of Athens and Sparta. Since the end of the cold war there has also been Western triumphalism and claims about “the end of history” on the side of the West. The second bias is of Euro-mitigation: This is the tendency for some textbooks to underplay the sins perpetrated by Europeans and Westerners across the centuries. Thus, the story of the European settlement of the xii Ali A. Mazrui Americas is often told with little discussion about the huge human and cultural cost—the genocide perpetrated against Native Americans, the reckless destruction of such flourishing indigenous civilizations as that of the Incas, Aztecs and the last days of the Mayas. The Transatlantic slave trade was a traffic in humans that continued for several centuries. Yet some textbooks give it a brief mention and hurry up to deal with less guilt-ridden subjects. And very few text- books not written by Black authors discuss the Middle Passage—the cruel method of transporting slaves across the Atlantic that cost so many lives en route. There is also some Euro-mitigation in the portrayal of European empires in Africa and Asia. In earlier years European colonialism used to be portrayed as a civilizing force in Africa, Asia, and the non-Western world. Nowadays Western textbooks have got past that civilizing clap- trap. But the enormous damage which European colonialism has done to African societies is still grossly understated in books. Then there is the understating of the faults of individual Western heroes. The most eloquent voice on liberty in American constitutional history was Thomas Jefferson. Yet Jefferson owned 200 slaves. He also had an aesthetic theory about the link between pain and poetry. He argued that although Black people had suffered enough pain and anguish, Blacks were incapable of great poetry. And although Abraham Lincoln was antislavery, he was not pro-racial equality. Almost on the eve of the Civil War, he was assuring his audiences that his preferred world was not a world where Blacks voted, or served as jurors, or were allowed to marry whites. Far from it, Abraham Lincoln assured audiences, spicing his speech with anti- Black jokes. Also in the field of Euro-mitigation is the reluctance to discuss white racism in school textbooks. Sometimes books on world history ignore racism entirely as a force in modern history—except perhaps when dis- cussing the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews. Occasionally the case of apartheid in South Africa used to be recognized. More absent is the rel- evance of race in American society or in relations between Whites and Blacks worldwide in the past 400 years. The third bias of Eurocentrism is Euro-exclusivity. This is the tendency to give disproportionate space in textbooks to the Western side of world history—such as five chapters on the history of Europe through medi- eval times, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, as compared with the one chapter on India and China com- bined across two millennia. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has done splendid televi- sion work. With me as author and storyteller the BBC did a nine-hour series on Africa (The Africans: A Triple Heritage). With Akbar Ahmed, they did a six-hour television series on the Muslim world (Living Islam). But the same BBC is capable of producing twelve-hour television series on Foreword: Biases of Eurocentrism xiii Ireland alone, or a multi-episode television drama on The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Between Sins of Quality and Sins of Quantity The fourth, fifth, and sixth biases of Eurocentrism are about how Eurocentrism affects other cultures. First Eurocentrism shortchanges the achievements of other peoples and cultures. In discussing Ancient Greece there is little recognition of how much the Greeks might have owed to ancient Egyptians—a subject reactivated since the 1980s by the Cornell University professor, Martin Bernal, with his multivolume study Black Athena (Contrary to some assumptions, Martin Bernal is not a Black man; he is a White British Jew, originally a don at Cambridge University in England). His thesis is that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europeans rewrote the history of ancient Greece to deny its debt to ancient Egypt and the Phoenicians. Bernal argues that the reasons for this historical revi- sionism was Europe’s new racism against Blacks and Jews. A Eurocentric history of great philosophers may mention Aristotle but not Avicenna; such a history of great historians may mention Edward Gibbon and Arnold Toynbee but not Ibn Khaldun; a Eurocentric his- tory of letters may mention Milton and Wordsworth but not Iqbal and Rabandranath Tagore. Almost all Eurocentric histories of religion ignore entirely indigenous African traditional religions, although these beliefs and values continue to influence millions of people to the present day.
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