Jared Diamond argued in Guns, Germs and Steel that it was to do with geography and biodiversity; David Landes, in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, that it was all about culture and values. Now, reports Adam Kirsch in the New York Sun, a new book – After Tamerlane, by John Darwin – sets out a more ambiguous case:
Mr. Darwin wants to show that Europe’s hegemony, which began in the late 18th century and crumbled after World War II, was the result of a contingent historical process, not the manifestation of some superior essence. Invoking Edward Said, Mr. Darwin attacks the “orientalist” assumptions behind Western historiography. “The European path to the modern world should no longer be treated as natural or ‘normal,’ the standard against which historical change in other parts of the world should always be measured,” he writes. “Europeans had forged their own kind of modernity, but there were other modernities — indeed, many modernities.”
Yet reading “After Tamerlane,” with its panoramic yet fine-grained view of six centuries of world history, it is by no means clear that Mr. Darwin has achieved his revisionist purpose. The clearest lesson of “After Tamerlane,” in fact, is that there were not “other modernities,” equally valid competitors with the West’s, which might have resulted in a different, more equal distribution of global power. On the contrary, it is precisely because modernity was Western — because it came flying the flag of England or France or America or Germany or even Russia — that it was so challenging and unsettling to the rest of the world. Non-Western civilizations were never at leisure to formulate their own visions of modernity, because they were desperately trying to stay afloat in the whirlpool caused by the West’s rapid progress. As even Mr. Darwin writes, “Being modern was not an absolute state, but a comparative one,” and it was Europe that always offered the term of comparison.
For Darwin, Kirsch says, history is all about empires. “Our current assumption that empires are “abnormal,” Mr. Darwin writes — that only the nation-state is a really valid form of government — must be discarded if we are to understand the history of Europe and Asia.”
Crucially, Mr. Darwin helps us to see European expansion as a dynamic system, in which commerce, politics, and culture reinforced one another. Non-Western empires were faced with an impossible dilemma. To join the modern world system meant ceding political autonomy to Europe, accepting a subsidiary place in the global economy, and jeopardizing local structures of authority and belief. On the other hand, refusing to join meant facing financial coercion or armed force from the European powers. Over the 19th century, the British in particular managed to strongarm their way into positions of dominance around the world, whether as outright colonial sovereigns, as in Africa and India; de facto rulers, as in Egypt, or bullying profiteers, as in China. Attempts to resist were met with concentrated fury: When the Islamic “Mahdist” movement rebelled against British rule in Egypt, in the 1880s, the British commander Lord Kitchener not only crushed the rebels, he disinterred their leader’s corpse and threw it into the Nile. “A word from Queen Victoria,” Mr. Darwin writes, “was needed to stop him using … the skull as an ashtray.”
So what brought Europe’s imperial hegemony to an end? For Darwin, the answer in a word is: disunity.
“The most vital prop of Europe’s primacy in Eurasia,” Mr. Darwin argues, “had been [the European powers’] determination not to fight each other.” When that determination failed, so too did the financial and cultural premises of European imperialism. In telling the story of the last 50 years, Mr. Darwin is on more familiar ground, and his analysis of the Cold War is fairly conventional. He ends “After Tamerlane” on a cautious note: Despite the current unipolarity of American power, he writes, history demonstrates “Eurasia’s resistance to a uniform system, a single great ruler, or one set of rules.” This final judgment — so general as to be a truism, yet fruitful as a reminder of the diversity of history — reflects both the strengths and the weaknesses of Mr. Darwin’s book.
