As a history enthusiast, there are two things that annoy me: inconsistency and recency bias. As a citizen of the United States, where interethnic interactions possibly hit their peak, there is another more specific thing that annoys me: bad interpretations of history as it pertains to Europe. Meanwhile, as a blogger, I have the platform to complain about that which annoys me!
So behold, and let your eyes feast upon this blog post and its loosely tied bundle of vague mini-rants.
Part One: Time
It is hard to conceptualize or even find a good comparison for the amount of suffering caused in the name of European (particularly western European) profits, settlement, and religion post-1500ish. The human toll of the trans-Atlantic slave trade is in the millions, while local populations were devastated in the western hemisphere through a combination of Eurasian disease and violent conflict. And that isn't even to mention later colonialism in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific and its accompanying merciless extractionism (and, of course, the environmental impacts of such extraction).*
We typically focus on the human impact of these events because there were huge numbers of people harmed as a result, and whose descendants today continue to face the repercussions. And that is perfectly fine! To me, experiences should be what we discuss first and foremost when it comes to history, because history in essence is just that: the experiences of humans over time, not about who won what war.
The problem is that we don't apply the same standard to the rest of history. While every American schoolchild can feel indignation and sadness after reading Olaudah Equiano's account of being enslaved and forcibly transported to America, the same wouldn't be true of, say, learning about the 400,000 who died building the Great Wall in Qin China, many of whom were probably just thrown into the wall if they died on the job. Or, alternatively, popular dialogue around World War I is (rightfully) about the conditions and horrors of the war, but the same isn't done for the conquests of Timur or the Yellow Turban Rebellion, despite those events also having huge death tolls and profoundly adverse impacts for the millions affected by them.
In general, for whatever reasons, we choose to consider the distant past in the abstract. Speaking from the perspective of a history student, I think this is very harmful, not because we are treating Europe's role in the past few centuries "unfairly" but because I think it creates a sense of inevitability of European subjugation of the world's peoples. Regardless of how much history you know, everyone knows that European nations, in the end, conquered and sometimes settled most areas of the world. Dwelling on human suffering because of European conquest, without doing the same for the rest of history, risks making that period of history the one people feel most emotionally connected to (i.e. the least abstract). But subjugation certainly isn't anything new, and by that standard European colonialism is (though more pronounced) not that different from other occurrences of subjugation throughout history. Putting European colonialism in context with the rest of world history is vital, and we simply don't get that with a hyperemphasis on colonial and post-colonial experiences.
*It's worth noting that other nations participated in this, too, specifically the US and Japan. I'm going to be simplifying the complexity quite a bit for this post after this asterisk, though, just so the footnotes don't become excessive (as history is quite good at saying "welllll, technically...").
Part 2: Bad History
There are two very frustrating camps of people**: those who underestimate Europe's role in history and those who overestimate it.
The latter is the colder of my two takes, so let me start with that one. Europe has undoubtedly played a massive role in scholarship and the pursuit of knowledge, from Greece and Rome to Italy, Britain, France, Russia, and more. But it also built on the work of many other civilizations***, many of which made significant advances centuries before Renaissance thinkers could do the same. There is probably also an observer bias/obscurity problem—as an example, I'd guess most people reading this post couldn't name many Chinese or Indian mathematicians who lived sometime between 1000 and 1700ish CE, despite A) both civilizations making well-known and substantial contributions to mathematics before and B) both civilizations doing pretty well during that time and inventing quite a deal of stuff. As it turns out, both were indeed making quite a deal of progress in math! It's just that it's not that well-known.
There’s the more cynical part of me that wants to point to the study of history being mostly conducted by Europeans and Euro-Americans in the last couple of centuries with . . . less objectivity, so you could obviously expect some biases there. And while that's definitely not the full story, it contributes a few chapters.
Outside of scholarship, though, European nations (or Europe as a region, if you'd like) were absolutely not the wealthiest or most influential for most of the past few thousand years. Those distinctions belong to India and China respectively.
On the other hand, Europe's academic and technological contributions are somewhat underrated as well. Entire fields of scholarship were invented by Europe, and much of our modern knowledge is mostly derived from or heavily influenced by European work. A present-day line of reasoning I encounter a lot is that a good deal of work traditionally credited to Europeans/Euro-Americans was figured out by non-Europeans/Euro-Americans who simply don’t get credit today because they lived as minorities and victims of othering and demeaning. This is certainly true in many cases (and in a similar sense for females), but not for the majority of accomplishments attributed to Europeans, which I don't think should be diminished simply because Europeans were oppressing much of the world at the time. That, to me, is just another form of historical revisionism.**** While it’s true that Europe had something of a monopoly on discovery because the rest of the world faced conditions that weren’t as conducive to research and ideation (for example, the short-term financial cost), and that having more things already known sometimes facilitated further development, it doesn’t seem right to undervalue European contributions for those reasons. The progress is undeniable, no matter how it was achieved.
**Actually, there are more than two types of annoying people, but let’s just go with it for the sake of preserving the cliché.
***The other interesting bit here is that the Renaissance, upon which much of European science was based, probably wouldn't have happened if Islamic scholars (who are ludicrously underappreciated for their own advances) hadn't preserved Greek and Roman texts.
****On a more general note, I think it’s disingenuous to cite evidence that we don’t actually know is there by saying, “Well, it’s probably there” and relying on theory to back us up. At best, it’s a somewhat-educated guess, and at worst, it’s pure conjecture. In this specific case, I definitely think it’s somewhere in between: I agree with the reasoning and the evidence of it happening, but don’t really believe it should be applied to the whole range.
Part 3: The Wrap-Up
I was going to do an elaborate transition into my conclusion, but then I just realized that I could create a new section and proclaim how I don’t feel like doing a transition, which has the added benefit of making me seem relatable to my audience.
So anyway! My thoughts on placing Europe in history are complicated, but I hope I made some sense in this blog post. Do you agree with me? Disagree? I’d love to hear what you think!
If there is one thing we can all agree on about Europe, though, it’s that this is a great song.
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