Regional comparison
The regional interest among anthropologists had led to collections such as African Political Systems[358] edited by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard and African Systems of Kinship and Marriage[359] edited by Radcliffe-Brown and Forde, which were not simply aggregates of individual accounts, unlike many historical anthologies, but which comprised a ‘theoretical' introduction discussing some general features of the regional societies and therefore acting in a preliminary way as a tool towards the story of the whole world, even if denying that intention.
This attempt at the unified treatment of Africa drew some scholars to broader questions as it called attention to their general features, and led to comparisons with areas outside of Africa, such as studies of the difference between (and implications of) bridewealth in Africa on the one hand, and dowry transactions in Eurasia on the other. This realization cut the cake in a different way. World history was not just a matter of taking into account the east, as Marx and Weber had in fact done, but re-evaluating the whole boundary drawn between the modern west and the more traditional (and primitive) east, and in re-equilibrating the supposed imbalance between the two. Taking the world into account was not itself enough, unless one balanced the assumed disparity, which world events were now contradicting every day.The similarities within Eurasia and Africa themselves were important; anthropologists usually stress the particular features of the culture in which they worked, as do the people themselves, disregarding the many similarities between them and their neighbours. This realization of similar features led me to contrast the structures of Africa and Europe in terms of the development of advanced Bronze Age societies (with their technologies of metal, urbanization, and cultures of a written kind) and to see them as related to the structures of family (or kinship for anthropologists).
For example, in Eurasia there was much more similarity between the east and west in this sphere than most had argued for, especially Malthus and those many historians (and anthropologists) who followed him in relating Western European achievement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to supposed differences in family structure, a difference that has been set aside not only by the work with Tambiah[360] but more importantly by that of Lee and Feng,[361] who rejected the arguments that had sprung out of the undoubted dominance of Western Europe in many spheres at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Our understanding was based on quite another interpretation of the history, if not of the world, at least on a new rebalancing of the Old World and its literate civilizations. That can be seen not only by a broader history than European scholars (or others) have normally undertaken, but by going back not to supposedly significant differences between east and west, accounting for what we can now see in some respects as a temporary state of affairs instead of appealing to ‘essentialist' factors of a more permanent ‘ethnic' kind, but by going back to common origins.The attempts to explain ‘capitalism' as a western phenomenon, by nineteenth-century westerners themselves, suffer from myopia, that is, not looking widely enough but also not going back deeply enough in time to see the many connections between the written cultures of Eurasia in the Bronze Age that derived from a common origin in the Ancient Near East - a common origin that produced great cultural differences but stressed the shared commonalities in this period of the written word and of the metal age. Only a reshaped world history can do this justice. Reshaped it has to be because most previous attempts in Eurasia were too strongly influenced by their origins as in the case of Rashid al-Din's Islamic attempt, in the more restricted version of Chinese scholars, or especially in the work of many westerners in the nineteenth century.
Clearly these written cultures had to ‘place' themselves in the known world, as did all those elsewhere. And each did so in an ethnocentric way that was often heavily influenced by the prevailing religion. But it is the job of scholarship to check or modify such widespread distortion, not to build on it and to assume a quasi-permanent superiority, as Western Europe (and others) did in the nineteenth century, translating temporary advantage into a long-term ‘ethnic' or even ‘racial' superiority.Taking a wider view, we can see such advantage or superiority as a matter of alternation, as part of un histoire pendulaire, but such a perspective comes up against egocentric prejudice, which is partly why ‘world history' meets with much resistance. The egocentric or even national point of view is one taught in every school and is ‘natural' to us all, but it is one that has to be eradicated or at least greatly modified if one is to understand the history of the world, or even that of one's own country in this mondial age.