The Bronze Age, writing, and the history of others
Many aspects of contemporary life clearly began in the Bronze Age. Writing, metals, urban society, ‘civilization', the religions of conversion, especially the monotheistic ones, and all that they implied.
But humankind had existed long before and it was both this long duree of oral cultures and the relatively rapid change with literacy that world history aims to emphasize. However, we do not see exchange, technology, or family life as beginning with our first records but in various ways as being developed at that time.Usually history takes a very egocentric view, as ‘We the people'. ‘Primitive history' is inevitably centred on one's own community and this is how it is still often taught in today's schools. That teaches of course about one's neighbours too, and what we know of the rest of the world has expanded with literacy and communication, especially in Europe's case with the Renaissance. But that was not just a western phenomenon. Others visited different societies. The Chinese too travelled, both by sea and by land. So too did the Indians and many other citizens of Bronze Age societies. As people and goods travelled, so too did knowledge of the world increase, especially with writing. However, that knowledge was often interpreted in terms of a society's view of others as inferior, even barbarous. And this was especially the case when reinforced by a conviction of religious superiority of the monotheistic variety.
So the major challenge in world history is not simply one of extending the scope from the national to the world, or at least to Eurasia if one is confining ‘history' to written cultures; pre-Columbian America had some writing but it was hardly a full written culture in the Near Eastern sense, after, say, 2000 bce. This extension itself took several forms. In simple societies there was the acknowledgement of neighbours.
But with writing there was an elementary ‘comparative history' that included accounts of other written cultures; in Europe this might just include Egypt and Rome. Any such effort was greatly helped by comprehensive studies like that of Needham[362] on Chinese science and in a very different way (and for nonliterate societies) in compilations by the west in Africa and elsewhere. These were continental or regional but collected together knowledge that could then be used more widely.The most severe challenge to Eurocentrism came from the other fully literate societies of China and India, and to some extent from the Near East. Needham's magnificent series on Chinese science and civilization has made it inexcusable for any English-speaking scholar to ignore their contribution to that field. The contributions of India and the Near East are more piecemeal, less easy to discover, and even many of the best-intentioned Europeans still view these cultures as giving little to modernity.
World history, like anthropology, may serve to make us less ethnocentric, or at least Eurocentric. It is of course hardly surprising that students of literature, studying what has been written in their own language, should consider Shakespeare, Goethe, or Moliere, as sans pareil, without compare. The same is often initially true of English, German, or French history, but there is less excuse for this. Comparative literature may be difficult for most to study, since it involves many languages. But world history can be done in one's own tongue, though many documents may have to be translated. But that process is less sensitive than with literature and the task of providing a comprehensive summary is less problematic, so a wider, or even world, perspective can be achieved without too much difficulty, modifying in some measure the ethnocentric bias resulting from our egocentric view of the world as well as from early instruction in schools and colleges in ‘national' history, even more critical for every new nation.
This is a perspective that both fields must undertake if they are to be considered in any way ‘scientific' and not simply celebratory.In world history it is not simply a matter of extending the range but of rebalancing the comparison so that it questions the view that no one except Western Europe could develop ‘capitalism' or ‘modernization'. Today such a confining idea is immediately refuted by developments in China and India, which are not just a matter of copying those of the west but of building on what these societies had themselves produced by way of a written, exchange economy with elaborate forms of knowledge and a technology that included cast iron and high-fired porcelain in China, cotton cloth and crucible iron in India, quite apart from the purely tropical products, the citrus fruit in China and the spices in India. As in the west, development occurred not in one society but often by a process of alternation. I myself was much struck by the fact that until the Italian Renaissance, as Needham claimed, science was more advanced in the east than in the west, and that China, India, and the Near East were in many ways more advanced than the west until relatively recently, well after the adoption of Arabic (that is, Indian) numerals to replace the more cumbrous Roman kind. Of course, world history does not always avoid Eurocentrism but it is an essential preliminary. Both Marx and Weber in different ways included the whole of Eurasia in their sights. Nevertheless, their reconstruction of the past was essentially Eurocentric in that they gave Europe, and indeed England, the credit for having invented the modern world order, that of ‘capitalism'.
One virtue of anthropology for world history is that it considers preliterate societies not simply in a mass as ‘primitive', waiting for the advent of civilization (usually from Europe) that they were unable to achieve themselves. Rather it considers oral culture not only in its own right but also as part of the journey to a more complex mode of existence.
It is this journey that archaeology tries to trace and which has culminated in attempts such as that of Eric Wolf to write the story of Europe and the People without History,[363] the story, that is, of the rest of the world. Wolf and other more recent scholars have set aside the dependency model, which viewed all other societies as dependent on western capitalism, and instead see western primacy as essentially contextual and alternating. Take the Near East. In the fourth or third millennium bce this area saw the birth of ‘civilization', which included the metal age and the birth of written culture, with its complex forms of exchange and of accounts. Accounting certainly did not begin with the double-entry of Weber's Protestants nor even with Marx's capitalism, nor yet with the Italian Renaissance. It is of course the case that the Near East did not seem to develop a complex industrial economy in the manner of nineteenth-century Europe, to which it had earlier exported ‘urban society'. But then it did not have the supply of metals, of wood and coal, and of water, nor did it have any longer such a central place in the growing system of international exchange. The ideology and the desire were there, the resources were not. While later differences, although not irrelevant, were marginal, the important factor is that from the perspective of the written cultures of Eurasia, all civilizations of the cultures of cities derive, as Childe and other archaeologists have maintained, from a common origin in the Bronze Age of the Ancient Near East.Comparative history is not only about the history of these written societies, much less of ‘modern' ones. If it dwells only on those, it will concentrate upon differences in the Industrial Age for example, without getting to grips with the commonalities in earlier societies, especially in written ones. That latter procedure would tend to emphasize the common factors, in those in the east and the west, instead of searching for differences, as Malthus and many others have done.
They existed, of course, but not in the way that western history has maintained. Only a world historical approach enables us to see these later divergences in a proper context, and how these have proved temporary especially with the ‘emergence' of China and India as great manufacturing powers. The usual western account sees this emergence as being the result of the migration of ‘capitalism'. This account is to give a much too limited interpretation of that concept and to disregard the fact that China was the greatest exporter of manufactured products until the end of the eighteenth century, and that India too was an exporter of steel in the Roman period as well as of painted cottons over a long period. To dismiss these nations as ‘peripheral' in relation to a western ‘core' is a peculiarly ethnocentric view based on the strictly temporary superiority of the latter's methods in the late eighteenth century, a view that tends to regard that particular situation as permanent and as connected with ethnicity rather than circumstance. But it clearly was not, neither in production nor in ‘knowledge'. Needham has demonstrated the great achievements of Chinese science before the Renaissance while Indian mathematicians used more convenient ‘Arabic' numerals to produce complex questions and answers in the intellectual field. The situation was not improved by those who assumed that Europe was unique in evolving a shift either to financial capitalism or to a world system. It was clearly unique in the sense that all historical situations are and in the advances it made in the Industrial Revolution but not in the assumption that there was a unique change of system. That would be to ignore the alternation, or rather the ‘spiralling', that took place in the history of all written societies. Those societies were metal-using and both this and the writing represented points on the road to modernization rather than a shift to a completely different ‘mode of production' such as ‘capitalism'.That again was a particularly western conception that excluded a consideration of the achievements of the east in an unacceptable way. There were as many ‘shoots of capitalism' there as in the west; and some aspects of that ‘system' (which has been called that of ‘petty capitalism') were first manifested in the exchange economy of the Near East involving the written transactions that eventually led to double-entry book-keeping. Of this Max Weber wanted to make a special case as representing a form of rationality that only the west possessed (or perhaps developed, though it seemed to imply we are born with this as an ‘ethnic' characteristic).[364] Many of the arguments of both west and east have assumed this permanent character, and indeed the very concept of culture in an anthropological context has something about it of this kind. Culture in Ruth Benedict's sense is certainly something you learn but often it is seen in a static rather than a dynamic way to indicate what are considered to be permanent features of a group, so that the ethic is not simply Protestant in a historical sense but an attitude that we acquire at birth.[365] In fact the Chinese also developed that form of bookkeeping as well as philosophical rationality.