The ‘simple' and the ‘complex'
Setting a boundary between ‘simple' and ‘complex' was complicated. In the nineteenth century, Europeans produced various schema based on different things: the Three Ages of Man concept used the dominant material (stone, bronze, iron); Marx used modes of production; Weber used intellectual orientation and the ‘Protestant ethic'; and others family and marriage, or political systems.
In all of these, the notion was that European institutions were always the most advanced of all, thus justifying colonialism. Neither the Weberian nor the Marxist theses stand up to the test of comparative history, though they both bring the whole of Eurasia into their account. They both see ‘capitalism' or ‘true capitalism' as a European development, neglecting in my view the growth of exchange, manufacture, and accounting in the east and the Near East, which had first seen the development of written societies.After querying the implications of the Eurocentric argument about the uniqueness of the Greek alphabet, a uniqueness that had been essential to the earlier discussions of Watt and myself[357] about the transformative role of (western) writing and modes of communication more generally, the view of most historians and sociologists, I drew the line in a different place, not between the modern and the traditional so much as between the literate and the ‘oral'. This recognized the concrete fact of differences, but the emphasis on communication set aside the simple/complex division that had turned around the nineteenth-century obsession about ‘the invention of capitalism' (‘modernity') in Europe and the whole concern with the ‘Uniqueness of the West'. It also recognized that literacy was not simply an aspect of an inherited ‘culture' but could be acquired by others, and that the mass introduction of schools, then taking place on a worldwide scale, thanks to UNESCO and to colonial and newly independent regimes, could revolutionize the transmission of knowledge, as had happened in many parts of the world in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Once that discussion had been set aside, the whole rationale for the special analytic category of ‘simple' societies was fatally weakened, and Eurasia, with its written history, could then be considered as a whole analytically, making ‘world history', or at least Eurasian history of the written variety, more manageable. ‘History' now included the story of all the major societies with writing (leaving aside ‘history' in the wider sense of a study of the past).