11 - Last words

Summary

In this book I have been concerned with the way that Europe has stolen the history of the East by imposing its own versions of time (largely Christian) and of space on the rest of the Eurasian world. We can perhaps claim that a world history demands a single reckoning of time and space which Europe has provided. But my special problem has been with the attempts at periodization that historians have made, dividing historical time into Antiquity, Feudalism, the Renaissance followed by Capitalism; this development is seen as leading from one to the other in a unique transformation until the dominance of the known world by Europe in the nineteenth century, following the Industrial Revolution that is considered to have begun in England. Here the question of imposing concepts has very different, teleological, implications.

Colonial or world domination in any form carries a considerable danger as well as possible benefits for intellectual work, not so much in the sciences as in the humanities where the ‘truth’ criteria are less clear-cut. In the present case the west assumes a superiority (which it has obviously displayed in some spheres since the nineteenth century) and projects that superiority back in time, creating a teleological history. The problem for the rest of the world is that such beliefs are used to justify the way ‘others’ are treated, since those others are often seen as static, as being unable to change themselves, certainly without help from outside.