A Hypothesis About the Nature of an Archaic Society

Abstract

S INCE the early days of recorded history, European man has come into contact with peoples to whom he was greatly superior in his ability to control his environment. Such contacts led to conquests or other forms of overlordship, temporary or lasting. Relations between the strong and the weak, be it individuals or groups, always have two aspects-that of leadership, fundamentally protective, and that of dominance, fundamentally abusive and exploitative. The two aspects appear in different ratios in individual cases, ranging from the extreme of a purely protective leadership relationship as in the normal case of parenthood, to the opposite extreme in which the weak one is used merely as a means to the ends of his master. There is often a considerable difference of opinion as to where a specific case is located in the spectrum, and the very same hierarchical order is described as a leadership relationship by some and as exploitative dominance by others. European colonialism in non-European continents was for a long time seen by most Europeans as legitimate by virtue of an all-embracing superiority which they took for granted, and as ultimately beneficial for the conquered, too. But around the turn of the last century, a new climate developed gradually among European and American intellectuals and colonialism came to be seen in a new light. On the one hand, a new relativism saw European nations and their colonial dependents no longer as occupying different stages of development but rather as representative of different cultures, different solutions to the problems of living, fundamentally of equal value or, as Ranke might have put it, equidistant to God. On the other hand, the relationship between the dominant European and the dependent Asian and African peoples was seen as exploitation and the backwardness of the colonial lands was attributed to European domination. A more radical version of anticolonialism, propagated by the political left, went further and attributed to exploitation by European imperialism not only Asian, African, and Latin American poverty