Letters

Abstract

50 Historically Speaking March/April 2008 Letters Rethinking the West To the Editors: I have read with some bewilderment the debate between John M. Headley and Professors Constantin Fasolt, John Hobson, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam in your issue of November /December last. They appear to be discussing diree distinguishable questions: 1.Whether Western civilization is a good tiling or a bad? 2.Whether Western civilization exists in a history that can be recounted without merging it with die histories of other civilizations? 3.Whether the claim, made in the 18thcentury West, to have established rights and values applicable to all humans has equivalents in the intellectual and moral histories of other civilizations? The first question appears entirely futile; the second only a litde less so. I would really like to hear some answers to the third. Yours in some irritation, J.G.A. Pocock Johns Hopkins University To the Editors: I am quite disturbed by the debate over John Headley's essay "Western Exceptionalism and Universality Revisited" in the November/December 2007 issue. Headley himself engages in intemperate accusations—I know no reputable Ottoman, Chinese , or world historians who would relegate Western civilization to "a great black pit . . . chained in Danteesque feasting upon its own evil being" (although some historians of Africa and Native-American peoples might indeed wish this in return for what imperialism visited on those regions). Still, the responses to Headley's claims that the West is unique in advocating universal values are not always helpful. Sanjay Subrahmanyam is quite right that Headley's accounts of Islam and India, mentioning only one individual per civilisation (Akbar, Mencius) do not provide sound contrasts. Constantin Fasolt cleverly takes apart the oxymoron of "exceptional Western universalism." AndJohn Hobson correctly points out that Europe was not so isolated or exceptional as Headley would have us believe. Yet all of these replies seem engaged in a kind of oneupmanship (which Headley's essay admittedly beChinese royal court scene, from Martino Martini, De bello tartárico historia (1655). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. gins), an odd quarrel over priorities, exceptionalism, and who did what when. Yet surely the point of the new world history is not merely to replace the old claims of Western civilizational superiority with a list of "firsts" or "equal points" by non-Western societies. Rather, the point is to better understand how interactions among all the major societies of the globe contributed to making the world we inhabit today. Each society was unique in its own ways, and made essential contributions to science, government, law, economics, and philosophy. The old "Western civ" approach tended to treat only the contributions of the West, starting widi classical Greece, as having lasting value, while the contributions of non-Western peoples were seen as emanations or accidents that only achieved real importance in Western hands. Thus Bacon's famous saying that three critical inventions changed the world—printing, the compass, gunpowder—used to be transmitted to students without noting not only that all three were invented by China centuries before their use in Europe, but also that the very saying itself was borrowed from China's traditional catalogue of the four great inventions: printing, paper, gunpowder, and the compass. The new world history seeks more accurately to show how the modern age arose from a mix of major accomplishments in varied times in varied societies , a mix in which the West played a very modest role until 1700 or so. If we are to understand the truth about the Renaissance—that it was not merely a revival of learning based on "lost" classical texts, but was in fact the result of Europe's encounter with a very active and creative tradition of Muslim scholarship combining Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Arabic insights, which was a consequence of the Spanish Reconquista, the Crusades, and the decline of Byzantium—then it is necessary for history texts to spend rather more time on Byzantium, Muslim societies and learning, and the political and economic histories of places from Morocco to Japan. If that means less emphasis on the Renaissance itself, then that is the price of broadening historical understanding. It is not an attack on the...