World Model of Colonizers: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric Historical View

Author: J.M. Blaut
Translator: Tan Ronggen
Country: United States
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-09-01
Features: The 19th century was the classic era of colonialism, during which Eurocentric expansionism took on the classic form I call. After the Napoleonic Wars, colonialism accelerated and intensified. Around 1810–1860, not only did it conquer most of Asia but also settle in most of North America, and began to penetrate Africa. From 1860 to the start of the World War, it occupied other regions in Asia and Africa. Colonialism made profits, accumulating capital in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, with wealth flowing from European settlements expanding dramatically. In the latter half of that period, the development of colonial agriculture outpaced industrial development. Other developments, such as the mining of non-precious metals, became important for the first time. There is deep disagreement about the impact of these changes on the evolution of European society and thought in that period. I will discuss this issue in Chapter 4, but here I will only note that the overall effect of European expansion is sufficient. These expansions were achieved through narrow colonialism, settlement, and the dominance of semicolonial economies. The depth of these changes was enough to create a large-scale intellectual model—the classic model of cultural expansionism. Around 1870, European thinkers reached a broad consensus on the fundamental nature and vitality of the world. Few doubted that biological and social evolution—progress—was a fundamental truth, although the process of evolution was often explained by religious or metaphysical methods rather than by natural laws, as in Darwin's theory. It seemed clear that Europeans were destined to experience frequent social evolution, part of God's and nature's plan for history. Some historians of thought used holism to explain this overall process, describing it as the transformation of society and the state; others used simplified methods (in a sense, psychological methods) to explain the process as the focus of intellect, the continuous progress of human reasoning, viewing capitalism, industry, and the like as products of the mind. However, many thinkers (including Herbert Spencer) did not see social and intellectual models as opposites but viewed progress as a flowing river, with the evolution of society and the mind following its course. For Europe and Europeans, of course, including Anglo-Americans, all this was clear. By the 1870s, the central proposition of cultural expansionism—that progress naturally and continuously occurs from within the European (or Western European) center—was firmly established in the minds of mainstream thinkers. Its truth was no longer seriously questioned by mainstream thinkers. The tropical climate theory mainly included three obvious theories. The first theory was that the hot, humid climate had a negative impact on the mind and body; the second theory was that the tropical climate was unfavorable to food production; the third theory was that tropical regions were prone to diseases. Until the mid-1940s, Europeans still held conflicting views on the efficiency of people working in humid tropical climates compared to other climates. Most believed that Africans could work under the scorching sun—this easily justified plantation slavery—but Europeans could not. Although some arguments for cultural expansionism were based on the idea that tropical climate conditions led to laziness and sluggishness, requiring remote control from temperate-climate civilizations. In the end, evidence from various sources, including sports research, showed that the human body of all peoples could work effectively in tropical or other climates, provided the body had enough time to adapt to the tropical climate conditions. Although some claimed that people in humid tropical regions could not think as well as those in temperate regions—“the tropical sun cooks the brain”—and that this theory was widely accepted by Europeans in the last century and woven into the famous theory of European cultural superiority (e.g., Huntington and Mackem), this theory was never supported by evidence in the first half of this century and is now widely rejected. Eric Jones is one of the few historians today who are unaware that this “climate energy” theory (as it was once called) has collapsed. Jones not only believed that this theory was valid but also considered it of considerable significance: civilizations rise and fall in latitudes with very high temperatures, while the further north one goes, the more civilizations rise. The explanation for this change provided in the literature is basically climatic factors (Gillfillan 1920; Lambert 1971). On the one hand, this theory links moderate climates to the production of human energy, and on the other hand, it claims that people living in tropical regions are affected by internal parasites, which prevent their societies from reaching a certain level and then stagnating. It should be noted that the literature does not provide evidence for any such arguments. Academic literature has directly rejected the “climate energy” theory, and this theory has not been seriously maintained since the 1950s. Climatological determinism as a whole has almost died, and there is no “migration” of ancient civilizations (ancient civilizations occurred between the equator and 45 degrees north) to the north. The idea that tropical regions are hindered by parasitic diseases, causing cultural stagnation, is false (we will address this slightly later). Jones's general idea that tropical climates “are not suitable for human requirements” is somewhat supported by academia, but this idea does not support the idea that the European climate led to the European miracle. The argument that moderate latitude climates are superior to tropical climates in terms of their psychological and physical effects on humans is completely baseless. In the 19th century, European scholars debated whether tropical climates were conducive to productivity. Some argued that tropical regions were rich in resources, but they did not use this proposition to demonstrate the huge potential for development there. Instead, they wanted to argue that the abundance of resources in tropical environments was too great, providing challenges like those Arnold Toynbee described, where human beings could no longer face challenges without colonial guidance, and therefore progress could not be achieved without colonialism. We will discuss this argument later in this chapter. What we want to discuss here is a completely opposite argument, which directly claims that tropical environments have very little potential for agricultural development, thus hindering the development of tropical regions. (“Tropical” or more accurately “humid tropical” refers to regions without a cold season, with moderate or abundant rainfall: approximately 750 millimeters of annual rainfall. Most of sub-Saharan Africa belongs to the humid tropical region, as do most of southern and southeastern Asia, and most of Central and South America.) According to this argument, the yield of food per unit area in tropical climates is very low. “Propositional activity” largely means logic. “Concrete (thinking)” is the way children think before logical thinking, and they cannot engage in abstract or theoretical thinking. Now Piaget is a great psychologist, but he does not and does not claim to have direct knowledge of the psychology of non-Europeans. His argument stems from the traditional dualistic development model, which equates children with primitives. (From an anthropological perspective, he was about 30 years behind.) However, many of his disciples tried to link their theories to modern chemical theories, studying this topic to see whether non-Western people (especially Africans) indeed have inferior cognitive abilities. If all these studies made a mistake and drew predetermined conclusions, this is not simplifying the issue. The methods they used to test cognitive abilities were the same as those Piaget used for European children, with little change. They applied these methods to African children and adults, and as expected, they found that these people did not possess the full cognitive abilities of adults. Thus, their mistake was clear. Today, most Piagetian psychologists no longer claim that non-Europeans have cognitive abilities like children. Along with the Piagetian studies of the 1960s and 1970s, there were many other studies by psychologists of other schools (such as Heinz Werner), who upheld the old theory of primitive minds as a fact. Psychologists in South Africa compared whites and blacks, while other Europeans studied other African populations. Several Israeli psychologists compared the cognitive abilities of Arabs and Jews. With few exceptions, European psychologists found that non-Europeans had cognitive defects, making them “traditional.” In almost all these studies, the tests used did not give “locals” any good chance, as these tests were European-style, conducted by Europeans, or conducted by European assistants in a Europeanized context. They made a well-known mistake, and the entire field of “cross-cultural psychology” gained a bad reputation—as a defender of ethnic centrism—until the 1980s, when they changed their research direction. The problem is that when most cross-cultural psychologists today superficially deny that non-Europeans are less rational than Europeans, their series of well-established publications are still used by others to argue the opposite. The theory of rationalism has a strong influence on the part of modern chemistry that is closely linked to—sociology and economics—especially those scholars who participated in formulating and implementing development policies for developing countries in the 1950s and 1960s. As we saw in the chapter, the ideas in this field are politically significant for modernization for three reasons: First and most fundamentally, it is necessary to make cultural expansionism effective. Second, in principle, the spread of new ideas and new technologies is cheaper than the development of large-scale capital and industries. Third, similarly, development at the level of ideas, research, publicity, and education does not pose a threat—it does not bring the danger of revolution and counter-revolution—the implicit effort to change the relationships between power groups, or land reform, and the like. For these reasons, scholars were encouraged, and in fact rewarded generously, so that their analyses of modernization mainly produced policies through intellectual influence. Malthus's theory dehumanized humanity. But even scholars who accepted Malthus's theory did not believe that the European family model drove away the disaster that Malthus described. The second method of applying the “unique European family” theory to the European miracle is to argue that the European family produced the unique enterprising spirit and actions of Europeans, which led to the miracle. This argument is often used in the form of Rostow's explanation: The European family system may be the source of a series of European characteristics, such as economic progress, possibly including invention. The European family system set conditions for all individuals to marry and have children, making saving and accumulation necessary. Thus, this family model led to the personality traits of the initial capitalists, and this played a role as early as the Middle Ages. This claim is equally unbelievable and does not correspond to the realities of life before 1492. Like MacFarlane and many others, Rostow made the false assumption that a typical medieval European family could actually save, hoard, accumulate, and the like. This argument requires that peasant families at that time must have had enough land, or at least a stable tenant farmer, to accumulate capital without being exploited to the point of exhaustion by their masters or landlords. There is much debate about the degree of land concentration in medieval Western Europe, but one thing is certain: the behavior described by Rostow could not have been widespread under slavery, nor could it have been widespread in places where farmers did not own land. This should be a rule, not an exception. This theory seems to be another telescoping of history. The enterprising freehold farmers of the 18th century are pushed back to the Middle Ages, with the result being presented as the cause.