11 - 17 January 2001
Issue No.516
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 11 - 17 January 2001 Issue No.516 |
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Grounds for comparison
Beyond Eurocentrism: A New View of Modern World History, Peter Gran, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2000. pp440
When Peter Gran published Islamic Roots of Capitalism. Egypt, 1760-1840 over 20 years ago, it caused something of a minor revolution among scholars interested in the historical evolution of the non-Western world. Gran's thesis -- that a capitalist take-off had been underway in Egypt of the late 18th century, and was aborted only by subsequent developments -- was hailed as "challenging the ethnocentric notion that modernist thought and a capitalist economy could only be transferred to the peripheral states through direct contact with the European centre."
This idea ran counter to both the neo-liberal assertion that modernity was exclusively European, and could not be transferred outside "the West" because of various cultural, economic, social or political impediments, and the developmentalist school of thought that held that non-Europe had been the passive subject of a process of underdevelopment produced by colonial occupation and/or imperialist exploitation.
In Egypt itself, Islamic Roots of Capitalism was not received with as much fanfare as could have been the case, until its relatively recent translation into Arabic. Since then, it has served to inspire the new generation of historians, most of whose work entails extensive examination of the vast archival material created by the Ottoman administration of Egypt. This attention has been channeled in two main directions, which do not always remain discrete: some Ottomanists seized upon it as "proof" that "Islamic society" was and is eminently adapted to capitalist development (a reading that makes Gran himself somewhat uneasy), while others interpreted it as an indication of Egypt's national cultural specificity. More generally, however, as noted in the introduction to the "Encounter with Peter Gran" published by the CEDEJ in a special issue of Egypte/Monde arabe (no 1/1999) devoted to the bicentenary of the French Expedition, the work aroused almost alarmingly intense controversy among both established and emerging generations of scholars interested in Ottoman Egypt
No one, however, foresaw the ways in which Gran himself would develop and apply his ideas -- and this is where Beyond Eurocentrism comes in. Islamic Roots, in fact, may be read as a pre-emptive application of the thesis of Beyond Eurocentrism to the Egyptian case, especially since the second book does not discuss Egypt explicitly as a case study (for this we must return to AUC Press's 1999 paperback re-edition of Islamic Roots for a discussion linking the older material with the idea of Egypt as an "Italian road" country). This last fact has meant that Beyond Eurocentrism found a far narrower audience in this country, since the historians who were so captivated by Islamic Roots, and the potential urgency and immediacy of its argument, find less to interest them in a study of Russia, Iraq, Italy, India, Mexico, Belgian Congo/Zaire, Great Britain and the US.
This, however, is exactly the reason for which Gran seems to have written Beyond Eurocentrism -- "a book that shakes up categories," in Immanuel Wallerstein's words, and "a work of revisionist scholarship," as Gran himself describes it: as an assault on the narrow, artificial and often absurd barriers academic and political thought imposes on the world it seeks to apprehend.
Beyond Eurocentrism is a bid to break free from the confines of world history as it has been practiced heretofore -- "in terms of elites, mainly Western elites" -- and bring the "newer logic of social history," seen as the history of the majority, to the field.
This task is not as easy as it may seem at first. Past attempts to study the global majority in any coherent manner have sometimes characterised the Third World and its populations as peripheral (to set them in opposition to the "core"); yet, as Gran asks rhetorically, how much sense does it make to characterise the vast majority of the world's population as peripheral? More relevant to the present conjuncture, perhaps, are the more recent efforts to study world history in terms of the globalisation of capital; again, Gran notes, since "most of the world's population is only involved in capitalism to a limited degree[,] world history cannot be based solely on world capitalism and/or claims about its globalism."
This statement, however, should not be read as signifying that it is capitalism that is peripheral or insignificant; rather, Gran seeks to shift the focus somewhat and capture the commonalties and divergences created by class oppression, as well as the multiple, shifting forms of hegemony and resistance -- perhaps "hegemonies" and "resistances" would be more appropriate -- within and between the countries he has chosen to study. Sown in the interstices of this Gramscian analysis are the seeds of an argument with even more subversive potential, at least as far as historians are concerned: that is, the idea that "writing history in a particular form, for example, as a narrative" is the main cause of a conceptual distinction between Europe and non-Europe that has become so ingrained in our way of thinking as to appear entirely natural. This suggestion converges with some implications of the work of both Foucault and Said: the first because he linked "narrativity with a presumption of centralized power," the second because he puts forth the idea that, "for 'Europe' to survive... it has to create a 'non-Europe'... and it has to destroy alternative concepts of the world."
By positing "Europe" as "homogeneously bourgeois democracy," the argument continues, Europeans believe that they are so alike as to be protected from each other. This, according to Gran, breeds a "false sense of security" (the precarity of which was demonstrated, for instance, in Yugoslavia beginning in 1992) and, on the other hand, entails the continuing exclusion of any elements that do not conform to this totalitarian definition -- such as southern Italy, which, once decontextualised, can be exploited with greater ease.
At no point is it clear, however, why it is precisely the southern regions (in Italy, France, or Egypt, for that matter -- as well as "the South" on a global scale) that are so often the targets of exploitation and the fertile breeding ground of its too-easily recognisable emblems. Why, in other words, is the south the South? Perhaps it is too ambitious to expect an answer to that question.
In Beyond Eurocentrism as in Islamic Roots, at any rate, one finds the key to Gran's argument, which could be both its greatest weakness and its most certain strength. In Islamic Roots, it is presented as the notion of the Industrial Revolution as a "universal watershed," in the author's words, occurring around 1750, and as a phenomenon linked, in a country such as Egypt, like elsewhere, with "an intellectual trend one could qualify as 'modern' in the sense that it marks the transition to modern culture through its resolve to strike a balance between faith and reason." It may be equally important to ask why the industrial revolution should be viewed as a watershed, in Egypt or anywhere else, and why striking a balance between faith and reason should be seen as a hallmark of modernity. It could be equally fruitful to question the industrialisation and modernity of Europe (and the West), rather than searching for their signs elsewhere.
At a time when historians of Europe are beginning to argue that the industrial revolution was in fact far less monolithic, and far more haphazard and piece-meal, than was hitherto assumed, combining as it did pre-industrial forms of capital investment or labour organisation with models more readily associated with "modern" (as in more recent) times, it may be interesting indeed to seek differences and similarities across borders, as Gran advocates -- as long as we are prepared to find them in entirely unexpected places.
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