‘Been there, done that …’

Abstract

The familiar phrase in my title is usually understood as indicating that one has already experienced the topic under discussion and become bored with it. Here it flags the view, first, that all portions of humanity go through essentially the same historical stages that can be identified in the history of the West, and thus that, whatever our non-Western contemporaries may now be experiencing, the West has already ‘been there, done that’. This view also underlies the patronizing assumption that many in the non-Western world belong in the past of the Western present, that they are likely to have a poor understanding of their own pasts, which are merely truncated or incomplete forms of the past of the West itself. This destructive view, which is commonly, but not always, associated with a sense of Western superiority, is one of the foundations of modern Western cosmopolitanism. In this paper, I take the destructiveness of this view as a given and aim, rather, to explore its origins. I suggest that the most important of these are to be found in the early history of European imperialism.

Notes

1. F von Schiller [1789], ‘The Nature and Value of Universal History’, History and Theory 11(3), 1972, pp 321–334.

2. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

3. James Chandler, England in 1819. The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998; Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

4. Schiller, ‘Universal History’, p 322.

5. Schiller, ‘Universal History’, p 325

6. Edmund Burke, Letter to William Robertson, 9 June 1777, in Correspondence, T W Copeland (ed), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958–1978.

7. N Inayatullah and D L Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference, London and New York: Routledge, 2004; Eric R Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982.

8. Lewis H Morgan, Ancient Society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964.

9. Claude Meillasoux, Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Community, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981; Emanuel Terray, Marxism and ‘Primitive' Societies: Two Studies, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972; Harold Wolpe, The Articulation of Modes of Production: Essays from Economy and Society, London: Routledge, 1980.

10. Schiller, ‘Universal History’, pp 325–326.

11. Friedrich von Schiller, ‘On Naive and Sentimental Poetry’ [1795], in H B Nisbet (ed), German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

12. Schiller, ‘On Naive and Sentimental Poetry’, p 194.

13. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984; Robert Cooper, The Post-Modern State and the World Order, London: Demos, 1996.

14. Susan Rose-Ackerman, Corruption and Government: Causes, Consequences and Reform, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p 5.

15. Fabian, Time and the Other.

16. Edward W Said, Orientalism, London: Penguin, 1985. The appearance of this book is often seen as marking the origin of modern postcolonialism, which addresses issues of the temporalizing of difference, alternative modernities and the colonial ‘not yet’. See especially, Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996; and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

17. Said, Orientalism, p 1.

18. The discussion here and in the following paragraphs draws on my ‘Uneven Development in the Moment of Theory’, Postcolonial Studies 10(1), 2007, pp 39–56.

19. Chandler, England, p 100.

20. Chandler's argument implies that a contextualizing historiography was a novelty in late eighteenth-/early nineteenth-century Europe. Others have argued, in contrast, that it appears rather earlier, in the protestant histories of heresy that emerged from a rejection of the scholastic assimilation of theology with Greek philosophy, and, in Britain, in the work of Hume and Gibbon. See especially, Ian Hunter, ‘The History of Philosophy and the Persona of the Philosopher’, Modern Intellectual History, 4(3), 2007, pp 571–600; John Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Vol Two: Narratives of Civil Government, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

21. Chandler, England, p 128.

22. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.

23. Chandler, England, p 155.

24. Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History, p 166.

25. Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

26. Aristotle, The Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 1253a1, 2–5.

27. Margaret Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964.

28. François Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus. The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988.

29. Richard Waswo, The Founding Legend of Western Civilization: From Virgil to Vietnam, Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1997.

30. Even if we accept my earlier suggestion that the origins of contextualizing historiography are to be found in protestant anti-metaphysical histories of heresy, the emergence of the temporalizing of difference should still be seen as a separate development.

31. Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

32. Fasolt, Limits of History, p 7. Fasolt's polemic neglects the anti-metaphysical thrust of the histories of heresy which, as I noted earlier, created a space for a kind of contextualist history and also for the contextualist narratives of civil government developed by Hume and Gibbon.

33. Max Weber's fable of the rationalization of the West (in his introduction to his studies of the world religions published in English as the introduction to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Talcott Parsons (ed), London: Allen & Unwin, 1930) can be seen as a late expression of this view.

34. A Anghie, ‘Francisco de Vitoria and the Colonial Origins of International Law’, Social and Legal Studies 5(3), 1996, pp 321–336. This treatment of Vitoria's De Indis as the origins of international law is dismissed as anachronistic by Pagden, who favours the conventional view that its origins lie in the natural law theories of Grotius, Pufendorf and Sdelden, in his Introduction to Vitoria's Political Writings, Anthony Pagden & Jeremy Lawrence (eds), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p xvi, but see David Armitage's ‘Introduction’ to Grotius’ The Free Sea, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004, p xv.

35. Beate Jahn, The Cultural Construction of International Relations. The Invention of the State of Nature, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000, p 35.

36. Mathew Goodrum, ‘Biblical Anthropology and the Idea of Human Prehistory in Late Antiquity’, History and Anthropology 13(2), 2002, pp 69–78.

37. I leave open the question of whether one can sensibly talk of the world-view of medieval Europe. For a powerful negative answer see ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

38. Jahn, The Cultural Construction of International Relations.

39. Wolfgang Haase, ‘America and the Classical Tradition’, in W Haase and M Reinhold (eds), The Classical Tradition and the Americas, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1993, pp v–xxxiii.

40. Richard Waswo's The Founding Legend of Western Civilization argues that the legend of the foundation of Rome by refugees from Troy, as retailed by Virgil and many later commentators, provided Western civilization with ways of thinking about relations between Western and non-Western peoples which have been re-enacted many times in the history of Western imperialism: for example, the view that civilization is always brought to people from somewhere else and that it will often be resisted; and the identification of civilization with agriculture and the cities that depend upon it and of savagery with the forest.

41. Michael T Ryan, ‘Assimilating New Worlds in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, 1981, p 537.

42. Peter Mason, ‘Classical Ethnography and Its Influence on the European Perception of the Peoples of the New World’, in Haase and Reinhold, The Classical Tradition and the Americas, pp 135–172. In fact, sightings of Amazon warriors had been reported in Carvajal's account, which was widely distrusted at the time, of Orellana's voyage down the Amazon. It later became the source of the movie Aguirre: Wrath of God, Charles C Mann (1491) New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, New York: Vintage, 2006, pp xiii–541.

43. Mason, ‘Classical Ethnography’, p 155.

44. A M Iacono, ‘The American Indians and the Ancients of Europe: The Idea of Comparison and the Construction of Historical Time in the 18th Century’, in Haase and Reinhold, The Classical Tradition and the Americas, pp 658–681.

45. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. P Laslett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p 49.

46. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man. The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. The argument that comparative ethnography is best seen as a nineteenth-century discipline can be found in G W Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, New York: Free Press, 1987.

47. Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, p 146.

48. Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, pp 146–200.

49. The complication was introduced by the American anthropologist Franz Boas, who undermined comparative ethnology by arguing that there was far too much diversity among tribal peoples for them all to be fitted into a single developmental scheme.

50. Hodgen, Early Anthropology, p 348.