Curtin, The World and the West

Curtin, Philip D. The World and the West: The European Challenge and the Overseas Response in the Age of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

 The interpretation of European imperialism outside of the Eurocentric model presents problems for historians. Avoiding the ethnocentricity of past scholars has been difficult since “Western societies actually did play a central role in world history during recent centuries” (vii). While approaching this topic with different questions, Philip Curtin notes that the “most fundamental question of how human societies change through time was hardly approached” (vii). He views human history in three separate periods based not on the rise and fall of civilizations, but on changing technology: a pre-agricultural age, lasting up to about 10,000 years ago, where our ancestors were hunter-gatherers with limited technology and technological change; an agricultural age when farming resulted in a population-density increase, a rise in urbanization and literacy, and an increased pace of technological changes; and beginning around the 1700s, a transition from agricultural to the industrial age. While agriculture developed independently throughout the globe and led to a convergence of human cultures, the industrial advances, which appeared full-blown in Europe but based on innovations from other societies, led to the West being the industrial leader. As a result, “the rise of European power in the early industrial age is necessarily at center stage” (xii). In writing The World and the West, Curtin aims to present “another approach to world history in a European age, centered on changing relations between the world and the West, this time through a series of cases studies rather than an overriding theory” (xi). Viewing history as an exchange of cultural items, he argues that “human cultures have been converging since the invention of agriculture, and the convergence has been more rapidly than ever since the beginning of the industrial age” (276). We now live in a globalized world with a homogenized human culture.

 Curtin presents his work as a combination of fourteen essays arranged in four parts from early trading-post empires of Europeans, through colonization and pluralist societies, and into twentieth century decolonization and modernization movements. His case studies pull from every corner of the globe, from examining pluralist societies in South Africa, Central Asia and Mexico in Part II, to comparing Ghanaian and Indonesian struggles for independence in Part VI. Part I, entitled “Conquest,” deals with “the technological sources of European power and with patterns of empire building around the world” (xiii). He concludes chapter two, “Technology and Power,” by stating that “the phases of European political and military activity overseas correspond to broad changes in European technology that accompanied the rise of industrialization” (36). Part II, “Cultural Change and Imperial Rule,” shows “some of the variety of circumstances in which non-Western people reacted to the policies colonial governments sought to impose” with cases of plural societies and reactions to “imperial policies regarding administration and land tenure in some of the territorial empires of southern Asia” (54-55). Plural societies were a “by-product of the age of Western empire building, and the formal end to European colonial power had not diminished the problems of ethnic conflict that they brought about” (72).

 Part III, “Conversion,” provides four essays that deal with “instances where people overseas, threatened in one way or another by the rise of Western power, chose to borrow from the West voluntarily and selectively, with a variety of different outcomes” (110). His last section, entitled “Independence and the Liquidation of Empires,” examines the culture changes between the 1950s through the 1970s, which “took off from a technology originally Western but now worldwide” (194). Reiterating his purpose in the Afterword, Curtin reminds his reader that he wishes to put “emphasis on the non-Western responses seen through case studies of particular problems, rather than through broad themes and overall generalizations” (275). His fourteen essays examine not only European colonial encounters, but also those by Russia, the United States, and Japan in relation to cultural borrowing. Globalization, he notes, is not a one-way street, and cultural borrowing results for each and every encounter, whether voluntary or intentional. Culture, like technology, is borrowed from others and adapted and modified to suit the setting and cultural environment.

 The essays presented here are not theory-heavy, nor are geared specifically towards scholars; the essays can stand alone and are attainable to most readers. Scholars can find his total lack of citations and references frustrating. However, he does provide at the end of each chapter/essay a list of further readings. Nevertheless, this work adds a comparative history of society to historiography. Through the study of underrepresented groups and cultures in the age of imperialism, industrialization, and globalization, Curtin does provide an expansive answer to his original question: how have human societies changed in the past two centuries? “The industrial revolution began in Europe, and the West was the first society to use the new technology to create an economic system capable of productivity per capita beyond the wildest dreams of the agricultural age – and to couple this new wealth with enormous advances in mass consumption” on a global scale (xii). In short, Europe was able to export its culture throughout the world, and with these new technologies, beginning “with the steamships and railroads, continued through cars and airplanes, and on to television, communication satellites, cheap computers, and the Internet,” we now live in a homogenized global culture with slight variations (194).