This book challenges one of the most pervasive and powerful beliefs
of our time concerning world history and world geography. This is
the doctrine of European diffusionism, the belief that the rise of
Europe to modernity and world dominance is due to some unique
European quality of race, environment, culture, mind, or spirit,
and that progress for the rest of the world results from the
diffusion of European civilization. J.M. Blaut persuasively argues
that this doctrine is not grounded in the facts of history and
geography, but in the ideology of colonialism. It is the world
model which Europeans constructed to explain, justify, and assist
their colonial expansion.
The book first defines the Eurocentric diffusionist model of the
world as one that invents a permanent world core, an "Inside," in
which cultural evolution is natural and continuous, and a permanent
periphery, and "Outside," in which cultural evolution is mainly an
effect of the diffusion of ideas, commodities, settlers, and
political control from the core. The ethnohistory of the doctrine
is traced from its 16th-century origins, through its efflorescence
in the period of classical colonialism, to its present form in
theories of economic development, modernization, and new world
order. Blaut demonstrates that most "Western" scholarship is to
some extent diffusionist and based implicitly in the idea that the
world has one permanent center from which culture-changing ideas
tend to emanate. Eurocentric diffusionism has shaped our attitudes
concerning race and the environment, psychology and society,
technology and politics.
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