Niall Ferguson, in his impressive and exuberant book Civilization, published last year, sought to explain why Western civilisation triumphed in the centuries after the Renaissance with reference to six factors. He identified them as competition, science, property, medicine consumption and work, or a particular work ethic.
These historical tours d’horizon are never without their critics, and Ferguson’s confident account of what one had thought an undoubted historical phenomenon found a memorable one in the pages of the London Review of Books. The London-based writer Pankaj Mishra dismissed what he saw as a triumphalist tone, and refused to accept that those eastern civilisations which are now in the ascendant have learnt from the West. The idea that the Chinese are, in Mishra’s paraphrase, ‘a thrifty, shrewd people who, in colonising remote African lands and building up massive reserves of capital, seem to borrow from the grand narrative of the West’s own ascent’ was obviously wrong and unacceptable.
Mishra made, moreover, an interesting case for the West possibly not triumphing at all. He drew our attention to research which claimed that China was economically neck-and-neck with Europe until 1800; he compared Tipu Sultan in energy and military skill to Frederick the Great; he emphasised Muslim contributions to European science. In short, he suggested that Europe only really triumphed for about five minutes in the 19th century before non-western forces began to assert their influence once again.
The reader may have been forgiven for finding this account somewhat unconvincing. What the real narrative was, and where Chinese ideas of colony and capital might truly have emerged from, remained unexplained in the review.
Perhaps still more strikingly, Mishra was so confident of his case that he appeared to compare Ferguson to a notorious racist theorist of the early 20th century, Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, who wrote The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy — an accusation which would be absurd to anyone who knows anything of Fergusson, but which lawyers for the London Review of Books saw nothing actionable in.
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