On the front page of the November 11, 1984, New York Times Book Review, distinguished historian Donald Kagan announced that ”World History is Back.” In his review of three exhaustive new world histories, Kagan traces the development of world history from Herodotus to the present and tells us that “The new universal historians have made a good start, and their example should encourage others to have a try.”
The writing of genuine universal or world histories, since the invention of the field by the early Greeks, has been rare. Civilizations outside the west have usually been reduced to peripheral zones of culture or objects of western exploration and expansion. Even twentieth-century histories that espoused a world context, such as Toynbee’s massive works, have still relied on western civilization as the norm of all civilization. In the past twenty-five years, there has been some attempt to construct a world history and, at the same time, escape the dogged western ethnocentrism of earlier efforts.
Few scholars in any field today would openly argue that Asian civilization has been inferior to the west. Most historians would probably advocate giving Asia its rightful status in both the scheme of world history and in its teaching in the schools and colleges. Changes are underway. Aspects of Asian culture and history are now included in the curriculum in an increasing number of colleges and in high school social studies courses.
Further, the more blatantly racist presentation of Asia, characteristic of our texts from a hundred years ago, has faded. Contemporary textbook writers would blanch at Philip Meyers’ 1876 schoolbook treatment of Asia: “Of all the races, the White or Caucasian exhibits by far the most perfect type, physically, intellectually and morally. It is the race with which we shall be almost exclusively concerned, as the other two races, if we except some few nations of the Turanian stock, have not played any greater part in the drama of history.”
Despite the general agreement that Asia should be included in world history, the question remains: What is the actual coverage and the conceptual treatment of Asia in the histories of the world and in the classrooms of most colleges and secondary schools?
With a few exceptions, the amount of space given to Asia in the newer texts, curricula, and teaching plans is still minor. This is true even in several of the newer world histories written by those “universal” historians that Kagan reviewed in the New York Times. A History of the World (1973), by J. M. Roberts, introduces India on page 263, covers the great Gupta age in less than two pages and traces China from the Warring States to the Tang dynasty in five pages. India is again introduced on page 381 and its history from the end of the Guptas to the coming of the British is covered in six pages. Similarly, China, from the end of the Tang to the coming of the Europeans, is disposed of in the same chapter in seven pages.
The second of the new world histories, A History of the World (1974), by Hugh Thomas, mentions Asia even less and does not deal with either China or India as civilizations with unique cultural values and histories. Only the third of the world histories, for instance, William McNeill’s work, unsuitably titled The Rise of the West (1962), treats Asian civilizations seriously. William McNeill devotes many pages to Indian and Chinese world views and their distinct cultural styles. He also offers an intriguing historical framework of cultural diffusion that integrates all cultural centers in the Euro-Asian landmass into an interacting whole. Even so, The Rise of the West sees technology, particularly military technology, as the motivating source of human development and the engine of human social change.
Although most of the major textbook publishers now have a college and high school “world history” on the market, few give the non-west equal or significant coverage. McNeill’s even-handed treatment of all the world’s civilizations is notably absent in the secondary school and college texts that often masquerade under the titles of “World Histories.”
In a currently and widely used high school text, Living World History, written by T. Walter Wallbank and Arnold Schreier, the students do not encounter India until page 204, and its entire civilization from the Indus Valley to the Europeans’ arrival is summed up in eleven pages. Chinese civilization is introduced on page 222, and in seventeen pages the text traces this great culture not only through the C’hing (4,000 years of history), but includes all of classical Japanese history as well. All of Chinese, Indian, and Japanese history is encapsulated in these few pages while western history is traced century by century in twenty-seven chapters. Asia is once again presented on page 532, when the Europeans venture into Asia in the imperialistic age.
Thus, contemporary texts too frequently collapse Asia’s history into an area study or cultural complex and offer it as a frozen time-frame in history. The impression is that India and China were nuclear civilizations on a par with Egypt and Sumer. Asian civilization usually vanishes from view with the coming of Greece and Rome, not to reappear until the age of imperialism, when, in fact, Asia has an ongoing unbroken history as complex as the west’s.
Thus, contemporary texts too frequently collapse Asia’s history into an area study or cultural complex and offer it as a frozen time frame in history.
Beyond the scanty treatment of Asia in school and college texts, there is the additional problem of historical conceptualization of Asia. Its minor status in western consciousness and its ethnocentric treatment have a long history. Early historical writings by Herodotus and his successors sought not only to explain their own local histories but also to offer an understanding of the entire world. Yet in inventing the art of history, western historians were unconsciously using the norms of their own civilizations as a basis for judging all others.
Thus, as Herodotus attempted a construction of the histories of Egypt and Sumer, he made them into exotic deviations from his Hellas. Similarly, later western historians continued to draw an invisible line separating the “Civilized West” from the alien “East,” and attempts at writing a genuine world history have suffered from the use of the Greco-Roman model for civilization. An eminent Asian scholar, Professor Edward Kracke, warned us many years ago that in approaching any Asian civilization, the greatest difficulty was that of overcoming our western bias.
Roots of this bias lie in the so-called “scientific” efforts to seriously study other people, which began about a hundred years ago. Historians such as John Fiske and the founding father of American anthropology, Lewis Henry Morgan, both agreed that every group passed through immutable stages of growth from savagery to barbarism to civilization in their human development. According to these early naturalist scholars, advanced technology was the engine of human progress.
The evolutionary concept of progress was not a new idea but almost as old as western civilization itself. The sociologist Robert Nisbet concluded that the idea of evolutionary progress goes back to the Greek belief that societies and civilizations grew and developed as if they were organic life. Since the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, the dominant western model has been the linear development of societies leading to ever higher planes of reason and social good.
From our own day, it is easy to see the basis for the popularity of the evolutionary model. The early social scientists were products of the growing industrial power of the west. To them, colonial control proved the superiority of western culture and demonstrated its highly evolved status, while the subject societies—now referred to as “Third World”—were rationalized as being on a lower plane of evolution. This model of social analysis held that non-western cultures were lower or “traditional” while western cultures were advanced or “modern.” The criterion for being civilized was the degree of commonality with the nineteenth- and twentieth-century west. The 1876 Meyers school text cited earlier exemplifies this approach:
. . . still the people of this race [Asian] have made but little progress in the arts and in general culture-perhaps simply through lack of favoring circumstances. Even their languages have remained undeveloped. These seem immature, or stunted in their growth. (p. 6)
A hundred years after the Meyer text, contemporary high school texts may still reflect this nineteenth-century evolutionary view of historical change. The world history text, The Record of Mankind (1970), by Wesley Roehm and Morris Buske, explains:
Man was first a savage, then a barbarian, and finally a civilized being. . . . Most American Indians be fore the coming of Columbus and most of the Negroes in Africa may be classified as barbarians. In contrast to the savage and the barbarian, the civilized man is one who, to a large extent, can change his surroundings to fit his needs and wants (p. 6).
The evolutionary model from traditional culture to like-the-modern west reached its acme in the American school of modernization theory. Wilbert Moore, one of its leading scholars, defined the process in his book, Social Change (1963), as “. . . Total transformation of a traditional or pre-modern society into the types of technology and associated social organization that characterize the ‘advanced,’ economically prosperous, and relatively politically stable nations of the Western World. . . .” (p. 91)
The modernization approach appears in a majority of school texts as the major model of analysis. The 1975 Asia Society study of nearly three hundred textbooks dealing with Asia found that this developmental approach appeared in 89 percent of the titles, was dominant in 73 percent, and was the exclusive approach in 56 percent of the texts evaluated (Asia in American Textbooks, 1975).
A second major tradition, apparent in many school texts, shaping the concept of Asia derives from the early nineteenth-century American Romanticism, which had much in common with the British Liberal Utilitarians. Liberal/Utilitarian thought posited a society of rational humans, individually pursuing happiness and avoiding pain. Law could solve human problems rationally, and a policy of ”just laws and light taxes” would usher in a society where poverty would be eliminated and earthly happiness could be embraced by all races and cultures of people.
British liberals like Bentham, Macaulay, and the two Mills believed the Asian social and cultural system was not only obsolete but irrational. If the multitudes of Asia could only put an end to Hinduism, Islam, and Confucianism and the accretion of centuries of superstitious values, the British liberal reasoned, they could build in Asians a sense of individualism, institute parliamentary democracy, rationalize the legal structure and promote social development.
Thus, great progress would be accomplished only if the negative influences of religion could be overcome. A school text by Fidler, India and Southeast Asia (1972), echoes British liberalism of a century and a half earlier when it explains:
Progress has also been discouraged by Hinduism, the religion followed by more than four-fifths of India’s population. This religion teaches that people should accept their way of life without trying to change it. India’s leaders have great difficulty convincing people that changes must be made. (p. I16)
Or consider this 1975 Prentice Hall text, Focus on India:
The lack of absolutes in Hinduism shows up in a disregard for time, apathy towards work and . . . carelessness. These attitudes are considered normal and proper by most Indians. (p. 40)
As good followers of Lockean philosophy, the Utilitarians believed firmly in the possibility of education as a means of uplifting the benighted Asians and helping them overcome their superstitious ways. After 1835, this belief was institutionalized by the introduction of English as a medium of instruction in India and the establishment of English colleges. The objective of this decision, as Macaulay put it, was to “. . . form a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”
Contemporary texts are slightly less blatant in their presentation of western civilization as the teacher of Asia, but the message persists. India (1971), published by the Oxford Book Company, echoes Macaulay’s sentiments in ex plaining the place of the cow of India:
India’s cattle population is a huge drain on the country’s food supply. The Hindu’s refusal to kill cattle or to eat meat for religious reasons as well as to ban cattle slaughter results in an unusually long life span for animals. . . . It is not unusual to see cattle roaming through fields of rice, corn or millet, eating as much as they want. (p. 96)
Similarly, later western historians continued to draw an invisible line separating the “Civilized West” from the alien “East,” and attempts at writing a genuine world history have suffered from the use of the Greco-Roman model for civilization.
The strong legacy of Liberal/Utilitarian cultural values has continued to in fluence American education in the twentieth century, militating against any serious study of nonwestern civilizations except as they represent stages of some future world system. The tendency to treat Asia as a stage in some future homogeneous rational culture is further promoted by the recent global education movement. The dominant analytical model in global education draws heavily on Liberal/Utilitarianism, Deweyian pragmatism, and the optimistic view of the future that envisions a world free from conflict and also free from cultural differences. Many leading global educators argue that the world is moving rapidly toward a single culture. As Lee Anderson has written in Schooling and Citizenship in a Global Age:
The point is that today most human beings live out their lives in a cocoon of culture whose circumference equals the circumference of the globe. In a word there is a global culture. (p. 268)
The everyman of the imagined impending global culture is the rational man who draws his identity from his economic behavior. He is an American writ large.
This assumption prompts teachers to argue that western history is more important to students because it is their heritage. We live, this argument goes, in the legacy of Aristotle and Michelangelo. Asia should be treated as an addendum since Confucius, Kalidas, or Akbar really have nothing crucial to say to American students.
Professor Ainslee Embree, former chairman of the Columbia University history department and recent president of the Association for Asian Studies, questioned this view in his presidential address in 1983:
Our agenda for the future seems clear: we must assert that Asia is as much the heritage of our students today as is Greece or Rome or the European Middle Ages. . . . As Asia becomes part of our future, so it also becomes part of our past . . . knowledge of the languages and literature and history of the great Asian civilizations must be given a place . . . not [as] an add-on in the curriculum, but a necessity if the unlikely situation arose where one had to select between a student knowing something of Chinese his tory and something less of American history, we would choose the China option.
Professor Embree’s argument that our historical consciousness is not an objective fixed reality but rather changes as we ourselves change, challenges all of us involved in education to accept Asia in the school and college curricula with more than ghetto status even if it means reducing our attention to Western European and American studies. We must deal with the great civilizations of Asia not on the basis of power or potential, but because they have long histories and have engaged in great human experiments that might offer us deeper understanding of what it means to be human.
By including Asia and other civilizations in our curriculum, not as add-ons, but as a source of questions and answers that are fundamentally different from those of our own western tradition, we teach critical thinking not only about specific civilizations but also about the nature of our own thought patterns and value systems. We also learn to question the assumptions of the disciplines of history and social science. The comparative approach has to be a part of the history we should teach, The great civilizations of Asia must be included to make comparisons at a significant level. Only on this basis would we be taking Asia seriously.
Donald Johnson teaches Asian history at New York University.
