The INVENTION of HUMANITY

EQUALITY and CULTURAL DIFFERENCE in WORLD HISTORY

SIEP STUURMAN

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2017

Copyright © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved

Cover design: Lisa Roberts

978-0-674-97196-7 (alk. paper)

978-0-674-97751-8 (EPUB)

978-0-674-97749-5 (MOBI)

978-0-674-97750-1 (PDF)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Stuurman, Siep, author.

Title: The invention of humanity: equality and cultural difference in world history / Siep Stuurman.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016039335

Subjects: LCSH: Equality--Cross-cultural studies. | Human beings--Cross-cultural studies. | Cross-cultural studies.

Classification: LCC HM821 .S778 2017 | DDC 305--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039335

CONTENTS

1. Introduction: How Cross-Cultural Equality Became Thinkable

2. 1.  Visions of a Common Humanity

3. 2.  Religious and Philosophical Universalisms

4. 3.  History, Ethnography, and the Anthropological Turn

5. 4.  Thinking across Frontiers in Medieval Islam

6. 5.  The Atlantic Frontier and the Limits of Christian Equality

7. 6.  Global Equality and Inequality in Enlightenment Thought

8. 7.  Modern Equality and Scientific Racism in the Nineteenth Century

9. 8.  The Globalization of Equality

10. 9.  The Age of Human Rights

11. Epilogue: The Future of Global Equality

12. Notes

13. Acknowledgments

14. Index

INTRODUCTION

How Cross-Cultural Equality Became Thinkable

COMMON HUMANITY and equality are not primeval facts that patiently await discovery. We should rather conceive of them as inventions of novel and potentially disruptive ways of looking at human relationships. That all the people in the world constitute a single community is not an empirical fact. What it means is that people can be represented as members of the meta-community of an “imagined humanity.”[1] That is not to say, however, that common humanity and equality are no more than illusory fictions or impotent shrieks in the dark. When a sufficient number of people believe that all people are fellow humans, or even equals, those beliefs become social facts on a par with other social facts, as much a part of society as political power, material wealth, and the force of arms. Whenever a sufficient number of people embrace universal ideas of common humanity, the limits of the thinkable are extended and new courses of action appear on the horizon.

How and in what historical circumstances did cross-cultural humanity become thinkable? How could it happen that people came to see foreigners as fellow human beings or even as equals? How did they surmount the deeply ingrained ethnocentrism that was omnipresent at the dawn of human history? How did they arrive at the daring vision that all human beings on earth are basically alike and should be considered members of the overarching meta-community that was eventually denoted by the term humanity? This book seeks to answer these questions by means of an inquiry into the history of ideas. It will trace concepts, languages, and discourses of common humanity, equality, and cultural difference.

Today, in the early decades of the third millennium, the equal standing of all human beings living on the planet earth may appear self-evident. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been called the secular bible of our time.[2] Over the long run of history, however, equality and common humanity were far from self-evident. At the dawn of history the inferiority of the stranger was self-evident, as was the practice of enslaving captured strangers.[3] In the first century BCE, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, surveying history from the center of the Roman Empire, observed that there were kings before the discovery of writing.[4] Diodorus was right: the shared reflection on the human condition made possible by the art of writing emerged in societies where distinctions between ruler and subject, man and woman, master and slave, lord and commoner, and finally between native and foreigner, were ingrained in social routines and moral standards. Inequality had prevailed since time immemorial and—most people expected—it would continue to reign supreme in the future. Even so, not all kinds of inequality were equally self-evident. The emergence of political thought in ancient times is an indication that traditional justifications of inequality no longer sufficed. That explains why so much of early social and political thought consisted of justifications for inequality. Powerful discourses of inequality defined people’s station in life and instructed them to speak and behave accordingly. What is truly remarkable, viewed against this background, is the emergence of notions of common humanity and equality.

Consequently, a history of thinking about common humanity and equality has to start from the unquestionable fact that these ideas do not refer to self-evident realities. The historian has to bracket the present-day majesty of the idea of equality. In our age equality has become the default setting of political thought, and inequality is only acceptable to the extent that it is justified by good reasons. During the greater part of history it was the other way around. Inequality was the habitual and reasonable standard, while equality stood in need of justification, if it was considered at all. Inequality was omnipresent, palpable, and realistic, while equality had to be imagined, argued for, conjured up from nowhere. In short, equality had to be invented.

Looking at history after the Neolithic revolution, when the invention of agriculture led to population growth and a steady search for new land, the image of a humanity carved up in neatly separated homogeneous civilizations and cultures has always been deeply misleading. Migration and cultural blending are as old as history, as are warfare and the enslavement of foreigners. From earliest times, people have crossed boundaries and frontiers. Travelers had to come to terms with the unfamiliar customs and ideas of “other” people. People beyond the frontier could be regarded as uncouth barbarians, vile enemies, or even as barely human, but it was also thinkable to see them as fellow humans with whom it would be possible to communicate, trade, and collaborate. The experience of travel has always affected the self-image of travelers. Returning home, they may well see previously self-evident customs and ideas in a different light. Traveling is an ambivalent experience. Conditioned by memories and social routines, travelers can never fully leave their homeland. But their experiences of the customs, languages, and ideas beyond the frontier transform them into persons who cannot really return there either. The same is true of curious savants, who learn languages not their own in order to study the writings of foreigners. The experience of travel, whether physical or in the realm of the mind, destabilizes the “deep truth” of home.

In most cases, the polarity between the foreigner as an equal and the foreigner as hostile, incomprehensible, and barely human is not a matter of all or nothing. Most thinking about others in history is played out on the continuum between the two extremes. This book focuses on common humanity and bridging frontiers, but that does not, of course, imply that the conflictual side of frontier encounters is of no importance. To neglect it would be impossible anyway, since notions of common humanity only acquire their significance and meaning in relation to discourses of otherness and inequality.

Even so, a history of the common humanity side of the continuum is badly needed. In the wake of Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism most research has privileged the inequality pole. Over the past decades, the intellectual history of frontier experiences has been dominated by a perspective that is conveniently summarized by the neologism “Othering.” The foreigner, countless books and articles have sought to demonstrate, has mostly been represented as savage, barbarian, irrational, inscrutable, uncivilized, irreligious, heathen, idolatrous, nonwhite, colored, primitive, backward, traditional, premodern—and the list goes on. The bulk of such research has demonstrated how throughout its history Europe, and more recently the West, constructed its self-images in an interminable sequence of oppositions to its “Others.” Meanwhile, this approach has also spread to the study of Chinese views of their “barbarians,” Indian xenology, and Arabic discourses on “savages” and “barbarians.” This line of research in intellectual history has been extremely fruitful. Nonetheless, this book proposes to reverse the perspective. Consequently, I shall study frontier texts as sites where common humanity and equal dignity become thinkable. That is less paradoxical than it may seem. Frontiers are frequently associated with hostility and xenophobia, but they equally are a precondition for any open-minded or sympathetic engagement with the foreign. When frontiers are not traversed at all, the foreigner can only be a figment of the imagination, like Homer’s Cyclopes.

Beyond the perimeter of the known world the discourse about strangers is either imagined as the opposite of the homeland or it is situated in the realm of the mythical and the monstrous, a language even a critical historian like Herodotus resorts to when his story reaches the remote and frozen lands beyond the steppe. Likewise, the fourteenth-century CE Arabic historian Ibn Khaldun is well informed about the culture of the desert nomads, but in his observations on sub-Saharan Africans derogatory judgments abound while his empirical information is exceedingly thin.

Generally speaking, the comparison of the familiar with the foreign is a condition for the emergence of ethnography and cultural history. Cultures cannot be equal in the sense of identical, for the elementary reason that cultures are defined by difference. If a single homogeneous culture reigned supreme across the globe, the concept of culture would become redundant. It follows that, observed by someone born and reared in one culture, another culture necessarily appears as “other.” It does not, however, necessarily appear as inferior or incomprehensible. Given the complexity and hybridity of all cultures, wholesale approval or condemnation are rare in the historical sources. Mixed judgments are the rule.

Everywhere observers who traverse a cultural frontier depict foreigners as “others” and contrast their customs with those of their homeland. That stance should not be unthinkingly conflated with “Othering” with a capital O in the sense of Said’s Orientalism. Always and anywhere, people seek to understand the unknown by comparing it with the known. That is how the human mind operates. Without such “crude” comparisons as stepping-stones, serious thinking about the foreign cannot even begin. Even then, an open-minded approach is by no means self-evident. The German Egyptologist Jan Assmann relates that the Egyptians of the Old and Middle Kingdom routinely designated strangers as “vile enemies” even when they had concluded treaties of amity with them. Outside of Egypt, no intelligible or meaningful social order could be imagined. The peoples beyond the frontier, Assmann concludes, were seen as “absolute aliens.”[5] Against this background, the detailed representation of the social order of foreigners as a counterpoint to one’s own way of life is a real accomplishment. Understanding that customs and beliefs beyond the frontier represent a different order instead of an absence of order is the first step toward the audacious idea that human life admits of a plurality of cultures. We easily overlook that, because we are looking back on more than two thousand years of geography, ethnography, and historiography.

Common humanity and equality began their historical career in the modes of imagination and critique. Against the tremendous weight of everyday experience they pitted the power of ideas. This book is predicated on the conviction that ideas matter and that canonized ideas matter a lot. What people can achieve assuredly depends on the military, political, and economic resources at their disposal but it also hangs on what they dare to think. At any historical juncture, the limits of the thinkable and the limits of action are dialectically related.[6] The first step to freedom is to unleash the imagination. To change the world one must be able to envision an imagined world that is different from the empirically given. Always and everywhere, common sense “realism” equals submission to the powers that be. The fission of the world into an empirical and an imagined one, once decried by Karl Marx as a symptom of alienation, the famous “opium of the people,” is in reality the key to freedom. Dictators and despots have always known that. Nothing frightened them more than the rise of dissident voices. The enchanting power of poetry, the spellbinding magic of stories, and the searing force of abstract ideas have been useful and enchanting but also terrifying and dangerous. Throughout history rulers have sought to control the dissemination of ideas. Their realistic intuition told them that ideas were dangerous because they could affect the balance of social change and political power.

For the subject of this book the transformative power of ideas is crucial. Key notions in our history are ideas such as common humanity, equal dignity, and equality. Such notions do not describe social realities but rather conjure up a different, imagined world. When sufficient numbers of people think such thoughts “reality” is changed. Bringing into existence social dreams and imagined futures, equality-thoughts create their own reality. That is why I discuss the key ideas of my history in terms of “invention” rather than “discovery.”

In line with the emphasis on frontiers, the book is structured around the great frontiers in world history: frontiers between the great civilizations and empires throughout history; the sedentary-nomadic divide from antiquity to the Columbian Exchange; the Atlantic frontier in the sixteenth century; the oceanic frontiers created by European expansion and colonialism in the modern age; the color line in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and finally global human rights and the “clash of civilizations” today.

A Framework for the History of Cross-Cultural Equality

Through the ages there have been contrasting concepts and discourses of common humanity and equality, some of which were religious, others philosophical, still others historical or ethnographical. For example, many nineteenth-century Christians opposed slavery because they believed all human beings, whatever the color of their skin, were created in God’s image. Twenty-first-century biologists may condemn slavery because they are convinced that all human beings stand on an equal footing as speech- and tool-using intelligent animals. Early modern philosophers of natural right would marshal similar arguments, but with the crucial addition of a shared moral faculty. Followers of Stoic philosophy would rest their case on a pantheistic over-mind whose sparks are present in every human mind. Still others may ground their opposition to slavery on the Golden Rule to do unto others as you would be done unto yourself, without explicit philosophical underpinnings. Finally, people can, and frequently do, employ various mixtures of concepts to make their case against slavery and other forms of oppression. At any moment in history, we can thus verify a plurality of discourses of common humanity.

Now someone might object that the irreducible plurality and the historical specificity of notions of common humanity and equality undermine the project of writing a history of such concepts. My answer is that discourses of common humanity are indeed historically specific and different but that interesting affinities and analogies can nonetheless be identified. The analogies are strong enough to treat them as parts of one history. Virtually all discourses of common humanity include the assumption or the conclusion that all human beings share one or more attributes, origins, obligations, faculties, or potentialities. This enables me to offer a provisional working definition of common humanity that roughly indicates the kind of discourses we are looking for. Accordingly, I propose to define common humanity as “culturally significant similarity.” Taking the argument further, we can conceive of universal concepts of equal dignity and equality as progressive intensifications of common humanity. The discursive space between common humanity and universal equality is a continuum. The definition has the further advantage that the qualifier “culturally significant” takes in the representational nature of common humanity and equality. People are not equal, but they can be represented as equals.

Moreover, common humanity and equality can be imagined along several dimensions. Equality may reign in one field while inequality remains the rule in other fields. Religious discourses positing the equality of all humans “before God” frequently restrict that equality to the spiritual realm, all the while justifying several forms of social inequality as part of the divine dispensation. As a rule, political equality is meticulously circumscribed and it frequently demarcates a “community of equals” that regards itself as superior to other communities. In ancient Athens, for example, it denoted equality before the law and the equal right to speak in the people’s assembly for all freemen. Slaves, women, and foreign residents were excluded as a matter of course, and slavery, in particular the enslavement of “barbarians,” was accepted as an everyday routine. As the fifth-century BCE Athenian leader Pericles affirmed, the internal equality of Athenian democracy in no way prevented Athens from tyrannically dominating other Greek city-states.[7] Likewise, modern democratic nation-states exclude foreign nationals from their “national equality.” Even so, the combination of equality in some fields and inequality in other domains opened the door to critique.[8] The boundaries of equality were always contestable, enabling dissidents and minority groups to question the prevailing regimes of inequality or the antinomies of elite equality.

As the very idea of equality is a highly contested concept in political thought, a further clarification will be helpful. In historical studies, equality as sameness is obviously a nonstarter; no two human individuals or categories of human beings are identical. Neither is the mathematical notion of quantitative equality applicable in historical investigations, except in special cases, such as economic assets and biometry. In most cases we use equality to indicate that the similarities between people are considered significant enough to outweigh the differences. Moreover, languages of equality usually combine empirical observations and normative standards. The two come together in the basic intuition of equality as the idea that people “can be alike and when alike should receive similar treatment.”[9] That explains why all discourses of equality are potentially egalitarian. As a rule, egalitarian thinkers criticize specific forms of inequality while disregarding or endorsing others. Across-the-board equality is seldom pursued. This book will mainly discuss those similarities people have considered significant, meaningful, valuable, and grounded in their ontology of the human. Furthermore, the meaning of equality can be traced in the historical evolution of the lexical fields in which it is deployed. Finally, there are numerous stories, poems, and aphorisms that do not contain any concept of equality but nonetheless have powerful equality effects. Doing things together can also produce equality effects. Engaging in common struggles against oppression can create a community of equals.

It is important to be clear about the nature of the basic conceptual framework I propose. An overarching and abstract notion such as “common humanity” does not directly refer to any particular historical language of common humanity. Such notions are meta-concepts that may cover any number of political, social, or religious languages in the sense of J. G. A. Pocock’s languages-in-time paradigm.[10] And let us recall that any of Pocock’s languages can itself cover an array of different theories, narratives, arguments, and value judgments. Such meta-concepts themselves are not historical. To make them operational, we have to identify the specific languages and notions of common humanity found in the historical contexts of times and places. To write the history of those particular languages and notions, we need the concept of invention, because invention and reinvention denote the dynamic mode in which such languages and concepts can be taken to exist historically.

The methodology thus remains historical and contextual, but its contextualism is deployed over the long run of human history and in a world-historical spatial framework. Frontier, it should be recalled, is a geographical as well as historical concept. Methodologically, my approach is akin to the “serial contextualism” recently proposed by David Armitage.[11] Actually, situating the different languages of common humanity in the long run of world history makes the methodology more contextual rather than less. It will enable us to distinguish what is specific to each language, comparing it not only with other contemporary languages of common humanity but also to what went before and, albeit with greater caution, to what came after. In particular, it will help us to recognize the world-historical polyphony of discourses of common humanity and equality and to avoid an overly linear view of history that would collapse the early part of our story into a prelude to modernity.

While common humanity is the first meta-concept of our theoretical framework, the second is what I have defined as the anthropological turn.[12] Discourses of common humanity highlight what all people share. As a rule, they are abstract and universal. By contrast, the anthropological turn focuses on cultural difference. It enables people to think about contingencies and boundaries. For any critical discussion of cultural difference, such discourses are indispensable. The privileged languages of common humanity are religion, philosophy, and science. The privileged languages of the anthropological turn are history, geography, and ethnography. Discourses of common humanity abstract from cultural difference and thereby transform the foreigner into the fellow human being. By contrast, the discourses subsumed under the anthropological turn deconstruct the semantics of “us” versus “them.”

The two basic components of the anthropological turn are explications of the internal coherence and rationality of other cultures and the inversion of the gaze. When the Han historian Sima Qian discusses the nomadic Xiongnu north of the Great Wall, he does far more than list their customs as a series of deviations from Chinese standards. Instead, he explains that their way of life is well adapted to survival in the harsh environment of the steppe and that their social and political institutions form an interlocking system. In Sima Qian we encounter the two main components of the anthropological turn: first, an open-minded appreciation of the reasonability of a foreign culture in its natural and political environment and, second, the ability to imagine what your own ways look like to foreigners. In Greek antiquity, the inversion of the gaze was beautifully exemplified in the lapidary statement of Herodotus that “the Egyptians are wont to call barbarians all men who do not speak their language.”[13] Put differently, the Egyptians look at the Greeks just as the Greeks look at the Egyptians. The anthropological turn makes for an awareness of the plurality of cultures that cannot fail to affect the self-image of the observer.

The third meta-concept of our theoretical framework concerns temporality. Discourses of common humanity as well as discourses of inequality and difference are deployed in a temporal framework, raising the question of how they are situated in historical time. Frequently, discourses of temporality determine who has a future and whose time is, historically speaking, over. Accordingly, our third meta-concept is the regime of temporality. There is by now a broad consensus among historians that all conceptions of historical time contain both linear and cyclical elements.[14] Tradition relies on cycles of repetition of the same routines and ideas.[15] Innovation is predicated on change over time, thus introducing the idea of a “linear” sequence of differing states of affairs. Consequently, we do not face a clear-cut choice between linear and cyclical time. All written histories tell stories of decisive events, such as major wars and the imposition of new political regimes. Such events are irreversible: they divide time into a “before” and an “after.” However, those unique transition points may well be embedded in a long-term cyclical rhythm in which states rise and fall. The metaphor of rise and decline can be regarded as a generalization of the human life cycle, but it frequently evokes the evanescence of political power and imperial grandeur, a vision of time that has powerful equality effects. On the other hand, a linear temporal regime may underpin cross-cultural inequality, in particular when time is imagined as “progression” and “development.”

Transforming the Stranger into a Fellow Human Being

An incipient notion of common humanity became thinkable when humans began to demarcate themselves from animals, imagining a hierarchy of sentient beings with humans at the apex of the pyramid. By enumerating the attributes that distinguished humans from animals, such as speech, morality and reason, they summed up the faculties all human beings were supposed to share.

While differentiating humanity from animality constituted a lower limit of human nature, religion introduced the notion of an upper limit. When Homer declares that all men must die, he marks them off from another class of beings, “the gods who are forever.” Immortality is unattainable for humans. Just as animals are inferior, the gods are superior to human beings. Since both religion and the subjection of animals predated literacy, we can say that throughout history humans were identified as in-between beings: more than animals but less than gods. This gives us a generic but of course quite weak notion of common humanity.

As I stated above, notions of common humanity and equality mediate between the normative and the factual. We can illustrate this with an argument about common humanity in the writings of the fourth century BCE Chinese sage Mencius (Mengzi), one of the founders of the Confucian tradition. Mencius seeks to make a case for empathy as a constituent part of human nature: “My reason for saying that no man is devoid of a heart sensitive to the suffering of others is this. Suppose a man were, all of a sudden, to see a young child on the verge of falling into a well. He would certainly be moved to compassion.” According to Mencius, the man’s compassion is spontaneous and not based on considerations of self-interest or reputation. “From this it can be seen,” he concludes, “that whoever is devoid of the heart of compassion is not human.”[16]

Here Mencius appears to make two claims wrapped up in one. In the first move of the argument, empathy is anchored in an ontology of the human, but in the second move Mencius assumes that there are people who are morally deaf to the cries of the endangered child. Such people, he concludes, are not fully human. Displaying symptoms of moral illiteracy, they are unable to realize their own human potential. It follows that Mencius predicates his argument for common humanity on a dialectic of is and ought. By doing the right thing, people feeling empathy for others realize their humanity. However, the very fact that Mencius feels the need to make the case for common humanity in this particular way shows his awareness that in real life many people are not doing the right thing. His argument seeks to convince such people to mend their ways, pointing out that otherwise they will deform their own real nature and thus forfeit their humanity.

As a rule, discourses of common humanity and equality are critical reflections on prevailing notions of otherness and inequality. Anthropologists have failed to reach agreement on the question whether inequality is a universal phenomenon found in all human communities, but its existence in most societies, and in all literate societies, is well attested.[17] Likewise, ethnocentrism, the view of the stranger as more “other” than “alike,” is ubiquitous. Common humanity and equality become thinkable by abstracting from the prevailing routines and common-sense notions of inequality. Abstracting from visible phenomena, they introduce new ways of seeing and understanding social relationships. It follows that common humanity and equality are not empirical but theoretical ideas, in the literal Greek meaning of theoria as, “a way of seeing more often than not a new way of seeing.”[18]

The Anthropological Turn

Basically, the anthropological turn transforms the way people look at the culture of foreigners. Instead of a lack of order it posits the notion of a different order. The disparaging concept of the barbarian is converted into the notion of “the stranger in the eyes of others.” Haphazard enumerations of outlandish attributes of foreign cultures are transformed into environmentally grounded explications of functional patterns of culture. Uninformed ethnocentrism is supplanted by informed criticism. Finally, observers of a foreign culture may seek to imagine how the foreigners look back at them, thus inverting the habitual hierarchy of the familiar and the foreign. Stories can introduce imagined foreigners giving a critical account of the author’s home culture, as in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. Such texts captivate readers with adventurous narratives of traveling strangers, but their critical and philosophical reflections go beyond a vulgar exoticism.

In Chapter 3, we will see that the Greek historian Herodotus, the Chinese historian Sima Qian, and the Roman historian Tacitus depict frontier peoples primarily as noncivilized. However, that elementary fact is not sufficient to dismiss their ethnographies of “barbarian” life as constructions of otherness along the lines of Edward Said’s diagnosis of European Orientalism. These historians are well aware that they themselves are portrayed as others by foreigners, the inversion of the gaze already noted in Herodotus and Sima Qian. Likewise, Tacitus devotes much attention to the critique of Roman imperialism by barbarian leaders. In later historical periods, such inversions of the gaze recur again and again. In our discussion of the Enlightenment in Chapter 6 we will relate how Diderot has an imagined (but not entirely fictitious) Tahitian invert the language of European ceremonies of colonial possession. Such inversions of the habitual hierarchy represent crucial intellectual breakthroughs. To see your own culture through the lens of the foreign advances the limits of the thinkable. It opens the door to an appreciation of cultural plurality as a basic feature of the human condition. That others live different lives can now be seen as the normal state of affairs rather than as a scandalous antinomy. Combined with the accumulation of ethnographical knowledge, this way of thinking makes cultural difference into an object of empirical investigation and philosophical reflection.

Like common humanity, the anthropological turn is a meta-concept. It can accommodate a broad range of theorizations of cultural difference, from ancient geography and historiography to Enlightenment discussions of the relative merits of the savage and the civilized to Islamic and Christian views of other religions and further to nineteenth-century critiques of racism. Its major representative in twentieth-century cultural anthropology is often called cultural relativism (treated at length in the discussion of Franz Boas in Chapter 8). In recent debates about cultural difference, cultural relativism is often conflated with ethical or moral relativism. Such conflation is, however, not confirmed in the historical sources. In this book, we shall encounter a good many authors who underline the relative nature of cultural difference, but none of them countenances ethical relativism. All of them are convinced that certain moral standards have an absolute and universal validity. Herodotus, for instance, declares that all peoples prefer their own customs and laws over those of others, but his story of the wicked misdeeds of the Persian king Cambyses, in which this maxim is found, makes it abundantly clear that his ethics are a far cry from any kind of relativism. He absolutely condemns certain actions, such as sacrilege and the killing of innocent people.

Another case in point is the well-known essay on cannibalism by the late sixteenth-century French humanist Michel de Montaigne, a particularly influential text. Montaigne’s dictum that “everyone calls barbaric what deviates from his own customs” has often been read as a typical instance of ethical relativism, but that is not at all what the author really says. What he criticizes is the European habit of condemning the cannibals in America while turning a blind eye on the hideous atrocities perpetrated by Europeans in the religious civil wars of which Montaigne had firsthand experience. His conclusion is that “we” can condemn the cannibals “according to the rules of reason,” but not according to “our own rules, because we surpass them in every kind of barbarity.”[19] Montaigne presents us with a hard-hitting repudiation of European ethnocentric arrogance, but his thought is miles away from an amoral “anything goes” posture. We shall see that the same is true of all other thinkers who deploy a variety of the anthropological turn.

Considered in philosophical terms the very idea of ethical relativism is an oxymoron. While it cannot be gainsaid that ethical norms cannot be more than human artifacts, it does not follow that such artifacts are arbitrary. The notion of a morally sanctioned duty implies that it cannot be reduced to an individual preference. To assert that it is morally indefensible to kill an innocent person in, say, Wisconsin but that it is perfectly all right to do so in, say, Texas borders on unreason. We might as well contend that ethical precepts vary according to neighborhoods and streets.[20] Throughout history, many people have apprehended this truth. True ethical obligations being mostly abstract and universal they left ample room for cultural difference and individual choice. On the other hand, the autonomy of ethics teaches us that such room will never be unlimited.

Regimes of Temporality

As indicated above, all regimes of temporality encompass linear and cyclical elements. What we will now examine is how regimes of temporality impinge upon the domains covered by the other two meta-concepts, common humanity and the anthropological turn.

Let us first consider religious discourses of common humanity. At one level, religious discourses tend to be atemporal. It makes no sense to ask if God has time on his side. Likewise, the temporality of sacred history in the monotheistic creeds reduces human history to a brief parenthesis in the eternal vastness of God’s time. Even so, one may rightfully surmise that within their respective historical visions, the Jewish people, the Christian church, and the Islamic Umma have time on their side. The Christian conviction that human history is governed by divine Providence is a case in point. But in other religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, notions of cyclical time predominate and human history is not regarded as the prelude to a Last Judgment or final Armageddon. It follows that the great monotheistic faiths are more likely to evolve into imperial religions than Hinduism and Buddhism. The historical record demonstrates that this is most certainly true of Christianity and Islam. By contrast, the dissemination of Buddhism beyond its original homeland in India was a matter of migration and voluntary conversion rather than imperial expansion.

Beyond the case of religion we may examine the link between temporality and philosophical discourses of common humanity. Philosophical discourses can be wedded to time in ways that are not always immediately apparent. Two examples may clarify this. In the Stoic notion of common humanity we encounter an indirect linkage with history. The Stoic thinkers posited a natural equality of all human beings, because all souls partook in the “disseminating logos” of the pantheistic world mind. This gave rise to a cosmopolitan view of humanity that transcended the traditional boundaries of the community of the citizens of the polis. In Roman times, Stoic cosmopolitanism was integrated into the vision of an expanding empire so that its persuasiveness came to depend, at least in part, on the linear-cyclical temporality of empire found in the historical writings of Polybius and Livy. Even in the case of Rome, however, the vision of ever-increasing imperial expansion was shot through with the ancient rhythm of cyclical time. Polybius is a perfect example. Writing after the destruction of Carthage and the sack of Corinth in 146 BCE, when Rome seemed to be carrying everything before it, Polybius increasingly came to identify himself with the empire.[21] Nonetheless, he refers in passing to the inevitable downfall of Rome that is bound to happen at some future time.[22]

In the European Enlightenment, we encounter a far stronger connection between philosophy and temporality. The Enlightenment conception of reason was both abstract and temporally framed. In the seventeenth century, Cartesianism was known as “the new philosophy.” A notion of historical advancement was implicit in the claim of Enlightenment thinkers to criticize and supersede the “old philosophy.” The concept of reason was, as Ernst Cassirer puts it, transformed from a concept of being into a concept of agency.[23] The idea of Enlightenment reason identified the advance of enlightenment with the progression of time. According to Kant, the Europeans of the late eighteenth century were not living in an “enlightened age” but in an “age of enlightenment.”[24] The European assignment was to move on to the enlightened pastures of the future.

There is an obvious connection between regimes of temporality and the anthropological turn. When Herodotus, Sima Qian, Tacitus, and Ibn Khaldun are writing about the “barbarian” frontier, they discuss it as a permanent feature of human history. The balance of power between the “civilized” and the “barbarian” may be subject to the vicissitudes of history, but the frontier itself is there to stay. Across Eurasia, the structural divide of the steppe and the sown was not even affected by the ascendancy of a Mongol dynasty in China. The dynastic cycles of the Chinese Empire and the vast continental oscillations of nomadic power persisted through time. There was real historical change, but no linear “development.”

As we turn to the anthropological turn in post-Columbian travelogues and philosophy the scene changes dramatically. The European conquest of America brought into being a new frontier where Europeans and “savages” faced one another. The disparity in technology and military power was immense, far greater than on the ancient sedentary-nomadic frontier. The Europeans often depicted the “Indians” as people dwelling in the “infancy” of the world or close to the beginnings of history. As we move from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the Native Americans were progressively turned into physical contemporaries whose time was, philosophically speaking, over. They were “in” the modern world but not quite “of it,” and their resistance against the arrow of Euro-global time was easily reduced to the pitiable status of a rearguard fight. The Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, one of the founding editors of Subaltern Studies, has termed the inequality effect of this temporal regime the hyper-reality of Europe.[25]

In the post-Columbian age, such developmental temporalities largely displaced the older regimes of cyclical time. Since the industrial revolutions of the last two centuries, “development” and “modernization” have acquired an almost sacred status in the mentalities of governments, political elites, and economic experts the world over. For all that, cyclical time has not entirely departed the scene. In debates on the role of empires in world history, the vision of rise followed by inevitable decline seems itself subject to a rhythm of rise and decline, as is apparent from the abundant literature about the prospects of the American Empire in the contemporary age. The same is true of the issue of religion. Until quite recently, a linear, developmental theory of steady secularization was widely embraced, but nowadays the confident expectation of a wholly secular future has turned into an apprehensive questioning mood.

Social Experiences and Available Discourses

The texts discussed in this book come in a great variety of genres: religious scriptures, epic and didactic poetry, wisdom books, philosophical treatises and dialogues, historical narratives, geography and ethnography, autobiographies, political declarations, and press publications. In some of these, equality and common humanity are discussed in explicit terms, but in others we encounter narratives, parables, aphorisms, and poems conveying an equality effect. To show this, we can quote a few lines from the psalmist:

A little that a righteous man hath

Is better than the riches of many wicked.[26]

Or we may point to some verses that were popular among radicals in the seventeenth-century English Revolution:

When Adam delved and Eve span,

Who was then the gentleman?[27]

From ancient Chinese books of wisdom, we can cite a saying of Confucius:

The Master said: ‘A man may have the splendid talents of the Duke of Zhou, but if he is arrogant and mean, all his merits count for nothing.’[28]

The word equality does not figure in any of these texts, but they have an unmistakable equality effect. That is not to say that the Bible or the Analects of Confucius are egalitarian treatises. The point is that later commentators and readers may find egalitarian inspiration in such passages. Let us recall that most of the great canonical books of the world’s civilizations are not systematic doctrinal treatises but rather syncretic collections of narratives, poems, dialogues, sayings, and practical and moral prescriptions. Such texts admit of selective, widely different, and often contradictory readings. Consequently, they stand in need of exegesis, interpretation, and commentary. Their authors pass away, but the texts live on, and it is up to future readers to make sense of them. The more influential and canonical a text becomes, the fiercer the struggles over its control and interpretation will be.

Equality effects can also issue from common practices. The experience of struggling together against oppression creates the sense of a community of equals, even if no explicit equality claims are made. In Chapter 8 we will see that Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha (“truth-force”) rested on a fusion of political struggle and community-making, demanding that all participants take personal responsibility for their actions. Consequently, responsibility could not be delegated to “leaders.” Various combinations of nonviolent action and community-making are found in twentieth-century politics across the world.[29]

As noted earlier, the limits of the thinkable and the limits of action are dialectically related. What people can will and do depends, among other things, on the intellectual materials available to them. In any historical period, there circulate definite dominant languages in which social, religious, and political concerns can be expressed. However, there usually also circulate other half-forgotten or marginal languages and ideas that people can draw on in their written and spoken interventions in public debates. Moreover, authors and thinkers can use the ideas of writers from remote antiquity in their contributions to the polemics of their own time. Every historical period has its treasury of “ancients.”[30] Finally, idioms and concepts, even well-established, canonical ones, can be stretched and recombined to forge critical new insights out of old intellectual materials.

In what follows I will often use the notion of a language of politics, of religion, and of other discursive fields. As indicated above, my use of the notion of “languages of” is inspired by J. G. A. Pocock’s approach to intellectual history. A political language, for instance, provides people with a basic vocabulary and a number of provisional rules for handling it. Early-modern natural law offers a good example. It starts with individuals having certain “natural” capacities, needs, and desires. These individuals are theorized as the bearers of definite “natural rights.” To arrive at a peaceful resolution of their conflicts they engage in a “contract,” creating a political authority that will henceforth secure their rights. The language of natural law leaves room for a large variety of arguments, depending on how human nature is defined, who are the bearers of natural rights, how the contract is framed, and what rights it guarantees. Delineations of human nature can generate tacit exclusions of, for instance, women, “savages,” people of color, or people deemed insufficiently rational. Natural law texts often exhibit internal tensions between universalistic, potentially inclusive concepts and the way these concepts are deployed in arguments and examples. These tensions provide the entry points for the thin end of the egalitarian wedge wielded by critics and outsiders.

Pocock’s methodology has mainly been used in studies of early-modern European political thought. In this book, I will use it to study a topic in global intellectual history.[31] Is that a feasible approach? Above, I introduced the notion of meta-concepts to bridge the vast distances in space and time covered by this study. Underpinning my meta-concepts are analogies between disparate languages and arguments in different civilizations and ages. An example may clarify what I have in mind. It turns on the tensions between nobility of character and established social hierarchies in the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal and the fifth-century BCE Chinese sage Confucius. About the nobles of his day Pascal has the following to say: “It is not necessary that I feel great esteem for you because you are a duke, but it is necessary that I address you correctly.” If you were a duke but not a civilized person, Pascal continues, I would salute you with the exterior signs of respect social conventions assign to your ancestry, but I would not desist from “feeling for you the deep disdain the baseness of your mind deserves.”[32] Confucius has a great deal to say about his ideal of the civilized man (the “gentleman”—junzi). A civilized man, he avers, “makes demands on himself; a vulgar man makes demands on others.”[33] Elsewhere he declares that a teacher of wisdom “sets his heart on the Way; if he is ashamed of his shabby clothes and coarse food, he is not worth listening to.”[34] In his discussion of the junzi, Confucius consistently marks off nobility of character from conspicuous consumption or arrogant and domineering attitudes. Just like Pascal’s honnêteté, Confucius ideal of the civilized man is directed against the ethos of aristocratic privilege. Notwithstanding all the differences in their ideas of virtue and human nature, Pascal and Confucius agree on what they most deeply dislike. The equality effects of their discourse on “nobility” are roughly similar. Across a distance of more than two thousand years and across the cultural gap between ancient China and early-modern Europe meaningful analogies do exist.

For my history such analogies are crucial. They enable me to follow the trajectory of concepts and discourses over two millennia and across the world. The concepts of equality in ancient Greece and modern Europe are not identical but both seek to answer the same question: can and should the many rule and, if so, in what kind of political regime? They thus exhibit sufficient analogies to include them in the same history. To draw on Wittgenstein’s theory of language, they show significant and meaningful “family resemblances.”[35] Likewise with synchronic cultural differences: The Polish-Australian linguist Anna Wierzbicka has shown that the meanings of concepts such as friendship, freedom, homeland, and fatherland are differently framed in English, Latin, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese. But they also overlap and their differences can be analyzed as variations on a common theme.[36]

In a global intellectual history, we study texts that traverse the world and are translated, reworked, and interpreted anew as they are inserted in novel lexical fields and deployed in new contexts of cognition and meaning-making. Most of the time, this is a two-way process, a facet that is frequently obscured in the traditional theories of cultural diffusion and intellectual influence. The recent theoretical approach of intercrossing histories (histoire croisée) is better suited to come to grips with the dynamics of global intellectual history.[37] To take an example more fully discussed later, Gandhi’s theorization of “Indian freedom” (Hind swaraj) “thinks with” Indian sources, South African political experiences, Christian scripture, and John Ruskin’s critique of modern culture but simultaneously “thinks against” other European thought systems, such as utilitarianism and political economy. Finally Gandhi’s ideas “came back” to South Africa and North America, where they were taken up and reworked in new twentieth-century contexts by Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. An account of the formation and travel of his ideas in terms of influence and reception would occlude the political dynamics in which ideas not only travel but are also continuously reframed and transformed.

Another problem concerns the linkages between political languages and social experience. Today, there is a broad consensus among historians that languages are themselves part of social experience. “Words are deeds,” as Wittgenstein famously observed. That is not to say, however, that all human actions are speech acts. The varieties of bodily feeling, the experiences of violence, the material energy of labor, the physical feel of nature, the hearing of music, and the work on human artifacts result in a spectrum of human experiences that is far broader than language. In human lives there is quite a lot of hors texte. Living through experiences together is not the same thing as speaking about them. We use the term social experience to indicate that people live through and cope with such experiences in collective frames that are, of course, also mediated by language. To borrow another insight from Wittgenstein, words and sentences acquire their meaning in use, and use is always embedded in a context of action.[38] Meaning is constituted on the interface between what people do and what they say. As their speech acts become more complicated, and written texts and second-order comments enter the fray, language gets more leverage. It is here that the notion of “available languages” is of crucial importance. Drawing on the available political, social, religious, philosophical, and literary languages, people can reflect on their experiences and, in many instances, think “beyond” them.

With all this in mind, we can ask what types of social experience facilitate the emergence of ideas of common humanity and equality. As previously noted, frontier experiences are of crucial importance. Without frontier experiences and border crossings notions of common humanity and cross-cultural equality cannot enter the realm of the thinkable. A second typical case concerns experiences of mutual dependency. Experiences such as fighting a war, defending a city, traversing a sea or a mountain range, or being part of a persecuted minority promote strong feelings of reciprocity and solidarity. Such feelings can cross cultural boundaries and occasion a critical look at established hierarchies. A third case is the meritocratic experience. Participating in a manual or intellectual craft, practitioners are rated according to their proficiency. Competing for customers, craftsmen and traders are judged by their skills. Considerations of ancestry, ethnicity, religion, status, and gender can then be bracketed or even downgraded as irrelevant, depending upon the value and prestige of specific professional pursuits for the larger community. Our fourth case concerns strong emotions, in particular experiences of friendship and love. The theme of illicit love, across the boundaries of rank, ethnos, or faith, is found in the literature of all civilizations. Friendship across cultural boundaries is another seminal genre.

A fifth case concerns religion and mythology. The mythical imagination opens doors to experiences of “realities” in temporally and spatially remote environments, or even in “places” that are altogether outside ordinary time and space. Such experiences of the imaginary often comprise vistas of common humanity and equality, such as golden ages, paradisiacal states of innocence and equality, the unity of all humans created in God’s image, the immateriality of the soul, feelings of cosmic wholeness, or awareness of the unity of all living beings.

Finally, we must consider the philosophical experience, or rather the opening of the philosophical window on the world. The activity of doing philosophy constitutes a new departure. Philosophy introduces self-reflexivity, a way of looking at ways of looking, enabling people to comment on all of the experiences discussed above, and ultimately to present comments on those comments, opening the door to second-order judgments and vistas of interminable self-reflexivity. Like the religious experience, the philosophical experience transcends “reality” by creating a “world of the mind” and paving the way for the practice of critique. Philosophical practice enables people to imagine that things could be otherwise than they now are. Moreover, the advent of philosophy coincides with the formation of intellectual communities. Thanks to the introduction of the written word such communities evolve into virtual communities and translocal networks that expand far beyond the communicative horizons of traditional face-to-face societies.

The History of Equality and the History of Modernity

How to write a history of common humanity and global equality? Where should it begin and what might it look like? One obvious starting point would be the European seventeenth century, when truly universalistic notions of equality, transcending religion, rank, gender, and sometimes even ethnicity and race, were articulated for the first time. Some of the Levelers in the radical phase of the seventeenth-century English Revolution proposed universal toleration “of all religions whatsoever, not excepting Turks nor Papists nor Jews.”[39] The literary and philosophical feminists of the time defended the equality of the sexes, others attacked rank and privilege, and still others criticized European prejudices about barbarians and savages. According to the Cartesian champion of the equality of the sexes François Poulain de la Barre, the opinion that “Turks and savages” were intellectually inferior to Europeans was one of the prejudices enlightened people should reject. In a previous book I have subsumed the universalistic notions of equality that became thinkable to a limited number of seventeenth-century men and women under the label of modern equality.[40] In the European Enlightenment, modern equality became an intellectual vehicle of critiques of inequality along the dimensions of rank and estate, sex and gender, and finally culture, ethnicity, and “race.”

The contours of a possible history now begin to appear. It would come in three stages: prehistory, from antiquity to the Enlightenment; invention, in the Enlightenment; and history, from the Enlightenment to the present day. The first part would point out key ideas and precursors found in ancient and medieval history, and investigate which of those were taken up and reworked in the Enlightenment. The modern part would present us with a beautiful case of Whig history. Much of that history would be true enough. That is what makes Whig history so seductive and so dangerous. It is part of a true story, and it tells itself so well. Herbert Butterfield, who coined the term in the 1930s, warned that since the historian knows not only the game but also the identity of the winners, “all history” has a tendency “to veer over into Whig history.”[41] In our case, a Whig history of cross-cultural equality would document its invention in seventeenth-century Europe, followed by its rise and global dissemination in the following centuries. This is a possible “true story” (actually, it is much like the one that is told about liberty in most textbook histories of political thought).[42]

Why not write such a history, putting cross-cultural equality at the center of the plot? I can think of four reasons why such a Whig history is inadequate. The first has to do with the pre-Enlightenment history of equality and with the role of pre-Enlightenment discourses in the making of modern equality. The philosophical legacy of antiquity was not abandoned after the Enlightenment; it is still with us today. The lasting influence of world religions has disproved the modernist commonplace of a wholesale secularization of human culture. The notions of a common humanity of the children of one God, of the equality of all human beings before God, and of a divinely created soul as a universal human faculty have played an enormously powerful role throughout history—before, during, and after the Enlightenment.[43] For example, while much of radical Enlightenment thought was inspired by anticlericalism and materialism, the overwhelming majority of the people who effected the abolition of slavery in the 1780–1880 century in the Anglophone world were evangelical Christians who condemned slavery on religious grounds. It follows that a neat separation between modern equality and premodern ideas cannot do full justice to the complex texture of egalitarian thought in the last three centuries.

A second reason concerns extra-European history. Generally speaking, various egalitarian arguments can be culled from the founding texts of the world’s religions and the books of wisdom of the great civilizations. Karen Armstrong has argued that “concern for everybody” was a significant tenet of the major religions and philosophies of the Axial Age (see Chapters 1 and 2).[44] The equal dignity of different religious cultures was always an extremely thorny issue, and history is replete with examples of bigotry and persecution. Nonetheless, the notion of a peaceful multireligious community is not a modern European monopoly. It was pioneered by the Achaemenid emperor Cyrus in the sixth century BCE and by the edicts of the Indian emperor Asoka in the third century BCE.[45] Later examples include the toleration of Buddhist, Nestorian, and Jewish cults in Tang China (though Buddhists were persecuted in the ninth century) and the toleration policy of Akbar, who governed Mughal India in the late sixteenth century.[46] None of these examples should be anachronistically reconfigured as “precursors” of modern European toleration.[47] Even so, they are useful to determine the balance of traditional and novel elements in European discourses of toleration. Likewise, the acceptance of cultural pluralism and the invention of the anthropological turn in Herodotus’s Histories were paralleled by the formulation of an ethnographic pluralism in the works of the Han Chinese historian Sima Qian (Ssu-ma Ch’ien) and by the dialectic of sedentary “civilization” and nomadic “barbarians” in the work of the fourteenth-century CE Arabic philosopher of history Ibn Khaldun. The discussion of such examples will enable me to identify common themes as well as significant differences in context, framing, and conceptual vocabulary.

The third reason why a Whig history is inadequate has to do with the Enlightenment itself. Apart from modern equality it gave birth to another discursive child, modern inequality. At least four eminently modern discourses of inequality are part of the Enlightenment: racial classification, political economy, biological and psychological theories of sexual difference, and, finally, the notion of a pedagogical, and often political, authority of the enlightened few over the not (yet) enlightened many. As a rule, the latter ideas were linked to a philosophy of history that posited four stages through which all peoples in the world had to pass. As only Europe had reached the fourth and highest stage, it represented the vanguard of the world and the future of all other peoples. The Enlightenment thus presents us with two faces. One side of Enlightenment reason was its attribution to every human individual. In theory, all were capable to judge what was best for themselves and for humanity, and to act accordingly. The other side of Enlightenment reason, however, was its de facto assignment to those who already were “enlightened,” who were then called upon not only to decide what was good and reasonable for all others but also to scientifically determine what the nature of those others was. In many cases, we should add, the demarcation of the enlightened few and the ignorant others coincided with racial boundaries.

The fourth and final objection to a Whig history of equality concerns what happened between the late eighteenth century and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Two major and largely modern counteregalitarian movements, wielding powerful discourses and ideas, disturb the victorious forward march of our Whig history. One comprises colonialism and nineteenth-century scientific racism; the other, twentieth-century totalitarianism. Both are much too massive and long-lasting to write them off as mere temporary setbacks on the highway of modern equality. Their legacies, both political and intellectual, are still with us today. These two great anti-egalitarian movements were rooted in ideas about truth and science that originated in Enlightenment natural history, human science, and epistemology. The very idea of a civilizing mission for European colonialism was unthinkable without the Enlightenment philosophy of history.

As the bearers of the civilizing mission were mostly white Europeans, the notion of a racial hierarchy was never far away. Far from being an atavistic remnant of premodern xenophobia, nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientific racism was a quintessentially modern worldview. Even the paranoid anti-Semitic theories of the Nazis represented an extreme, mentally deranged variety of racial doctrines most nineteenth-century European intellectuals subscribed to. In a similar way, the theoretical bedrock of communist totalitarianism was the assumption that the Marxist-Leninist vanguard possessed a superior science of history that entitled it to determine the fate of those who lacked such knowledge. Again, this way of thinking represented an extreme intensification of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century belief that the well-instructed and enlightened elites should rule and educate the ignorant masses.

To think of the Enlightenment and our own time as history we need a framework that transcends the Enlightenment. That is why I begin my account in antiquity, when notions of common humanity were invented throughout the Old World. Offshoots and later adaptations of these ancient religious and philosophical ideas about common humanity are integral parts of the global intellectual landscape of our time. The conceit that all these ancient ideas are now superseded and that we will soon have them “behind” us, as Condorcet announced in his Esquisse d’un tableau des progrès de l’esprit humain (1794), is itself part of the Enlightenment philosophy of history.

The Enlightenment is of signal importance because it represents a vital turning point in European and global history, but we must realize that by now it is also history. It is undeniable that our thinking about history and human nature is greatly indebted to the Enlightenment, but to conflate modernity with a putative Enlightenment “project” would result in a Hegelian version of modern history as the progressive unfolding of Enlightenment reason in time and space. Against that, I will seek to understand modern history as an ongoing dialectic of progression and contingency in which Enlightenment ideas are frequently put to use but also profoundly transformed by political actors and thinkers across the world.[48]

The Cross-Cultural Dynamics of World History

My view of the history of common humanity and cross-cultural equality is premised upon a vision of history that foregrounds frontiers and interfaces between cultures and civilizations. I am indebted to American world historian William McNeill’s thesis that “the principal factor promoting historically significant social change is contact with strangers possessing new and unfamiliar skills.”[49] Consequently, frontiers are the engine of history. McNeill’s original model turned on the transmission of skills and techniques from one civilization to another. Its focus highlighted the ascendancy of the most creative and productive civilizations, while their less well-endowed counterparts were seen as lagging behind. McNeill’s title, The Rise of the West, affirmed that perspective, even though his subtitle, A History of the Human Community, indicated a different, more ecumenical vision. In a remarkably candid review of his own work, published in 1990, McNeill admitted that his book, its global intentions notwithstanding, had indeed developed into a history of the winners.

To arrive at a more balanced account of world history, McNeill proposed a far-reaching modification of the concept of civilization. Since Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History it had been customary to take “civilizations” as the building blocks of world history. However, McNeill now considered he had overly reified the concept of civilization. Accordingly, he proposed to make more room for transcivilizational flows of people, goods, skills, and ideas. Some systems of thought, such as the great world religions, traverse and affect all the civilizations on the planet. Such upgrading of global connections naturally leads to the question if, and in what terms, we are still justified to speak of civilizations as world historical units. Tackling that issue, McNeill interestingly makes a move from political to intellectual history: “A shared literary canon and expectations about human behavior framed by that canon are probably central to what we mean by a civilization.”[50] Consequently, the diffusion and circulation of worldwide ecumenical ideas will affect the identities of all the civilizations concerned. Frontiers remain highly significant, but the fault lines between civilizations become more fluid and permeable. By blurring the boundaries of civilizations and allowing for the global reach of religions and other systems of thought, the whole model becomes less stable and more tension ridden.

Another element that calls into question the stability of frontiers originates in the intellectual dynamics of religion and philosophy. Religious and philosophical ideas are invented in particular places, but they codify the local customs and convictions in languages that admit of a more universal interpretation. In encounters with foreigners such universalizing impulses can serve as the intellectual means of bridging cultural differences. What began as a local cult can evolve into a universal religion. The evolution of Christianity and Islam are signal examples. The wisdom of a sage in a particular ethnos can become a philosophical vision of the human condition. This is not only a question of modifying ideas to make them useful as “bridges.” The intellectual origins of the transformation of local into universal truths are also lodged in the internal dynamics of religions and philosophies. Notions of “truth” and “the good life” possess an inner logic, an impulse to “think deeper and further,” that pushes them beyond the cultural parameters of their original homelands. The conviction that certain ideas possess universal validity sits ill with the admission that they lose their validity beyond the Great Wall or on the other shore of the Atlantic. That is not to say, however, that such “inner logics” move through history on their own steam. It is always people in determinate historical contexts who have to do the moving. When universalistic ideas are connected to migration, state formation, and imperial expansion, they can be translated into other languages and adapted to the idioms of other places. But such translations will always involve reworking and innovation. Intercultural highways always bear traffic in both directions with frequent exchanges midway, a valuable insight I take from the intercrossing approach to global intellectual history.

The reference to imperial expansion is not accidental. The rise and decline of empires determines the grand patterns of world history. But just like the civilizations with which they usually overlap, empires are not only made by wealth and military might. To govern many millions of people the power of ideas is indispensable: no Chinese Empire without Confucianism; no Roman Empire without Hellenism and Christianity; no Spanish Empire without Catholicism; no British Empire without Protestantism-cum-Enlightenment; no Soviet-Russian Empire without Marxism-Leninism; no American Empire without the American Dream. As a rule, the worldwide circulation and syncretism of ideas is linked to the great imperial rhythms of rise, consolidation, and decline.

Throughout history, universal ideas and messages are Janus-faced. One face is truly universalistic and consequently foregrounds common humanity and the equal dignity of all human beings on earth. The other face, however, does not entirely sever the ties between a universalistic creed and its original home culture. The Spanish missionaries who entered America in the sixteenth century, to take a familiar example, conceived of Christianity as a universal divine message to humanity, but also as “our religion” that “we” are now bringing to “the benighted Indians.” Likewise, eighteenth-century Europeans, to take another familiar example, viewed Enlightenment Reason both as a body of universal truth and as a European achievement.

Imperial perimeters are the sites where ethnographic knowledge is assembled, making cultural difference into a possible object of investigation and philosophical reflection. In the orbit of empire both common humanity and the anthropological turn become thinkable. Moreover, anxieties about the future prospects of empires on the part of their rulers as well as the understandable diffidence of peoples who find themselves on the receiving end of imperial conquest incite all concerned to reflect on the temporality of empires and, beyond that, on the temporal regimes of world history.

Organization of the Book

Chapters 1 and 2 discuss the inventions of common humanity in the long era that runs, roughly, from the Greeks, the Hebrews, the Indians, and the Chinese to the rise of Christianity and Islam. Most of the texts I discuss contain notions of common humanity as well as powerful messages denouncing or downgrading those who follow other creeds. I shall pay attention to both aspects of these Janus-faced canonical texts.

Chapters 3 and 4 introduce the anthropological turn. The focus shifts from religion and philosophy to history, geography, and ethnography. The borderlands between the sown and the steppe in Eurasia and between the urbanized littoral and the Sahara in Africa made up the Great Frontier of the Old World. I present an extensive analysis of the ethnographies of three canonical historians of the ancient world, focusing on their ethnographies and judgments of the peoples beyond the imperial perimeters. I then discuss the medieval Islamic commonwealth, at the time the only Old World civilization that was in contact with all the others, looking at three Muslim scholars. The first and the third—Al-Biruni and Ibn Khaldun—are ethnographers and historians, while the second one, Farid al-Din Attar, is a Sufi poet who theorized all doctrinal religions as human-made avenues to God.

Chapter 5 introduces an altogether different type of frontier. In the wake of Columbus’s transatlantic voyages, the European colonization of America resulted in a direct confrontation between a vigorous sedentary civilization and—with the exception of Mexico and Peru—mostly small-scale agricultural and nomadic societies whose military resources were no match for the firearms, armor, and iron weapons of the invading Europeans. This made the American frontier fundamentally different from the Old World frontiers, where an approximate military balance obtained. The chapter discusses the most vociferous defender of the Native Americans, the Catholic priest Bartolomé de las Casas, and several of his allies and adversaries, followed by meta-discourses on America in the writings of José de Acosta and Michel de Montaigne.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European globalization came full circle. The Atlantic slave trade connected Africa to Europe and America, while Europeans entered the Indian Ocean, colliding with the far-flung commercial, political, and cultural networks of Islam and the other high civilizations of Asia. The Russian Empire began its colonization of Central Asia and Siberia. After 1760, European settlers embarked on the colonization of Australia and the exploration of the South Pacific. Chapter 6 examines the Enlightenment’s responses to the formation of a Euro-global world order. It is the most Eurocentric chapter of the book, but at the same time it highlights the critique of Eurocentrism and European imperialism by Enlightenment thinkers.

We then enter the world of human rights, proclaimed and disseminated by the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. Simultaneously, however, we enter the world of the color line. The nineteenth-century abolition of Atlantic slavery coincided with the rise of scientific racism, a worldview that percolated through all varieties of European and North American ethnology, biology, history, politics, and education, as well as popular literature. After the Age of the Democratic Revolutions, Chapter 7 discusses abolitionist African American thought and the inception of the Indian critique of British imperial civilization. It ends with a discussion of the colonial civilizing mission that emerged in the late nineteenth century.

Chapter 8 focuses on the globalization of egalitarian critiques of colonialism and racism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After a brief discussion of the internationalization of these intellectual trends around the turn of the century, it zooms in on the theoretical and historical critique of racism by the Haitian writer Antenor Firmin and the indictment of Spanish colonialism by Jose Rizal, an early champion of Philippine independence. Next, it offers extended discussions of the American anthropologist Franz Boas, the African American historian W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Indian anticolonial thought of Mahatma Gandhi.

Chapter 9 discusses the “Age of Human Rights,” the new world order inaugurated by the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. It opens with the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations in 1948, followed by the critiques of scientific racism enshrined in the two Statements on Race promulgated by UNESCO in the early 1950s. The chapter further looks at the pictorial representation of common humanity in The Family of Man, an exhibition that toured the world in the 1950s. Following are ideas on equality and history of two postcolonial intellectuals of the postwar era: The francophone poet and thinker Aimé Césaire, and the Egyptian American theorist of gender and Islam Leila Ahmed. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of the increasing role of human rights in world politics since the 1970s.

The epilogue explores the future of global and transcultural equality. It discusses new ideas and configurations of common humanity and equality that have stood at the center of debates and polemics since the fall of the Berlin Wall, such as multiculturalism and its critique, the clash of civilizations, and the abiding relevance of empires.

1

VISIONS OF A COMMON HUMANITY

BEFORE MODERN TIMES no one was able to survey the entire surface of the globe. Consequently, a community including all the inhabitants of the earth could not be empirically verified. Many learned men in ancient Eurasia and North Africa believed that the Southern Hemisphere was not fit for human habitation and perhaps inaccessible because of the extreme heat in the tropics. Even so, myths, epics, religions, and philosophies imagined an overarching human community long before anyone was able to draw up a global ethnography. Poets, priests, and philosophers devised powerful visions of common humanity and ideas of what it meant to be human. As the creators of these “imagined humanities” were members of definite civilizations, it is not surprising that their ideas bore the imprint of their local origins. Set against that background, it is all the more impressive that these texts are replete with comprehensive concepts and discourses of human nature, laying the groundwork for universalistic visions of common humanity.

Apart from their universalistic potential these writings have something else in common. Many of them are still with us today. The groundwork for universal visions of the human condition was laid in the last millennium before the Common Era. The German philosopher Karl Jaspers regarded this period as one of the major intellectual breakthroughs in the history of humanity and christened it the Axial Age. The Axial Age, he contended, invented the philosophical notion of the human: in that historical juncture “the human being as we still conceive of it today made its appearance.” According to Jaspers, writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, twentieth-century humanity was still drawing on what was conceived and thought in that distant age.[1]

Hellenism, Christianity, and Islam, which came to dominate late antiquity in North Africa and western Eurasia, as well as the canonization of Confucianism and Buddhism in South and East Asia, are sometimes seen as belonging to a secondary Axial breakthrough. Not all the religious and philosophical doctrines of the Axial Age have survived into our post-Enlightenment modernity, but enough of them have to make them essential to a world history of common humanity. Numerous later thinkers have drawn upon the great texts of the Axial Age, while those who explored new lines of thought frequently felt the need to reappraise, revise, and criticize the Axial doctrines of their civilizations.

The Ambiguities of Common Humanity in the Axial Age

The founders of the Axial Age embraced inclusive visions of humanity as an overarching moral community. We should not, however, assume that they countenanced egalitarian social and political ideas. Most of them combined notions of the moral and spiritual dignity of all humans with strongly hierarchical views of the social order. The move from common humanity to a critique of the prevailing hierarchies of gender, rank, ethnos, and politics was rarely made. Nonetheless, the Axial texts are replete with admonitions to the high and the mighty not to overstep the divine and human boundaries set for them. Likewise, they warn them not to abuse their power, lest they become oppressors of the common people and might have to face popular revolt and divine retribution.

The language of the Axial texts made it thinkable to censure kings and great lords, and it gave a voice to prophets and popular leaders desiring to secure some safeguards for ordinary people. Even so, the same texts justified the basic hierarchies of the social order enshrined in the traditional codes of rank and gender, in most cases including slavery. Consequently, these texts often allow for widely diverging interpretations. The apostle Paul’s Letter to the Romans, to take a well-known example, was often cited in defense of a strict submission to the powers that be, but his affirmation that the ruler is “the minister of God”[2] also opened the door to a critique of rulers who manifestly did not live up to the demanding standards associated with a minister of the Lord. Confucius, another classical example, is noted for his conviction that a civilized human community should be ordered according to the “five relationships,” four of which are starkly hierarchical. However, the sage also asserted that for the ruler of a state the support of the people was of even greater import than food and arms, for it was thinkable to survive without arms and food for some time, but “without the trust of the people no government can stand.”[3] Though written in widely different languages of politics and cosmic order, the New Testament and the Analects convey a similar tension between acceptance and questioning of the social order.

When it comes to cultural boundaries we face a more complex situation. To begin with, all canons of religion and wisdom originated in definite societies and states, often grafted upon communities of lineage and ethnic descent. The canonization of written texts we associate with the onset of the Axial Age began in sedentary agrarian societies ruled from urban centers. Cities, government centers, and scribes are an important presence in all of the great Axial Age texts. It follows that the image of “civilization” in most of those texts has a definite urban-agrarian flavor. The wandering tribes of Israel in the Hebrew Bible tell the story of a nomadic past, but the scribes who put together the canon of the Tenach were priests working in an urban environment. The story of Exodus is not a vindication of the nomadic way of life but a narrative of escape from oppression followed by the arduous trek through the desert to the Promised Land where the scribes themselves were living or hoped to return. The symbolic terminus of the story is not the Sinai but the future city of Jerusalem. In such texts, the validity of the civilizing mission of prophets and sages is always assumed. One of its most impressive testimonies is in Confucius. The sage is about to depart for the remote lands of “the nine barbarian tribes of the East.” One of his disciples inquires if he is not terrified by the prospect of sojourning in such a wild place. Confucius’s laconic reply says it all: “How could it be wild, once a gentleman [Junzi] has settled there?”[4]

We do well to appreciate the significance of this self-confidence. It would be a mistake, I think, to dismiss it as dogmatism. Reading the life story of Confucius, one is struck by the sheer hopelessness of his enterprise. In the midst of incessant war, violence, and duplicity he sought to convince his contemporaries of the dignity of a civilized life. Without the inner certainty that his vision represented the deep truth about living a human life, he could never have mustered the courage to defy the storms of his time. His words breathe serenity rather than dogmatism. Dogmatism can only flourish with a great mass of servile followers. Confucius had few followers and those he had were not servile. Only an unshakable confidence in the inner truth of his ideas enabled him to stand against the world and to ward off the always possible descent into dread and despair.

Civilizations, Empires, and Universalisms

The example of Confucius shows that common humanity is both a given and an assignment. Once written down, such ideas partake in the magical power of language. To realize itself, humaneness has to be encoded in words, and sooner or later those words will be canonized in authoritative texts. The linkage of truth, wisdom, and civilization is both unavoidable and precarious. The fragility of the linkage stems from the intrinsic limitations of frail and fallible human beings. Living in accordance with truth and wisdom is not the same as unthinkingly following the conventions of one’s civilization. Prophets and sages have frequently marshaled the authority of truth against the facile pretensions of the complacent ideologues of a traditional social order.

Even so, the great canonized religions and philosophies usually evolved in close conjunction with the civilizations and empires that underpinned their regional or global dissemination. Over the centuries, they became associated with them and were frequently conflated with them. Confucianism was intimately connected to the civilization of imperial China, Hinduism and Buddhism to their Indian origins, Islam to its tricontinental Arabic roots, and Christianity first to Roman imperial civilization and later to Europe and its settler colonies, and beyond that to “the West.” Consequently, their discourses of common humanity were both universal and culturally specific. Historically, both poles of the dialectic are equally vital and equally “real.”

To prophets and scribes, universal truths were also “our truths.” The God of the Tenach was portrayed as a universal deity who “in the beginning” created the entire cosmos, but also as “our God,” the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. A basic tension lay at the core of the universal visions of the Axial Age. Defined by shared bodily and mental faculties and limitations, by common duties and needs, and unified by universal values, humanity was imagined as one meta-community. But at the same time the particular standards of truth, virtue, and proper conduct proclaimed by the “wise men,” and an occasional “wise woman,” of particular civilizations tended to produce a duality of “we” versus “them.”

Most, perhaps all, conceptions of humanity were therefore universalistic as well as dualistic, setting forth the unity of humanity but also affirming a dichotomy of “we” and “them.” When these religions and philosophies crossed boundaries, as most of them did sooner or later, the dialectic of the universal and the particular had to be renegotiated. New peoples adopting a creed that comes from “elsewhere” always have to reinterpret and rework it in order to make it their own. To take a rather extreme example, the Japanese minorities converted by the Jesuits in the sixteenth century CE appropriated the biblical stories in original ways, situating them in an imaginary geography that was in Jacques Proust’s apt formulation “neither Japan nor Judea.” They opened the narrative of the Deluge with God sending a message to the pious king Happamaruji, warning him that when the eyes of the temple dog turned red, the world would be submerged by a devastating flood.[5] Admittedly, this is a fairly extreme case, brought about by the involuntary autonomy of the Japanese Christians when the Tokugawa state’s anti-Christian persecution severed their links with Rome. Nonetheless, it exemplifies a tendency that was at work wherever universal religions entered new territories.

But that is not all. When we investigate the cognitive and emotional core of religions and philosophies, we become aware of a deeper dialectic that springs from the ontological status of “deep truth.” As evinced by the imperturbable confidence of Confucius in the power of the sage, these texts claim an absolute authority. Their serene composure sometimes baffles the modern reader. The aggressive denunciations of the “untruth” and the imposture of other creeds in several religious texts is only the other, less pleasant face of this supreme self-confidence. Even the gentle words of Confucius are predicated on a distinction between those who understand and follow the Way and those who fail to do so. Whoever professes to speak in the name of philosophical or divine Truth ipso facto claims the authority to offer guidance and instruction to the benighted multitudes still dwelling in the darkness of Untruth.

Such authority could be exercised within the perimeter of a core state and its civilization, but it could also be projected outward, to distant and foreign lands. In such cases, the superiority of truth over untruth was easily equated with the justification of imperial rule over cities and peoples who had not yet seen the light of the imperial creed. Moving outward, universal belief systems abstracted from “home,” all the while extending the moral and intellectual power of “home” to its imperial domains. The case for empire could be so powerful precisely because its religions and philosophies were universal as well as imperial. As Joseph Conrad famously put it in Heart of Darkness: “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only.”[6] The tension between common humanity and imperial hegemony was lodged at the heart of the universal religions and philosophies of the Axial Age. When empires were organized around a dominant ethnos and its myth of descent, that tension paralleled an equally portentous strain between universalism and ethnocentrism.

In the final analysis, the dialectic of universalism and ethnocentrism inflected thought and structures of feeling in two directions. The empires with their ethnic cores and myths of descent were awesome historical realities, giving rise to a hard, and frequently deadly, clash between “our truth” and “their darkness.” The other side of the dialectic was that it was precisely the attempt to enshrine the contingent reality of empire in an aura of absolute truth that could contrive universalistic ideas that transcended the frontiers of the empire and might ultimately be turned against it.

Homer and the Notion of Civilized People

Our story begins with Homer because the Homeric epics are aristocratic texts in which liminal notions of common humanity and equality make their appearance. A generic concept of “humanity” and a universalistic idea of equality were not available to Homer, but we shall shortly see that his stories contain norms and ideals of moral rectitude and right conduct that suggest an emergent idea of common humanity and universal justice. In the transition from the Iliad to the Odyssey we can document the universalization of the Justice of Zeus as the foundation of common humanity. In the travelogue of Odysseus we can also document the invention of the “savage” as the antonym of the “civilized.” Moreover, Homer was at the core of the Greek and later the Hellenistic canon. Probably recorded in writing in the seventh century BCE, the Iliad and the Odyssey had attained the status of supreme literary authorities by Plato’s time. Later still, when numerous cities of the Roman Empire established their own libraries, scrolls of the two works were among their most prized possessions.

The world of the Iliad and the Odyssey is dominated by the social imagination of the Greek and Trojan aristocracies. The great lords, Homer’s “heroes,” are the chief protagonists of the narrative, while the common people dwell in a shadowy background. The ruthless logic of war, as well as the harsh treatment and humiliation of slaves and women, are commonplace in the story. In his influential history of ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre has even asserted that the Homeric concepts of goodness and virtue refer to aristocratic standards of behavior, so that the common people have no moral standing at all.[7] But that is an overstatement. The Iliad gives the aristocrats pride of place, but it does not take aristocratic standards for granted. Homer recounts the ancient story of the Trojan War from the vantage point of a later age, the end of the eighth century BCE, when aristocracies of lineage and wealth had to govern city-states in which the common people wielded significant power.[8]

In the Homeric epics ordinary male freemen are not depicted as mere tools of the great lords. At every important turning point of the Trojan War, the assembly of all the warriors, lords and commoners alike, has a role to play.[9] As a rule, only the aristocrats make the speeches, but the acclaim of the ordinary soldiers is far from inconsequential. Moreover, the vulnerability of the heroes and the tensions in the moral code they have to live by are central to Homer’s storyline. The quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, which constitutes the main subject of the Iliad, is about aristocratic honor and status, but it also represents a clash between two standards of judgment. Agamemnon claims a greater share of the spoils on account of his superior status as great king and commander-in-chief of the Greek army, while Achilles, the most valiant Greek warrior, rests his case on his contribution to the actual fighting. There is an element of meritocracy in the warrior’s position, while Agamemnon relies on the authority of rank and estate. Moreover, Agamemnon’s haughty attitude paralyzes the army, for Achilles reacts by withdrawing from the battlefield, and without the mighty Achilles the Greeks cannot win.

A true leader, Homer intimates, is able to put the common interest above his pride and greediness. Agamemnon’s failure to live up to those standards endangers the entire Greek war effort, putting commoners as well as aristocrats at risk. Achilles denounces Agamemnon as a “people-devouring king,” but in a later episode a more radical version of the same critique is voiced by Thersites, the only commoner to get a major speech in the Iliad.[10] Thersites calls upon his fellow soldiers to go home and cease putting their lives at risk for the greedy lords who take all the credit and all the booty. His point is that without the rank and file the aristocrats will be as helpless as any general without an army. His mutinous call fails in the end, but it is a near thing. Homer does not sympathize with Thersites, to put it mildly, but by giving him voice he shows that he is not a prisoner of the aristocratic worldview. He is able to imagine how the Trojan War is experienced by the mass of the fighters. Thersites in his eloquent speech demonstrates that an anti-aristocratic political argument is at least thinkable in Homer’s worldview. In the narrative the aristocratic ethos prevails, but it is not the only thinkable ordering of the world. Homer’s intuitive political view is premised on the combination of a strong idea of equality among the aristocrats and an emergent, much weaker notion of equality among all freeborn males.[11]

Coming to the issue of cultural difference, the first point to note is that the Trojan War is not depicted as a clash of civilizations. The Greeks and the Trojans are caught in a struggle of life and death, but they share the gods as well as a basic code of honor and civilized behavior. Wanton killing and disfiguring the remains of a dead enemy are considered dishonorable among mortal men and a breach of Zeus’s divine order. When not at war, strangers are to be given succor and treated humanely. Such is the code governing relations among civilized people. The issue of the boundaries of the civilized world does not arise in the Iliad, where the entire action is played out before the ramparts of Troy. By contrast, the action of the Odyssey unfolds in a larger theatre and its cast of characters is more diversified across the dimensions of ethnicity, rank, and gender. The long and arduous homeward voyage of Odysseus introduces the reader to distant and unfamiliar lands and peoples. In the opening lines of the epic Odysseus is introduced as the man who saw the cities of many people and got to know their mentality. While the Odyssey contains nothing like an empirical ethnography, it definitely explores the frontiers of the civilized world.

Interestingly, the Odyssey—unlike the Iliad—also includes proto-philosophical utterances about attributes that all humans share. Homer’s protagonists mention three such commonalities: all humans need the gods, all humans are mortal, and everyone, however lowly, has a name.[12] These traits are the foundations of Homer’s notion of humanity. To qualify as a full-fledged, “civilized” human being, however, more is needed. It is in the fateful encounter of Odysseus with the Cyclops Polyphemos that the boundaries of the civilized world are dramatically highlighted. Representing savagery and cannibalism, the Cyclopes present us with a negative counterpoint to Homer’s emergent notion of humanity.

When they are approaching the island of the Cyclopes Odysseus tells his companions that he desires to “make trial of these men, to learn who they are, whether they are arrogant, and wild and unjust, or whether they are kind to strangers and fear the gods in their thoughts.”[13] This suggests a division of the world into two parts. On one side of the divide stand civilized people who follow Zeus’s command to treat strangers humanely, but on the other side one may encounter “wild and unjust” beings whose humanity cannot be taken for granted. That the Cyclops belongs in the latter category is soon made clear to Odysseus and his companions in a most cruel manner. When Polyphemos enters his cave, Odysseus addresses him with the customary greeting of the stranger, requesting the hospitality that is his due and invoking Zeus, the “avenger of suppliants and strangers.” Polyphemos, however, is not impressed. The Cyclopes, he answers, pay no heed to Zeus and the other Olympian gods, for they are “better far than they.”[14] Instead of offering hospitality the Cyclops seizes two of Odysseus’s companions, smashes their skulls on the floor of the cave, and immediately devours them—flesh, hair, marrow, bones, and all. Both his consumption of human flesh and his arrogant dismissal of Zeus identify the Cyclops as a “godless savage” who is beyond the ken of civilized humanity.

Asked to identify himself, Odysseus answers that his name is Nobody (Outis). This happens in the famous scene when Polyphemos is handed cup after cup of sweet wine until he falls drunkenly asleep. Retribution swiftly follows: putting a sharp stick in his single eye, the Greeks blind the Cyclops. Awakened by his terrible shrieks, the other Cyclopes hurry to his cave. When they inquire what is going on Polyphemos replies that Nobody is attacking him. Relieved, the other Cyclopes go home. Nobody was there: so there was nobody. At this juncture, they are relegated to the category of “dumb savages” who fail to understand that Nobody cannot be a name. The Greeks, Homer tells his audience, can play with language, but such craftiness is definitely beyond the Cyclopean mind. When the Greeks have finally escaped by means of another clever stratagem, Odysseus unwisely defies Polyphemos. Calling out from his ship he discloses his real name. In response, Polyphemos curses Odysseus and implores his father, the sea god Poseidon, to avenge him.

Homer depicts the Cyclops as a stupid savage, but Polyphemos is more than an imaginary ethnographic construct. He is a literary hybrid. One source of the story is probably an ancient folktale tradition about gigantic monstrous figures frequently represented as one-eyed cannibals.[15] Another source, however, comes from the Greek myths of the origin of the Olympic gods. In Hesiod’s Theogony, the Cyclopes belong to the first generation of the gods, born from the Earth. Hesiod depicts them as anthropomorphic natural forces, like Thunder and Lightning, possessed of great strength and with a single eye in the middle of their foreheads.[16] In a later stage, they will be inferior to Zeus, just like all the other gods. As we have seen, Homer’s Polyphemos indeed claims divine ancestry, telling Odysseus he is a son of the sea god Poseidon. This is more than a haphazard remnant of an old myth, for it explains why Poseidon obstinately, and against the will of Zeus, obstructs Odysseus’s homecoming after the encounter with the Cyclops, a theme that is central to the plot of the Odyssey. Another theme that brings to mind the divine side of the Cyclopes is that they live in a bountiful nature, a land of everlasting plenty where survival does not depend on unceasing toil.

Mixed with the remnants of folktales and the lore of Theogony we encounter the image of the savage, which is not present in the folktale tradition and in Hesiod’s Theogony. It is Homer’s contribution. At the core of his description of the Cyclopean way of life is a series of negations: they have no agriculture, no cities, no assemblies, no laws, no justice; they cannot build ships and they do not travel. Last but not least, they lack the intelligence of the Greeks. The story of Odysseus’s ingenious escape is a typical case of the victory of brains over brawn. In Homer’s lines, the natural plenty of the island of the Cyclopes is redefined as a lack of industriousness. Furthermore, their indulgence in uncontrolled, wild violence stands in contrast to the organized violence of Greek warfare. Odysseus finally portrays the Cyclopes as basically unsocial. Their isolated dwellings show that “they have no regard for one another,” a conclusion underlined by their indifference to the cruel fate of Polyphemos. Their lack of commerce with the rest of the “world” can be read as another indication of their unsocial nature. Finally, their cannibalism as well as their arrogant contempt for the justice of Zeus identify them once more as beings dwelling on, or even beyond, the borderline of the human.

Their cannibalistic inversion of hospitality marks them as absolute aliens, for the humane treatment of the peaceful stranger is the most inclusive obligation in Homer’s world, an obligation that “even the most slow-witted man” will understand.[17] Rejecting it, the Cyclopes place themselves outside Homer’s implicit notion of humanity. The contrast with the Trojan War is enlightening. The Greeks and the Trojans share the gods, they share the heroic code, and, as the moving final scene of the Iliad demonstrates, they can share grief over fallen comrades. In the pursuit of war, they glorify heroic violence, but they are well aware of its downside. Homer’s well-known penchant for detailed descriptions of wounds, mutilation, and killing brings home the human costs of warfare. Compared with Polyphemos’s mindless and “wild” killing, the Trojan War appears as a conflict between peoples who abide by certain codes of war.

The significance of the justice of Zeus is highlighted once more in the final episode of the Odyssey. Back in Ithaca, Odysseus kills the aristocratic suitors who want to marry his wife, Penelope, in order to usurp his rightful place as head of the family estate. As the suitors are the sons of other aristocratic families the massacre could easily have resulted in an ever-ongoing vendetta. It is Zeus himself who intervenes to guarantee a future peace by sending the goddess Athena to assist Odysseus. The men who want to kill Odysseus are themselves killed or persuaded to desist from further bloodshed. Zeus proclaims the final verdict: “Now that noble Odysseus has taken vengeance on the suitors … let him be king all his days, and let us on our part bring about a forgetting of the killing … and let wealth and peace abound.”[18] To “forget” the killing symbolizes the readiness to reconciliation and the insight that civic peace is preferable to interminable strife. In the Odyssey the justice of Zeus appears as a universal law decreed by a supreme deity. In the language of a later political philosophy, it indicates the transition from private vendettas to the justice of the polis.[19]

What can we conclude about Homer’s invention of humanity? As stated above, Homer has no term we can render as humanity. Nonetheless, his epics contain an emergent notion of common humanity. We can picture the Homeric perspective on common humanity as a configuration of widening circles. The innermost circle comprises the male aristocrats who respect and honor each other as peers, suggesting a fairly strong form of equality. The second circle includes all Greek freemen. Here we do not find strong equality, but rather a sense of mutual dependency between the leaders and their men. Notions of stronger equality may arise, as in the speech of Thersites, but in Homer’s lines these remain fairly marginal. When we extend the model to include the Trojans, common humanity remains significant, but in a weaker and more precarious manner. The widest circle includes all free men and women who subscribe to a minimal code of civilized behavior and who respect the justice of Zeus. Ordinary women, however, are at the outer margins of humanity. Penelope is depicted as a paragon of matrimonial fidelity, but the servant girls who had collaborated with the suitors are summarily executed by Odysseus and Telemachus. Homer’s negative description of the Cyclopean culture indicates the core values of civilized people. The justice of Zeus enjoins them to treat one another as fellow human beings deserving of succor and sustenance. The opposite of justice is hubris, the transgression of the due order of things. The hubristic man refuses to respect the boundaries set for mortal humans. Hubris denotes disrespect for the justice of Zeus as well as a lack of self-control.[20]

In practical terms, we may understand the justice of Zeus as a minimal code governing human interaction, including encounters with unfamiliar “others,” in a politically fragmented world where wars between city-states and minor principalities are endemic. The code sought to ensure that not every encounter with strangers would end in bloodshed, robbery, or rape. It governed relations between members of the aristocracies, but it also extended to other travelers, such as pilgrims, merchants, wanderers, fugitives, and survivors of shipwreck. A recognizable social order, a sense of community and reciprocity, underpinned the code. That the code of common humanity often failed is abundantly clear from the historical record. Geographically, the justice of Zeus embodied common humanity and civilized behavior in the world of city-states and minor kingdoms around the eastern and middle Mediterranean, with Greece as its symbolic epicenter.

In Odysseus’s voyages we pass beyond the perimeter of Homer’s common humanity. In the apt characterization of François Hartog, the story of Odysseus’s travels presents us with a “poetic anthropology” where cultural difference makes its first appearance.[21] In Homer’s narrative the borderlands of the civilized world remain fluid and uncertain. Of the lands beyond the frontier the Greeks possessed only a fragmentary knowledge or none at all. The hybrid nature of Homer’s literary construction of the Cyclopes testifies to the blending of mythical and proto-ethnographic notions in the Odyssey. What is striking is how the image of the primitive “savage” is constructed in terms of a series of opposites of the Greek way of life. Homer had no ethnographic knowledge of any really existing “savages.” The savage is imagined as the inversion of the civilized. The Homeric image of the savage precedes all ethnographic knowledge about “primitive peoples.”

Hesiod and the Life of Ordinary People

Hesiod is the second major figure in the Greek canon. Together, Hesiod and Homer represent the inception of Greek literature.[22] Hesiod’s notion of common humanity centers on the life of ordinary people, the majority of farmers and peasants whose labor kept Greek society afloat. Hesiod’s Theogony gives us the first Greek theological text, but his social philosophy is miles away from the aristocratic outlook of the Homeric epics. A theme that connects the two poets is the justice of Zeus, but Hesiod develops it in an altogether different direction.[23] Instead of the Homeric warrior ethos the virtues of peasants and farmers get pride of place in his great didactic poem, the Works and Days.

The opening lines of the Works and Days invoke “high-thundering Zeus,” who allots fame to some people but not to others: “For easily he strengthens, and easily he crushes the strong, easily he diminishes the conspicuous and increases the inconspicuous, and easily he straightens the crooked and withers the manly.”[24] The emphasis is not on the exploits of the great lords but on the transience of all human greatness, a theme that is found in the wisdom literature of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Hebrew prophets, but that is absent from the Homeric epics. War and strife are assuredly present in Hesiod’s world, but they do not occupy center stage. Labor and duty are the core values, and justice is framed accordingly. The common man, who makes but a few appearances in Homer’s lines, is now the main protagonist of the story. Hesiod’s recurrent emphasis on Zeus’s punishment of overweening pride and his professed sympathy for the harsh predicament of the peasantry give the poem an unmistakable equality effect.

In his discussion of strife and conflict Hesiod introduces an important distinction that has no place in Homer. According to Hesiod there are two kinds of strife among mortal men and these have “thoroughly opposed spirits.” The laudable variety is fueled by the ambition of people incited to industry by their desire to get as much wealth as their hardworking neighbors. The harmful variety, however, causes war and bloodshed, or lawsuits contrived by no-goods to seize the fruits of another’s labor.[25] The good variety has a distant affinity with modern concepts of economic competition. Contesting the Homeric celebration of the aristocratic lifestyle of leisure and fighting, Hesiod extols the virtues of industry and frugality. The upshot is that humanity’s quarrelsome nature must be tempered by work and justice.[26]

To labor in the sweat of their brow is the fate Zeus has imposed on humanity. Hesiod’s myth of the origin of humanity explains how this came to be. In the beginning, humans dwelt in misery, fearing the wild animals. To tilt the balance to humanity’s advantage, Prometheus stole the element of fire from the gods and gave it to humans to protect themselves against the great carnivorous beasts. Zeus was not pleased. To punish humans, he and the other gods created woman, a seductive being with “a dog’s mind and a thievish character.” They christened her Pandora (“All-Gift”), “since all those who have their mansions on Olympus had given her a gift—a woe for men who live on bread.”[27] The divine messenger Hermes brought Pandora to Epimetheus, Prometheus’s slow-witted brother, who unthinkingly accepts the superficially enticing present. Arrived on the earth, Pandora opens her box, setting free all the maladies and other catastrophes that will reduce humanity to hardship and misery.

So it came to pass that humans shall suffer and toil from infancy to old age. Here Hesiod’s myth of origin is akin to the biblical story of the Fall in Genesis. Toil and want are explained as a divine punishment for human transgression: in Genesis, the humans seek to steal knowledge and immortality from God; in Hesiod, they steal fire from the gods. In both myths, the first woman plays a fateful role in the fall of humanity from paradisiac abundance to historical scarcity.[28] However, Hesiod’s tale is far more misogynist than the story of Genesis. Furthermore, Hesiod is akin to Genesis and the Hebrew prophets in his warning that Zeus was considering the annihilation of all of humanity unless they desisted from their evil ways.[29] If, on the other hand, they became righteous and industrious, there was hope. Let us recall that hope (elpis) was the only item left at the bottom of Pandora’s jar, an indication that the doom of humankind was not irreversibly sealed and a better outcome remained thinkable. Thinkable, but not guaranteed, for elpis can mean the hope for better times to come but also the anticipation of future hardship.[30]

Hesiod’s account of the origin of human society is a far cry from the Homeric narrative. His distinction between the two varieties of human strife is a new departure. According to Hesiod, war wreaks destruction in human society, while industrious rivalry is the wellspring of prosperity. Prosperity, in turn, depends on peace. It is not only in his judgment of war and peace, and of idleness and labor, that Hesiod departs from Homer. Beneath the difference of opinion, there is an emerging difference of genre. In the discussion of the two types of strife Hesiod stands back from his narrative and reflects on his own story. We do not encounter that kind of meta-text in Homer’s lines where all reflexive observations are uttered in indirect speech by the protagonists of the narrative. We may, I think, regard the analytical distinction between two kinds of conflict as the first glimmering of political theory in the Greek tradition. It is theoretical in the literal sense that “theories” represent different “ways of seeing.” Political theory begins when people are able to imagine that the present order of things is not the only possible state of affairs. What is does not have to be. Henceforth, people can distinguish different ways of ordering society and ask which is preferable. That is what political theory is about. Hesiod’s philosophical imagination definitely goes beyond Homer.

What he shares with Homer is the emphasis on the justice (“dike”) of Zeus. The content of the Hesiodic concept of justice is socially more inclusive, but the notion of a set of rules valid for all humans and sanctioned by a supreme deity is akin to the Odyssey. Unlike Homer, however, Hesiod underscores the obligations of the high and the mighty. They should not make improper use of their power and wealth to deceive and enslave the common people. The socially inclusive notion of justice makes it more powerful and universal than the dike of the Odyssey.

The incipient universalism of Hesiod’s view of divine justice ties in with his exalted vision of the supreme power of Zeus. In the Theogony he recounts the gruesome story of the succeeding generations of the gods. Zeus’s father, Cronos, is the divine ruler of the second generation, “the king of the earlier gods.”[31] Hesiod depicts him as an amoral and paranoid despot, scared to death by an ancient prophecy that a divine rival will arise to dethrone him. What he dreads most of all is his own progeny. To safeguard his monopoly of power, he devours his children right after their births. Only Zeus is saved by his mother, Rhea, who offers Cronos a rock in swaddling clothes, which the paranoid deity promptly gobbles down. Coming of age, Zeus manages to subdue Cronos, compelling him to vomit up his brothers and sisters. Thus, the third generation of the gods is enthroned, establishing a new divine regime. Henceforth, Zeus governs the other gods as a high king. Admittedly, the other gods are immortal beings with great power over mere humans, but in the end Zeus’s will is supreme. The defeat of Cronos stands for the transition from a blind struggle between amoral natural powers to a moral order presided over by a supreme deity.[32]

The rule of Zeus is not a naked despotism but the imposition of a moral law guided by a keen understanding and a panoptic gaze. “Thus it is not possible to deceive or elude the mind of Zeus,” Hesiod declares in the Theogony.[33] In the Works and Days, the supreme power of Zeus, the “father of gods and men,” is identified with justice and moral prudence: “A man contrives evil for himself when he contrives evil for someone else, and an evil plan is most evil for the planner. The eye of Zeus, which sees all things and knows all things, perceives this too.”[34] According to Robert Lamberton, the transformation of Zeus is the linchpin of Hesiod’s vision of the human condition: “The spectacle is just the opposite of the redemption of mankind by Zeus through dike. Rather, it is the redemption of the Zeus of tradition, through dike, by poetry—poetry that insists incessantly on its humanity, on its sympathy for the victims of power.”[35] Lamberton’s reading is perhaps a shade too secular-humanistic, but we can surely maintain that Hesiod reinvents Zeus, transforming him from an aristocratic god-king into the embodiment of justice, and from the supreme deity of an aristocratic mythology into the high god of the common people.[36]

To fully appreciate Hesiod’s vision of humanity we need to situate his idea of justice in his philosophy of history. As is well known, Hesiod divides history into five ages: a golden age, a silver age, a bronze age, a heroic age, and finally the iron age of his own time. Several commentators have explained the construction as a hybrid. The four metallic ages—gold, silver, bronze, iron—probably derive from an earlier tradition into which Hesiod inserted the heroic age he identifies with the age of the warriors who fought before Thebes and Troy. In this way, the Homeric heroes find their place in the sequence.[37] The first four ages are past and done with. Their stories are narrated in cyclical time. The gods have their role to play in the unfolding of each cycle.[38]

The golden race was created by the immortal gods in the time of Cronos. The first humans enjoyed a carefree life of abundance and everlasting youth. Theirs was a truly golden age. Even so, Zeus put an end to it—Hesiod does not explain why—but they are not obliterated. They remain on earth as guardian spirits, ever present though invisible to the mortal men of later ages. In the second age the corruption of humanity makes its appearance. The silver race is in all respects worse than the golden race of the first age. In the end, they “could not restrain themselves from wicked outrage against each other, nor were they willing to honor the immortals.”[39] The failure to honor the gods and the coming of social conflict are here depicted as two faces of the degeneration of humanity. Seeing their wickedness, Zeus concealed them under the earth. Next, Zeus created a third race of “terrible and strong” men who “cared only for the painful works of Ares and for acts of violence.” Their weapons were of bronze, for “there was no black iron in those days.” Their portrayal may refer to the ancient giants of traditional folklore.[40] The bronze race comes to grief by indulging in violence, the wrong kind of strife according to Hesiod.

The fourth race does not fit into the narrative presented thus far. Its advent represents a rupture with the story of steady decline. The fourth race, Hesiod tells us, was “more just and superior” than its predecessor. It was “the godly race of men-heroes, who are called demigods, the generation before our own upon the boundless earth.” For all their admirable qualities, this race too was destroyed by “evil war and dread battle.”[41] The survivors of the wars Zeus dispatched to the islands of the blessed on the banks of the Ocean. Finally, we attain the iron age, Hesiod’s own time. He paints the grim picture of an ever-ongoing war, of cruel men who pay no heed to the gods, and who know nothing about justice and moderation. Sons do not honor their fathers and comrades become enemies. Once more, humanity stands on the brink of self-destruction. However, it is precisely at this juncture that Hesiod begins to consider the possibility of another, less dismal outcome. He admonishes his audience finally to give heed to justice. For justice, he now declares, “wins out over Outrageousness when she arrives at the end; but the fool only knows this after he has suffered.”[42]

Significantly, Hesiod warns the kings of his age to ponder the value of justice and to consider that Zeus’s all-seeing eye is watching them. They should stop taking bribes and protect the common people instead. Right now, he admits, the human predicament is so miserable that he himself would rather not be a just man among so many who are unjust. “But I do not anticipate,” he concludes, “that … Zeus will let things end up this way.”[43] Hesiod then explains that human beings are superior to animals: “Fish and beasts and winged birds eat one another, since Justice is not among them, but to human beings [Zeus] has given Justice, which is the best by far.”[44] The Works and Days ends with a lengthy disquisition on the proper way to live, once more singing the gospel of work and the death-song of idleness. Its detailed counsels and rules are attuned to the peasantry. Commerce and sea travel are briefly mentioned, but Hesiod has a rather dim opinion of such pursuits.

What should we make of Hesiod’s philosophy of history? The cyclical pattern of the first four ages has led many commentators astray. As a matter of fact, the point Hesiod seeks to make by means of his mythical history of humanity only emerges in his discussion of the iron race. There the audience finally discovers that the cyclical pattern is not an immutable law of history but rather an impressive series of negative examples: decline and fall is what happens when humans give free rein to greed and violence. Against the backdrop of the golden age of peace, leisure, and plenty, the later ages are more and more “historical” in the sense of approximating the Greek experience of the human condition. The overall pattern appears to be one of ongoing and recurrent decline. Passing from one catastrophe to another, the human race is carried along from a primeval golden age to the somber present.

Such might be our reading of Hesiod’s mythical history of humanity were it not for his treatment of the fifth age. There another historical dialectic makes its appearance. The author knows the outcome of the first four ages, but contemporary history still hangs in the balance and the philosopher himself is a participant in it. Accordingly, the discussion of the iron age becomes probabilistic and normative. The fifth age may end in the same way as all its predecessors, but that outcome is no longer presented as an iron law of history but rather as a terrible danger to be avoided.[45] The tale of Zeus’s gift of justice as a means to overcome the war of all against all that governs the animal kingdom provides the story with a deeper layer of meaning. Prometheus’s theft of fire may have allowed humans to rise above the animals, but it is only the justice of Zeus that enables them to ward off a relapse into animality. Humanity can be saved, but only if it saves itself.

What is the temporal frame of Hesiod’s philosophy of history? As in most historical narratives, we can identify a combination of cyclical and linear elements. The creation and dissolution of the first four races exhibits a cyclical rhythm. On the other hand, the lesson of an original golden age that gives way to later historical ages of scarcity, turmoil, and labor presents us with an irreversible linear transition. The golden age is behind us and will never return. History, whether cyclical or linear, appears to move toward ruin and death. However, Hesiod’s discussion of the fifth age introduces another type of linear time that we might call a temporality of moral reform. In the contemporary era, Hesiod intimates, the bad cyclical outcome still threatens to realize itself, but a good linear outcome, based on the interplay of hope and dike, is still possible. The final sections of the Works and Days can be read as a script for this morally and materially healthier future.

Hesiod’s vision of common humanity is broader than Homer’s and can usefully be seen as a competitor with Homer in the later Greek paideia.[46] It is far more socially inclusive, although it continues the exclusion of slaves and women. Compared to the Odyssey, the Works and Days utterly disregards female agency. What about foreigners? Unlike Homer, Hesiod has no travel stories and no discourse on the “savage.” Even so, his encomium of agricultural labor suggests a contempt for nonagricultural modes of subsistence akin to Odysseus’s negative view of Cyclopean culture. Furthermore, his exhortations not to mistreat foreigners are comparable to Homer’s. According to Hesiod, “those who give straight judgments to foreigners and fellow citizens … their city blooms and the people in it flower.” In contrast to Odysseus’s laudatory references to shipping and travel, Hesiod relates that the industrious tillers of the soil “do not go unto ships, for the grain-giving field bears them crops.”[47] His perspective shows an affinity with Homer’s unflattering asides on the Phoenicians.[48]

All things considered, Hesiod’s philosophy of history has a more universalist ring than Homer’s vision of common humanity. The implication of his myth-history is that the whole of humanity was created by the gods, suffers a common fate, and must find a way out through justice and honest labor. At the present time, most commentators agree that Hesiod and his forgotten Greek predecessors borrowed their stories of the destruction of human races from older sources in Mesopotamia and possibly Egypt.[49] Intellectually, Hesiod inhabits a wider world than Homer. In that respect, the Hesiodic corpus is comparable to the Hebrew Bible. The ancient civilizations of western Asia were land-based urban-agrarian societies. Hesiod’s links with their mythological literature may explain both his incipient universalism and his disapproval of the culture of the seafaring peoples.

Philosophical Monotheism and Cultural Difference in Xenophanes

The sixth century BCE saw the rise of philosophy among the Ionian Greeks of Asia Minor. The “philosophers,” as they came to be called in the centuries after 500 BCE, sought to contrive a reasoned explanation of the world around them, reducing the kaleidoscopic multiplicity of the universe to a limited number of elements and principles. While atheism in its modern sense was unthinkable, most of the early Greek thinkers were deeply dissatisfied with the portrayal of the gods in Homer and Hesiod. In their opinion, these deities were far too human. Their critique of traditional religious myths incited their audiences to question received ideas. Finally, they criticized not only traditional views but also one another, thus introducing the notion of philosophy as an agonistic exercise in self-reflection and second-order judgments.[50]

Anaximander’s cosmogony, put together roughly a century after Hesiod’s Theogony, is well suited to illustrate the novelty of Ionian thought. According to his account, the universe originated from the apeiron, a boundless plenum that in primeval times spawned a “germ” which produced cold and heat. From their dynamic interaction sprang the four elements: water, earth, air, and fire. Working with those elements, Anaximander seeks to account for the observable astronomical phenomena. Beyond that, he explains the origin of life by the spontaneous generation of living creatures in the slime or mud that resulted from the drying out of the earth.[51] Aristotle later considered Anaximander’s notion of the apeiron “divine” because it was deathless and indestructible.[52] It seems clear that such a vision of divinity is a far cry from Homer’s, or even Hesiod’s, representations of Zeus.

Xenophanes, a native of the Ionian city of Colophon, was born around 570–560 BCE, a generation after Anaximander. His work, of which only fragments survive, is significant for the subject of this book in several ways. Like his predecessors, he seeks to explain the world by natural causes instead of invoking divine intervention at every turn—“without the great sea there would be no wind nor streams of rivers nor rainwater from on high; but the great sea is the begetter of clouds, winds, and rivers.”[53] Such explanations of natural phenomena assume a world emptied of most of the gods and spirits of traditional Greek religion. Xenophanes certainly participated in the religious civic rituals of the cities where he resided. To do otherwise would be tantamount to social suicide. In that mundane sense, the presence of the gods is still assumed. But a deeper presence is now also postulated: an underlying natural reality the metamorphoses of which bring about the phenomena ordinary humans see but cannot understand. Most humans go by appearances. “If god had not made yellow honey,” Xenophanes sarcastically observes, “they would think that figs were much sweeter.”[54] Even so, there is an objective nature beneath the visible appearances. That is a new way of thinking we do not encounter in Homer or Hesiod. We will now see that it also led to a new view of common humanity and cultural difference.

The new concept of nature demands a new and more abstract notion of the divine. According to Xenophanes the gods of Homer and Hesiod are far too much like humans, who attributed to the gods “all sorts of things which are matters of reproach and censure among men,” such as theft, adultery, and deceit.[55] With suchlike gods, the philosopher suggests, we can hardly expect virtue and truthfulness among humans. Next he explains that all men are liable to fashion the gods in their own image. If given the opportunity, animals would do the same:

But if horses or oxen or lions had hands

Or could draw with their hands and accomplish such works as men,

Horses would draw the figures of the gods as similar to horses, and the oxen as similar to oxen.[56]

Pursuing this train of thought, Xenophanes sets forth the daring conjecture that the gods of humanity are divinely inflated representations of the ethnos of their worshippers:

Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black;

Thracians that theirs are blue-eyed and red-haired.[57]

In order to arrive at a truly majestic notion of the one high god, Xenophanes seeks to supplant such anthropomorphic representations of the divine with a philosophical idea of god. He is, of course, cautious enough not to deny the existence of the ancient gods. After all, these were the gods of his fellow citizens. But the true god is not to be found in temples or oracles: “One god is greatest among gods and men, not at all like mortals in body or in thought … whole he sees, whole he thinks, and whole he hears.”[58]

This vision of god can still be seen as a radicalized version of Hesiod’s image of the all-seeing and all-knowing Zeus, but the theology of Xenophanes goes well beyond that. While Hesiod’s Zeus governs the world by means of thunderbolts and other manifestations of his awesome power, Xenophanes’s god is an altogether more transcendent being: “Completely without toil he shakes all things by the thought of his mind … always he abides in the same place, not moving at all, nor is it seemly for him to travel to different places at different times.”[59] This god is, so it seems, everywhere and nowhere. He does not impart movement to worldly entities by means of physical forces, as Zeus was believed to do, but by the sole power of his divine mind. Here we encounter the first glimmering of the notion of an “unmoved mover” that will be part of many later philosophical notions of god.[60] Xenophanes does not elaborate this train of thought, at least not in the fragments that have come down to us, but we can surely discern here an emergent notion of the duality between god, conceived as mind, and the world, conceived as matter.

Knowing Xenophanes as a “philosopher,” we may unthinkingly assume that he moved in the kind of elite intellectual milieu we habitually associate with the Platonic dialogues of the early fourth century BCE. Some intellectual elitism cannot be gainsaid, but it is by no means the whole story. Two aspects of his surviving work strongly suggest that Xenophanes strove to reach a much broader audience than the restricted circle of the literate. To begin with, we have to consider his own view of the social import of “doing philosophy.” Surveying the contribution of various categories of citizens to the polis, he demands a rightful place for philosophy. “Our expertise,” Xenophanes claims, “is better than the strength of men and horses.” Sportsmen and charioteers do not contribute to better government, so why is it that the athletes are richly rewarded, while the philosopher goes home empty-handed?[61] To argue that a philosopher can contribute to better government assumes a meritocratic political regime, in which lineage and wealth are not the only assets that count. It is only when open public debate becomes a factor in the survival of the polis that the philosophical “expert” acquires a certain prestige and political leverage. To be successful in politics, the philosopher has to be able to speak to a broad group of fellow citizens, far broader, we may surmise, than the extremely restricted category of literate males.

The second aspect we have to consider is the genre of the writings. In a time of transition, when prose was emerging as the privileged medium of philosophical debate, Xenophanes expressed his ideas in hexameters. In the matter of genre, he followed Homer and Hesiod rather than the philosophical innovators of his age. This provides us with another indication that he sought to speak to a broad audience. In an age when oral communication was the only channel open to the overwhelming majority of the people, metric poetry was popular because it enabled people to memorize large chunks of the recitals they heard. Given his penchant for aggressive innovation, it is quite unlikely that Xenophanes opted for the poetic genre out of respect for tradition. The only credible reason is that he sought to address a large public that perforce had to rely on the oral transmission of ideas. The philosopher himself tells us that for many years he traveled all over the Greek world. According to Herbert Granger, Xenophanes was the first philosopher who attempted to influence a mass audience.[62] He sought to contest the traditional Greek paideia on its home turf. He continued to participate in the religious rites of the towns where he resided, but he also spoke to the public about his ideas on religious reform. Moreover, his affirmation that the rainbow and Saint Elmo’s fire were natural phenomena implied a critique of the belief in portents that was such a vital part of Greek religion.[63]

Although the surviving fragments of Xenophanes’s writings are not sufficient to reconstruct his views on justice, his philosophical theism strongly suggests a universalist conception of the duties of all human beings toward god and toward one another. He was the first Greek author to coin the expression “one god” (heis theos), even though this comes in the phrase “one god, the greatest among gods and men.” The “one god” is thus not the only god that exists but a god who is far more powerful than all the others. Monotheism is not introduced in one fell swoop, but the tendency toward monotheism is clearly discernible when Xenophanes discusses the deity.

Moreover, his critique of the culturally specific anthropomorphic gods starts from a universalist vantage point. It is only by abstracting from the local deities of the various peoples that one can arrive at the truth about god. The representations of the gods of the Ethiopians, the Thracians, and, we may assume, the Greeks are no more than the fleeting manifestations of doxa, superficial judgments on the basis of appearances. The thesis that all local gods are culturally specific makes cultural difference into a thinkable object of philosophical discussion and critique. It represents the first step toward the anthropological turn. In Xenophanes, it comes in a negative version: all local images of the gods are delusions. However, the critical look at local beliefs makes thinkable its positive inversion: “we” may be as susceptible to critique as those “others.” In an indirect way, this tells us something about common humanity. All humans and all peoples are liable to look at the world in this manner. All local gods are culturally parochial approximations of the one god who is beyond the ken of ordinary human observation and can only be apprehended philosophically. To preclude anachronistic fallacies, this is not what Xenophanes says, but what his words prepared the way for.

Once liberated, philosophy launched a critical perspective on human culture that was unable to define its own limits. It that sense, Xenophanes represents a new and potentially revolutionary departure in thinking about common humanity and cultural difference. What is known about his contemporary Hecataeus, the first Greek prose historian, suggests the existence of a sizable body of ethnology among the Ionians of the second half of the sixth century BCE.[64] In this manner, Xenophanes and Hecataeus, and possibly others whose work has not survived, opened up cultural difference as an object of philosophical investigation.

Humanity in the Hebrew Bible

A wide chasm separates the philosophical monotheism of the Ionian thinkers from the God of the Hebrew Bible. The Tenach is written in a prophetic language of fear and trembling rather than the philosophical language of analysis we encounter in the Ionian texts. Monotheism is not expounded in a debate on the agora but announced to Moses by a God who descends in fire and smoke on Mount Sinai. The Decalogue conceives of common humanity as a divine truth revealed to a people that owes its identity to a covenant with God.

Judaic monotheism gradually evolved from the ninth century BCE. It understood itself as deriving from a long history of oppression, struggle, and liberation. In its early stages, the Jewish creed was monotheistic but not radically universalistic. With God’s help the Jews escaped from their Egyptian bondage. During their long and arduous trek through the desert on the way to the Promised Land, their leader, Moses, received God’s revelation on Mount Sinai. The first commandment of the Decalogue says: “I am the Lord thy God, which has brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” The Jewish people are instructed not to make images. Thou shalt “not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.”[65] From the context it is clear that these commands come down to an abjuration of the gods of the other peoples in the region. Later on, Moses instructs his followers to refrain from taking wives among the surrounding tribes and nations, lest they fall back into idolatry. Contact with strangers is thus equated to pollution. The rejection of “other gods,” now downgraded to “idols,” indicates the abandonment of polytheism, but it does not necessarily follow that those other gods do not exist. Nor is it clear, in this early stage of prophecy, that the one God of Israel is identified with the God of all of humanity.

The canonization of the biblical texts was a long drawn-out process. It began in the kingdoms of Israel and Judea in the eighth century BCE. The story of the exodus from Egypt, it is now assumed, was the kernel of the earliest biblical texts. Pure monotheism only arrived at the time of the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in the early sixth century.[66] It is thus roughly contemporaneous with the advent of Ionian philosophy. The creation stories in Genesis were probably added under the influence of Mesopotamian creation myths. In the mid-fifth century BCE, the scribe Ezra proclaimed the Pentateuch as the divine law or “teachings” (Thora) of the Jewish people in Judea, at that time a province of the Persian Empire.[67] The returnees from the Babylonian exile put together a collection of holy books consisting of the Pentateuch plus Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. They further added oracles from the prophets and a number of psalms.[68] In the third century BCE, when Palestine belonged to Ptolemaic Egypt, the temple scribes at Jerusalem added more books of the prophets, the Psalms, the Proverbs, and a number of other historical and wisdom books. After their time, they believed, no new divine revelations would come.

The codification of the canon was in step with the Hellenistic culture that came to dominate the eastern Mediterranean in the centuries after Alexander the Great. The books of the Hebrew Bible were “our books,” in the words of the first century CE Jewish historian Flavius Josephus.[69] Once the preserve of priests and temple scribes, they were now accessible to a wider lay public. In this, Jewish culture adopted the pattern of Hellenistic civilization. The major cities possessed libraries featuring the Greek classics, with Homer by far the most popular author.[70] The Greek translations of Bible books from this period are an indication of the intensive contacts between Judaism and Hellenism.

Over the last two thousand years, the Hebrew Bible has become one of the most influential books in world history. Apart from the Jewish diaspora it was a formative agent in the making of Christianity and Islam. The Tenach presents us with a complex and layered text that allows for a broad array of interpretations. Through the ages, the “same” passages were read as repositories of historical, moral, allegorical, and eschatological truths. That accounts for the remarkable staying power of the biblical texts across widely differing historical periods and cultural settings.

The Story of Creation and the Unity of Humanity

The Hebrew Bible opens with the famous words “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” The creation of the universe and the creation of the first human beings are presented as episodes of one narrative. Modern biblical criticism has demonstrated that the early chapters of Genesis represent a jointure of two distinct creation stories. The first one represents God in a more awe-inspiring, transcendental manner and outlines the beginnings of a cosmogony. The second—older—narrative depicts God in more anthropomorphic terms (“walking in the garden in the cool of the day”) and contains geographical references to Mesopotamia and Ethiopia. Its cosmogony does not begin with a formless void but in a dry wasteland that only starts to blossom when God makes it rain on the earth. Here, God is represented as the divine rain bringer of a nomadic desert people.[71]

During most of history, however, believers, be they Jews or Christians, have read Genesis as a seamless web, and the second story as an elaboration of the first. It is therefore reasonable to begin with what both stories have in common. In the first place, Genesis represents all human beings as a community of descent. In the biblical language this is much more than a “biological” fact. The text says: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he them; male and female created he them.”[72] The idea of a first couple from whom all humans spring flows over into the portentous notion of a common human-divine nature. Moreover, God gives the earth, the plants, and the animals to the first humans, who will dominate nature and draw sustenance from it. It is God’s declared intention that they will endeavor to “multiply and replenish the earth.” Here we discern the first glimmering of the notion of divine Providence. The opening chapter of the Bible thus depicts humanity as a community of descent, all of whose members share a human-divine nature, and as the beings to whom God has bequeathed the common ownership of the world. The allegory of the earth as the patrimony of humanity easily leads to the normative idea that all members of the human species are entitled to their rightful portion of the common heritage.

The first human couple live in “paradise,” depicted as a state of plenty and virtue not unlike Hesiod’s golden age. Even so, they do not enjoy perfect freedom. They are under God’s law, summarized in the command to abstain from the fruit of the forbidden tree. This interdiction can be read as an allegory for the invention of ethics. The first man and the first woman, and consequently all later humans, have the capacity to distinguish right and wrong. However, their moral sense is from the outset envisioned as imperfect and vulnerable. Let us recall that the story depicts the fruit of the forbidden tree as very attractive. Enters the snake (an allegory of the rebellion against God), who seduces Eve, telling her that she will not die from the forbidden fruit, as God had warned, but “that your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”[73] Eve eats the fruit and persuades Adam to do likewise. The first consequence is that Adam and Eve are ashamed and cover their nakedness. Next they are severely punished by God, who foretells that henceforth Adam shall labor in the sweat of his brow, while Eve shall bear children in pain and come under the dominion of Adam. Finally, God expels them from paradise to the outside world of danger and want.

Again, the story can be read as an allegory. The forbidden fruit stands for pride and hubris. Not respecting their God-given limits, the first humans are catapulted into the kind of world they deserve. Innocence gives way to shame, sexual difference is reconfigured as male supremacy, plenty is turned into scarcity, leisure supplanted by unceasing toil, and soon the first murderer makes his appearance. In sum, we move from paradise to history.

Next the progeny of Adam and Eve began to spread over the world. Daughters were born to them and the “sons of God” coveted them and took wives among them. A reunion of the human and the divine seems imminent, but God foresaw that his spirit would not always remain with men, for “he also is flesh.” To underscore the boundaries set to humanity God limited their life span to a hundred and twenty years.[74] Mortality thus became the birthmark of humanity. Worse was to come. After Cain murdered Abel God had seen that his creatures were descending into a fatal wickedness anew, “for the earth is filled with violence through them.”[75] God repented his creation of humans and resolved to eradicate all his creatures from the face of the earth, except for Noah and his family who “walked with the Lord.” So he instructed Noah to build the ark and destroyed all the rest by the Deluge.

After the terrible cataclysm, Noah built “an altar unto the Lord,” symbolizing the coming of organized worship. Granting humanity a new beginning: God instructed Noah and his progeny to “replenish the earth.” For good measure, he now added a severe ban on killing fellow humans: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.”[76] Henceforth, human life is sanctified and murder is represented as a transgression of divine law. Finally, God announces to Noah that he has set the rainbow as “the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations.”[77] From the three sons of Noah, the text tells us, have sprung all the peoples of the earth.

After an enumeration of the generations after Noah, the narrative moves to the next turning point, the construction of the Tower of Babel. In that distant age, all the people on the earth were of one language. In the plain of Shinar, the Bible relates, they started work on a mighty edifice, a tower “whose top may reach unto heaven.” Recently, critics have explained that the expression “unto heaven” was a commonplace one, meaning simply a very tall tower, and not the outrageous project of building a staircase to the very heavens.[78] Even so, the intention of the people to “make a name” for themselves appears to stand for a second attempt to overstep the limits set to the achievements of mortal men. This time, God’s punishment is to diminish the collective power of humanity by destroying their means of communication. Introducing the multiplicity of languages, God divides humanity into different tribes and peoples. No longer able to agree on a common project, the Lord scatters them “abroad upon the face of all of the earth.” Humanity began its career as one people, but they are henceforth condemned to continue it as many.

Theodore Hiebert’s recent attempt to tone down God’s punishment to a “neutral” introduction of cultural difference is unconvincing and looks mildly anachronistic.[79] One has only to compare the language of Genesis 11 with the introduction of cultural difference in the Great Hymn to Aten, the core text of Pharaoh Akhenaten’s mid-fourteenth-century (1352-1338 BCE) attempt at a reform of Egyptian religion, to see the difference. The Hymn says: “You set every man in his place.… Their tongues differ in speech, their characters likewise; their skins are distinct, for you distinguished the peoples.”[80] In the Great Hymn, cultural difference is part of the original creation of the world, while in Genesis is comes at the end of a sequence focusing on human transgression and God’s corrective responses. Finally, virtually all interpreters from antiquity to the present have read the introduction of the multiplicity of languages as a divine punishment. They were right to do so. In our perspective, it represents the final episode in the transition from paradisiacal innocence to the cruel world of history.

The first eleven chapters of Genesis tell us how humanity evolved from an original golden age to a condition recognizable to the Jews living in the aftermath of the Babylonian captivity. In religious terms, it is a story of recurrent sin and separation from God, followed by human submission and reconciliation with God. It moves through three episodes patterned after a sequence of human transgression followed by divine retribution and resulting in a reformation of the human condition. After the Fall, the first humans enter a world of shame, male supremacy, scarcity, and labor. The limitation of their life span underscores their mortality and their separation from God. After the Deluge, God concludes a covenant with all humans, expressly forbidding the taking of human life, while Noah’s altar stands for the beginning of an organized cult. After the Tower of Babel, God introduces cultural difference, thereby subverting the recurrent human striving to become “as gods.”

Submission to God will remain an arduous task throughout the Hebrew Bible. Mostly, the protagonists of the story begin with too much pride and selfishness, only to submit to God’s grace after many misfortunes. As Jacob admits at a turning point his life: “Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.”[81] With each episode, the human condition becomes more akin to the historical reality of the ancient world. After Babel, the narrative takes up the life of Abraham, commencing the long history of the Jews that will be the main subject of the remainder of the Hebrew Bible. As Richard Moye has observed, the narrative of Genesis begins as “historicized myth” and moves progressively toward “mythicized history.”[82]

At the same time, the biblical narrative can be read as an ascending sequence of moral examples, leading up to the story of the establishment of Jewish monotheism. The biblical god is more superhuman and awesome that Hesiod’s Zeus. Moreover, Zeus retains some of the arbitrariness of the pre-Olympian Greek gods, while the biblical god is portrayed as caring for humanity. Genesis and the subsequent history of the Jewish people are informed by a dialectic of separation and return, of transgression followed by submission to God. At every turning point, God’s grace and its acceptance by mortal humans is the core element of the plot. The biblical God has an intention with his creation and finally concludes a covenant with humanity, a pledge Zeus never makes.

Finally, both Hesiod and Genesis discuss inequality, but not quite in the same way. In both stories, the first unequivocal introduction of inequality turns on gender. The first woman plays a key role in the transition from paradisiac plenty to historical scarcity and toil. But Genesis emphatically declares that woman, just like man, is created in God’s image, an affirmation not found in Hesiod, whose portrayal of Pandora is far more misogynistic than the depiction of Eve. Even so, Genesis goes on to justify the subordination of woman after the Fall. Considering the issue of social inequality, the glorification of the virtues of labor and the condemnation of idleness and aristocratic pride are a central theme in Hesiod and, as we shall see, a recurrent theme in the Hebrew Bible.

The biblical history of the Israelites is written as the history of the common people. After the Fall labor makes its appearance as a punishment, but it is also a necessity and finally a positive value. The biblical authors have little patience with great lords who oppress the poor and the humble. As the psalmist declares: “The wicked have drawn out the sword … to cast down the poor and the needy … [but] their sword shall enter into their own hearts, and their bows shall be broken.”[83] Such condemnations are found in more than a few psalms.[84] The biblical authors preach humility and unreserved obedience to God’s commands even if they seem incomprehensible and cruel, as in the story of Abraham and Isaac. Time and again the prophets foretell the woes that will befall nations where profit and money count for more than justice. Time and again they decry the sinful excesses of the rich and the mighty.[85] The biblical tales about the travails of ordinary people are couched in a language of empathy. They invite the reader to identify with their suffering fellow human beings and to imagine what it would be like to find themselves the victims of oppression. The great and the mighty are reminded that their worldly power is merely delegated, because true power belongs to God only.

Cultural Difference and Holy War

Thus far I have focused on the representation of common humanity in the Hebrew Bible. But the Tenach also turns on the history of the Jews as God’s “chosen people,” the community of those who first embraced the true faith. God is the creator of the universe, but he also is the God of Israel. Like the Greeks, the Israelites were almost constantly at war, either with other peoples inhabiting the lands God had promised to them or with the great empires that succeeded one another in the Levant. The Bible relates the histories of many bloody wars the people of Israel had to fight in their travails from the Exodus to the rise of the Persian Empire.

The wars described in the Torah are vindicated as wars against idolaters. The Jews are frequently warned not to take wives among them or otherwise befriend them, lest they fall back into the old worship of graven images. God commands the Jews not to conclude treaties with them, to tear down their altars, and to burn their wooden idols.[86] While the Greeks and the Trojans worshipped the same gods, the adversaries of Israel are enemies in a double sense: because they occupy the land God gave to Israel and because they are hostile to the true faith. “And ye shall chase your enemies and they shall fall before you by the sword.” Again: “Thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them.”[87] When one of the Israelites takes a Midianite woman, both he and the woman are killed on the orders of Moses. In the ensuing campaign against the Midianites their cities are razed to the ground, and all the males and all women who had intercourse with an Israelite are killed. Only the rest of the women and the female children are spared.[88]

The most warlike language is found in Deuteronomy. If the defenders of a city surrender voluntarily, the Israelites must offer them a treaty, but if they resist the adult males will be killed and the women and children treated as booty. An even more ruthless treatment will be meted out to the inhabitants of the lands God has promised to the Israelites; “of the cities of these people … thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee.[89] While the martial passages in the other books of the Torah remain within the bounds of “normal” ancient warfare, Deuteronomy has God order the wholesale massacre of entire nations. Killing and enslaving conquered peoples was common practice in the ancient world. Greek historians discussing the history of the Israelites were rarely offended by such practices. What shocked them, however, was the destruction of temples and statues. Victory in war, the Greeks believed, gave no license for sacrilege.[90]

However, the image of the Jews as cruel conquerors is always balanced by the image of the Jews as a banished and enslaved people, first in Egypt and later in Babylon. The memory of the Egyptian bondage is a key element throughout the Torah. The Jews are admonished to treat strangers as they would like to be treated themselves: “And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”[91] “One law and one manner shall be for you, and for the stranger that sojourned with you.”[92] In these and similar passages the stranger is defined as a fellow human being who must be treated with equity and charity. The references to the Egyptian bondage give these declarations a flavor that goes beyond the simple affirmation of the humanity of all people. Rekindling the Jewish memories of repression, they enjoin the faithful to recognize their own experiences in the fate of the stranger, a feeling of empathy that is lacking in Zeus’s law to treat the stranger as a fellow human being.

Despite the potentially universalist message of the creation story and numerous other passages in the Hebrew Bible, Judaism never aspired to become a universal religion. Admittedly, in ancient times, a sizable number of non-Jews were converted to Judaism. Under the Julian emperors some 7 percent of the population of the Roman Empire followed the God of the Hebrew Bible.[93] In the first millennium CE, a Jewish kingdom was established in the southwestern corner of the Arabian peninsula, and the king of the Khazars on the Pontic Steppe of western Asia adopted Judaism as the state religion in the eighth century CE.[94] Generally, however, Judaism was not a proselytizing creed. Even so, several passages in the Hebrew Bible extol the greatness of God as Lord of all peoples and monarchs, as in Psalm 22:

All the ends of the world shall remember and turn unto the Lord:

And all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee.

For the kingdom is the Lord’s:

And he is the governor among the nations.

In Second Isaiah, there are cryptic allusions to a savior who will make all nations acknowledge the God of Israel as the One True God. In one verse, this savior seems to be identified as Cyrus, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire. Second Isaiah was probably redacted after 550 BCE, when Cyrus launched his campaign to conquer Babylon. Victorious, he gave all his subjects the freedom to worship their own deities, and he let the Jews return to their homeland. According to Isaiah, Cyrus was the “anointed” of the Lord, “whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him.” To his prophet God announced: “I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth.”[95]

Second Isaiah has God proudly declare that “there is no other God besides me.” Here we meet with a powerful vision of an unmitigated monotheism. Even so, commentators have never reached agreement on the meaning of Isaiah’s prophecies. Some saw him as announcing the future conversion of the entire world to the belief in the One True God, but others defended a more “nationalistic” view, arguing that his prophesies extolled the chosen people and foretold the recognition of the glory of Israel by foreign nations. Only at the very end, in the so-called Third Isaiah, the first glimmerings of a universal conversion to the God of Israel can be seen.[96] Some commentators intimate that Isaiah believed that Cyrus might be God’s chosen instrument to bring this about. However, such grandiose visions were never to be fulfilled. Cyrus himself probably was a follower of Zoroaster, but as ruler of the Persian Empire he pursued a pragmatic policy of toleration.[97] Jewish monotheism remained the religion of the Israelites. Only much later, Christians, notably Paul, would take up Isaiah’s message to construct a message of worldwide conversion.[98]

We may conclude that the Hebrew Bible includes particularistic as well as universalistic messages. Its voluminous historical narratives mainly concern the history of the Jewish people, but its universalist messages, while never advocating worldwide conversion, set forth a language of common humanity. Read as allegories, the biblical histories can acquire a more universal meaning. The story of Exodus, for example, turns on a plot about escape from oppression, followed by a long struggle to reach the “promised land”—that is, to give birth to a better life and a more just commonwealth. The covenant God concludes with “all the people” then stands for the ideal of a polity to which all the inhabitants freely commit themselves.[99] Many stories in the Hebrew Bible allow for a double reading: they sermonize upon episodes in Jewish history, but allegorically they present us with lessons and reflections about a universal dialectic of suffering, struggle, redemption, and liberation.

Coming to cultural difference, the Tenach speaks with two voices. One voice proclaims the unity of humanity and the duty of everyone to respect the sanctity of all human life, since all human beings are created in God’s image. Strangers must not be molested but treated with equity and empathy. The other voice speaks the language of holy war: those strangers who are enemies of the people of Israel and who are beholden to idolatry must be shunned, fought, and in some cases slaughtered without mercy. As history, those texts relate that God commanded the Jews to wage a merciless war against certain enemies. But they can also be understood allegorically, leaving the choice between violence and more spiritual and peaceful interpretations to future generations. The tension ever remains, and every new generation of readers has to resolve it one way or another.

Humanity between Ethnocentrism and Universalism

None of the texts discussed in this chapter, with the possible exception of Xenophanes, are systematic philosophical treatises. The visions of the good life in them are wedded to the social routines familiar to their authors. A critical reading of these ancient writings discloses an uneasy balance between traditional ethnocentrism and an emergent universalism. And how could it be otherwise? The first universalist notions of humanity originated in societies where ethnocentrism was second nature. What is amazing about these texts is not their ethnocentrism but how they escape from the common-sense “realism” of their environments. We should inquire how that was possible. How could universal concepts of humanity become thinkable in the circumstances of those times?

A first answer concerns the status of traditions. In all the cases we have discussed traditions were a potent force, but they could no longer be taken for granted. In the days of Homer and Hesiod, the Greeks were in the throes of the transition from a world of kings and aristocracies to a society made up of city-states. At the same time, navigation and commerce fostered an increasing awareness of frontiers and foreigners. In Xenophanes’s days, the erosion of tradition had progressed a good deal further and was much more alarming to all concerned. In such conditions “philosophy” became thinkable.

The gradual emergence of the Hebrew Bible came about in the centuries when the Jewish people arrived in Palestine, were exiled, managed to return, and had to survive in the borderlands of the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires. Settled in Palestine, the Israelites evolved into a sedentary, urban-agrarian civilization. Not protected by the sea, their geographical situation was more vulnerable than that of the Greeks. Warfare, deportation, and imperial occupation provide the background to the dialectic of oppression and liberation that is a hallmark of the biblical narratives. More than the Greeks the Jews were forced to reinvent themselves over and over again, clinging to their traditions as drowning people to wreckage in a sea of troubles.

But how can people reinvent themselves? How can they achieve a psychological and intellectual rupture with old certainties? An elementary condition is the articulation of collective memories and the conscious ordering of ideas made possible by the use of written records. An author who ventures beyond the composition of lists of things and events creates a story that is about reality without being identical with it. The story recounts, summarizes, judges, and explicates, and so calls into existence a new reality, the reality of the narrative. Gods and natural forces are beings that are knowable through their effects, but they are seldom plainly visible, save in visions and dreams. Moral standards do not represent generalizations of how people actually behave but rather images of what they ought to do but all too often observe in the breach. Consequently, narratives always position authors as well as readers at a certain distance from the given order of things.

Put differently, the composition of a text enables the author to think beyond reality. That is a necessary condition of the thinkability of ideas of common humanity and divine order, abstract notions that cannot directly refer to palpable and observable phenomena. Such notions enable authors and readers alike to develop a critical account of extant practices and doctrines, and to formulate and imagine ideas that reach “beyond reality.” The texts discussed above partake in this dialectic of the real and the imaginary. They refer to the routines and the cherished traditions of the societies in which they were contrived, but they also think beyond them. The tension between ethnocentrism and universalism in these texts is at the core of the dialectic. It was in this creative tension that the first notions of common humanity could be invented.

2

RELIGIOUS AND PHILOSOPHICAL UNIVERSALISMS

THE RELIGIOUS AND PHILOSOPHICAL texts discussed in this chapter have crossed numerous boundaries. They were taken up, and invariably interpreted anew in the process, by later generations and by the inhabitants of lands far distant from their place of origin. The Bible and the Quran eventually became the canonical books of the two major world religions, at the present time claiming the allegiance of more than half of the world’s population. Stoic philosophy began its career in West Asian Hellenism, later becoming a widespread creed among the governing elites of the Roman Empire and a major ingredient of early-modern European intellectual culture. Finally, Confucianism, from Tang times onward, radiated out to Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, making accessible a “Chinese” model of civilization to people who were not ethnically Chinese.[1]

As we shall see, these religions and philosophies all subscribed to notions of common humanity, and sometimes divine or natural equality. In the wake of Judaism, Christendom and Islam conceived of humanity as a community of descent. The New Testament and the Quran affirmed a basic equality of all humans as created in God’s image. Both religions eventually consummated a rupture with their Judaic and Arabic roots, pursuing a policy of universal conversion, all the while drawing a clear-cut boundary between those who had seen the light and others who were still dwelling in darkness. Consequently, the history of the two world religions has been driven by a powerful dialectic of universalism and exclusion.

Like Christianity and Islam, Stoicism originated in West Asia, but it functioned as a philosophical creed rather than a religion. Stoic ideas of natural equality were grounded in the theory that all human minds partook in the universal cosmic reason. In practice, they ranged from an egalitarian widening of Greek and Roman politics to the cosmopolitan equality of imperial citizenship in Roman times. Beyond that, Stoic conceptions of natural equality were incorporated in the philosophy of modern natural law in early-modern Europe.

Confucianism had religious overtones without ever becoming a religion in the strong sense of the term. Its ideal of a civilized life endowed secular human relationships with the aura of the sacred.[2] In Han times, some Chinese literati dreamed about a future age when the entire world would emulate the Way of the great Chinese sage, but that future only materialized in East Asia. Unlike Christianity, Islam, and Stoicism, Confucian notions of common humanity and human nature lacked a transcendental foundation. Confucian thinkers conceived of human society as an integral element of the cosmic order, but this cosmic order was an immanent principle and not a divine grounding situated at an ontologically “deeper” level of reality. As we shall see, this lack of a transcendent anchoring made it harder to move beyond a Sinocentric view of history and civilization.

Monotheism in Christendom and Islam

Both Christians and Muslims recognized Judaism as a predecessor and both adopted the notion of the exclusion of all previous “other gods,” so ardently set forth in the Hebrew Bible, as a central element of their creed. But they did so in different ways. Christianity started its career as a deviant offshoot of Judaism. It appropriated and reordered most books of the Tenach into the “Old Testament.” The numerous Judaic prophecies were henceforth interpreted as allegorical anticipations of the coming of Christ. A central theme of the story of Christ was the Jews’ refusal to accept his message and their complicity in his crucifixion. Consequently, anti-Judaism became one of the hallmarks of Christianity.

Islam did not emerge as a direct descendant of Judaism, and for Muslims the Quran was the only Holy Book, the “uncreated” word of God. Nonetheless, Islam recognized the prophets of the Bible, notably Abraham, Moses, and Christ, as true prophets and men of great wisdom. Muslims, however, argued that their messages were now superseded by Muhammad. Even so, Muslims have always acknowledged Jews and Christians as “peoples of the book” who had a higher stature than pagan polytheists and were permitted to reside as tolerated minorities in Muslim lands. In one important respect, though, Islam was closer to Judaism than Christianity. It proclaimed a rigorous monotheism along the lines we have encountered in the Hebrew Bible. Many passages in the Quran strongly condemn the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. As we shall see below, the early history of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula involved clashes with the local polytheists but also with the Jews. Its later history was marked by frequent and bitter conflicts with Christians.

Like Judaism, Christianity and Islam proclaim that their God is the only true god and that all other gods are mere delusions. What sets them apart is their unceasing efforts to convert other peoples to their faith. Christianity and Islam were crusading universalisms. In this respect, Christianity was more radical. While Muslims generally abstained from converting other peoples of the book, Christians included Jews and Muslims in their missionary fervor. The worldwide expansion of Christianity and Islam was not, however, solely a question of voluntary religious conversion. Christianity began as a barely tolerated and often persecuted minority in the Roman Empire, but after the pro-Christian turn of Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century CE the career of Christianity was closely connected to the fortunes of the empire. The connections between empire and Islam were even closer. The evolution of Islam was right from the start tied to military mobilization, state formation, and, finally, imperial conquest.

Common Humanity in the Christian Scriptures

Christianity started as a messianic movement under the leadership of “Jeshua” (Jesus), a man about whom little historically reliable information is available. Jesus addressed himself to the Jews with a message of radical religious reform. The story of Jesus’s birth, his life, his teachings, and finally his crucifixion is told, with different factual material and emphasis, in the three synoptic Gospels. Together with the Acts of the Apostles (written by the same author as the Gospel of Luke), the Epistles of the Apostles, and the Revelation of John, these books constitute the canon of the New Testament, committed to writing by some sixteen authors between 50 and 120 CE.[3] Most of these books are addressed to fellow Christians, but the Epistles also speak to the pagan communities in the Roman Empire. The New Testament is written in the Greek lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean world. As they began to organize themselves in a supralocal “church,” the Christians recognized a large part of the Tenach as their “Old Testament.” One of the early fathers of the church, Jerome, translated the entire Christian Bible into Latin between 382 and 405 CE. This translation, known as the Vulgate, became the authoritative version of scripture in the European Middle Ages.

Like the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament conceives of humanity as a community of descent, as the community of all those who are created in God’s image, and as the community of all those who are answerable to God’s commandments. But while the Hebrew Bible always addresses its readers as members of the people of Israel, the authors of the New Testament gradually dissociate themselves from Judaism. A main theme of the Gospels is the rejection of Jesus’s message by the Jews. Admittedly, Jesus is executed by the Romans, but the Gospels underline the complicity of the Jews in his crucifixion. Throughout, Jesus is portrayed as a Jewish reformer who severely castigates the established leadership of the synagogue.

In the end, the Christians resolved the tension between Jesus the Jewish reformer and Jesus the founder of a new universal faith by designating him as the Messiah whose coming was foretold by the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. In this way, the coming of Christianity represented the fulfillment of the Old Testament, and the Christians could restyle themselves as the “new Israel” and incriminate the Jews as blind and deaf to the redemptive message of true salvation preached in their midst. In the subsequent history of Christianity the Janus-faced relationship of Jesus to the Jewish people was to become the seedbed of anti-Judaism as well as philo-Judaism, but much more of the former than the latter.

The message of Jesus was radical indeed. Despite his assurances that he came to fulfill the Law and not to abolish it, his language differs from that of the Torah. Referring to the Decalogue’s ban on adultery, he says that a man who lustfully gazes at another man’s wife has already committed adultery in his heart.[4] Asked to explain his criticism of the dietary laws, he declared that whatsoever enters the mouth goes into the belly and finally into the draught, “but those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man.”[5] In the Sermon on the Mount he reminds his audience of “thou shalt not kill” in the old Law, and then continues: “But I say unto you, that whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment.”[6] The message is that the disposition of the heart is more important than pious words and that deeds should be in accordance with inner convictions.

Coming to the social implications of Jesus’s message, the first thing to note is the centrality of love. Jesus consistently upholds the love of God and the love of one’s neighbor as the highest commandments and the epitome of the Law. As he declares in the Gospel of Matthew: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart.… This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and all the prophets.”[7] The followers of Jesus are instructed to avoid the trappings of material wealth and to assist others in the daily struggle for survival instead of indulging in their own selfish pursuits. The message is socially inclusive. The Sermon on the Mount blesses the “poor in spirit,” the “meek,” and the “merciful.” Jesus blesses those “which are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”[8] It is also quite clear who are the adversaries of his message. He warns his followers that they shall in no case enter the kingdom of heaven, unless “your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees.”[9]

On account of such statements not a few contemporaries sought to besmirch him as a political subversive. The Pharisees, Matthew relates, tried to entrap him with a question about the lawfulness of paying taxes to the Romans. In his famous reply he showed them a piece of money and asked whose image was on it. Caesar’s, the Pharisees answered. Whereupon Jesus replied: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.”[10] Jesus was not a political revolutionary, but his language constituted an anti-politics. His vision of God represents a repudiation of the close union between the state and the gods in Greco-Roman religion. Consequently, the Christian always was a citizen of two worlds. The center of the political community and the center of the religious community no longer coincided. This was, of course, also a departure from mainstream Jewish views in which it was assumed that the religious community coincided with the people of Israel.

Augustine, probably the most influential of the church fathers, later expressed this duality in the simile of the Civitas Dei. According to Augustine, the church is the “commonwealth of God,” not in a merely spiritual sense, but in the fullness of history. It recognizes the supreme authority of the state in secular matters, but it claims for itself the highest authority in the religious sphere. Implicit in Augustine’s vision, written down under the shadow of the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410 CE, is that the future church will be a spiritual force, but not an otherworldly one. In a sense it will continue the civilizing mission of Rome, but of a new and better Rome.[11] The Christian worldview thus engenders, and has to endure, a latent tension between the secular and the sacred, and the risk of a collision between the worldly authority of the state and the transcendental authority of the church can never be entirely excluded. As the Christian philosopher Bardaisan, writing in 200 CE in Edessa, on the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire, observed about the Christians: “In whatever place they may find themselves, the local laws cannot force them to give up the law of the Messiah.”[12]

The Jesus movement in Palestine was suffused with an apocalyptic mood. At one moment, Jesus tells his disciples that some of them “shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God.”[13] After the death of the founder, when the apostles started preaching the new religion to non-Jews in several parts of the Roman Empire, such visions of an imminent end of the world receded into the background. Slowly, the Jesus movement transformed itself into the early church. The first sizable Christian community outside Judaea arose in Antioch, the largest city in the Asian provinces of the Roman Empire. It was there that the followers of Jesus were for the first time called “Christians.”[14] The task of building a new community of converts from many cities and nations called for a longer time horizon. It also confronted the leaders of the movement with the stark reality of cultural difference. The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, also written by Luke, provide us with a convenient entry into the ideas underpinning the early Christian churches.

When Jesus proclaimed the sacred duty to love your neighbor as yourself, he left open how wide the circle of neighbors was to be. The word neighbor could be taken in its colloquial sense as a member of one’s local community, but it might also refer to the entire Jewish community, and finally it could stand for the inhabitants of the Roman Empire or even for the community of all human beings. This ambiguous sense of neighbor is played out in the famous parable of the Good Samaritan. The story begins with a lawyer who inquires what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus replies with the two commandments to love God and to love your neighbor. Thereupon the lawyer seeks to challenge him, asking “and who is my neighbour?” Jesus is not fooled and replies with the parable of the Good Samaritan:

A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. And likewise a Levite … passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, and went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.… Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour onto him that fell among the thieves?[15]

The lawyer has to admit that it was the Samaritan. Jesus then concludes the episode with the words “Go, and do thou likewise.”

The key to the parable is the Samaritan. On the face of it, Jesus’s message is quite elementary. The neighbor who needs your love can be anyone. The parable simply disregards the claims of kinship, community, ethnicity, or religious allegiance. However, as many commentators have noted, Jesus does not answer the lawyer’s query in a straightforward manner. Instead, he sets him an example to follow, and that example is the Samaritan. Now the Samaritans were not seen as belonging to the people of Israel. They practiced a mixed religion, combining the Torah with some of their traditional gods. The common view among the Jews depicted them as at best a halfway house to the truth but more often as despicable idolaters.[16] It is one of these Jesus sets as a shining example, contrasting his compassion to the guilty indifference of the priest and the Levite, who represent the established elites of Israel. If his sole aim had been to expose the hypocrisy of the elite, he might well have chosen an ordinary Jew as example. By giving the role to a Samaritan, who would traditionally be excluded from the community to which charity was owed, the story introduces the issue of cultural difference.[17]

The salience of cultural difference appears on two levels. In the first place, the Samaritan’s compassion for the victim, presumably a Jew, disregards the cultural chasm separating them. He does not “see” a stranger; he “sees” a fellow human being who needs help. The implication clearly is that charity does not stop at cultural boundaries. Second, by setting up the Samaritan as the good example, the story underlines that acting in accordance with Jesus’s teachings is not restricted to Jews. In the parable, it is the non-Jew who heeds the great commandment, while the Jews fail to do so. In the end, it is not descent or ethnicity that is decisive but what you believe and what you do. Possibly, the Samaritan is Luke’s invention. Of the three synoptic Gospels, only Luke mentions the Samaritans. Luke recounts three events with Samaritans, two of which show them in a favorable light.[18] However, most early Christians read the parable in a different key. To them the victim of the robbery represented humanity reduced to sin by the agency of demons (the “robbers”), while the Samaritan was an allegory for Christ who alone can heal the wounds of fallen humanity. A double reading was also possible. Augustine upholds the allegorical interpretation but also underlines the moral reading that compassion should not be confined to the in-group.[19] And even on the allegorical reading the appearance of the Samaritan as an allegory for Christ suggests a universalistic reading of Christ’s great commandment.

In the Acts of the Apostles we find the announcement that the new creed shall be witnessed “unto the uttermost part of the earth,” as foretold by Second Isaiah, and that those who have the true faith are accepted by God regardless of their national origin.[20] It is Paul who carries this message to different provinces of the Roman Empire and finally to Rome itself. It is useful to recall that Paul was not the first Jew to preach a universalist faith. The Pharisees, who staffed most of the synagogues of the Diaspora, taught that the Torah contained a universal message for Gentiles as well as Jews.[21] Even so, their universalism still was a Jewish universalism. Paul has been called the true inventor of Christianity because he severed the new religion from its Jewish roots, notably circumcision and the dietary laws, and replaced the Torah with the mystical Christ.[22] The later doctrine of the Trinity deified Christ. Its appeal to numerous believers lay in the narrative of God coming down in human form to the world of men, associating with ordinary artisans and not with the wealthy and the powerful. As creator God was high and far away but as Christ he was nearby and approachable for all who opened their hearts and minds to his message.[23]

When the Jews spurned the word of God, Paul finally declared, “We turn to the gentiles.”[24] Paul repeatedly proclaims that in Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female … circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian.”[25] What Paul preaches in these words is a notion of cross-cultural spiritual equality. In his First Epistle to the Corinthians he declares that there are many kinds of voices in the world and “none of them is without signification.” He goes on to say:

Therefore if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me.[26]

Here the apostle is obviously playing out the double meaning of the Greek word barbaros. The Greek fathers of the church would later express a similar idea in a philosophical language, equating the idea of the soul to the Platonist notion of the mind.[27] As a rule, spiritual equality did not imply social equality. The social egalitarianism of many passages in the Gospels, most notably in Luke, is considerably toned down in the Pauline Epistles. The famous message of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans enjoins all Christians to behave as law-abiding and tax-paying subjects of the empire. Paul is also known as the apostle who ordered women to be silent in the church. The soul might have no sex, but the body politic and the clergy most certainly did.

Later spokesmen of the early church generally endorsed slavery but counseled the masters to recognize the “natural equality” of all men, lest they fall into an un-Christian pride. Significantly, they objected to Jews and pagans owning Christian slaves.[28] Preference for Christians in worldly and legal matters persisted throughout medieval times. Most Christian theologians accepted the reality of slavery in civil law (though not in natural law), but they condemned enslaving fellow Christians.[29] Likewise, the Lateran Council of 1139 forbade, “under pain of excommunication,” the use of the crossbow, then a new and dreadful weapon, against Christians, though not against infidels.[30] In theory, Christian universalism did not recognize cultural and religious frontiers; in practice, it often privileged Christians over the adherents of other faiths. Only when it came to converting others to the Christian faith was it truly universalist. Forcible conversion was practiced on a huge scale, despite the biblical tenet that involuntary conversion was a form of hypocrisy. The champions of coercion were always able to find scriptural justification for it, in the Old as well as in the New Testament. In the later dissemination of the faith Christians consistently claimed the authority to convert peoples worldwide, but they rarely allowed preachers of other religions to enter Christian lands.

The language of the New Testament is thus ambiguous and allows for radically different interpretations. Its cross-cultural universalism was attuned to the Christianization of the multiethnic Roman Empire, but it could also be turned against Christian arrogance and brutality toward non-Christians. Likewise, the otherworldly thrust of many biblical texts could be used to marginalize socially egalitarian readings, but it might also provide the seedbed for an “anti-political” critique of the social order and, beyond that, of cross-cultural visions of common humanity. Finally, the stories of Jesus in the Gospels have through the centuries made available a politico-religious language to radical reformers and critics of many forms of inequality.

Common Humanity in the Quran

The third monotheism to emerge in western Asia was Islam. Its message of common humanity and universal salvation was predicated on the same dialectic of universality and exclusion we have encountered in Christianity. The message of Islam addressed all humans, but history was depicted as an ever-ongoing struggle between the Muslims and the “unbelievers.” The Quran admonishes all peoples and tribes to recognize one another, but it also repeatedly suggests that the status of non-Muslims cannot be equal to the followers of Muhammad’s message.

At the beginning of Islam stands, just as in Judaism and Christianity, the imposing personality of a great founder. Like Moses and Jesus, Muhammad (ca. 570 CE, Mecca–632, Medina) was an audacious and severe religious reformer. His rejection of polytheism met with fierce opposition among the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula. In some respects Muhammad is comparable to Moses. Both men emerged as religious and political leaders in the borderlands between the sedentary agrarian civilizations and the nomadic pastoralists of the desert zone. Both propagated the faith in One God against traditionalist adversaries. Finally, both were living in the frontier zones of great empires. Moses and his successors had to reckon with Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, and the Persian Empire. Muhammad and his heirs confronted the Eastern Roman Empire and Sassanid Iran.

Within two generations after the death of Muhammad Islam became the religious vector of powerful empires in North Africa and West Asia. The religious and intellectual environment of early Islam was strongly affected by Judaism and Christianity, and possibly by the Zoroastrian culture emanating from Iran. Peter Brown has called the Arabian Peninsula “a gigantic echo-chamber, in which the conflicting religious options of the Near East had already been translated into Arab terms.” Muhammad grew up in a region where the merits and defects of Judaism and Christianity had been debated for over a century.[31]

Mecca was a crossroads of trade routes through the peninsula and beyond.[32] The urban merchants maintained a working relationship with the nomadic tribes who controlled the caravan trails of the desert interior. Muhammad was born to a family of the Quraysh, the tribe that held the stewardship of the shrine of the Ka’aba, a major center of polytheistic worship. Kadija, a widow, hired him to manage her caravan trade. Later she proposed marriage, an offer Muhammad accepted. As a caravan merchant he became a member of a network of partners and got to know various regions of the peninsula. Around 610 CE, however, he began to withdraw to the solitude of the desert to engage in meditation. In a vision he heard voices, telling him that he would be God’s chosen vessel to receive the divine message. Like others experiencing such visions, Mohammad was at first too panic stricken to act on them, but Kadija convinced him that he had to bring God’s message to the people. In the Islamic tradition, a woman is therefore honored as the first person to recognize the validity of Mohammad’s prophecy.[33]

A later source in the Hadith (the corpus of sayings attributed to the Prophet) relates that Kadija brought Muhammad to her cousin Waraqah, a Christian who knew Hebrew and was conversant with the Torah. According to Waraqah, the message in Muhammad’s vision closely resembled “the namus [nomos, law] that was once sent down to Musa [Moses],” thus providing the new divine message with a Judaic genealogy.[34] The traditional accounts of Muhammad’s life understandably depict him as an unwavering antagonist of polytheism, but more recent studies have underlined that his polemics against Jews and Christians were equally and perhaps more significant.[35] The existence of a Jewish kingdom in sixth-century southwestern Arabia that persecuted Christians, provoked Persian intervention, and left religious turmoil in its wake may also be relevant in this respect.[36] In the Quran, the “Israelites” are frequently addressed, and both the Jews and the Christians are exhorted to return to the fold of pure monotheism.[37]

Muhammad’s attempts to correct the religion of the Quraysh met with such hostility that in 622 CE he was forced to flee to Medina, where one of the clans had requested his mediation in an impending civil war. The year of his flight marks the beginning of the Muslim calendar. In due course, the majority of the people of Medina recognized Muhammad as their new religious leader, but the three Jewish clans of the city refused to do so. In the following years two of the three Jewish groups were exiled and the third was liquidated. The Quranic polemics against the Jews, and more generally the call to take up arms against “infidels,” were thus connected to the struggle for hegemony in Medina.[38] In the wake of Muhammad’s ascendancy Medina became the seat of the first Muslim community. Meanwhile, the Meccans remained hostile. In 624 CE it came to a military showdown at Badr, from which Medina emerged victorious. It was the first victory won under the banner of Islam. The fledgling Muslims regarded it as a vindication of their belief in the One God.[39] More victories would shortly follow, until Mecca finally rallied to the new faith. The Ka’aba, a massive black stone (perhaps a meteorite, supposedly hurled from the heavens by God), became the sacral center of Islam. Through these eventful years Muhammad continued to have visions, until his death in 632 CE.

After his death, his followers faced the problem of preserving the oral and written testimonies of the Prophet. The established Muslim consensus is that the authoritative canon of the Quran was put together under the guidance of Uthman, the third caliph, who ruled from 644 to 656 CE. Western critical studies have amended this view, arguing that the Uthmanic recension represented only the start of a canonization process that ended some two centuries later.[40] Much uncertainty remains, but we probably can accept Michael Cook’s conclusion that the process of canon formation of the Quran was far more rapid than the New Testament, and more directly controlled by the state.[41] We should also note that the Quran, unlike the Christian scriptures, was canonized while the early Muslims were waging one war after another. A further difference is that only the Arabic text was recognized as the true canon, while Christians from the fifth century onward acknowledged the Latin Vulgate as their canon—only in the Renaissance would European scholars return to the Hebrew and Greek originals.

The Quran as we have it today contains 114 suras, varying in length from a few verses to many pages. Compared to the Hebrew and Christian scriptures it offers the reader few historical references.[42] The suras are ordered by length and not chronologically. There is no underlying historical narrative or plot, leaving ample room for exegesis and hermeneutics. The text clearly assumes the creation story of Genesis, but it does not contain a creation narrative of its own. Likewise, it relies on the stories of Abraham, Moses, Jacob, and Jesus as a necessary background, without recounting or summarizing those stories in full. All prophets mentioned in the Quran, with the exception of Muhammad himself, are also attested in the Jewish and Christian scriptures.[43] The Quran portrays Abraham as the first true monotheist, underlining that he “was neither a Jew nor a Christian.”[44] Likewise, Jesus is represented in a favorable light, but it is a “cleansed” Jesus, shorn of his Christian deification.[45]

What kind of scripture is the Quran? To begin with, Quranic monotheism borders on the obsessive: the text is even more God-centered than the Tenach and the New Testament. In numerous suras, God appears as the speaker as well as the central focus of the text.[46] God, the Quran teaches, is the creator who has given us the natural world to know and the holy Quran to believe. He is one, absolute, eternal, and all-powerful. Islam appears as even more emphatically monotheist than Judaism, and polemics against the Christian Trinity recur throughout the text. Seen in a slightly different perspective, however, the Quran is also decidedly anthropocentric. God is the creator of humanity, and all the other elements of his creation are functionally related to the human beings addressed by God in the Quran. The very stars are made “so that they can guide you when land and sea are dark.”[47] Even so, the Quranic portrayal of humanity is not a flattering one. Humans are depicted as sinful, weak, vulnerable, fickle, easily corruptible, and frequently misguided. Some Quranic passages depict human history as bordering on the meaningless: “Bear in mind that the present life is just a game, a diversion, an attraction, a cause of boasting among you, of rivalry in wealth and children.… The life of this world is only an illusory pleasure.”[48] History and human pursuits are here reduced to mere vanity. The parallel with the biblical book of Ecclesiastes is unmistakable. Believers should beware of worldly seduction and keep to the straight path of Islam. The Quran contains a number of terrifying evocations of Armageddon and the final judgment that will come on that dreadful day of reckoning.

Like its Hebrew and Christian predecessors, the Quran affirms the unity of humanity. All humans share in a common descent, all are created by God, and all are called upon to embrace the true faith. Following Genesis, the story of the creation, the forbidden fruit, and the Fall is recounted in the Quran, but this time it is not Eve who heeds the evil counsels of the serpent and then seduces Adam but rather Adam and his wife who are simultaneously seduced by Satan.[49] Consequently, the Quranic version of the story does not justify female subjection. However, later the Hadith recounts the story of Adam’s rib as told in Genesis.[50] Moreover, the Quran includes numerous social prescriptions that imply the subordination of women, for example in matters of inheritance and obedience.[51] The most inflexible of these is the requirement of two female witnesses to counterbalance one male witness in lawsuits.[52] The Quranic rules concerning divorce and inheritance represented no overall improvement over the tribal customs that preceded them, contrary to what Muslim authorities have sometimes asserted. The actual record is mixed. It was only when the first caliphs conquered the Middle East that Muslims fully adopted the patriarchal mores and doctrines prevailing in Mesopotamia and Iran.[53] From Abbasid times Islam became solidly misogynist with the exception of some dissenting currents of which the Sufis were probably the most influential.[54]

That is not to say, however, that the Quran is a seamless text that leaves no room for female autonomy. In her classic book on women and gender in Islam Leila Ahmed has shown that Abbasid practice and doctrine systematically disregarded the universalist notions of common humanity and equality in the Quran. She reminds us that in the first Muslim community at Medina women fully participated in religious rituals, attended the mosque, and were present in Muhammad’s audience. Muhammad’s wives made important contributions to the Hadith. More than two thousand are attributed to Aisha, of which three hundred were canonized by later extremely stringent commentators. According to Ahmed’s reading of the Hadith, the women at Medina were not merely “passive, docile followers, but … active interlocutors in the domain of faith.” Their active role has probably influenced the text, for in Medina Muhammad was still receiving new revelations. At one moment, the women asked Muhammad why the Quran addressed only men when women had also gladly accepted the revelation. Their question occasioned the revelation of Sura 33 that addresses both sexes.[55] God first speaks to the wives of the Prophet, exhorting them to modesty, to stay at home, and not to “flaunt your finery as they used to do in the pagan past.” But then the religious duties of men and women are placed on the same level:

For men and women who are devoted to God—believing men and women, obedient men and women, truthful men and women, steadfast men and women, humble men and women, charitable men and women, fasting men and women, chaste men and women, men and women who remember God often—God has prepared forgiveness and a rich reward.[56]

In the final verse of Sura 33 the sexes are once again placed on the same level: “God will punish the hypocrites and the idolaters, both men and women, and turn with mercy to the believers, both men and women.”[57] While the Quran prescribes different social and political positions for men and women, their moral virtues and religious duties are here declared identical. These passages convey the same basic message as the declarations of Paul that in Christ there is neither male nor female. They also have the same limitation: the gendered distribution of social and political power, detailed in other Quranic passages, is left untouched and thus tacitly endorsed.

Another biblical theme that returns in the Quran is the Deluge. In the Quranic story one of the sons of Noah refuses to board the ark and perishes with the rest of antediluvian humanity. After the Flood, God declares: “Noah, descend in peace from US, with blessings on you and some of the communities that will spring from those who are with you. There will be others We will allow to enjoy life for a time, but then a painful punishment from Us will afflict them.”[58] Here the vision of humanity is somewhat less inclusive than in the corresponding passages in Genesis.

One of the five pillars of Islam is the obligation to pay the zakat, a tax used to pay for poor relief. All Muslims who possess some income, capital, or land are expected to pay for the upkeep of their destitute brothers and sisters:[59]

Goodness does not consist in turning your face towards East or West. The truly good are those who believe in God and the Last Day … who give away some of their wealth, however much they cherish it, to their relatives, to orphans, the needy, travelers and beggars, and to liberate those in bondage; those who keep up the prayer and pay the prescribed alms; who keep pledges whenever they make them; who are steadfast in misfortune, adversity, and times of danger.[60]

Charity is elevated to an integral part of honesty and reliability. The Quran characterizes goodness both in religious and social terms. Piety and praying without caring for other less fortunate people does not count as real goodness. Let us note that travelers are mentioned among those who may need help. The Quranic obligation to assist the needy thus also applies to strangers. Generally, the Quran displays distrust toward wealth and riches not unlike what we have encountered in the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Like the biblical God, the God of the Quran elevates whoever he will and brings down whoever he will, thus underlining the transience of all human grandeur.[61] Finally, wealth and social distinctions will be of no avail on the Day of Judgment. Standing before God only individual merit shall count.[62]

The final recension of the Quran coincided in time with the expansion of Islam into North Africa, Mesopotamia, Iran, and, finally, Central Asia. A Quranic formula runs: “The East and the West belong to God: wherever you turn, there is His Face.”[63] The expression clearly conveys the geographical imagination of late antiquity, when the known world consisted of the great band of civilizations extending from the far west to the Indus and the borderlands of China. Some of the most quoted lines of the Quran recount that God commands humans to overcome their divisions:

People, We created you from a single man and a single woman, and made you into nations and tribes so that you should recognize one another.[64]

Originally, these verses were probably meant as a call for concord among the tribes and clans of the Arabian Peninsula, but as the sway of Islam expanded they could be invoked to justify peace and understanding in ever-widening circles.

At the time of Muhammad’s death, Islam had faced the task of unifying the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula. By the mid-eighth century, it had become the religious component of a vast empire comprising numerous nations, civilizations, and religious creeds. Muslim rulers and thinkers understandably believed that their Islamic “world empire” heralded a new age in the history of the world. Even Ibn Khaldun, whose theory of history turned on secular social forces, acknowledged the decisive role of the Islamic faith in the rapid expansion of the Arabic empires.[65] However, the new reality of empire also forced the Arab rulers to come to terms with the problem of governing a multiethnic and multilingual commonwealth. How to rule it, how to keep it from falling apart, and how to manage its widely different peoples and cultures were unprecedented and urgent questions. Inevitably, answers were sought in the Quran and in the Hadith.

How to spread the true faith and how to deal with opposition to it? The Quran posits the general principle that there is no compulsion in religion.[66] In practice, however, coercive methods were frequently employed, and several Quranic passages could be cited to justify such policies. Just as Christians, Muslims proclaimed the right and the duty to convert other peoples, preferably by persuasion but if need be by coercion. Others, however, were not accorded the right to convert Muslims. Like Christians, Muslims did not tolerate apostasy. In many cases, it was a capital crime.

Muslim theologians divided the world into two large zones, the Dar al Islam (the abode of Islam) and the Dar al Harb (the land of war). The Dar al Islam coincided with the Umma, the overarching community of all believers. Every Muslim belonged to the Umma, so that political borders within this Islamic space were not regarded as absolute separations. In principle, all Muslims were authorized to travel through the entire commonwealth of Islam and to set up domicile wherever they liked, but when a part of the Dar al Islam was conquered by the infidels, Muslims were advised to leave. Migration of Muslims to the Dar al Harb was at best a necessary evil, and in no case should they marry infidel women, not even those belonging to other peoples of the book.[67]

The next question concerned the treatment of adherents of other religions living in Muslim territories. The people of the book were allowed to reside in the Dar al Islam, were they had to pay a poll tax but were free to administer their own affairs. The Quran mentioned the Jews, the Christians, and the “Sabians” as peoples of the book.[68] It is unclear who the Quranic Sabians were; in the ninth century, the polytheists of Harran in Syria, not far from Bardaisan’s Edessa, called themselves Sabians in order to escape forcible conversion to Islam.[69] In the first century of Islamic rule in Iran, the Zoroastrians were also considered a people of the book.[70] That is not to say, however, that the peoples of the book were accepted as equals: “They say, ‘Become Jews or Christians, and you will be rightly guided.’ Say ‘No, [ours is] the religion of Abraham, the upright, who did not worship any god besides God.’”[71]

“Pagans,” on the other hand, faced a choice between conversion to Islam, death, or emigration. Even so, not a few Muslim scribes opined that even polytheists ought to enjoy the protection of the law in Muslim lands. This doctrine was frequently used to justify the presence of pagan merchants in Muslim cities.[72] When Muslims ruled lands where the great majority was “pagan” a more flexible policy imposed itself. Examples of such pragmatic toleration are found in the early stage of Muslim rule in Iran and later the Ottoman Empire. In late seventeenth-century Mughal India, the Muslim emperor Akbar adopted a syncretic variety of Islam, abolished the poll tax for Hindus, and decreed a policy of mutual toleration for the different creeds in his empire.[73]

The notorious notion of Jihad can be rendered as “holy war,” but also as “struggle for the true faith.” The second meaning may refer to armed struggle but also to an inner, spiritual struggle or a “struggle for God.” The Quran considers war as an ultimate recourse when all peaceful methods of conversion have failed. Starting from the maxim of “no compulsion in religion,” voluntary conversion is by far the most desirable, but when the “heathen” persist in their unbelief, coercion is permitted and may even be mandatory. The latter course is in any case justified when the “idolaters” break a treaty. In such cases they get four months to move freely in the land, but when the moratorium has elapsed they may be attacked:

When the forbidden months are over, wherever you encounter the Idolaters, kill them, seize them, besiege them, wait for them at every lookout post; but if they turn to God, maintain the prayer, and pay the prescribed alms, let them go on their way, for God is most forgiving and merciful.[74]

To sum up: if the “idolaters” return to the fold of Islam of their own accord, they will not be molested; but if they refuse to do so and remain in the land, violence is justified. The people of the book may also be forcibly disciplined but only if they refuse to pay the poll tax.[75] Forcible conversion is not permitted in their case.

The Quran is ambiguous on the use of violence. Some passages justify violence and coercion, while others recommend peaceful persuasion. This distinction roughly corresponds to the two meanings of Jihad mentioned above. Altogether, the term Jihad occurs some forty times in the Quran, of which sixteen refer to war and conquest. A considerable number of other passages define Jihad in terms of an inner struggle against the evil in one’s own heart.[76] It follows that both the advocates of armed struggle against the unbelievers and the proponents of peace and persuasion can find solid support in Quranic passages. In this respect, the Quran does not greatly differ from the Bible. It is certainly more warlike than the New Testament, but the difference with the Hebrew Bible is not so great.

We may conclude that the Quran, like the Judaic and Christian scriptures, presents us with a dual vision of humanity. One side of the duality is a truly universalist vision, grounded in the divine creation of a common human nature and a common human descent. The often-quoted passage (Sura 49:13) that God has made humanity “into nations and tribes” in order that they recognize one another evokes an ethos of peace and intercultural respect.[77] Even so, human beings can only become their true selves by submission (“Islam”) to God and by accepting the Quran as God’s word. So we arrive at the other side of the duality, which is grounded in the conviction that only Muslims can fully realize the essence of what it means to be human. Consequently, the undiluted doctrine of the “one true faith” cannot be reconciled with the acceptance of religious pluralism, except as a necessary evil. As in Judaism and Christianity, the tension between universalism and exclusion is inescapable.

Natural Equality and Convention in Greek Political Thought

As we have seen, the cradle of Greek philosophy lay at the western rim of Asia Minor. In some respects the position of the Greeks was comparable to that of the Hebrew states in Palestine. Both were vibrant newcomers in a world dominated by the great civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia.[78] Greek culture, like that of the Jews, bore the imprint of West Asian and Egyptian influences.[79] The founding of colonies by numerous Greek city-states further complicates the picture and differentiates them from the Jews. At the close of the sixth century BCE there were Greek colonies, usually independent cities trading with their hinterlands, in southern Italy, Liguria, Cyrenaica, Egypt, and around the Black Sea. Colonization and trade provided the Greeks with a sizable body of knowledge about strangers, thus making cultural difference a potential object of philosophical investigation.

Xenophanes’s opposition between timeless truth and the vagaries of the human imagination prefigured the distinction of nature (phusis) and convention (nomos) that would become pivotal to Greek philosophy in the fifth century BCE. If something was right and true by nature, no human power could change it. Convention, on the other hand, stood for human customs that differed from place to place and changed over time. The Greek city-states themselves were the scene of incessant conflicts and regime changes, thus offering yet another example of the variability of laws and conventions. The independent polis itself, however, was not a Greek invention; in this matter, as in others, the Greeks probably took their model from the autonomous cities in Mesopotamia, Syria, and Phoenicia.[80]

In the fifth century, the new political regime of “democracy” or “people’s power” arose. The Athenian democracy, the only one about which we are well informed, was based on a powerful ideal of equality, expressed in two institutional arrangements: the equal right of all free citizens to speak in the people’s assembly (isegoreia) and equality before the law (isonomia). However, Athenian equality excluded slaves, resident aliens, and women, even though women had an important part in religious and civic rituals.[81] When push came to shove, the Athenians did not acknowledge equality, or even reciprocity, between themselves and other Greeks. A famous incident in the Peloponnesian War, related by Thucydides, demonstrates how the Athenians proceeded against a small city that sought to remain neutral in the war between Sparta and Athens. The Athenians had invaded the island of Melos with numerically superior forces. Their ultimatum to the Melians offered the latter nothing but the choice between surrender and the prospect of total annihilation. When the Melians asked for moderation and reasonableness the Athenians coldly retorted that in wartime solely the right of the strongest counted for anything.[82] The islanders opted for resistance but were defeated in the end. Punishment was swift and merciless: the Athenians killed all the adult males and sold the rest of the population into slavery. Melos was virtually depopulated. Subsequently, Athens dispatched 500 colonists to the island.[83] It was a classic case of extermination followed by colonization.

Consequently, there is no direct link between the idea of equality underpinning Greek democracy and the emergence of the notion of the equal dignity of all humans, not even within the restricted cultural space of the Greek world. There may, however, be an indirect link. Unlike monarchy and aristocracy, democracy could not rely on the authority of tradition. It was a new departure that could only be justified by “theoretical” reasoning. Greek democracy dissolved the notion of a given order in nature and society, replacing it with the question of explaining how the actual ordering of the polity could persist and what type of order was the best.[84] The balance between nature and convention was obviously important for the legitimacy of democracy itself. The heart of the matter was whether democratic equality was grounded in a deeper truth about human nature or could be reduced to the status of an arbitrary convention. In the latter case it might be more plausible to regard inequality as the “natural” condition of humanity. In Plato’s Gorgias, the brutal antidemocrat Callicles asserts that “nature” has decreed that excellent and strong men should lord it over the weak and the slow-witted. According to Callicles, democracy is an artificial creed created by the collective power of the weaklings to ward off their “natural” servitude.[85] Likewise, Trasymachus’s claims in the Republic boil down to the axiom that democratic equality has no other foundation than the power of the multitude.[86]

What about the equality between Greeks and non-Greeks? Here, democratic practice exemplified inequality rather than equality. Resident aliens (metics) in Athens had fewer rights than native freemen. The composition of the slave population of Athens also reflected the lower status of foreigners. The majority of the slaves were imported from “barbarian” lands, most of them from Thrace, Syria, Asia Minor, and the Black Sea region.[87] Aristotle’s notoriously inconsistent theory of “natural slaves,” arguing that they are human and yet not fully rational, is only understandable against the background of Greek prejudices about barbarians.[88] The philosopher actually relates that when the Greeks justified the enslavement of prisoners of war, they did not refer to fellow Greeks but to “barbarians.”[89]

Among the Sophists, the group of radical fifth-century thinkers so unjustly denigrated by Plato, we encounter a great variety of opinions. Some of them, notably Archelaus, maintained that “justice and baseness exist not naturally but by convention,” concluding, like Callicles, that only selfishness is natural.[90] Another, Critias, proposed that the belief in the gods was invented by an ancient sage who sought to frighten the malevolent so that they would not even dare to contrive evil deeds in secret.[91] According to Protagoras, perhaps the best known of the Sophists, contradictory opinions circulated about virtually every subject.[92]

This sort of radical doubt could also be employed to criticize the commonplace Greek ideas about barbarians. Antiphon, another well-known Sophist, started from the skeptical thesis, shared by many of his contemporaries, that the laws and customs of any particular polis are merely conventional and therefore, philosophically speaking, arbitrary. But he also marshaled the idea of “nature” to criticize the concept of the “barbarian”:

The laws of nearby communities we know and respect, but those of communities far away we neither know nor respect. We have thereby become barbarous toward each other, when by nature [phusis] we are all at birth in all respects equally capable of being both barbarians and Greeks.

We can examine those attributes of nature that are necessarily in all men and are provided to all to the same degree, and in these respects none of us is distinguished as foreign or Greek. For we all breathe the air … and we laugh when we are pleased in our mind or we weep when we are pained, and we take in sounds with our hearing, and we see by the light of our sight, and we work with our hands and we walk with our feet.[93]

Antiphon’s words show that the opposition between nature and convention can be turned against the democratic polis but that it can also be enlisted in a critique of the Greek prejudices about foreigners as essentially inferior and “barbarian.” In the first case, “nature” undermines the political culture of common citizenship underpinning the democratic city, but in the second case it contains the germ of a notion of common humanity that moves beyond the polis and ultimately beyond the commonplace ideas of Greek identity.

Antiphon is playing on the ambiguity of the term barbarian in his time. Its ancient meaning was simply non-Greek-speaking or foreigner. The geographer Strabo, writing at the end of the first century BCE, has traced its etymology to an imitation of the incomprehensible tongues of strangers, and in particular to those who spoke raucously, in a thick voice, or in gibberish Greek.[94] In Athenian theatre performances witty remarks at the foreigner’s expense were fairly common. Directors had their Persian personages ramble on in Ionian dialect mixed with a smattering of Persian.[95] Against that background, Antiphon’s neutral use of the term barbarian and his assertion that at birth everyone is capable of becoming a “barbarian” have an unmistakable polemical thrust. In the next chapter we shall see that Herodotus criticizes the received notion of “barbarian” in a similar way.

Likewise, Antiphon’s insistence that all humans share a number of basic physiological and psychological traits that indicate a common human nature implies a critique of the commonplace image of foreigners he assumes in his Greek audience. The fragment cited above shows the first glimmerings of a universalist notion of common humanity grounded in a common human nature. One Sophist, Alkidamas, went so far as to condemn slavery as unnatural: “God,” he contended, “set all people free; nature has made no one a slave.”[96] Whether such outright condemnations of slavery were exceptional or widespread we cannot know. Aristotle’s remarks about “natural slaves,” intended to refute unnamed critics, suggest that the critique of slavery was important enough to merit an answer.[97] However that may be, we are probably warranted to assume that the idea of a natural equality of all humans, regardless of their ethnic origins or customs, circulated in fifth-century Greek communities.

Empire and Natural Equality in Stoic Philosophy

Unlike the Sophist’s critique of Greek ethnocentrism, the Stoic notion of the natural equality of all humans rested on a theological foundation. Consequently, Stoic philosophy propounded a stronger version of common humanity than the Sophists. To understand the rise of Stoic political thought, we have to situate it in the context of post-Alexandrian politics and state formation.

In Hellenistic and Roman times, the urban communities of the old city-states remained the centers of political life, but they now had to maintain themselves in the framework of imperial politics. Whatever their internal political regimes, very few cities were able to pursue an independent military or foreign policy. Empires and medium-sized kingdoms now controlled taxation and military power. The death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE seemed to give the Greek cities an opportunity to regain their autonomy, but their revolt, led by the Athenians, met with utter defeat.[98] In Hellenistic times the population of the cities became ethnically and religiously more mixed. Also, cities as well as their citizens were more liable to participate in international networks.[99] With the coming of the Romans the Greek cities lost the last vestiges of their independence. The sack of Corinth in 146 BCE, the year Carthage was also razed to the ground, marked the end of the Greek resistance against Rome. The Romans, for their part, adopted much from Greek culture, so extending Hellenism to the western part of the Mediterranean. The Roman poet Horace expressed the final result in a famous ironic comment: “Captured Greece captured its fierce conqueror.”[100]

In Julius Caesar’s time, the rapid growth of the empire disrupted the delicate political equilibrium of the Roman Republic, unleashing the civil wars from which imperial Rome was to emerge. A major keystone of the future imperial edifice was already put into place in 89 BCE when the Lex Julia conferred Roman citizenship on the elites of its allies and of those insurgent cities who laid down their arms of their own accord.[101] Cicero summarized the results in De Legibus. Referring to Cato, born in Tusculum but a Roman citizen, and probably also thinking of his own provincial home town of Arpinum, he declared: “Surely, I think that he and all natives of Italian towns have two fatherlands, one by nature and the other by citizenship.”[102] In the early first century CE there were nearly six million Roman citizens while the entire empire counted some fifty to sixty million souls.[103] Roman citizenship did not comprise the active rights of the Greek democratic polis, but compared to the Greek cities the numbers were truly staggering. The Romanization of the Empire accelerated under the Flavian emperors, reaching an all-time high in the second century CE.[104]

In terms reminiscent of Cicero, the Greek philosopher Aelius Aristides developed the theme of Rome “as the common native land, the communis patria of the peoples of the world.” He enthusiastically reports on the security of travel within the empire, where to pass in safety from one province to another “it is enough to be a Roman.” According to Aristides, “the former contrast of Greeks and Barbarians has given way to the distinction of Romans and non-Romans.”[105] Meanwhile, such effusive celebrations of Roman rule should not make us forget that the empire could also show another face: whoever resisted the power of Rome had to reckon with a merciless retribution that could range from huge exactions and plunder to deportation and the extermination of entire tribes and nations.[106]

In these circumstances the polis-centered philosophies of Plato and Aristotle lost much of their attraction. The philosophy most suitable to the imperial setting of urban life proved to be Stoicism, a current of thought that emerged in the third century BCE, when the successor states of the empire of Alexander the Great dominated Greek politics. The founders of Stoicism mostly hailed from the eastern borderlands of the Hellenistic world. Zeno was born in Citium on Cyprus, but he began his teaching career in Athens, walking up and down the Stoa Poilike, a colonnade adorned with paintings celebrating Greek victories over “barbarians.” Andrew Erskine conjectures that Zeno’s contention “that the only significant distinction between men was between the virtuous and the rest … called into question the very meaning of the paintings and their assertion of the superiority of the Greek over the barbarian.”[107] Two aspects of Stoic philosophy made it attractive to urban men of letters in an imperial world. The first was its focus on the pursuit of a good and reasonable individual life in a fast-changing and dangerous world; the second, its universalistic ethics that could readily accommodate imperial cosmopolitanism. Both the demand of moral self-cultivation and the universalistic message spoke to people for whom the self-government of the polis was no longer a credible ideal.

For a Stoic thinker, the model of the wise man (or woman) was the bedrock of philosophy. The sage should not overly care about things that were beyond his control. Material hardship, illnesses, poverty, even slavery were of secondary importance compared with the cultivation of the soul. The wise man is always free, even when his body is enslaved, while the fool is always a slave of his passions and needs, even if his body is free.[108] Human beings, the Stoics believed, were destined by nature to live according to reason. Human nature is part of the natural world, which includes the gods as well as humanity. Individual human reason, according to the Stoics, is but a spark of the cosmic logos of the universe. It necessarily follows that all human beings are endowed with reason, even though not all will be able to fully realize their indwelling rationality.

The good man, the Stoics held, will approach other human beings with justice and moderation. Even though Stoicism did not preach an anti-politics, the wise should not parochially identify themselves with a particular community. Epictetus, who was born in Phrygia, taught some years in Rome, and finally moved to Epirus, counseled his pupils: “Never in reply to the question, to what country you belong, say you are an Athenian or a Corinthian, but that you are a citizen of the world.”[109] Stoic thinkers, it seems, were loyal subjects of the city they lived in, but reason and not politics was their supreme authority. Consequently, a Stoic thinker would ultimately place the dictates of reason above the “reason” of state.[110]

We can now see why Stoicism was well attuned to the imperial framework of Hellenistic and Roman times but at the same time politically highly ambivalent. The Stoic conception of reason was universal because all humans partook in the cosmic logos of the universe. In that sense, they are naturally equal. However, Stoic philosophy also divides humanity into a minority of the wise and a majority of fools. All humans are naturally equal, but some, it seems, are more naturally equal than others. One pole of Stoic thought could advance a universal natural equality, regardless of religion, ethnicity, gender, rank, and locality. It provided the foundation for a critique of chauvinism that could, ultimately, result in a deconstruction of the idea of the “barbarian other.” The other pole of Stoicism, however, highlights the dichotomy of the wise and the fools. Only the wise can fully cultivate reason, while all others fall short of the mark. Those others have to be educated by the wise and, failing that, disciplined by the law. The elite of the sages is truly cosmopolitan, because they are not tied to any particular culture, but the lofty ideal of cosmopolitan reason will always elude the majority of humanity who are imprisoned in the invisible cage of their parochial culture. Consequently, the cosmopolitan ideal cannot be truly universal.

Even so, Stoic universalistic and egalitarian ideas could be turned against the excessive and “unnatural” inequalities in cities and states. Two cases in which Stoic ideas probably were interpreted in such antinomian terms were the political crisis in Sparta in the mid-third century BCE and the attempt at agrarian reform led by the Roman tribune Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BCE. According to Erskine, the proposal to include nonurban Lacedaemonians and resident aliens in the Spartan citizenry showed traces of Stoic influence.[111] In the political upheaval in Rome, Blossius, a Stoic philosopher from Cumae, participated on the side of Gracchus’s agitation for a more equitable share in land for the poor and the landless, but it is not altogether certain that his politics were grounded in his Stoic ideas.[112] That a critique of inequality was part of the Stoic legacy is also apparent from their views on private property, slavery, and the composition of the city. According to the early Stoics, private property was a matter of convention and thus not natural; witness its absence from Zeno’s ideal city.[113] The Stoics did not believe in natural slavery, a standpoint with potentially subversive consequences that were, however, rarely drawn.[114] Several Stoic texts indicate that they conceived of a city as the sum of all its inhabitants and not merely of its citizens.[115]

Bypassing these radical possibilities, and probably reacting against them, late Stoicism in its Roman incarnation took another road. To understand the consequences for theorizing common humanity we have to take a closer look at Stoic theology. Cicero’s writings, which include some of the most extensive discussions of Stoic thought that have come down to us, are a useful source.[116] Cicero himself was an eclectic thinker, but his philosophical dialogues present us with a moderate Stoicism that was probably well received by his Roman audience. In De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods) the Stoic views are advocated by Balbus. Throughout the dialogue he delivers a critique of the Epicurean philosopher Velleius. In Cicero’s time, Epicureanism went through a revival, stimulated by Lucretius’s great didactic poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things).

According to Lucretius, the immortal gods exist but do not care about the fate of humanity. Lucretius himself regards all religion as superstition maintained by irrational fear and priestly intrigues. He relates the story of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia who was slaughtered by her own father, Agamemnon, to assuage the ire of Artemis and so obtain a favorable wind to sail to Troy. For Lucretius the murder of an innocent girl to pacify the wrath of a god demonstrates the ultimate malignancy of religion: “So potent was religion in persuading to evil deeds” (Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum), lines about which Voltaire later remarked that they would live forever in the memory of humanity.[117]

Balbus’s exposition of the Stoic view of the divine seeks to refute Epicurean materialism by several arguments. Epicurus had posited that the “fortuitous collision” of atoms had produced our “elaborate and beautiful world.” Well, counters Balbus, if that were true we might randomly throw thousands of all the letters of the alphabet on to the ground and in that manner produce “the Annals of Ennius, all ready for the reader.”[118] Without the ordering agency of god an ordered universe simply cannot have come into being. Look at the stars, Balbus exclaims, and behold the eternal regularity of their motion. This is the argument from design (“intelligent design,” in today’s parlance).

Coming to the nature of god, Balbus takes human nature as his starting point. Humans, he says, are endowed with reason and therefore superior to animals. And yet the order of the universe is greater than humanity and embodies a higher form of rationality than individual human reason. “This world,” Balbus concludes, “which must necessarily be the most excellent of all things, is itself a living being and a god.”[119] Diogenes Laertius relates that in Stoic thought “God, intelligence [nous], fate, and Zeus are all one,” and concludes that God is “the seminal principle of the world.”[120] Here we have arrived at the essential core of the Stoic notion of the divine. The Stoic maxim that we have to live according to nature comes down to living in accordance with divine Providence.

The Stoic concept of God is a far cry from the plain polytheism of the average Greek or Roman. Neither can the Stoic idea of the deity be identified with the personal God of the monotheistic religions discussed above. When Balbus speaks about “God” in the singular he means a pantheistic indwelling over-mind that pervades the entire cosmos. All humans have access to virtue by means of right reason, provided it is well cultivated. Human reason participates in the cosmic logos and is therefore predisposed to understand the good. As matter is permeated by the logos, sense experience can be a source of true knowledge. Consequently, humans possess the capacity to know the good and to discover the path of virtue.

What are the implications of the Stoic understanding of god and reason for ideas of common humanity? To begin with, the unity of humanity necessarily follows from them. Humanity is the community of all mortal beings who participate in the divine cosmic logos. The notion of a universal ius gentium (“the law of nations”), developed by Roman jurists, derives from Stoic sources.[121] The more pragmatic vision of knowledge and virtue in late Stoicism strengthened the idea of common humanity. Besides the deep wisdom of the sage, it validated the practical knowledge of the average citizen. Next to the ascetic virtue of the philosopher, it acknowledged the significance of the mundane virtues in everyday human intercourse. Panaetius, on whom Cicero heavily relies in De Officiis, his famous treatise on the duties of the private person as well as the citizen, distinguished between different sorts and grades of virtue, depending on one’s profession and station in life. Panaetius, Cicero tells his readers, is undoubtedly right to affirm that no great man could have succeeded without the enthusiastic support of countless lesser men.[122] It follows that great leaders as well as ordinary citizens have their share of reason and virtue. Interpreted along these lines, Stoicism offered an ethical code for the citizen as well as the wise.[123]

In the early Stoa, the cosmopolis of the wise evoked the ideal of a cosmic community to which local ties hardly mattered. The Roman Stoics replace this somewhat otherworldly vision with the idea of an encompassing humanity composed of regional, local, and familial subcommunities. The second-century CE Stoic Hierocles envisioned every human person as surrounded by concentric circles: the innermost circle included family members and relatives; the next circle comprised fellow citizens who shared the same fatherland; the outermost circle, finally, was identified with humanity, the inhabitants of the known world, the oikumene or orbis terrarum.

Likewise with the natural equality of all humans: in the Stoic view, all humans are equals because they all participate in the cosmic logos, but they also differ because they realize their natural potential to different degrees. Consequently, natural equality coexists with significant inequalities according to rank, status, gender, power, reputation, and ethnicity. Cicero, for example, rejected democracy, which he associated with mob rule and an excessive degree of equality.[124] On the other hand, inequality cannot claim an absolute validity. Some Roman Stoics, for instance, judged that the ideal marriage should be a partnership of equals, and they accordingly advocated an equal education for boys and girls. Musonius Rufus even criticized the double standard of sexual morality that was current in Roman society. Discussing the not-so-hypothetical example of a man sleeping with a female slave, he advises such a man to imagine how he would react to his wife having sex with a male slave.[125] Even so, the distinction between reasonable people and “fools” always remained significant as a background assumption. The concept of humanitas that circulated widely in the final days of republican Rome was frequently associated with learning, “good breeding,” and refined taste.[126]

The boundaries of the Stoic notion of humanity are flexible and ambiguous. The conquests of Alexander the Great had enlarged the “known world” to an unprecedented degree. In the same era the Greek traveler Pytheas of Massilia sailed around Britannia. The known world now extended from the Irish Sea in the far west to the Indus and the Hindu Kush in the east. Stoicism offered the intellectual tools to subtend geographical multiplicity with a philosophical unity. That is not to say, however, that the Romans and the Greeks henceforth considered the inhabitants of northern Europe or Central Asia as equals. Both the universal cosmic logos and the image of remote and irreducible barbarians were integral parts of the worldview of the Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman Empire.

The Roman Stoics observed the world from the imperial capital. The center of the concentric circles of humanitas was Rome. The founders of Stoicism hailed from the eastern rim of Hellenism, but the Stoics of Cicero’s days were solidly lodged in the imperial heartland. According to Cicero the empire had a civilizing mission: Roman authority, Cicero believed, was better characterized as a “protectorate of the world” (patrocinium orbis terrae) than as a form of domination (imperium).[127] Herein Cicero deviates from one of his Stoic teachers, the Syrian Greek Poseidonios, who opined that the moral stature of Rome had declined after the “savage” destruction of Carthage.[128] Cicero’s attenuation of Stoic cosmopolitanism fits into a vision of the expanding Roman Empire as the enlightened rule of six to eight million Roman citizens presiding over some sixty million less civilized subjects. Many of those Roman citizens came from the provinces outside Italy, so that no sharp divide between ethnic Ur-Romans and “others” could arise. What we witness is the formation of an ethnically mixed governing class that shared a Greco-Roman model of civilization. De Officiis can be read as a manual for young Romans preparing for a career in the imperial administration.[129] The historian Livy, a younger contemporary of Cicero, who wrote the first comprehensive history of Rome, transformed the Stoic notion of a cosmic Providence into a historical script for the manifest destiny of the Roman Empire.[130]

The Stoic notions of common humanity ranged from a cosmopolitan community of potential equals to the differential rationality of an imperial commonwealth legitimized by a civilizing mission. Beyond that, the combination of a cosmic logos and a role for the traditional Roman gods and omens gave it the shape of a syncretistic religion. At the same time, it offered a systematic and comprehensive theory of the world. The victory of Christianity in the fourth century put an end to the religious role of Stoicism, but its ideas of personal virtue and its cosmic worldview remained potent intellectual forces that would eventually survive the decline and fall of the empire.

Common Humanity in the Confucian Tradition

Confucian wisdom defined the identity of “the Central States” (The term commonly used for the empire, the name “China” is a much later European invention) more than any other current of Chinese thought. Its theorization of common humanity ranges from a Sinocentric discourse of civilization to an incipient universalization of the human condition. Common humanity there certainly was, but an equal stature of Chinese and “others” always remained a liminal idea. Even so, we will see that cross-cultural understanding was a thinkable idea in the Confucian tradition. Here we shall focus on the foundations and the limits of common humanity in Confucian thought.

Nowhere in the world did canonical texts wield more power than in China. According to Mark Edward Lewis the Chinese classics constituted an imaginary empire of the mind, a spiritual “super China” that contributed to the resiliency of the “real” China in the turbulent interludes between dynasties.[131] The Chinese canon emerged from the fifth to the second century BCE. It acquired intellectual and pedagogical authority under the early Han (202 BCE–6 CE). A class of literati emerged and in 136 BCE the emperor Wu installed the first state-salaried scholars who were assigned to study and comment on the five classics. In the course of the next century, a system of recruitment, instruction, and examination of scholar-officials was put in place, making Confucianism the official state ideology.[132]

Among the five classics were the Spring and Autumn Annals, a chronology of the state of Lu, that was traditionally ascribed to Confucius. The expression “Spring and Autumn” stood for the cycle of the seasons. Much later, it became the name of the period 722–481 BCE in Chinese history, the years documented in the annals of Lu. In those centuries, China was divided into some fourteen states. The ideal of a great empire existed only in the memory of an idealized past, the legendary Zhou dynasty of the eleventh century. According to tradition, Confucius was born in 551 BCE in the state of Lu, one of the smaller states in the region of the Yellow River. In his time, the more powerful states in the north, south, and west struggled for the control of the central lowlands. Treaties and covenants were broken almost as soon as they were concluded. It is hardly coincidental that thinkers living in the small central lands frequently advocated peace. The grim and brutal circumstances of the age undoubtedly stimulated a rethinking of the foundations of morality and politics.[133]

Confucius was a wandering sage who instructed his pupils by exemplary comments and answers to questions. He aspired to be councilor of one of the princes but failed to get any appointment. Confucius died in 479 BCE, without leaving any written exposition of his thought. His pupils jotted down from memory what they recollected from the Master’s teaching. For a long time several versions of the Analects circulated. The notes of the disciples were only assembled and collated during the reign of Emperor Wu (140–87 BCE). The text we have today mostly dates from the Han recension of the Analects.[134]

The canonization of Confucius accorded with the political culture of the Han dynasty.[135] The first centralized imperial state was built by the short-lived Qin (Ch’in) dynasty, which unified China in 221 BCE. The political crisis that would result in the downfall of the Qin began as early as 210. The dynasty was brought down by a series of popular revolts caused by the ruthless methods and draconic punishments the government implemented to maintain law and order. The Qin rulers followed the political philosophy of Legalism, developed by Han Fei in the third century. According to Han Fei, the authority of a state was based on raw power and severe punishments rather than moral persuasion. “The people,” he declared, “will bow naturally to authority, but few of them can be moved by righteousness. Confucius was one of the greatest sages of the world. He perfected his conduct, made clear the Way, and traveled throughout the area within the four seas, but in all that area those who … were willing to become his disciples numbered only seventy.” Consider a young man of bad character, Han Fei added. “His parents rail at him but he does not reform; the neighbors scold but he is unmoved.… But let the local magistrate send out the government soldiers … and then he is filled with terror, reforms his conduct, and changes his ways.”[136]

Gaozi, the first Han emperor, had embarked on his political career as the leader of one of the rebellions that unseated the Qin. He was well aware of the importance of the loyalty of the people. Throughout Han times, the memory of the Qin acted as a warning sign not to resort to excessively despotic methods. In these circumstances Confucianism became an attractive alternative to Legalism. The Confucian thinkers who rose to prominence under the Han rejected Legalism as too simplistic. Dong Zhongshu, the intellectual architect of the canonization of Confucius, explained to Emperor Wu that Legalism resulted in external obedience without inner loyalty. In spite of cruel corporeal punishments and countless death sentences, banditry did not cease under the Qin, while the people became estranged from their rulers. Dong referred to a passage from the Analects: “Guide them by edicts, keep them in line with punishments, and the common people will stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. Guide them by virtue, keep them in line with the rites, and they will, besides having a sense of shame, reform themselves.”[137] The lesson of Confucius was that laws and decrees are insufficient when they are not combined with an inner disposition to dignity, respectful manners (li, the “rites”), and a sense of right and wrong. As Herbert Fingarette has shown, Confucian thought is a thoroughly this-worldly philosophy that nonetheless gives secular human relationships an aura of sacredness.[138] The corresponding political style can be characterized as government by civilization.

For all the prestige of Confucianism in Han times, we should not think that Confucius’s philosophy enjoyed an uncontested supremacy. Legalism remained a redoubtable competitor and Han intellectual culture was marked by a plurality of philosophical schools. The later myth that Confucius was right from his death acknowledged as the supreme master of Chinese thought is a Han invention.[139] The Confucian scholars assigned themselves the sacred duty to shield the emperor and his ministers from the temptations of Legalism. At least in theory they claimed the double role of ideologues and critics of imperial rule. Their care for education and true authority was not simply an instrumental justification of state power. Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi, as well as later Confucian theorists, shared the conviction that state power existed to ensure the prosperity and the civilization of the common people. In the final reckoning, the state existed for the people, not the people for the state. In the Analects this supreme maxim of politics is formulated thus:

Zigong asked about government. The master said: ‘Sufficient food, sufficient weapons, and the trust of the people.’ Zigong said: ‘If you had to do without one of these three, which would you give up?’—‘Weapons’—‘If you had to do without one of the remaining two, which would you give up?’—‘Food; after all, everyone has to die eventually. But without the trust of the people no government can stand.’[140]

The centrality of the people in the political vision of Confucius raises the issue of common humanity and equality. Who are the people: all the inhabitants or only a part of them? And what about the non-Chinese “barbarians”? Do they also partake in the sense of morality and proper conduct? To arrive at an answer to these questions, we do best to start from the vision of human nature that emerges from the Analects. To Confucius, individual lives as well as the state are forever in flux: “The Master was standing on the riverbank, and observed, ‘Isn’t life’s passing just like this, never ceasing day or might!’”[141] Every human being exists as a process in time, fashioned by the interplay of change and persistence. It is by maintaining themselves, keeping themselves afloat in the flux of time, and by critically reflecting on their experiences that people can arrive at wisdom and understanding. Creatively appropriating their experiences people transform and polish themselves.[142] Moreover, life is not an individual but a relational process. Only in a web of relationships with others can an individual become fully human.

An immanent conception of humanity stands at the core of Confucian thought. To follow the “Way” is to creatively insert oneself in the evolving order of the cosmos, an order that encompasses nature and humanity in an ongoing movement. In one sense the immanent cosmic order is a given, but in another sense it represents a demanding assignment. There is no divine Providence; human agency alone can create order in the whirl of the social world. Surely, one should pay ritual respect to the spirits of deceased ancestors, but in the end those spirits are not “demons,” but rather the ideational vehicles of the memory of the venerable dead.[143] In the final analysis, people are far more important than spirits. As the Analects have it: “Zilu asked how to serve the spirits and gods. The Master said: ‘You are not yet able to serve men, how could you serve the spirits?’”[144]

Humanity, then, does not appear as a given point of departure but rather as a precarious result that has to be gained by fortitude and perseverance. Confucius is deeply attached to tradition but at the same time he shows a keen awareness of the need for reform in the light of changing historical circumstances. As he expounds the idea himself, “Reviewing the old as a means of realizing the new—such a person can be considered a teacher.”[145] That Confucius expresses his reformist ideas in a language of return to the ancient virtues should not make us believe that he was “really” a conservative at heart. The memory of the authoritative past is called up to pave the way for a critical review of the present.[146]

Consequently, humanity is only to be achieved in the fullness of history. The Chinese character for humanity or humaneness is ren, a combination of the characters for person and two. Therewith social relations are made a constituent element of the notion of humanity. Ren is frequently rendered as “humanity,” “humaneness,” “benevolence,” or “goodness.” It means far more than the abstract idea that a human being is not an animal. What it seeks to convey is an ideal, an assignment to become what one should become. Ren is a social rather than a psychological notion. By becoming ren, the individual sustains the community. It follows that not every person will achieve ren.

In Confucius, ren is closely connected to li, a character that is frequently translated as “rites” or “ritual.” Those terms may convey a suggestion of outward, formal rules of conduct and politeness, or worse, prescribed religious rituals, but that is not what Confucius has in mind. Performing the correct ritual words and gestures is necessary, but they should express sincerely felt duties. Otherwise, they degenerate into hypocrisy. The li constitute a social grammar tying together external codes and inner dispositions in a seamless web.

The emphasis on the relational in ren and li can result in a strongly hierarchical vision of society. In Confucian social doctrine, state and society are constituted by the five relationships: father–son, older brother–younger brother, husband–wife, ruler–servant, and finally friend–friend. Of these, only friendship refers to a relationship between equals, but most Confucian thinkers have harbored mixed feelings about the egalitarian potential of the “fifth relationship.”[147] The first four relationships are based on modes of subjection. The hierarchical elements in Confucius are indeed unmistakable, but they are not the whole story. Confucius’s social philosophy also contains strongly meritocratic elements. The hierarchical notions in the Analects cannot be equated with a justification of the ranks and estates in fifth-century society. Confucius was many things but definitely not an apologist for the feudal states that made up China in his days. Actually, he considered the traditional culture of the feudal aristocracy the principal obstacle standing in the way of the moral reform he advocated.

Traditionally, the term junzi (“gentleman”) indicated somebody’s social standing, but Confucius transforms it into a moral ideal instead of an indicator of formal rank. The core of the concept of junzi shifts from wealth and lineage to inner and outer civility, virtue, talent, competence, and merit.[148] This approach was well suited to the social group Confucius himself belonged to, a fluid category of literati situated between the urban middle strata and the feudal aristocracy. Later, this was the group from which the Han Empire recruited its administrative and scholarly elite. Confucius constantly stresses the difference between the values of the true junzi and the hollow pretensions of men who were nobles in name only. To quote a typical observation: “If a person with talents more admirable than the Duke of Zhou is arrogant and niggardly, the rest is not worthy of notice.”[149] Elsewhere we read: “Exemplary persons [junzi] cherish their excellence; petty persons cherish their land. Exemplary persons cherish fairness; petty persons cherish the thought of gain.”[150] The junzi may delight in the good things of life, but he should not think that he is a better person than those who have to content themselves with little: “Exemplary persons help out the needy; they do not make the rich richer.”[151]

According to Confucius, everyone can become a junzi. Never, he proudly declares, has he refused to adopt someone as a pupil, even if he was too destitute to pay and could only offer a bit of dried meat.[152] On the other hand, he strongly believes that the people as a collectivity stood in need of guidance by virtuous literati. The common people, it says in the Analects, can be induced to follow the Way, but it is not feasible to make them realize the Way by their unaided efforts.[153] About women Confucius has not very much to say, but what he says is not complimentary. Generally, the female sex needs guidance by men. Within the boundaries of masculinity we may characterize the Confucian ideal as an open meritocracy.

In his peculiar manner, Confucius considered himself a realist. He estimated, with some justice, that his philosophy offered a better account of human nature than the cynical view of the Legalists who theorized government as commandeering writ large. We should be careful not to caricature Confucius as an aloof and otherworldly moralist. He lived in an age of violence, cruelty, and greed, and he was all too familiar with the weaknesses of the flesh and the delusions of the mind. A short saying that occurs twice in the Analects makes this abundantly clear: “I have yet to meet the man who is as fond of virtue as he is of beauty in women.” (Leys translates: “I have never seen anyone who loved virtue as much as sex.”)[154] Confucius cherished the ideals of virtue, civility, and humanity because they represented the only safeguards against a descent into violence and gluttony.

Asked for a maxim that would guide a person until the end of his days, Confucius offered “reciprocity [shu]: do not impose on others what you yourself do not want.” The character shu has been rendered as “reciprocity” but also as “putting oneself in the other’s place,” which is closer to empathy.[155] The principle of reciprocity, known as the Golden Rule in Greek philosophy, suggests a standard of universal equal dignity that remains valid even in hierarchical relationships. Those in the seats of authority should always recognize that their social inferiors are also fellow human beings to whom they stand in a relation of reciprocity. Regardless of the high appreciation of hierarchy in the Analects, there also is a basic intuition of common humanity.

According to Arthur Waley, the character ren, like the Latin gens, originally referred to the freemen of the tribe, as opposed to min, the “subjects.” Later, the distinction between freemen and serfs gradually disappeared, and the tribe was supplanted by larger circles of identification, from China to “all under heaven.” Moreover, as we have seen above, ren came to mean humaneness, or the qualities that enabled a man to follow the Way. Finally, ren would acquire the meaning of humanity as opposed to animality.[156] In Confucius, however, the latter meaning cannot be found. The brief allusions to “barbarians” in the Analects—not a subject to which Confucius gave much thought—suggest that he regarded the boundaries of China, ill-defined though they were, as the outer limit of ren: “The Master said: ‘The Yi and Di barbarian tribes with rulers are not as viable as the various Chinese states without them.’”[157] The Confucian notion of humaneness is expansive and potentially universal, but in the Analects it does not pass beyond the Chinese cultural space. The only evidence pointing to a more universalistic reading is negative: besides the one quoted above, there are no contemptuous or chauvinistic observations about “barbarians” in the Analects.[158]

Confucianism as Political Theory

According to Sima Qian, the first grand historian of China, Mencius “laid out the ideas of Confucius.”[159] However, what Mencius did when he drafted the books named after him around 320 BCE was much more than summarizing the thought of the Master. Starting from the sayings in the Analects, he produced the first systematic political theory in the Confucian tradition. In his thought we can discern the beginnings of a Confucian “orthodoxy.” It was extremely influential in the subsequent evolution of the Han canon. For the subject of this book, it is significant that Mencius laid the groundwork for a coherent theory of politics and human nature along Confucian lines.

According to Mencius, human nature (ren xing) is basically good, but its goodness is only present as germs within the human heart (in the introduction of this book, I discuss his example of compassion as a “natural reaction” upon seeing a child in distress). To become virtues, these germs must be cultivated. Goodness is thus natural, but its fruits are not naturally given. Mencius formulates his theory of the germs as follows:

The heart of compassion is the germ of benevolence; the heart of shame, of dutifulness; the heart of courtesy and modesty, of observance of the rites; the heart of right and wrong, of wisdom. Man has these four germs just as he has four limbs. For a man possessing these four germs to deny his own potentialities is for him to cripple himself.[160]

When a man has fully developed the four germs, Mencius goes on to say, “He can take under his protection the whole realm within the Four Seas, but if he fails to develop them, he will not be able even to serve his parents.” Just as in Confucius, virtue and goodness are never offered on a plate; they have to be achieved. Rightness, Mencius insists, should never be looked at as an external good: “You must work at it and never let it out of your mind.” On the other hand, one should let it grow and mature in one’s heart, and never force it. Forcing virtue would be like a man who all the time pulled at his rice plants to make them grow faster.[161] Needless to say, the plants do not survive such treatment. Ultimately, the four “hearts” or “germs” are grounded in human nature, which is an integral part of cosmic nature that is ordered by the “mandate of heaven.”[162]

Goodness is not only indispensable in the conduct of everyday life; it is also the wellspring of civilized government. No virtuous man, Mencius emphatically declares, would kill a single innocent man in order to gain the empire.[163] Like Confucius, Mencius puts merit above rank. He posits that there are three things which are acknowledged by the world as exalted: rank, age, and virtue. “At court, rank is supreme; in the village, age; but for assisting the world and ruling over the people it is virtue.”[164] Mencius contends that virtue is in the end even more valuable than life itself, for someone who seeks to save his life at any cost will readily sacrifice virtue and honor. Even destitute people have a sense of honor and shame. When the food he badly needs is given with abuse and contempt, even a beggar will not accept it.[165] When Kung-fu Tzu (Confucius) asked why some men are greater than others, even though all are equally human, Mencius answers that all men have the capacity to think and act well, but that not all men develop their potential to the same degree. All men, he added, share the desire to be exalted. But many people are not aware of the potential that lies dormant in their heart.[166]

Far more than Confucius, Mencius explicitly theorizes the concept of humanity. Like Confucius, he conceives of humanity as something that has to be brought off in the face of adversity, but he also highlights the empirical, “given” aspects of virtue and wisdom. Moreover, he repeatedly declares that all humans, lords and commoners alike, share in the basic attributes of being human. His notion of humanity is therefore more consciously universalistic than what we find in Confucius.

But what can we say about the image of the “barbarians” in the philosophy of Mencius? His utterances about non-Chinese nations are more interesting and sophisticated than the single passage Confucius devoted to the “barbarians.” The following passage, for instance, is more complicated than it may seem:

Shun was an Eastern barbarian.… King Wen was a Western barbarian.… Their native places were over a thousand li apart, and there were a thousand years between them. Yet when they had their way in the Central Kingdoms, their actions matched like the two halves of a tally. The standards of the two sages, one earlier and one later, were identical.[167]

What to make of this? Shun is traditionally known as the last of the five emperors of antiquity. By calling him an “Eastern barbarian” Mencius indicates that he came from the eastern borderlands that in those remote days were not yet a part of the central “proto-China.” Elsewhere Mencius relates that Shun grew up in extremely humble circumstances: “In the depth of the mountains, he lived amongst trees and stones, and had as friends deer and pigs.” But in a coarse body lived a good heart: “When he heard a single good word, witnessed a single good deed, it was like water causing a breach in the dykes of the Yangtze or the Yellow River. Nothing could withstand it.”[168] It appears, then, that a profusion of virtue can emerge from a “barbarian” commoner who has not much going for him except his good heart. The other “barbarian,” King Wen, presents an even more intriguing case. Wen is one of the great exemplary figures of Chinese history, the predecessor and inspiration of the legendary ancient Zhou dynasty and so “the object of imitation par excellence.”[169] Attributing a barbarian ancestry to one of the great cultural heroes of China is surely remarkable. Perhaps Mencius was influenced by the figure of the “wise barbarian,” a trope found in several early historical texts.[170]

Even so, Mencius also makes disparaging observations on foreigners, recounting how the Duke of Zhou “subjugated the northern and southern barbarians, drove away the wild animals, and brought security to the people.” Elsewhere, he refers in passing to the “twittering tongue” of the southern barbarians.[171] More systematically, he compares the tax rates in the Central Kingdoms and the foreign lands. Excessive taxation he associates with tyranny, but very light taxation is a symptom of primitiveness. The northern “barbarians,” he explains, are “without city walls, houses, ancestral temples or the sacrificial rites,” and they employ but a few artisans. That is why a low tax rate is sufficient for them.[172] Finally, Mencius’s most apodictic and generalizing statement on foreigners is unabashedly Sinocentric: “I have heard of the Chinese converting barbarians to their ways, but not of their being converted to barbarian ways.”[173] Consequently, cultural exchange seems to be a one-way street.

. Mencius presents his view of human nature as a refutation of several other views, among which is the thesis that “there are those who are good by nature, and there are those who are bad by nature.”[174] The latter view would, of course, correspond with an essentialist notion of the “barbarian other.” By opposing it Mencius implicitly says that “barbarians” do not have a different nature, which accords with his view that “barbarians” are capable of adopting Chinese customs. That, I conclude, is about as far as we can stretch his theory. I therefore agree with Irene Bloom that Mencius’s concept of human nature is biological as well as moral and that it is truly universalist.[175] But it remains a weak universalism that hardly engages with non-Chinese cultures.

Unlike Confucius and Mencius, Xunzi, the third great Confucian thinker of pre-Han times, never attained an uncontested canonical status, although he enjoyed a considerable reputation in his own time. Born around 310 BCE in the northern state of Zhao, he studied and worked in several states. His intellectual career largely coincided with the terminal stage of the Warring States period. When the militaristic western state of Qin finally conquered all the others and established a unified empire in 221 BCE, Xunzi had reached the age of ninety. He had only held minor administrative positions, but during his long life he had seen more than enough of the seamy side of politics. Despite his Confucian convictions the successes of the despotic methods of the Qin deeply impressed him. For the imposition of peace and order, it seemed, more was needed than virtue. The upshot was that he felt the need to rethink the foundations of the Confucian philosophy, deeply impregnated by the ideas of Mencius, which he had ingested as a youthful student.[176] In Xunzi’s reappraisal of Confucianism two issues were at stake: in the first place, whether a state should be governed by coercion or by virtue and civilization and, second, whether human culture naturally emerged from the cosmic order of tian (heaven/cosmos) or was the product of conscious human creation and innovation.[177]

We have seen that Mencius’s social theory relied on the “germs” of virtue humans were bound to cultivate to realize what lay dormant in their nature. Xunzi, perhaps impressed by the pessimistic temper of his time, feels unable to accept this somewhat benign vision of natural virtues. Humans, he argues, are born with a desire for profit and with feelings of envy and hate. If these are not reined in, all sense of courtesy, humility, loyalty, and good faith will disappear, and unceasing strife and conflict will ensue. Human nature, Xunzi concludes, is evil, while “goodness is the result of conscious activity.”[178] In another work, the Exhortation to Learning, he underlines the power of education to permanently alter one’s basic inborn nature.[179] Virtue and social order, he goes on to observe, are artificial and not natural; they have to be created by human efforts. Nature is what we are born with, while the path of rites and righteousness must be learned. At times, he comes close to saying that morality is a human invention.[180] We should, however, not construe Xunzi’s position as analogous to the Hobbesian notion of the naturalness of the war of all against all. Human nature is not intrinsically or incurably evil but its natural propensities should be classified as evil because they cannot, by themselves, produce a well-ordered commonwealth.[181] According to Xunzi, punishments are necessary, but in a deeper sense they are “merely an accessory to instruction through ritual and music.” A perfect ruler would instruct the people in such a manner that punishments would be superfluous.[182] Apart from the virtuous prince, he underlines the significance of socialization by peers; quoting an “old text” he states: “If you do not know a man, look at his friends; if you do not know a ruler, look at his attendants.” He concludes with an exclamation: “Environment is the important thing! Environment is the important thing!”[183]

Though not agreeing with Mencius on the intrinsic goodness of human nature, Xunzi’s universalism is decidedly more inclusive and egalitarian. To follow the correct rituals, to approach your fellow human beings politely, to give everyone his or her due, those cardinal virtues do not depend on rank or aristocratic descent: “Although a man may be the descendant of kings, dukes, or high court ministers, if he cannot adhere to ritual principles, he should be ranked among the commoners. Although a man may be the descendant of commoners, if he has acquired learning, is upright in conduct, and can adhere to ritual principles, he should be promoted to the post of prime minister or high court official.”[184] Even more emphatically than Confucius and Mencius, Xunzi employs meritocratic arguments to downgrade the traditional claims of noble birth. That is not to say, however, that he advocates a leveling egalitarianism. Quite the contrary; he justifies hierarchies and inequalities as functional and unavoidable in any well-ordered society, and he fully endorses the basic Confucian relationships, interestingly naming only the first four and passing over in silence the potentially egalitarian fifth relationship of friendship.[185] What Xunzi propounds, we may conclude, is a strong version of common humanity coupled to a weak version of equality.

Does Xunzi’s theorization of common humanity and of virtue as an artificial creation pave the way for cultural pluralism? If the ancient Chinese notion of “the Way” can no longer be justified as a human emanation of the cosmic natural order, what of the barbarian other? At one point, Xunzi seems indeed to endorse a relativist view of cultural difference:

Children born among the Han or Yüeh people of the south and among the Mo barbarians of the north cry with the same voice at birth, but as they grow older they follow different customs. Education causes them to differ.[186]

The Huai Nan, a text from the early Han, likewise observed, “If a three-month old baby is born and then moves to another country, he will be unable to know his [own] native customs” but will instead adopt the practices of his new home.[187] On the face of it, such passages seem akin to the position of the Sophist Antiphon, discussed above, but read in the context of Xunzi’s Confucian view of civilization the analogy with the Greek vision of cultural difference progressively dissolves. We can show this on two levels: first, by a close reading of other passages in which Xunzi mentions “barbarians” and, second, by investigating his theorization of “the Way.”

Xunzi’s dispersed utterances on foreigners give us some clues about his views on cultural difference. In his chapter on self-cultivation he tells an imaginary pupil that “if you are respectful in bearing and sincere in heart … though you may choose to live among the barbarian tribes, everyone will honor you.”[188] Music was highly valued by Xunzi, because it elevates and orders the mind, but he admonishes his readers to take care “that strange and barbaric music is not allowed to confuse the elegant classical modes.”[189] When discussing the goods, foodstuffs, and animals China imports, he routinely pictures the four corners of the world as supplying the raw materials that the Chinese, situated in the center, then use to manufacture all kinds of useful products.[190] In all these passages, the inferiority and the submission of “barbarians” is simply assumed.

Finally, we must consider his view of the Way and the theory of virtue that goes with it. For all his insistence on the artificiality of virtue and goodness, Xunzi never questions the absoluteness of his Confucian morality. His certainty on this score is adamant: “There are not two Ways in the world; the sage is never of two minds.”[191] How can we square this with his equally apodictic contention that human morality is artificial? According to Michael Puett, Xunzi is walking a philosophical tightrope suspended over the double abyss of naturalism and relativism. Puett quotes Xunzi to the effect “that human nature is the basis, beginning, material, and substance; conscious activity is the pattern, principle, abundance, and flourishing [something like matter and form in Aristotelian thought]. If there were no human nature, there would be nothing for conscious activity to act on. If there were no conscious activity, human nature would be unable to beautify itself.”[192] Puett theorizes this as an “implicit teleology” that saves Xunzi from altogether sawing off the Confucian branch upon which he is sitting. Coming back to the barbarian problematic, we may conclude that Xunzi’s philosophy can accommodate the varieties of human customs, but it is unable to give a reasoned account of “deep” cultural difference. His notion of common humanity offers some openings to the “barbarian other,” but in the end it remains anchored in a Sinocentric vision of truth and morality.

Reviewing our discussion of Confucian notions of common humanity and cultural difference, four conclusions suggest themselves. In the first place, the concept of humanity (ren), which Confucius elucidates by means of many examples, becomes more explicitly theoretical in Mencius and Xunzi. Second, because Mencius and Xunzi seek to formulate systematic theories of politics and human nature they have to confront the choice between a broad cosmic-moral concept of human nature (Mencius) and a narrow biopsychological view predicated on self-preservation and short-term hedonism (Xunzi). Third, while Mencius’s solution yields a fairly consistent linkage between cosmic nature (tian) and human nature (ren xing), Xunzi’s solution, which seeks to balance a cosmic teleology with a conventionalist theory of virtue, makes for an ambivalent dialectic of (“bad”) nature and (hopefully “good”) civilization. Fourth, it is important to note that both Mencius and Xunzi, despite their deep theoretical disagreement, retain the Confucian conviction that humanity is never simply given but has to be achieved in the teeth of adversity and cultural amnesia.

Finally, all three Confucian thinkers subscribed to the ideal of a single sage emperor ruling all under heaven. The existence of a collection of competing states in the perilous period of the Warring States was theorized as an imperfect present that should eventually give way to unification under the guidance of a sage Son of Heaven. While Confucius hardly ever discussed the place of the barbarians in the future imperial order, Mencius envisages it in terms of a Chinese civilizing mission. That the barbarians can and may adopt the Way is consistent with Mencius’s universalist theory of a good human nature. Both Confucius and Mencius inhabited a Sinocentric “imagined world” dominated by the civilization of the “Central States” (Zhong Guo).

For Xunzi, who lived to see the victorious Qin unification, the cultural homogeneity of the “world” was no longer so self-evident. It certainly was an irony of history that the long-awaited empire was realized by the Qin, whom many, perhaps most, of the cultured gentlemen of the Central States had always regarded as half-barbarian at best. Of the three thinkers, Xunzi is the only one to confront the worrisome reality of cultural pluralism and to formulate an explanation for its persistence—but not more than that. In his worldview the barbarians can respond to the virtue of civilized people, presumably Chinese, but left to themselves they will never attain an understanding of the Way.[193] In the end, even Xunzi cannot escape the Sinocentric teleology of Confucian thought.[194]

Such Sinocentric openness to the virtues of strangers is also found in later ages. Charles Holcombe quotes from an essay on “The Chinese Mind” composed by Chen An in the final century of the Tang dynasty: “Someone who was born in the central lands [China] but whose behavior does violence to the li and yi [justice], is Chinese in appearance but barbarian in his mind; someone who was born in barbarian regions, but whose behavior conforms to the li and yi, is barbarian in appearance but Chinese in his mind.”[195] The cultivated foreigner can be superior to the defective Chinese, but Chinese civilization remains the ultimate standard.

Common Humanity as an Available but Liminal Notion

All the texts discussed above originated in a world where common humanity and universal equality were liminal concepts. Seen against that background, Christianity, Islam, Stoicism, and Confucianism represented intellectual breakthroughs with far-reaching ramifications. They extended the limits of the thinkable and introduced the practice of religious and philosophical critique. They initiated notions of common humanity that transcended the local horizons of the tribe, the city, and the ethnos. After their appearance, the conviction that the local community was the final yardstick of morality and behavior lost its self-evident naturalness. In cultures impregnated by the sway of routine and tradition, these religious and philosophical discourses enabled people to imagine their world anew, to “rethink” the human condition in the most literal sense of the word.

What these texts have in common is that they advance reasons to recognize “cultural others” as fellow human beings. The reasons are religious, philosophical, and psychological as well. All of them situate the unity of humanity in a comprehensive ontology. The boundless multiplicity of the “ten thousand things”—as the Chinese expressed it—is reduced to a deeper unified pattern of divine or cosmic order. The structuring principles are of course different: the monotheistic idea of God that Christianity and Islam have appropriated out of the Judaic inheritance; the Stoic conception of the divine cosmic mind whose sparks impregnate human reason; the immanent cosmic-human order of the Confucian universe. Across this religious and philosophical spectrum, however, a common logic is at work. Within the parameters of their different ontological foundations, these texts construct notions of human nature in terms of the basic formula “all humans share X.” The New Testament, the Quran, and the Stoa propound a human-divine common nature, created in God’s image or animated by the divine cosmic logos. In the Confucianism of Mencius, the four germs of virtue play an analogous but more Sinocentric role. The intellectual operation all these texts accomplish in this manner is the subordination of the contingent to the universal. Here they differ from Homer and Hesiod, whose worlds were more manifold and phenomenal. The Hebrew Bible represents an in-between case: its ontology is more unified than that of Homer and Hesiod, but its overall logic is more manifold and less systematizing than the thought systems discussed in this chapter.

Furthermore, it is striking that all these texts appeal to empathy, the ability to feel compassion and to imagine how other people experience pain and grief. Empathy operates in a psychological and moral register. The appeal to empathy gives the text an emotional melody that speaks to the heart. Its moral message is that without empathy, charity, love, and concern for others’ true humanity cannot be attained. The other face of empathy and its underlying rationale is reciprocity. These texts, and here they pursue a line that is also at the core of the Hebrew Bible, testify to the invention of various notions of reciprocity as the foundation of any enduring human community. The canonical traditions that sprouted from them disseminate the invention of reciprocity and in the process develop it further (the transition from Confucius to Mencius is a good example of this “logic”). Likewise, all these texts posit an idea of justice in terms of “giving everyone what is his or her due.”[196] In most cases, the modus of distribution will not be strict equality, but a matter of degrees, dependent on a person’s station in the social order. The strangers or the “barbarians” will thus not be totally excluded, but their allotment will be smaller or less readily given than that of the “civilized” insiders.

These canonical texts share yet another important element, the affirmation of a “correct” way of thinking and a well-defined vision of the “good life.” The monotheistic religions divide humanity into true believers and those who are godless and sinful. In philosophical canons, the “wrong” way appears in the guise of human beings who fail to realize the telos of their own humanity. Such imperfect people become the legitimate object of conversion and pedagogical intervention or, failing that, punishment and, ultimately, death. Consequently, the ideas of humanity discussed in this chapter are universal as well as dualist. They combine universal empathy and reciprocity with doctrines of the good life that are not universal. Karen Armstrong has argued that the holy war aspect of the great religions represents a “distortion” of their true message.[197] The historical trajectories of those religions do not, I think, bear that out. Their basic truth claims, like those of the great philosophical systems, impregnate their doctrinal and teaching practices with an absoluteness that all too easily overflows into dogmatism and the persecution of those who, for one reason or another, fail to conform. The tension between universalism and dualism is inherent in the absolute truth claims of the great religious and philosophical systems. It is inescapable and it explains the ever-ongoing history of conflicting interpretations they set in motion. The balance between universalism and exclusion can be struck in different ways. The interpretation history of the canonical texts is the history of that changing balance.

The historical trajectories of the canonical texts are, moreover, subject to a second ambiguity. A universalism that potentially included all of humanity was always accompanied by an imperial universalism. The New Testament, the Quran, Stoicism, and Confucianism were put together by men living at the margins of the great power systems of their time. But with the canonization of the creeds of the founders the situation changed dramatically. The continental and, in some cases, global spread of Christianity, Islam, Stoicism, and Confucianism became possible when they became the religious and philosophical vectors of the empires of their times: the Roman Empire, the series of Islamic empires from the Abbasids onwards, and finally the Han Empire and its successors in eastern Eurasia. Consequently, their universalisms became tied to the justification of those empires and their civilizing missions directed at the “barbarians” in their frontier zones. The strong universalist thrust of these texts is always complicated by tenacious “centrist” elements. That is not to say, however, that the universalist and critical interpretations of the great texts passed into oblivion. Imperial interpretations could always be countered by radical, egalitarian, and anti-imperialist readings. That gives us another explanation of the ever-ongoing history of contentious interpretations.

Finally, it is worth observing that the universalism of these canonical texts takes in and includes the “barbarian others” but does so by factoring out their otherness. It is precisely the strong “good life” universalism of these religious and philosophical thought systems that stands in the way of a serious intellectual engagement with the contingencies of cultural difference and frontier experiences. In the next chapter we shall see how new historical and ethnographic modes of understanding emerged that made it possible to appreciate and to give a reasoned account of the contingencies of history and the otherness of foreigners and “barbarians.”

3

HISTORY, ETHNOGRAPHY, AND THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL TURN

WE NOW MOVE from universal discourses on the human to the contingencies of history, geography, and ethnography in an investigation of how historians in the Axial Age approached the problematic of empires and their “barbarian others.” None of them propounds philosophical concepts of common humanity, but all of them discuss the customs and politics of the “barbarians” in ways that incite their readers to reflect on the fact that their own way of life is not self-evident but just one of the thinkable orderings of human society. They invite their audience to imagine how things might look to people living beyond the frontier who look back at the empire. In an indirect way, these histories flesh out common humanity by offering thick descriptions of the cultures of others. The three exemplary cases considered are Greek historian Herodotus (mid-fifth century BCE), Han Chinese historian Sima Qian (ca. 100 BCE), and Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus (ca. 100 CE). In all three cases the anthropological turn enables these historians to engage intellectually with cultural difference in a way that eluded the religious and philosophical systems discussed previously (with the possible exception of the Greek Sophists).

History represented a new way for a society to reflect on itself, competing with the religious, poetic, and philosophical modes of self-understanding. More than those older genres, history investigated the contingencies of time and place. It made it possible to explore frontiers and to reflect on the differences between one’s own way of life and the customs of foreigners. It is surely significant that in Greece, as well as in China and Rome, the discourse that went by the name of history comprised a large amount of geography and ethnography. In the cases of Herodotus and Sima Qian historians belonging to a sedentary civilization confronted the nomadic culture of the northern peoples inhabiting the great band of steppe lands that traverses Eurasia from east to west. The woodland peoples of Germania and Britannia discussed by Tacitus are comparable to the Scythians and the Xiongnu in that the Romans were unable to conquer or “civilize” them. Like Herodotus and Sima Qian, Tacitus approaches the barbarian other as an integral part of his analysis and judgment of imperial policy. Throughout, I will discuss the barbarian ethnographies of the historians in the context of their views of empire and civilization, as well as in connection with the temporalities underpinning their historical narrative.

The dialectic of empire, ethnography, and history powerfully frames these histories. The writing of history is always an exercise in self-definition. More than anything else, it is the confrontation with others that compels people to question their own identity. That is what makes imperialism so central, whether empire is a menace from without, as in Herodotus, or a perilous course the fate of one’s own civilization depends on, as in Sima Qian and Tacitus. Their societies had reached a stage when it was no longer possible to understand one’s civilization without reflecting on the nature of frontiers and “strangers.”

Herodotus’s Histories recount the history of the Greco-Persian Wars in the early decades of the fifth century BCE, against the backdrop of a history and ethnography of the world of West Asia and North Africa. The rise and defeat of Persian imperialism and the maintenance of Greek independence are the main themes of his history. In the Shiji, Sima Qian presents a history of China from its mythical beginnings to the Han Empire of his own lifetime, including major chapters on the history and ethnography of the frontier zones of the empire. The emergence of a unified empire out of the Warring States of pre-Qin China, the consolidation of the empire under the Han, and the relations between the empire and the surrounding peoples are pivotal themes of his history. Tacitus, finally, wrote the history of imperial Rome against the backdrop of the fall of the Roman Republic, which was closely tied to the politics of empire. His histories of Rome and the peoples living on the northwestern frontier present us with fascinating examples of how a Roman historian sought to assess the relationship between the empire and its “barbarian” adversaries.

Frontiers and “Barbarians” in the Ancient World

The written sources are overwhelmingly on the side of the imperial centers. Unsurprisingly, historians in the ancient world routinely refer to the people living beyond the imperial borderlands as “barbarians,” but the meaning of that term varies across a broad spectrum, from the neutral “stranger” or “foreigner” to the depreciative “uncivilized,” “primitive,” “inferior,” or “savage.” Another feature is their propensity to underestimate the complexity of “barbarian” societies. Admittedly, Herodotus notices that some Scythians are tillers of the soil, but his narrative highlights the nomadic Scythians. Likewise, Sima Qian pays only scant attention to the agricultural and urban elements in Xiongnu society. Tacitus depicts the frontier peoples as woodland villagers and seems to be unaware of the emergence of towns and far-flung commercial networks among them, a development that long predated the arrival of the Romans.[1] Even so, all three historians respected the military capacities of the “barbarians” and seriously sought to understand the functioning of their societies.

The foreigners inhabited the lands to the north and the south of the great band of literate civilizations that extended from China in the east to the Roman Empire in the far west. The civilizations had an agrarian economy with a high population density ruled from urban centers dominated by a literate elite and an aristocratic governing class. Their religious and philosophical canons were codified in written texts. The “barbarians,” by contrast, usually had few cities and no written language. Some of them, notably in the Eurasian steppe and the Sahara, were nomads, while others, such as the peoples of Indochina and northwestern Europe, mainly lived in village communities. Undiluted pastoral nomadism, however, was rare; in most steppe regions pastoralism coexisted with agriculture and in some parts of the Eurasian steppe independent cities functioned as hubs of trade and travel. Likewise, scattered towns and trade existed in northwestern Europe.

The literate elites of the great civilizations looked down on foreigners as primitive and uncultured. Mencius is fairly representative: barbarians could become civilized by adopting Chinese ways, but for the Chinese to adopt barbarian customs was simply unthinkable. Even so, the ruling elites in the imperial centers were careful not to underestimate the military power of the barbarian outsiders. As we shall see, the Chinese Empire as well as the Persian Empire in West Asia feared and respected the military skills of the steppe peoples. Likewise, the Romans learned to their cost that the “primitive” tribes of Germania could be redoubtable enemies. Both the Great Wall of China and the Roman Limes in Germania served the purpose of policing the frontier, controlling the flows of trade and travel across it, and keeping the barbarians at bay. Sometimes that was not sufficient: for long periods the Chinese Empire paid tribute to the nomadic federations to keep them from raiding China. It is not an overstatement to say that the borderlands between the empires and the “barbarians” represented the Great Frontier of the ancient world.

That is not to say, however, that the relations between the civilizations and “their” barbarians were always hostile. The steppe, a vast “sea of grass,” as world historian William McNeill has called it, was the grand highway connecting eastern and western Eurasia.[2] The steppe peoples controlled the complex of trade routes known as the Silk Roads. As Jerry Bentley observes, the network of trade routes that sustained communication across the entire expanse of Eurasia and North Africa was facilitated by the “political and economic collaboration between settled and nomadic peoples.”[3] The nomads needed some of the products of the agrarian civilizations and the urban empires imported produce from the steppe, notably hides, fur, horses, and slaves. The Roman Limes was likewise a setting for mutual trade. The military perils as well as the economic utility of the frontier peoples made it worthwhile to collect information about them. Human curiosity did the rest. Consequently, a good deal of quite detailed information was collected about the barbarian borderlands. By contrast, information about the “savage” tribes dwelling beyond the “barbarians” was fragmentary and often marred by mythmaking. In this way, the urban centers and in particular the imperial capitals became storehouses of geographic and ethnographic information, eventually giving rise to the new intellectual disciplines of geography and ethnography.

The writings of Herodotus, Sima Qian, Tacitus, and many others are known as history, probably because Herodotus advertised his work as historia—that is, the results of an inquiry. While these works are history in the sense of a roughly chronological reasoned narrative of how things came to pass, all of them contain a fair amount of geography and ethnography. From its inception, history was not only about the “when” but also about the “where.” What makes the writings of the historians particularly relevant to the problematic of this book is that they present us with the first reasoned and self-reflexive accounts of “cultural otherness.” As we shall shortly see, the image of the barbarians in these histories frequently oscillates between the twin stereotypes of the “noble barbarian” and the “ignoble barbarian.” Even so, we will also encounter evenhanded and fairly accurate descriptions of the customs of foreigners, as well as accounts of how the barbarians looked back at the imperial centers, frequently resulting in a political critique of the conceits and weaknesses of rulers and the hubris of empires. Such critique is voiced openly or covertly, depending on the temper of the historians and the political regimes in which they had to survive.

Frontiers, Ethnocentrism, and Empire in Herodotus

When Herodotus was born, shortly before 480 BCE, Greece traversed the final stage of the Persian Wars. He hailed from Halicarnassus, an Ionian town on the coast of Asia Minor. At some point, he left for the island of Samos, then part of the Athenian confederacy, possibly because his family was expelled from Halicarnassus by the tyrant Lygdamis. He later returned to his place of birth, which had deposed its tyrant and joined the Athenian confederacy. In the 440s, Herodotus spent some years in Athens. Probably in 443, he moved to the newly founded Athenian colony at Thurii in southern Italy. There he died between 430 and 424. His places of residence thus covered a great part of the Greek world. Moreover, he traveled extensively, and in the Histories he refers to firsthand oral and visual evidence of many lands. He claimed to have visited Egypt, Cyrenaica, Babylon, Phoenicia, and Scythia, but some students of Herodotus do not accept all of those claims.

Though well connected, Herodotus seems never to have belonged to the inner circles of the political elite in any of the cities in which he resided. In a broad way, he sympathized with the Greeks, which is hardly surprising since the resistance of the Greeks against Persian imperialism is his main subject, but he was not a partisan of any Greek city, not even of Athens, though he greatly admired it for its paramount role in resisting the Persians. Several commentators have argued that his insistence on the hubris and inevitable decline of empires implied a censure of Athenian maritime imperialism that probably was not lost on his Greek readers who were living through the early stages of the Peloponnesian War when Herodotus finished his work.[4] Herodotus, then, wrote the Histories for the literate citizenry in the Greek world—his narratives began as entertaining public lectures—and not at the behest of any particular city or prince.

The Histories revolve around the new world order created by the Persian bid for domination of the “known world.” The Persians had extended their power to the borders of India, ruling Iran, Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, and after their conquest of Palestine and Egypt they were the masters of the Levant. To the Greeks this was the most awesome empire ever seen. The first four books of the Histories present us with a dazzling panorama of the known world: the first book recounts the coming of the Persians to Asia Minor and their conquest of the Lydian state; the second book contains a historical ethnography of Egypt, the oldest civilization in the known world; the third book tells the story of the Persian conquest of Egypt, with long digressions on Persian culture and politics. The fourth book is mainly about the nomadic Scythians north of the Black Sea, closing with a brief section on North Africa. These ethnographic books are followed by the spellbinding story of the failure of the Persian bid for “universal empire.”

The World of Herodotus

In the opening statement of the Histories, Herodotus informs his readers that he has written down the results of his inquiry so that “the great and marvelous deeds done by Greeks and barbarians shall not fall into oblivion.”[5] The barbarians are thus introduced as people who have accomplished great deeds that are worth remembering, on a par with those of the Greeks. This is not the language of ethnocentric parochialism. Throughout, Herodotus uses barbarian (barbaros) as a neutral, not disparaging term, which we also might render as “non-Greek.” It is striking that he is well aware of other peoples classifying the Greeks as barbarians. In a passage that brings to mind the Sophist Antiphon’s utterances discussed earlier, he relates that the Egyptians call “barbarians” all peoples who do not speak Egyptian.[6] He says this in passing, without offering any explanation. Apparently, the inversion of the customary Greek vision of the barbarian other did not need extensive argument.[7] Another maxim in the opening section of the book likewise conveys a powerful equality effect: “[I will] speak of small and great cities alike. For many states that were once great have now become small: and those that were great in my time were small formerly … human prosperity never continues in one stay.”[8] The transience of greatness, a recurrent theme in the Histories, seems to preclude the lasting success of any imperial venture. Generally, Herodotus disapproves of the lust for wealth and power he observes in most rulers.

It is important to note that Herodotus gives his most powerful and explicit statement of cultural relativism in the gruesome story of the madness and death of the Persian king Cambyses (ruled 530–522 BCE), who has rightfully been called “the most cruel and stupid of all Herodotus’ kings.”[9] The story of Cambyses actually represents Herodotus’s first instance of Persian defeat. It recounts the failure of his attack on Ethiopia, a defeat Herodotus attributes to the king’s reckless mismanagement of his army. Only when his troops are near starvation and resort to cannibalism does he abandon the campaign. Upon his return to Egypt Cambyses demonstrates that he has learned nothing from his mistakes. The Egyptians are in the midst of one of their great religious festivals. The paranoid Cambyses fancies that they are rejoicing over his misfortunes, falls into a blind rage, and kills the Apis, the holy calf of the festival. Blinded by ire and hubris, Cambyses believes that he can wantonly kill and insult, respecting neither the customs of other peoples nor those of his native Persia. (To avoid a misreading of history, this is not a fair account of Cambyses’s rule. Persian religious policy is better characterized as pragmatic tolerance. However, some historians accept the account by Herodotus of Cambyses’s immolation of the Apis.)[10]

Herodotus presents the fate of Cambyses as an object lesson in the perils of unchecked power, and in particular of the risks of trampling on peoples’ cherished beliefs and customs.[11] It provides the background to the famous “anthropological experiment” executed by the later Persian king Darius: “Darius … summoned the Greeks who were with him and asked them what price would persuade them to eat their fathers’ dead bodies. They answered that there was no price for which they would do it. Then he summoned those Indians who are called Callatiae, who eat their parents, and asked them (the Greeks being present and understanding by interpretation what was said) what would make them willing to burn their fathers at death. The Indians cried aloud, that he should not speak of so horrid an act. So deeply rooted are these beliefs.”[12] Generalizing from Darius’s experiment Herodotus formulates his version of the anthropological turn as a universally valid maxim:

For if it were proposed to every people to choose which seemed the best of all laws and customs, all, after examination made, would place their own first; so well are all persuaded that their own are by far the best.[13]

Custom, Herodotus declares, quoting a well-known line from the poet Pindar, is “king of all.” Here, his maxim resonates with much of ancient opinion, for this was one of the most frequently quoted lines of poetry throughout antiquity.[14]

Introducing his maxim, Herodotus tells his readers that he deems it in every way proved that Cambyses was “very mad”; else he would never have endeavored “to deride religion and custom.” Respect for the cultures of others thus represents the counterpoint to the delusions of imperialism. Herodotus likewise explains the Persian failure to conquer Scythia and Greece by their lack of understanding of other cultures. The Persians misinterpreted the guerrilla tactics of the Scythian nomads, and their belief in the military superiority of monarchies led them to fatally underestimate the strength of the Greek city-states. Herodotus’s lessons, however, were also intended for the Greeks themselves. His invocation of the Egyptian perspective, to which I have already alluded, gets its point from his critique of the Greek pretensions to superiority over the Egyptians.[15] In particular, the Histories implicitly targeted the Athenian Empire. Let us recall that Herodotus finished his work during the disastrous Peloponnesian War that pitted Athens against Sparta and which contemporary popular views blamed on the excessive power of the Athenian Empire.[16] Chester Starr has estimated that at its apex the Athenian thalassocracy directly ruled some two million Greeks.[17] In the second year of the war, Pericles himself had argued in the people’s assembly that the empire was largely based on self-interest and functioned as a “tyranny” in its rule over other Greek cities.[18]

The Scythians on the Steppe Frontier

Of all the peoples discussed in the ethnographic part of the Histories, the Scythians, who inhabited what is today the Ukraine, are by far the most “other.” They did not live in cities and their mode of warfare was almost the opposite of the infantry tactics practiced by the Greeks and the Persians. Some authors, notably François Hartog and James Romm, therefore have interpreted Herodotus’s study of Scythian culture in terms of a fascination with the exotic. Romm places them, together with the other northern peoples, in the Herodotean category of “the most remote of all human beings,” while Hartog reads the Scythian ethnography as a structural inversion of Greekness.[19] However, Herodotus in his full-blown ethnography of the Scythians places them on a par with the Persians and the Egyptians in the narrative of the Histories. It stands in sharp contrast to his treatment of the other northern peoples, represented as a motley collection of savages and monstrosities at the outermost rim of the world.

Actually, Herodotus’s approach is better explained by the long history of Greco-Scythian contacts that continued into his own time. For over two centuries there had been Greek colonies on the northern coast of the Black Sea. The Greeks imported grain, cattle, slaves, honey, wax, dried fish, hides, and gold from the Black Sea region. They exported wine, olive oil, textiles, tools, and ceramics. Greek traders traveled widely in the Scythian hinterland, and they even marketed art specially tailored to Scythian taste.[20] Closer to home, Scythian public slaves were employed as a police force in Athens.[21] Another reason for Herodotus’s interest in the Scythians is that they were enemies of the Persians. He explains Darius’s invasion of Scythia as a revenge for a previous Scythian incursion into Persia.[22] At the same time, the Persian defeat in Scythia provides a runner-up to the main story of their defeat in Greece. In his gleeful account of the failure of Darius’s campaign in 512 BCE, Herodotus skillfully interweaves Persian defeat and Scythian ethnography.

Because the Scythians had no cities, while their army consisted of fast-moving mounted archers, their guerrilla tactics could easily avoid a regular open-field battle with the heavily armed Persian infantry. The Persians were lured into Scythia, in search of an enemy they could not find and into a land from which they could not draw sustenance. Their plight was the consequence of their inability to understand the functioning of Scythian society. As usual, Herodotus blames this in particular on the Persian king. Darius’s obtuseness is highlighted in the story of the Scythian message. The haughty king had demanded that the Scythians surrender and offer him their land on a plate. With the Persian army exhausted by the inconclusive guerrilla war, the Scythians finally dispatch a herald who brings the Persians a gift consisting of a bird, a mouse, a frog, and five arrows. The herald refuses to disclose its meaning, saying that the Persians should find that out themselves if they are clever enough. Darius thinks that the mouse signifies the earth and the frog water, while the arrows stand for arms, so that the upshot of the message is that the Scythians are willing to surrender their earth, water, and arms to the Persians. His naive reading is disputed by his adviser Gobryas who argues that the meaning of the gifts is far less auspicious. Read correctly, it spells Persian doom: “Unless you become birds, Persians, and fly up into the sky or mice and hide you in the earth, or frogs and leap into the lakes, you will be shot by these arrows and never return home.”[23] Gobryas is right, but let us note that Herodotus is not saying that the Persians as an ethnos are incapable of good intelligence; Darius’s wishful thinking is just another item in Herodotus’s long list of monarchical misinterpretations of messages, omens, and oracles. Only after additional misfortunes does Darius finally come round to Gobryas’s view. The Persians abandon the campaign, happy to get out alive.

The next thing to note in Herodotus’s ethnography of the Scythians is that he does not portray them as backward barbarians. When he remarks on the feeble mental powers of the inhabitants of the far north, he at once makes an exception for the Scythians.[24] His appraisal of Scythian intelligence also appears in the first story he tells about them. When the Scythians returned from their Persian expedition, their slaves’ sons born during their absence rebelled against them, but they were defeated by a clever stratagem. Herodotus relates that one of the Scythians said: “‘My counsel is that we drop our spears and bows, and go to meet them each with his horsewhip in hand. As long as they saw us armed, they thought themselves to be our peers … [but] let them see us with whips … and they will perceive that they are our slaves.…’ This the Scythians heard, and acted thereon; and their enemies, amazed by what they saw, had no more thought of fighting, but fled.”[25] The Scythians are here depicted as perfectly capable of analyzing the role of the imagination in power relations—no mean feat; let us recall that Homer demonstrates the stupidity of the Cyclopes by their utter inability to understand such things.

Coming to the functioning of Scythian society, Herodotus expresses his admiration for their technology of military nomadism, the combination of mobile homes and fast-moving mounted archers that enabled them to evade and wear out the mighty Persian war machine: “The Scythian race,” he declares, “has in that matter which of all human affairs is of greatest import made the cleverest discovery that we know.”[26] Herodotus’s story of the Scythian campaign is probably the earliest analysis of how a powerful regular army is helpless in the face of guerrilla tactics. We may contrast his admiration for Scythian military strategy with Hippocrates, who also gives a description of the Scythian mobile homes but entirely refrains from any positive appreciation of their utility and generally gives an unflattering picture of Scythian customs and physiognomy.[27]

Although Herodotus does not admire the Scythians in all respects, the only aspect that explicitly comes in for criticism is their stubborn ethnocentrism. “The Scythians (as others),” he says, “are wondrously reluctant to practice the customs of any other country, and particularly of Hellas, as was proved in the case of Anacharsis and again also of Scyles.”[28] Anacharsis and Scyles were Scythians who visited Greece and “went native” there. When they returned home their adoption of Greek ways was discovered, and both were put to death.[29] We should further consider that Scythia stands on the side of liberty in Herodotus’s grand opposition between free peoples and despotic imperialism. What we learn about their political regime is much closer to the tribal democracy of Tacitus’s Germans than to the great Oriental empires. The story of Darius’s Scythian campaign ends with the Ionian Greeks’ refusal to assist the Scythians in destroying the retreating Persian army and so to use the opportunity to free the Greek cities in Asia Minor from Persian rule. Herodotus depicts the Ionian leaders as shortsighted petty despots who are fearful that an anti-Persian revolt will bring about a victory of the democratic party in their cities, and he gives the Scythians the last word. The episode concludes with their biting critique of the Greeks’ servile mentality.[30] Here the Scythians seem to represent the Greeks’ bad conscience about a missed opportunity rather than a simple inversion of the values of Greek civilization (but note that Herodotus recounts elsewhere how the Scythians, having subdued the Medians in Cyaxares’s days, lose their conquests because of their pride and lack of prudence).[31] The outcome of the Scythian episode fits into two of Herodotus’s grand themes: the need for a united stand against Persian might and the supreme importance of freedom.

Generally, Herodotus’s discussion of the Scythians is remarkably evenhanded. His serious examination of their customs exemplifies what I have called the “anthropological turn.” He really wants to understand Scythian society, displaying a detailed knowledge of their food, clothing, and funeral customs. That he contrasts their ways with those of the Greeks is not so surprising given the fact that cultures are constituted by difference, so that it is impossible to describe them without terms of comparison. What matters is not the bare fact that Herodotus contrasts and compares but the intellectually serious and open-minded way in which he does so. His interest in “barbarian” culture is much more than a mere inversion of Greekness.

Herodotus’s Histories make thinkable, I conclude, a new discourse of common humanity, predicated on a serious intellectual engagement with the culture of strangers. Starting from the stark “facts” of cultural difference, Herodotus makes two major discursive moves, one on the meta-narrative level and another in the narrative text. The meta-narrative move is his explication of the logic of the anthropological turn. Acknowledging difference, it affirms similarity on a higher level of abstraction: all men are fundamentally alike in the way they relate to their own customs. In most cases they stay within the ambit of their own culture, but culture (nomoi) is not a hermetic prison from which there is no escape. What works fine in Greece is not necessarily functional on the steppe. Conversely, Scythian tactics are not suitable to a great port city and the Athenians were right to maintain a well-equipped fleet, which would have been quite useless to the Scythians.

The second move is made up of countless little moves: passages in which the hubris of rulers, the prideful ambitions of empire builders, and the pretensions to superiority of Persians over Scythians and Greeks, and Greeks over Egyptians and Persians, are scrutinized and found wanting. In numerous other passages Herodotus displays his mastery of the anthropological turn: his intellectual engagement with non-Greek cultures is serious, often sympathetic, but seldom haughty or patronizing. He decidedly glorifies the Greek victories over the Persian invaders, and he believes in the virtues of Greek democracy, asserting that the Persians are servile and do not fight in good order.[32] However, his really biting criticisms are aimed at the Persian kings, while he has their advisers counsel prudence and moderation. Like Gobryas in the Scythian story Artabanes vainly warns Xerxes of an impending disaster on the eve of his invasion of Greece.[33]

The main emphasis is on the theme that great power blinds those who wield it, coupled with the retribution the gods mete out to mortals who overstep the bounds set for them. Most of Herodotus’s criticisms of the Persians focus on their despotic political regime. There are some traces of an “Orientalist” image of the Persian Empire and Herodotus sometimes seems to discuss the Greco-Persian wars as a clash of civilizations, but that should not be overread as a discourse of Persian cultural or ethnic inferiority. His discussion of Persian customs is fairly balanced, giving praise where it is due.[34] Given the fact that the Persians are the Greeks’ enemies in his history, his treatment of Persian culture is remarkably open-minded.

The upshot is that Herodotus appreciates the specific virtues of many, perhaps most, cultures. He situates them in their natural ecology and strategic environment, and his working hypothesis seems to be the equal worth of all cultures, unless there are strong arguments to judge otherwise. Not to overstate my conclusion, it should be added that he nowhere explicitly says that all cultures are of equal worth. But his narrative and the lessons he draws from it strongly suggest it. That all peoples think their own way of life superior to all others only serves to underline the relativity of their convictions. Some Hellenistic critics, notably Plutarch, even called Herodotus a barbarophilos, a lover of the barbarians.

Finally, we need to underline that Herodotus’s relativism is cultural but not ethical. Certain actions, such as sacrilege and the killing of innocent people, he condemns in strident terms that leave no room for moral relativism. In the narrative of the Histories, the ethically relativist standpoint that “anything goes” as long as you are powerful enough to get away with it is represented by Cambyses, Herodotus’s proverbial evil king. It is definitely not the view of Herodotus.

Sima Qian on the Han Empire and Its Barbarians

In Sima Qian’s world, empire was a solid reality. The Shiji, his encyclopedic survey of the history of China and the surrounding lands, has been called by David Schaberg “the imperial text par excellence.”[35] While Herodotus acknowledged Egypt and Persia as civilizations older than Greece, the Han were confident that China represented the dawn of human civilization.[36] According to the imperial ideology no foreign prince could claim equal status with the Han emperor, but the Han were well aware of the power and riches of realms outside China, certainly after Zhang Qian’s mission to the far west (139–126 BCE).[37] Moreover, the pre-imperial history of “China” was marked by ethnic diversity.[38] The Han Empire itself was by no means a culturally homogeneous space. Against this backdrop, the insistence on the cosmic grounding of Chinese civilization appears as a discursive means of domesticating diversity rather than a confident celebration of “reality.”

Contrasting with Herodotus’s life story, the career of Sima Qian was from start to finish intertwined with the politics of the Han state under the ambitious and severe Emperor Wu (ruled 141–87 BCE). Sima Qian was born in 145 BCE, near Longmen (“Dragon Gate”) in North China. William Nienhauser notes that his hometown Han-ch’eng belonged to the frontier zone and was often raided by the Xiongnu (Hsiung Nu), China’s most dreaded nomadic enemies.[39] When Qian was five, his father, Sima Tan, obtained the position of grand astrologer at the imperial court in the Han capital, Chang’an. However, neither Sima Tan nor his son was an official historiographer. They had access to the palace archives, but Sima Tan’s historical work was a self-imposed “private” project. And so it was with his son who, complying with his father’s last wish, continued the latter’s history of China.[40]

Like Herodotus, Sima Qian traveled widely, within China as well as in the northern and southern borderlands. In 110, he accompanied Emperor Wu on an inspection tour of the northern frontier, a region of intermittent clashes and skirmishes with the nomadic Xiongnu. He also collected much knowledge about distant lands and people by interrogating travelers.[41] In 108, he succeeded his father as grand astrologer. Five years later, however, he suffered disgrace because he had spoken in defense of General Li Ling, who had surrendered to the Xiongnu after a heroic battle against numerically superior forces. The punishment was death for defaming the emperor, but the sentence was eventually commuted to castration. In such cases, the code of honor prescribed suicide. Sima Qian, however, continued to work on his history, living in shame and humiliation, but fulfilling his filial duty to his father and hoping for recognition in future ages. Rehabilitated in 96, he managed to finish the history before he died in 86, a year after Emperor Wu. The Shiji is a work of inordinate length, recounting the entire history of China up to the historian’s time. Like Herodotus’s Histories, the Shiji contains a sizable amount of geography and ethnography, in particular of the peoples to the west and north of the Han Empire.

On the face of it, Sima Qian’s relation to political power seems almost the opposite of Herodotus’s. As a loyal servant of the emperor, one would expect him to write a history endorsing the Han Empire. To some extent, he lived up to such expectations, justifying the order and unity of the empire and endorsing the new Confucian canon that informed the Han vision of Chinese history. For all that, Sima Qian envisaged the task of the historian as an eminently critical one. Attributing his own views to Dong Zhongshu’s (Tung Chun-shu) exegesis of Confucius’s explanation of the message of the Spring and Autumn Annals, he declared in the concluding chapter of his work that “Confucius realized that his words were not being heeded, nor his doctrine put into practice. So he made a critical judgment of the rights and wrongs of a period of two hundred and forty-two years in order to provide a standard of rules and ceremonies for the world. He criticized the emperors, reprimanded the feudal lords, and condemned the high officials in order to make known the business of a true ruler.”[42]

The World of Sima Qian

Sima Qian’s invocation of the authority of the great sage to justify his view of history as critique was in line with the Confucian view of the double function of history as the public concern of the ruler and the private duty of the sage to uphold moral rectitude.[43] Sima Qian’s self-image can be traced back to the critical stance historical writings had achieved during the Warring States period.[44] Accordingly, the Shiji contains numerous criticisms of emperors, ministers, and lower officials. Such criticisms, however, are invariably found in the speeches of personages in the narrative rather than in the meta-narrative first-person comments placed at the beginning and end of each chapter, contrasting with Herodotus who expresses his condemnations of rulers in his own authorial voice.[45]

The Shiji contains six chapters on barbarian peoples, of which the Xiongnu chapter is the longest. There are accounts of the southern marchlands of the Han Empire, as well as Korea (Chaoxian), Ferghana (Dayuan), Bactria (Daxia), and Parthia (Anxi). Ferghana represented a link in the Chinese trade routes to the west, but its main attraction was the excellent opportunity it offered to outflank the Xiongnu.[46] Around 100 BCE, the Han had established garrisons there. The descriptions of the Xiongnu and Ferghana are fairly detailed; the others are shorter, and about still other regions Sima Qian possessed only bits and pieces of disconnected knowledge.[47] About India (Shendu) he presents some information the Chinese had obtained from Bactrian merchants who had visited Indian markets. India, they told the Han envoys, lies several thousand li (1,000 li is about 415 kilometers, or 260 miles) to the southeast of Bactria; the people cultivate the land, they use elephants in battle, the climate is hot and damp, and the kingdom is situated on a great river.[48] The regions described by the two historians represent adjacent parts of Eurasia. The eastern extremities of Herodotus’s Scythia border on Sima Qian’s westernmost nomads, the “great Yuezhi.”[49] To both of them, India is a distant country at the rim of the known world, although Sima Qian’s information about it is more matter-of-fact than Herodotus’s account of “gold-digging ants.”[50]

Ironically, the most redoubtable foreign power was not a sedentary civilization but the nomadic Xiongnu federation. In 209, shortly before the fall of the Qin dynasty, the Xiongnu king Maodun defeated his steppe rivals in the east and the west and established a strong nomadic confederacy that now confronted China along the entire Great Wall. The confederacy was defensive, for the Qin had sent armies and settlers northward, threatening the nomads’ access to agricultural areas. The Xiongnu pastoral economy entertained a symbiotic relationship with agricultural regions and towns in the steppe regions from Central Asia to southern Siberia. They also engaged in trade in the northern frontier zone of China, exporting horses, furs, and jade, and importing luxuries and agricultural products.[51] The Xiongnu eventually came to control a large territory, extending from the Tarim Basin in the west to northern China, and to Manchuria in the east.[52] Their formidable fighting power rested on the same technology of military nomadism Herodotus so admired in the western Scythians.

In the steppe environment, the military tactics of the nomads were superior, but they usually avoided regular battles with numerically superior Han forces. The upshot was an unstable equilibrium, precariously regulated by the peace treaties concluded by Emperor Wen (179–157 BCE). The Chinese paid annual tribute to the Xiongnu, and China and the Xiongnu recognized each other as coequal states.[53] Because the Chinese considered nomadism a definitely inferior way of life they only reluctantly admitted the equal status of the Xiongnu. The ensuing emotional and intellectual ambivalence could have led to a dogmatic closure, upholding Chinese superiority against the backdrop of barbarian baseness, but it might also have occasioned a more open, questioning outlook. As we shall see, both perspectives are discernible in Sima Qian’s history.

In this connection, it is important to realize that the civilized/barbarian divide did not neatly coincide with the boundary between Chinese and non-Chinese. Sima Qian frequently mentions “ethnic mixing” within China. He asserts, for instance, that the mixture of the Qin dynasty’s customs with those of the Rong and Di barbarians accounts for the violence and cruelty of the Qin regime.[54] In an earlier chapter he had reported that the Qin themselves were considered barbarian by the more centrally situated states in pre-imperial China.[55] In an investigation of Chinese perceptions of the Yue (Viet) peoples in pre-Han and Han times, Erica Brindly notices a general ambivalence in Chinese sources, ranging from not-yet-civilized others within the orbit of an expanding Chinese cultural space to an essential alterity ascribed to the more remote “barbarians.”[56]

To Sima Qian and his contemporaries the Xiongnu question represented China’s greatest foreign policy challenge. In 133 BCE, Emperor Wu made an end to the treaty system, commencing a century of bitter wars whose financial and demographic burden almost crippled the Han economy. Sima Qian belonged to a current of opinion questioning the wisdom of this policy. The costs of warfare, they argued, were appalling and victory was doubtful, while high taxes and conscription could lead to a popular revolt. This, and not his cruel punishment by the emperor, was the main reason for Sima Qian’s critical approach to Han imperialism. Approvingly he cites the advice of Yan An to Emperor Wu:

Now, when China is not troubled by so much as the bark of a dog, to become involved in wearisome projects in distant lands that exhaust the wealth of the nation—that is hardly right for a ruler whose duty it is to be a father to the people.[57]

Yan An reminded the emperor that the fall of the short-lived Qin dynasty came about when the people rebelled against the heavy burdens caused by “excessive warfare.” More generally, the memory of Qin recalled the perils of a despotic style of government. Similar criticisms are quoted in the Shiji in other places, usually with prudent endorsement. Like Herodotus, Sima Qian’s critique of imperialism is thus wedded to a critique of despotic rule.[58]

The chapter on the Xiongnu begins with the observation that throughout Chinese history the northern nomads have been “a source of constant worry and harm.” “The Han,” Sima Qian declares, “has attempted to determine the Xiongnu’s periods of strength and weakness so that it may adopt defensive measures or launch punitive expeditions as the circumstances allow. Thus I made ‘The Account of the Xiongnu.’” On the face of it this is history in the service of imperialism. There follows a summary description of the economic and military foundations of Xiongnu society that begins with the emblematic negative statements found in so many travelogues on nomads: “They move about … and have no walled cities or fixed dwellings, nor do they engage in any kind of agriculture.… They have no writing.” The ethnography moves to a positive key in its description of the military skills of the nomads, observing for instance that they “are very skilful at using decoy troops to lure their opponents to destruction,” but its discussion of the battle tactics of the Xiongnu is ambiguous. Like Herodotus on the Scythians, Sima Qian reports that the Xiongnu advance when things go well for them, but do not consider it disgraceful to take flight when they are hard pressed. “Their only concern,” the historian scornfully remarks, “is with self-advantage, and they know nothing of propriety or righteousness.”[59] Later on, however, the tactics of hitting with lightning speed and vanishing “like the mist” when the enemy outnumbers them are mentioned in an explanation of the military successes of the Xiongnu.[60]

Sima Qian’s ethnography of the nomads wavers between his disapproval of their “un-Chinese” ways and an objective appraisal, bordering on a grudging admiration, of their military skills and efficient style of governance. He does not go quite as far as Herodotus, who considers the social technology of military nomadism “the cleverest invention” we know, but neither does he fall into the typically “civilized” underestimation of it. Sima Qian’s ethnography of the Xiongnu thus oscillates between an essentialist reduction of their nature to those aspects the Chinese found particularly reprehensible and a more favorable appreciation of their intelligence and versatility. An example of essentialism is the blunt statement that “in times of crisis” the northern barbarians “take up arms and go off on plundering and marauding expeditions. This seems to be their inborn nature.”[61] Likewise, some Xiongnu customs, such as their preference for seats on the left and facing north, are depicted as simple inversions of Chinese ways.[62] But the greater part of the ethnography is not like that at all. The description of the political organization of the Xiongnu confederation, with its sophisticated combination of centralized control and decentralized administration, seems well suited to elicit the admiration of Sima Qian’s Chinese readers, many of whom were critical of the unwieldy governmental apparatus of the Han. It is true that Sima Qian mentions several examples of cruel behavior, including parricide, but elsewhere he recounts even more instances of similar cruelty on the part of Chinese rulers and aristocrats.

It is not easy to determine the cultural distance between the Chinese and the Xiongnu in Sima Qian’s narrative. The Xiongnu are surely represented as “other,” in the sense that their means of subsistence, methods of warfare, gender regime, code of honor, food, clothing, and housing differ profoundly from Chinese ways. They are also “other” because they are consistently represented as enemies, placing them at a political and emotional distance that is absent from Herodotus’s depiction of the Scythians. On the other hand, the nomadic-sedentary boundary is less permeable in Herodotus than in Sima Qian. In Herodotus, Scythians sometimes adopt Greek ways, but Greeks never adopt Scythian customs (though there is one passing mention of “Scythian Greeks”).[63] Sima Qian, however, reports continuous travel across the frontier with several instances of Chinese adopting the Xiongnu way of life. Unlike the Scythian frontier, the Great Wall frontier is culturally permeable in two directions.

In the early Han we find several examples of border crossing and cultural adaptation. In this period, the military balance tilted toward the Xiongnu. Hann Xin, appointed by the first Han emperor Gaozu to rule the border province of Dai, went over to the Xiongnu side when they invaded his province, eventually becoming a Xiongnu general. Shortly thereafter, Sima Qian relates, “a number of Han generals” went over to the Xiongnu.[64] The most striking example of the cultural inversions such contacts could bring about is the story of Zhonghang Yue. This was a eunuch dispatched by Emperor Wen, not long after 174 BCE, to accompany a Han princess who was to marry Jizhu, the successor of Maodun, as part of the peace treaty. The court had forced this mission on him against his will. Upon his arrival at the court of the Shanyu (the official title of Xiongnu kings) Zhonghang Yue promptly defected to the Xiongnu. Jizhu treated him with great favor, appointing him as a sort of official advisor on matters Chinese. Sima Qian quotes Zhonghang Yue extensively, first when he warns the Xiongnu against adopting Chinese ways and, second, when he refutes the criticism of the customs of the nomads voiced by a Han envoy. The speeches Sima Qian attributes to Zhonghang Yue merit a careful reading, for they demonstrate the extent and the limits of the historian’s ability to imagine how the Xiongnu look back at China.

To begin with, Zhonghang counsels his Xiongnu friends to recognize the demographic imbalance between themselves and China. The Chinese vastly outnumber the Xiongnu (the ratio probably was about fifty to one) and yet the military power of the latter is sufficient to withstand the Han. That is because their way of life is well suited to military preparedness. “The strength of the Xiongnu,” Zhonghang argues, “lies in the very fact that their food and clothing are different from those of the Chinese, and they are therefore not dependent upon the Han for anything.” However, the tribute the Chinese send to the Xiongnu court might change this. The Shanyu is getting fond of Chinese garments and food, and his subjects might develop similar tastes. Zhonghang strongly warns against such Sinification, pointing to the utter uselessness of Han silk when riding on horseback “through the brush and brambles.” On the other hand, he “taught the Shanyu’s aides how to make an itemized accounting of the number of persons and domestic animals in the country.”[65] Here he advises them to adopt some of the routine practices of the Han state.[66] But the key issue in Zhonghang Yue’s advice has to do with the cultural consequences of taking up Chinese habits and tastes. It presents us with an analysis of the dangers of luxury to a militarized society not unlike later European explanations of the fall of the Roman Empire.

Thus far, Zhonghang Yue has mainly dwelt on the perils of Sinification. When faced with the Han envoy’s disapproval of Xiongnu customs, however, he replies with a critique of Han society from a Xiongnu perspective. The first point the envoy had made was that Xiongnu customs showed insufficient respect for the aged, for they give the best food and drink to the young men. Well, Zhonghang Yue retorts, is it not true that the Han do the same in wartime, when “the old parents at home voluntarily give up their warm clothing and tasty food so that there will be enough to provide for the troops”? The Han envoy has to agree. Zhonghang then concludes that, since warfare was the main business of the Xiongnu, it was perfectly appropriate to allot the best food and the sturdiest clothing to those who bore the brunt of the war effort. The final results were beneficial to all: “So the young men are willing to fight for the defense of the nation, and both fathers and sons are able to live out their lives in security. How can you say that the Xiongu despise the aged?”[67]

The Han envoy is not yet finished. “Among the Xiongnu,” he continues, “when a father dies, the sons marry their own stepmothers, and when brothers die, their remaining brothers marry their widows! These people know nothing of the elegance of hats and girdles, nor of the ritual of the court!” This time, Zhonghang Yue’s repartee is longer. For a start, he explains that the Xiongnu are well provided with all they need and enjoy more leisure than the average Chinese. The laws of the Xiongnu, Zhonghang further declares, “are simple and easy to carry out; the relation between ruler and subject is relaxed and intimate, so that the governing of the whole nation is no more complicated than the governing of one person.” Sima Qian’s readers would surely decode the praise of Xiongnu simplicity as an indirect critique of the Han state. Coming to the Han envoy’s objections against the Xiongnu marriage code, he explains that their purpose is to safeguard the preservation of the clans, so that the ruling families will stand firm in hard times. This is followed by a searing critique of Han society:

In China, on the other hand, though a man would never dream of marrying his stepmother or his brother’s widow, yet the members of the same family drift so far apart that they end up murdering each other! This is precisely why so many changes of dynasty have come about in China! Moreover, among the Chinese … enmity arises between the rulers and the ruled, while the excessive building of houses and dwellings exhaust the strength and resources of the nation. Men try to get their food and clothing by farming and raising silkworms and to insure their safety by building walls and fortifications. Therefore, although danger threatens, the Chinese people are given no training in aggressive warfare, while in times of stability they must still wear themselves out trying to make a living. Pooh! You people in your mud huts—you talk too much! Enough of this blubbering and mouthing! Just because you wear hats, what does that make you?[68]

How should we read this fascinating passage? The first thing to note is that Sima Qian does not express these criticisms in his own voice but puts them in the mouth of a Chinese who “went native” among the Xiongnu. He seems to be telling his readers that if an intelligent and unprejudiced Chinese man were to familiarize himself with the “barbarian outlook” on the world, this is the kind of opinion he might well arrive at. Elsewhere, he relates that the Wusun, who live in western Inner Asia, fear and respect the Xiongnu but hardly bother about distant China.[69] Sima Qian often presents such appreciative reports about remote peoples. Nicola di Cosmo considers it possible that he “might have been regarded as a ‘barbarophile’ by his contemporaries.”[70] Apart from that, the historian has his Han/Xiongnu composite personage express an opinion he himself probably shared: China is huge and wealthy, but the majority of the Chinese are toiling away for a meager reward while a small elite wallows in luxury. Consequently, there is enmity between the popular classes and the ruling stratum. Here the author seems to use his nomadic subject matter to deliver his opinion in an internal Chinese debate.

The cultural self-transformation of Zhonghang Yue is in itself a highly significant psychological argument. It literally punctures the assertion by Mencius of never having heard of Chinese adopting barbarian ways. In the speech quoted above Sima Qian has Zhonghang Yue perform a discursive move not unlike the one Herodotus attributed to “the Egyptians” when he reported that they called all people who did not speak Egyptian barbarians. However, he nowhere employs his meta-narrative comments (figuring at the end of all his chapters) to formulate a general critique of ethnocentrism in anything like the strident terms of Herodotus. What he is saying is that a “barbarian perspective” on Han culture and institutions is thinkable and intelligible for an educated and well-informed Chinese. In this manner, he paves the way for a historical understanding of cultural pluralism.

Sima Qian’s discussion of the Xiongnu is thus far more than a long digression on “savages” and “barbarians.” It is a densely written and serious ethnography, comprising three observations. In the first place, he posits, here and elsewhere, that the Xiongnu way of life is well adapted to the steppe environment in which they have to maintain themselves. Second, their peculiar and, in Chinese eyes, “barbarian” marriage customs ensure the survival of their people in a society permanently organized on a war footing. In the third place, the technique of nomadic militarism enables them to escape domination by the numerically superior Chinese. When all is said and done, it is no mean feat to force the mighty Han to recognize a nomadic confederacy as an equal partner in international relations. The upshot is that there are no good reasons for the Xiongnu to become “civilized” along Chinese lines, and very good reasons not to do so.

The opinions attributed to Zhonghang Yue may well reflect views held by the author himself. This is also apparent from his frequent endorsement of the politics of Emperor Wen (ruled 179–157 BCE). Let us recall that it was Wen who concluded the peace treaty with the Xiongnu, while it was Sima Qian’s master, Emperor Wu, who had sided with the war faction in 133 BCE. Praise for Emperor Wen thus represented an indirect way of criticizing Emperor Wu. That stance should not be equated, however, with a disapproval of Chinese imperial expansion as such. Sima Qian’s discussion of imperial foreign policy exhibits the same ambivalence we have encountered in his ethnography of the Xiongnu. He quotes a letter dispatched in 162 by Emperor Wen to the ruler of the Xiongnu: “We have heard it said that Heaven shows no partiality in sheltering mankind, and Earth no bias in bearing it up. Let us, then, with the Shanyu, cast aside these trifling matters of the past and walk the great road together … in order that the peoples of our two states may be joined together like the sons of a single family.”[71] These words are part of the proposal to establish a lasting peace in which both parties would recognize the Great Wall as the legitimate border. Sima Qian clearly sympathized with the worldview just outlined. At one moment, he attributed to Emperor Wu the dream of winning over the kingdoms of the far west by peaceful means.[72] Elsewhere, he even imagined that “the multitudinous tribes within the four seas, translating and retranslating their strange tongues, have come knocking at our borders in submission. Those who bring tribute and beg for an audience are too numerous to be told.”[73] These words surely represented a Confucian metaphysical dream rather than a realistic appraisal of the state of affairs in central Eurasia. But it was a dream that was solidly lodged in the intellectual imagination of Han China.

Finally, we must consider the philosophical background. The important thing to note here is that both Herodotus and Sima Qian drafted their histories in a climate of intellectual pluralism. In Greece, this was the age of the Sophists. Herodotus in his strong formulation of cultural relativism shows his affinity with Sophistic skepticism.[74] Sima Qian also alludes to pluralism in relating how his father explained the doctrines of the “six schools” to him. Sima Tan was probably the first to classify the schools according to their intellectual content instead of the names of the founders.[75] This shows that the intellectual culture of the early Han was pluralist and syncretic.[76] In the intellectual cultures of fifth-century Greece and early imperial China traditional knowledge claims no longer commanded unquestionable authority.

Introducing systematic and interpretative history, Herodotus and Sima Qian experimented, each after his own fashion, with a new type of knowledge about the human condition. Better than philosophy history was able to make sense of the contingencies of time and place. While it could not achieve the theoretical universality of philosophy, history could discern meaningful patterns and significant lessons beneath the kaleidoscopic surface of events. Both historians conceived of history as a critical discipline that would enlighten the minds of men in uncertain and dangerous times.[77]

Tacitus on the Northwestern Frontier of the Roman Empire

Tacitus’s attitude to barbarians and empire is in some respects comparable to Sima Qian. His long-term view assumes the manifest destiny of the Roman Empire, but he is well aware of its downside. He is able to imagine how Roman imperialism is experienced by the peoples finding themselves at its receiving end, and he often expresses a sincere admiration for their love of liberty.

The Roman Empire reached its greatest expansion in the course of the first century CE. Around 100 CE, the Roman forces totaled about 300,000 legionaries, of which some 110,000 were stationed on the northwestern frontier, running along the Rhine, the Limes, and the upper Danube.[78] A brief inspection of the map suffices to see that more than a third of the entire Roman army was assigned to less than one-tenth of the imperial border. This was no coincidence, for it was here that Rome met with its first great reversal. In 9 CE, a Germanic revolt under the leadership of Arminius annihilated the legions of the Roman general Varus in a battle near the Teutoburg forest. Arminius had gained his military experience in Roman service as an officer commanding auxiliary troops. The auxiliaries were units of local people serving under their own commanders who usually belonged to the “barbarian” aristocracy. In the first century about half of the Roman forces consisted of such units.

The World of Tacitus

After Teutoburg the Romans abandoned all projects for the further conquest of Germania. Commenting on campaigns in his own time, Tacitus sourly remarks that they were waged “more to redeem the prestige lost with Quintilius Varus and his army than from any wish to extend the empire.”[79] In his ethnography of the Germanic peoples, Tacitus gives the impression that it was not only the outcome of one battle that made the Romans abandon further conquests. No other nation, he tells his readers, resisted the Romans with greater vigor—“neither Samnite nor Carthaginian, neither Spain nor Gaul, nor even the Parthians have taught us more lessons.”[80] Considering that the Parthians (the successor empire to the Persians) were Rome’s most redoubtable adversary in the east, the judgment of Tacitus testifies to Roman respect for their enemies beyond the Rhine.

To understand Publius Cornelis Tacitus’s appraisal of barbarian valor we must take into account his political outlook. Writing a century after Octavianus Augustus took power as Rome’s first emperor, he had a bleak view of politics. In the opening section of the Annals, the coming of imperial Rome is summarized in a few terse sentences: The emperor had collected all power in his own person. Opposition there was none. The boldest spirits had been liquidated, and “the rest of the aristocracy found a cheerful acceptance of slavery the smoothest road to wealth and office.”[81] This is hardly the language of an admirer of the imperial regime. Even so, Tacitus did not advocate a resuscitation of republican rule, which he deemed impracticable and dangerous. His self-image was that of “a good man in a wicked age.”[82] The highest one could aim for, he believed, was responsible rule by an able and honest emperor who understood the value of political liberty.

As a young boy, Tacitus experienced the dangerous political crisis of 68–69 CE that shook Rome to its foundations. Three of the four pretenders to the imperial purple were supported by frontier armies: Galba was procurator of Spain, Vitellius commander of the Rhine armies, and Vespasian, who finally carried the day, commanded three legions in Palestine. The civil war raging in Rome weakened its grip on the imperial perimeter. Vitellius’s high-handed and corrupt policies, occasioned by his use of German resources for the greater fight in Rome, contributed to the outbreak of the Batavian revolt, which for a time seemed to imperil Roman control over the entire lower Rhine region. Tacitus himself obtained senatorial rank under Vespasian and held offices under Trajan and Hadrian. For Romans of his generation, we can safely assume, the close links between the risks of civil war at home and the recurrent crises on the imperial frontier were all too clear.

For Tacitus, libertas and virtue were two halves of the same walnut: destroy the one and the other will go down with it. As we will shortly see, these values provide the key to his grudging admiration for barbarians who resisted Roman imperialism. Even though he considered them uncivilized and incapable of building real states, Tacitus appreciated their stand for liberty and he recognized the virtue of their leaders who risked their lives to safeguard the freedom of their people. The final result was an ambivalent view of Roman imperialism and its barbarian adversaries. The empire was an epitome of Roman glory, but it was administered by commanders who chiefly distinguished themselves by their callous cruelty, sexual misconduct, and boundless greed. Tacitus endorsed the empire but he could not bring himself to hold it dear, let alone revere it blindly.[83] On the other hand, his interest in barbarian cultures was, much like Sima Qian’s, partly instrumental. The peoples living on the Roman frontiers merited attention because they had become part of the problem of imperial rule and their attitude consequently affected the health of the Roman state itself.

The most forceful expression of Tacitus’s ambivalent admiration of barbarian valor is found in one of his earliest writings, the Agricola, an account of the Scottish campaign of his father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, who was governor of Britannia from 78 to 85 CE. A year before his return to Rome, Agricola went to the north in order to complete the pacification of the Scottish highlands. In a decisive battle at Mons Graupus (the exact location of which is still unknown) he crushed the last organized resistance of the Caledonians. Tacitus opens his story with a laudatory account of Agricola’s political career, emphasizing his deep commitment to libertas and culminating in his appointment as governor of Britannia. He tells his readers that it was under Agricola that the Roman fleet for the first time rounded the northern coasts of Scotland and so established the insularity of Britain. According to Tacitus, “the red hair and the large limbs of the inhabitants of Caledonia proclaim their Germanic origin.” The southern Britons he finds much resembling the Gauls though they display a higher spirit, “not having yet been emasculated by long years of peace.”[84] Having portrayed the Caledonians and the Britons as fierce and physically strong peoples, Tacitus immediately goes on to identify their main weakness as the divisions caused by the quarrels and ambitions of petty chieftains. Physically they may be “the stronger races,” but the Romans’ most effective weapon against them is “that they have no common purpose … [and] accordingly they fight individually and are collectively conquered.”[85] Here we meet with a first ambivalence in Tacitus’s accounts of barbarians: for lack of discipline their love for libertas easily degenerates to the unruliness of licentia, which we can define as an anarchical liberty unrestrained by political virtue.

Tacitus then discusses the conquest of Britannia, pausing to mention the great rising under Queen Boudicca in 60 CE. The Britons, he remarks in passing, recognize no distinction of sex among their rulers. Another aspect he singles out for attention is their ardent love of freedom and country. In the Annals, Tacitus gives Boudicca a brief but vehement speech, in which the queen declares “that she was avenging not her kingdom and her power as a woman born from noble ancestors, but rather her lost freedom, her body worn out by whips, and the defiled chastity of her daughters.” Here we have another item frequently mentioned by Tacitus: sexual license and the rape of “barbarian” women and girls by Roman soldiers and officers. Boudicca’s resolve as a woman was to win or to die; those men who were unwilling to fight, she concludes, “might live and be slaves.”[86] The Britons, we now learn, sometimes have a common purpose after all. Tacitus admits that Britannia was almost lost to the Romans.[87]

Agricola put down several revolts, restoring Roman rule by terror, in one case by exterminating an entire tribe. The other face of his policy, if we may credit Tacitus, was to fight corruption in the Roman administration. The conquest of Caledonia, the last region not under Roman control, was to be the capstone of his campaign. Tacitus paints a fearsome canvass of ever more Britons and Caledonians gathering to resist Agricola’s northward march, until an army of more than thirty thousand men is assembled. Then he zooms in on the Caledonian commander, Calgacus, introducing him as a man of eminent birth and character. Conforming to good Roman custom, he has Calgacus deliver an eloquent eve-of-battle speech. In its opening clause, the Caledonian general evokes the prospect “that this very day and this unity of ours will be the beginning of liberty for all Britain.” He admits that the battle will be hard and unforgiving, for no retreat or escape is left, and the Roman fleet is cruising off the coast. Then he comes to the heart of his message to the troops:

Here, at the world’s end, on its last inch of liberty, we have lived unmolested to this day.… Now the uttermost parts of Britain lay exposed, and the unknown is ever magnified. But there are no other tribes to come; nothing but sea and cliffs and these more deadly Romans, whose arrogance you cannot escape by obedience and self-restraint. Robbers of the world, now that earth fails their all-devastating hands, they probe even the sea: if their enemy have wealth, they have greed; if he be poor, they are ambitious; East nor West has glutted them.… To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname empire: they make a desolation and they call it peace.[88]

In the remainder of his address, Calgacus repeats over and over again that the only choice left is between slavery and freedom. By portraying him as a champion of native libertas, Tacitus gives him a worthy cause. Beyond that, Calgacus’s inversion of the ideology of Roman imperialism is a well-crafted example of the anthropological turn. It demonstrates that Tacitus, who composed the speech (it is highly unlikely that it was, as he contends, “reported” to him verbatim), is perfectly able and willing to imagine what Roman imperialism looks like when you find yourself at its receiving end. In the speech, Tacitus deploys a critique of imperialism that is in line with his own deeply felt love of freedom but at the same time contradicts the endorsement of Roman power and glory that sustained his grand historical vision.[89]

In the Histories Tacitus has left us another account of a clash between the Romans and a people on the northwestern frontier, the rising of the Batavians under Julius Civilis. As noted above, the uprising began when Rome went through a political crisis that derailed into a civil war. Vitellius, one of the would-be emperors, had ordered a levy of young Batavians for his army. The greed and license of the Roman officers in charge of the levy, Tacitus recounts, embittered the Batavians and gave Civilis the opportunity he needed. Julius Civilis is introduced as a man of high birth, possessing greater intelligence than “the average barbarian.” He pretended to support Vespasian against Vitellius in the Roman power struggle, but his real aim was to get rid of the Roman yoke. “We are no longer regarded as allies, as once we were,” he told his countrymen, “but as slaves.”[90] The Batavians persuaded two other nations, the Canninefates and the Frisians, to make common cause with them. Together, they routed two Roman cohorts by a surprise attack on their winter quarters.

After the victory Civilis convinced the other leaders that the final goal had to be a total independence from Rome. In his peroration, he recalled Arminius’s victory of sixty years before, but his main theme was liberty:

Let Syria, Asia, and the East, which is accustomed to kings, play the slave; there are many still alive in Gaul who were born before tribute was known. Surely it was not long ago that slavery was driven from Germania by the killing of Quintilius Varus, and the emperor whom the Germans then challenged was not a Vitellius but a Caesar Augustus. Liberty is a gift which nature has granted even to dumb animals, but courage is the peculiar blessing of man.[91]

Whether Tacitus had access to an account of Civilis’s speech we cannot know. Be that as it may, the parallel with Calgacus is unmistakable. Beyond the particular grievances mentioned by Tacitus both leaders are portrayed as fighting for liberty and combating slavery. According to Civilis, Roman rule has over time become more burdensome and despotic so that it now is akin to slavery.

On all these counts, Civilis’s evocation of the defeat of Varus by Arminius is to the point. Stephen Dyson has made a comparative study of five major anti-Roman uprisings: the revolt of the Gauls under Vercingetorix, the rising of the Pannonians and Dalmatians under Bato, the German revolt under Arminius, the rebellion of the Britons under Queen Boudicca, and finally the Batavian rising under Civilis. He concludes that all these revolts happened when the Romanization of the area was intensified, that in all of them young men from a new generation participated, that all risings were led by partly Romanized elite men with military experience as auxiliaries, and finally that the Romans were taken by surprise in all cases.[92] Dyson might have added that the accounts of Roman historians also agree in attributing an ardent love of liberty and an equally burning hatred of slavery to the leaders of these revolts.

Even so, we must be careful not to overstate our case. That Tacitus endorses the authenticity of the anti-Roman leaders’ struggle for liberty does not imply that he sympathizes with their cause. Quite the contrary; he discusses the eventuality of Batavian success with dread and disgust. When he recounts the Batavian victories and their proclamation of a Gallic empire his tone is bitter. A story of Roman officers swearing allegiance to “the empire of Gaul” he relates with barely concealed indignation.[93] When the fortunes of war turn against the insurgents Tacitus is visibly relieved. He has Petillius Cerialis, the general sent by Vespasian—meanwhile installed as the new emperor in Rome—to quell the revolt, make a fine speech in defense of Roman civilization and imperialism. According to Cerialis, the battle cry of “freedom” is merely a specious word used by men who seek to grab power for themselves. The Roman Empire, he contends, has been built up by “the good fortune and order of eight hundred years.” He likens it to “a mighty fabric which cannot be destroyed without overwhelming its destroyers.” If the Romans are driven out, Cerialis concludes, the final outcome will be an epoch of “wars among all peoples.”[94] For all his admiration of the Batavian love of liberty Tacitus cannot see how such “barbarians” could put together a smoothly functioning state—the recent civil war in Rome is conveniently forgotten at this juncture. Unfortunately, the later sections of Tacitus’s account of the Batavian uprising have not come down to us, so that we do not have his final judgment of its eventual failure.

Tacitus displays a keen interest in the phenomenon of Romanization. The leaders of the barbarian revolts are generally portrayed as people in an in-between position. Most of them had seen Roman military service and some of them had acquired Roman citizenship or even equestrian status. But how far did their enculturation go? And the most pressing question, did it ensure their loyalty? The revolts demonstrated that the loyalty of these people was opportunistic at best. Tacitus’s observations on Britannia and Gaul boil down to the view that adaptation of a Roman lifestyle took more than one generation. It had happened in Gaul only after the demise of the generation of Vercingetorix. In Tacitus’s days the pacification of Gaul was taken for granted. The inhabitants of southern Britannia had likewise adopted Roman manners. They had taken to the toga, the bath, and the promenade. Tacitus speaks about them in a patronizing tone, as dupes who gave the name of “civilization” to their slavery.[95] However, he clearly understood that the German, Batavian, and Frisian leaders, though having acquired Roman skills, hardly felt any inner loyalty to the empire. At times, Tacitus seems to suggest that it was precisely their Roman enculturation that enabled them to articulate a critique of Roman imperialism, in which case their speeches in his pages might be less fictional than many commentators have believed.

An anecdotic story in the Annals may serve to illustrate the point. Under Nero, some Frisian leaders accompanied by a number of followers arrived in Rome. Waiting for an audience, they were taken to a theatre. The play on the stage did not interest them much, but they asked questions about the spectators in the auditorium, inquiring where the different orders were seated:

They noticed a few men in foreign dress on the senatorial seats. They inquired who they were, and, on hearing that this was a compliment paid to the envoys of nations distinguished by their courage and for friendship to Rome, exclaimed that no people in the world ranked before Germans in arms or loyalty, went down, and took their seats among the Fathers. The action was taken in good part by the onlookers, as a trait of an ancient impetuosity and generous rivalry. Nero presented both with the Roman citizenship, and instructed the Frisians to leave the district. As they ignored the order, compulsion was applied by the unexpected dispatch of a body of auxiliary horse, which captured or killed the more obstinate of those who resisted.[96]

This tale beautifully conveys Tacitus’s vision of such only partly Romanized people. They are depicted as craving for honor in the Roman social order and their spontaneous action is typified as an instance of impetuosity. However, when some of them refuse to comply with Nero’s orders, the Roman authorities at once resort to violence. The barbarian leaders, it seems, feel entitled to take their rightful place in the Roman hierarchy, but they do not fully accept or understand Roman political culture. Their followers, however, seem to be much less Romanized and have to be disciplined by force of arms.

Tacitus also provides ethnographic descriptions of the Germanic nations. He portrays the Germans as “a race unmixed by intermarriage with other peoples,” with red hair and blue eyes. Generally, they are quite tall and physically strong, but not productive and industrious. The women and the old men, those who cannot fight, perform the necessary labor. Tacitus depicts the Germans as a people with strong communal ties. In war, they defend themselves but above all the freedom and honor of their women. He remarks in passing that taking “maidens of high birth” as hostages is a useful guarantee of their loyalty.[97] The Germans live in a way Romans would consider extremely primitive: they have no towns and cities, no stone houses, no writing, no fine clothing, and little in the way of luxury. Marital fidelity is held in high esteem; the Germans, Tacitus reports, “are almost the only barbarians who are content with a wife apiece.”[98] He favorably contrasts German mores with the sexual license of the upper-class Romans of his day. Political decisions are made in open-air assemblies where the leaders make speeches and the multitude grumbles or declares its assent by a clashing of shields and spears. Criminal justice is administered by the priests. On particular days, Tacitus relates, human sacrifices are performed.[99]

In the pages of the Germania, the noble and the ignoble savage rub shoulders. At one moment their virtue and marital fidelity are praised, but a few pages further on we hear about all-night drinking bouts where the men gamble away their own liberty and where violence is never far away. Tacitus describes their political life as a rather primitive face-to-face democracy with aristocratic overtones, but the reader does not get the impression that any kind of reasonable debate is conducted in their clamorous assemblies. As in the Agricola, the point is that a primitive variety of libertas tends to degenerate into licentia. Likewise, the simplicity of German mores is depicted as a primitive ethos without discipline. Tacitus’s veritable ideal is a disciplined austerity that he identified with his nostalgic image of the Roman Republic of bygone days.[100] There can be no doubt that Tacitus considers Roman civilization superior but morally corrupted. Neither can there be much doubt that he judges the Germanic way of life inferior but as yet morally undefiled. In Tacitus’s vision of history, Roman imperialism is better than anarchy, but about the Roman right to invade and enslave other peoples his language is deeply ambivalent.

Tacitus was not the only Roman historian to illustrate the barbarian love of freedom by giving their leaders eloquent speeches. Eric Adler has recently shown that similar orations are found in the writings of Sallust, Pompeius Trogus, Polybius, Livy, and Cassius Dio. Among other examples, he discusses the speeches of Boudicca, Civilis, and Arminius reported by Tacitus. Adler concludes “that the inclusion of speeches at least partially critical of Rome’s imperialism was part of a historiographical tradition” influencing generations of Roman historians. He further states, correctly in my view, that none of these historians can be accurately described as anti-imperialist. On the other hand, they were seriously concerned with the moral issues raised by wars of conquest. Perhaps, Adler conjectures, the slowing pace of imperial expansion impelled historians to take a harder look at Roman misrule. He further observes that “Eastern kings often appear decadent and conniving, and Western leaders come across as rambunctious, undisciplined, and uncivilized.”[101]

In Tacitus’s historical imagination, the “barbarians” have an authentic love of liberty and they have the courage of their convictions. So far, they hold the high moral ground and that is why Tacitus gives them an autonomous voice in his narrative. But when it comes to efficient statecraft they are too quarrelsome and undisciplined to accomplish much. Even so, Tacitus is well aware of the evils of Roman imperialism. Both in the Agricola and in the Histories, he is careful to idealize neither the Roman nor the barbarian side.[102] To him, the empire cannot be more than a necessary evil. But we do well to realize that an evil necessity remains a necessity. Tacitus acknowledged the moral force of the barbarian critique but in the end he was unable to imagine an alternative to Roman civilization.

Empires, Barbarians, and the Temporalities of History

In the dialectic of the civilized and the barbarian as well as in visions of empire, notions of temporality play an important role. Some temporalities only allow empires to falter and fail in the teeth of fate, while others promise them a victorious ride on the wings of time. That is not to say, however, that we face a clear-cut choice between linear and cyclical time. There is, by now, a broad consensus that all regimes of temporality contain both linear and cyclical elements.

Connecting the ethnographies in Herodotus, Sima Qian, and Tacitus to the temporalities underpinning their histories will enable us to identify similarities and differences in their handling of the anthropological turn. In the first place we may conclude that the strong developmental temporality characteristic of the European Enlightenment is entirely absent from these histories. There is no stadial theory guaranteeing the evolution of “lower” barbarian societies to the “higher” stage of sedentary, agricultural civilizations. In Herodotus, individual Scythians adopt Greek ways, but this proves to be their undoing, and there is absolutely no prospect of the Scythian people adopting Greek or, for that matter, Persian culture. Sima Qian’s account mentions cultural border-crossing in two directions, and the historian discusses the possibility of the Xiongnu being seduced by Chinese luxuries and habits. But the latter point is only made to underline the perils of such an acculturation for the vitality and independence of the steppe peoples. Tacitus, for his part, is familiar with the Romanization of “barbarians” but speaks disparagingly about the emasculation of the Gauls who have lived under Roman rule for several generations. However, he does not harbor any illusions about the Germans or other peoples beyond the frontier adopting Roman ways of their own accord. In all three cases the barbarians are there to stay.

The Han regarded themselves as the cultural center of the world, with concentric regions of “barbarity” around them.[103] It follows that the desirable and intelligible transition would be for the “barbarians” to become “civilized.” But Sima Qian’s ethnography of the Xiongnu conveys a quite different message. Unlike Mencius, he has heard of Chinese adopting “barbarian ways.” In his narrative several Chinese act out the “non-intelligible” move from Han to Xiongnu culture, and one of them voices a critique of Han culture from a Xiongnu standpoint. In these sections of the book, the grand Sinocentric sweep of Sima Qian’s historical narrative is quite literally punctured by the anthropological turn. From his account of the Xiongnu it seems extremely unlikely that the Chinese will ever impose their civilization to the north of the Great Wall.

The differences between Herodotus and Sima Qian on “civilizing the barbarians” are closely connected to the temporalities of their histories. In Herodotus, time is both linear and cyclical: the wars between the Greeks and the Persians are recounted as a unique series of events with an irreversible and auspicious outcome. That is linear time, but it is “weak” linear time, for Herodotean history is also cyclical. Cities and empires rise and decline. Fortuna never stays in one place for long. The real lesson of the Histories is not Greek victory but Persian defeat. “World Empire” is a dream that will always elude mortal men. In secular terms, this outcome is explained by the corruption of power and the blindness of kings. At another level of thought, it is inscribed in Greek religion, for the gods will not permit the affairs of a man, a city, or an empire to prosper forever.[104]

The temporalities of the Histories exclude the enduring transformation of one culture by another. The attempt by Cambyses to damage and ridicule Egyptian religion bespeaks his insanity and will eventually ruin him. Herodotus recounts how the Persian king dies from a self-inflicted wound on his thigh, in the selfsame spot where he had stabbed the Egyptian holy Apis calf.[105] Like the overall pattern of the Histories, the narrative of Cambyses’s downfall is framed by two cycles. He is brought down by his own mindless pride, but it is equally true that he is felled by the revenge of an Egyptian deity, a religious explanation understandable to Herodotus’s Greek audience.

Just as in Herodotus, the temporality of the Shiji is not perfectly cyclical. The dynastic cycles represent a series of analogies between recurrent political crises. Sima Qian refers to “the law of change, that when things reach their period of greatest flourishing, they must begin to decay.”[106] The Shiji, however, is also structured by notions of linear time. Unlike the work of Herodotus, it is a history “from the earliest times to the present day.” According to Joseph Needham “the Chinese were the most historically minded of all ancient peoples.”[107] They kept written records from the eighth century BCE onward, so that historians in Han times could look back on a long past in which Chinese civilization had gradually expanded, albeit with numerous setbacks and ages of war and turmoil.

Sima Qian’s Confucian outlook theorizes the growth of order and civilization as the unfolding of the immanent potential of human and cosmic nature. There is an encompassing order pervading the course of nature and human endeavor (hence the “encyclopedic” structure of the Shiji).[108] This cosmo-political order, however, remains precarious and is forever threatened by the failure of the human actors who must sustain it.[109] The immanent cosmic order can only realize itself through human agency: there is a cosmic onto-teleology, but there is no such thing as divine Providence.[110] There is a vision of “reform” and “correction,” but its temporality is not “progressive,” suffused as it is by the powerful notion of a “return” to the Way of the ancient sages. Assessing the temporalities of pre-Han historical writing, David Schaberg typifies it as “a record of continual failure and rare success.”[111] Grant Hardy argues that the thematic and nonlinear narrative structure of the Shiji conveys an open-ended, contingent, and nonfinalist vision of historical development, and he observes that “a sense of loss permeates the Shiji, a yearning for what once was.”[112] We may conclude that Sima Qian’s vision of history and the expansion of Chinese civilization is structured by a weak linearity forever threatened by dissolution and decay. The empire is a solid historical fact, but its future moral and political health is not, in the end, guaranteed by the temporality of Sima Qian’s history.

With Tacitus, the picture changes again. He wrote his historical works while serving the Roman state in several capacities. His vision of Roman history is driven by a linear plot of conquest and imperial expansion. As we have noted, the speech he puts in the mouth of the Roman general Cerialis posits that the Roman Empire, constructed over a period of eight centuries, is such a mighty edifice that he can only envisage its collapse as a universal catastrophe that will tear down everything in its path, including its barbarian gravediggers. For all that, it would be a mistake to attribute to Tacitus a serene confidence in the future of Roman power. He knew full well that in his time the Roman legions had to guard the frontier against barbarian incursions instead of conquering new lands. Tacitus is fairly confident that they will prove capable of containing the barbarians in the borderlands, but it would be far-fetched to attribute anything like historical optimism to him. (On the other hand, diametrically opposed conjectures have been advanced about his hopes for the future of the Roman Empire, some of them depending on alternative translations of a notoriously equivocal passage in the Germania.)[113]

His sense of honor and his strict morality were deeply offended by the unfettered power of the emperors, about most of whom he had a very low opinion. Even a good man, Tacitus feared, would in time be corrupted by such overdoses of arbitrary power.[114] In a well-known passage in the Histories, he directly attributes the corruption of Roman politics to the growth of its empire: “The old greed for power, long ingrained in mankind, came to full growth and broke bounds as the empire became great. When resources were moderate, equality was easily maintained; but when the world had been subjugated … so that men were free to covet wealth without anxiety, then the first quarrels between patricians and plebeians broke out.”[115]

Like Sima Qian’s history of China, the basic temporality of Tacitus’s history is predicated on a weak linearity forever threatened by corruption and decay. Tacitus and Sima Qian share a propensity to envisage future improvement in terms of a recovery of ancient virtues, even though both of them understand that a literal return to the greatness of the days of yore is not feasible. Both of them, and here they differ from Herodotus, were close to the seats of power and found it difficult to imagine a meaningful world without a central empire. At the same time, for both of them the future of empire was a cause for deep concern.

Coming to the problematic of a civilizing mission, Tacitus is again closer to Sima Qian than to Herodotus. The Greek historian did not envisage, and perhaps could not even imagine, any sort of civilizing mission for the empires of his time. Tacitus, however, was familiar with the Romanization of “barbarians” within the pacified regions of the empire, such as Gaul and Spain, but he harbored serious doubts about Germania. Judged as ethnography, his book on the Germans is much less sophisticated than Sima Qian’s chapter on the Xiongnu or Herodotus’s ethnography of the Scythians. To some extent, he appreciated the love of liberty and the virtue of the Germans, but unlike Sima Qian or Herodotus he never seriously investigated the functionality of the Germanic way of life in its ecological and political environment.

In relation to “their” empire, Tacitus’s Germans are largely comparable to Herodotus’s Scythians and Sima Qian’s Xiongnu. The three peoples stand for natural and cultural spaces that are not open to imperial penetration. A further similarity concerns the reports on what lies beyond them. Like Herodotus’s brief sections about the far north and Sima Qian’s cursory treatment of the lands beyond the Xiongnu, Tacitus’s ethnographic images change as he ventures further beyond the frontier. As his narrative moves further east and north his information becomes more fragmentary and his “Germans” more savage. Like Herodotus’s Amazons, he mentions a remote tribe ruled by women. But while Herodotus refrains from any negative judgment of the Amazons, Tacitus declares that men who let women lord it over them have fallen lower than slaves.[116]

Unlike Sima Qian’s Xiongnu, Tacitus’s Germans are never portrayed with a reasoned explanation of their customs as an alternative and viable order, as valid in northwestern Europe as the Roman way of life in its Mediterranean ecology. In this, Tacitus provides an image of Germanic mores much closer to what in a later age would be called the customs of “savages.” There is none of the sincere admiration and respect the reader encounters in the ethnographic chapters of Sima Qian and Herodotus on the steppe nomads.

Notions of common humanity and an incipient cultural relativism play a significant part in all three historians, but in different ways. The dialectic of “othering” and common humanity bespeaks a creative ambivalence in their outlooks. They fully belong to their native cultures—Sima Qian is a Han Chinese, Herodotus a Greek, and Tacitus a Roman—but their histories are fueled by an investigation of the dynamics of their own cultures in evolving relationships to other cultures. Something else they share is a secular orientation. While it is true that the gods have their role to play in Herodotus and Tacitus and that there is a cosmic-metaphysical element in Sima Qian’s Confucian outlook, none of them ever explains trends or events in terms of a divine plan for the world. Their visions of history are fundamentally different from the divinely ordained sequence of events that structures the historical narrative of the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament, texts that are world-historically contemporary with them.

A final difference concerns the anthropological turn. While all three historians produced ethnographies of the “barbarian” others living on the frontiers of their civilizations, Herodotus’s formulation of cultural relativism is the most explicit and epistemologically grounded. It accords with the peripheral position of the Greeks in relation to the great civilizations of western Eurasia and northeastern Africa. They were living on the rim of that world, and their political and intellectual culture was a highly agonistic one of ever-shifting power relations in and between city-states. By contrast, the Chinese ideal of civilization and the state was more stable. Nathan Sivin observes that “China differs from the Greek World primarily in that the state was so rarely reinvented.”[117] While the Greeks peered from the outside into the entrails of empires, Sima Qian wrote from an insider’s perspective within what he, with some justification, believed to be the greatest and most lasting empire in the world. In Sima Qian’s history, Chinese civilization occupies a unique nodal point in space and time. That is where he differs from Herodotus, who never claims, nor could have claimed, a comparable centrality for Greek civilization (only a much later European “invented tradition” made such a claim for Greece).

Tacitus’s position is closer to Sima Qian than to Herodotus, and for the same reasons. Like the Han historian, he started from an insider’s perspective on what he considered the most powerful empire in the world. In his historical narrative, it is Rome that holds a unique nodal position in space and time. As the barbarian adversaries of Rome were notably less powerful than the Xiongnu, Tacitus’s depiction of the northwestern barbarians is more suffused by “othering” than the Chinese view of the steppe peoples. His appreciation of the barbarian others centers on his sympathy for their love of liberty but does not probe the functioning of their societies as deeply as Herodotus or Sima Qian. In the end, Tacitus clung to his belief in Rome’s imperial mission, while Sima Qian belonged to the faction at the Han court that opposed further military expansion. Tacitus’s ambivalent judgment of the northwestern barbarians stands in stark contrast to his hostile disparagement of eastern civilized nations who resisted Roman rule in the name of the values of their own culture, codified in authoritative written texts. In the introductory part of his account of the Jewish revolt of 69 CE, he characterizes the Jews as a people with exclusionary religious practices who are extremely loyal toward one another, while they feel only “hate and enmity” for other peoples.[118] Here there is no trace of the appreciation of the struggle for liberty that we have found in Tacitus’s account of the northwestern barbarians.

Underlying all these histories is an implicit notion of humanity as the collection of all the peoples of the known world. The religious and philosophical discourses discussed earlier abstracted from the differences between those peoples in order to arrive at ideas of what all humans share. By contrast, history and ethnography zoom in on cultural difference, but they do so against the backdrop of a weak and untheorized vision of common humanity. All peoples are “human” in a generic and unspecified sense, but what really matters for these historians are the differences between them, and in particular how imperial rulers should handle such differences (Sima Qian, Tacitus) or, conversely, how they are defeated by their failure to understand cultural difference (Herodotus). The historical and ethnographical approach to cultural difference represented a major intellectual innovation. It opened up the vast contingencies of space and time for historical inquiry and theoretical reflection, something the more generic and abstract discourses of common humanity were unable to do.

4

THINKING ACROSS FRONTIERS IN MEDIEVAL ISLAM

IN THE EARLY SPRING of 1220 CE, the Daoist sage Qiu Chuji (Ch’ang Ch’un) left his native China for a long and arduous trek to the far west. The occasion was a summons from Genghis Khan, whose court was then at Perwan, some fifty miles north of Kabul. Traveling north and then westward through steppe and desert and circumventing the towering peaks of the Tien Shan mountain range, Qiu Chujin approached Ferghana in the autumn. There he noticed that he was about to cross a cultural boundary. He was still among Buddhists but people told him that farther west he would find people who were “only worshipping the western quarter”—that is, they were Muslims praying toward Mecca. The travel journal, kept by his secretary Li Chih-Ch’ang observed that this “was natural enough, for the dominions of the Tang dynasty extended to this place.”[1] The secretary was right: to their west flowed the Talas River, where in 751 CE an Abbasid army had defeated a Chinese expeditionary force, blocking further Tang expansion in Central Asia and paving the way for the coming of Islam to the region.

The penetration of Islam into Central Asia coincided in time with its expansion into Armenia, North Africa, and southern Spain. At the beginning of the ninth century CE, the Islamic commonwealth extended from the Atlantic coast of Morocco to the western borderlands of China. By 1000 CE, Islam included large swaths of West Africa, and in Central Asia it had reached the western marches of the Indian peninsula. According to Archibald Lewis, it was “the great intermediary civilization of medieval times,” the only one that maintained contacts with all others, from sub-Saharan Africa and Christian Europe in the west to India and China in the east, and through its participation in the Indian Ocean trade with Southeast Asia as well.[2] The huge Muslim commonwealth was an economic as well as a religious entity. Through the rise and fall of states and empires its far-flung commercial network subsisted, both overland by caravans and overseas by convoys of merchant vessels. Never before had people, goods, and money moved so freely over such vast distances.[3]

The Islamic commonwealth is of obvious relevance to the problematic of this book. It stimulated cross-cultural encounters and exchanges on an unprecedented scale. Its two main languages, Arabic and Persian, enabled philosophers, geographers, and historians to travel and exchange views across continental distances. I will discuss how three Muslim authors, with widely different backgrounds, mindsets, and interests, explored the problematic of common humanity and cultural difference from disparate perspectives: the comparative study of civilizations (Al-Biruni), the common quest for God along different theological avenues (Attar), and a new theory of history focusing on the dialectic of sedentary and nomadic societies in the dynamics of world history (Ibn Khaldun). Each of these thinkers effects a broadening of common humanity: Al-Biruni seeks to balance the differences and commonalities of two great civilizations; Attar posits that all people, in whatever religious tradition they are born, can engage in the quest for God; Ibn Khaldun conceives of the interaction of the sedentary and the nomadic peoples as the engine of world history. Even so, their ideas of common humanity have definite limits. Their visions of civilization and truth are to some extent Islamocentric and the “wild” peoples from the Arctic and sub-Saharan Africa are situated at the margins of their imagined humanity.

Common humanity and the anthropological turn are found in the writings of all three, but in very different forms. Al-Biruni discusses the intellectual and religious achievements of India with an unstable mixture of intellectual respect and religious indignation, while his statements on the ubiquity of ethnocentrism show affinities with Herodotus. Attar expounds the esoteric philosophy of Sufism in Persian poetry, developing what we can characterize as an Islamocentric theory of toleration predicated on the idea that all religions are merely human entrances to the quest for God. Ibn Khaldun, while also sympathetic to Sufism, devotes his intellectual energy to an altogether different project, the writing of a new kind of world history that would not merely describe but also explain the interaction of the sedentary and nomadic societies, as well as the rise and fall of states.

Both Al-Biruni and Ibn Khaldun depict the moderate climatic zone in the Northern Hemisphere as the abode of humanity. But Ibn Khaldun emphatically includes the nomadic peoples in his vision of common humanity while Al-Biruni sometimes mentions them but assigns them no well-defined “place” in historical time and space. Finally, Ibn Khaldun experiments with a new language of common humanity, not grounded in morality, philosophy, and religion, but in the study of far-flung networks of mutual interdependence which tie the fate of lands and peoples together and could incite political leaders to look beyond their parochial horizons and to investigate transcontinental connections.

The Central Asian Connection

A sizable number of Arab immigrants settled in the new Islamic lands of Iran and Central Asia. The major defeats the Arabs inflicted on the Sassanid armies in 637 and 641 enabled them to incorporate the greater part of Iran in their empire, while the battle on the Talas in 751 stopped further Chinese expansion to the west and installed the Arab conquerors as overlords of Transoxania. In the wake of the Arab armies, the language of classical Arabic entered West and Central Asia where it henceforth coexisted with Persian, Aramaic, Sogdian, Turkic, Greek, Chinese, and Indic languages. During the next century, great numbers of natives converted to Islam.[4] In the initial stages of the conquest, the Umayyads left most of the Sassanid administrators in place, but from the end of the seventh century they began a policy of Islamization, starting with a change of the language of administration from Persian to Arabic, the minting of coins inscribed in Arabic, and the dismissal of Zoroastrian officials.

Despite the crass violence used against anti-Arabic uprisings, we should not assume that Islamization was solely the effect of forcible conversion. As a rule, the Arab conquerors only considered local rulers and city governors trustworthy when they adopted Islam. In order to retain their share of power, most of them converted, and their subjects followed suit. Another important impulse came from the increasing Muslim domination of trade. Muslim missionaries followed in the wake of the merchants. Furthermore, we should take into account that Central Asian Islam was frequently somewhat hybrid, absorbing bits and pieces of Iranian and Turkic religions and giving them Islamic meanings.[5] The final result was a society that we might conceive of as a linguistic and religious mosaic with a growing Muslim majority and presided over by Muslim political and religious authorities. It must be underlined, however, that an increasing number of these Muslim rulers were not Arabs but Persians, Sogdians, and Turks.[6]

The major lingua franca of the region was Persian and not Arabic, with written Persian increasingly expressed in Arabic script. Persian remained the medium of poetry, but scholars, addressing readers throughout the entire Islamic world, mostly wrote their books in Arabic. Apart from Islam, the major religions of the area that extended from eastern Iran to the Aral Sea in the north and the Uighur lands of western China in the east were Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Judaism, and Nestorian Christianity. Judaism and Christianity became “protected” communities as “peoples of the book” within the Dar-al-Islam, paying the poll tax and running their own internal affairs. Zoroastrianism was not eradicated but thoroughly marginalized. Buddhism, deemed a form of idolatry, had a hard time under Muslim rule, but there are numerous indications that it retained a presence throughout Central Asia (and was later revived under Mongol rule).[7]

From ancient times Central Asia had functioned as the crossroads of the network of Eurasian overland trade lanes known as the Silk Road. Regional trade and production were integrated in the transcontinental commercial linkages between the Roman Empire and its successor states, the Levant, Iran, India, and China. The Central Asian economy was highly diversified. Indians, Chinese, Persians, Jews, and Greeks traveled, and often settled, in the region, contributing to its economic dynamism and polycultural orientation. The Sogdians, who controlled much of the trade in pre-Islamic times, were also instrumental in bringing Buddhism to China and translating Sanskrit texts into Chinese.[8] Over the following centuries, a network of Buddhist monasteries arose along the Central Asian trade arteries. Besides receiving worshippers they functioned as way stations for merchants and pilgrims.[9]

We can roughly delineate the region by its major cities: Nishapur in eastern Iran; Herat, Balkh, Kabul, Ghazna, and Bamiyan in Afghanistan; Gurganj south of the Aral Sea; Merv, Bukhara, and Samarkand in Sogdia, the core of the region; and finally Kashgar in the Chinese far west. Countless traders, pilgrims, envoys, and other travelers passed through the Central Asian cities. The comings and goings of people from so many lands naturally awakened a curiosity about the products, customs, religions, and philosophies of other peoples. During the early Middle Ages, the empires of Eurasia came into direct contact with one another, and, as Christopher Beckwith observes in his history of Central Eurasia, “each empire was forced to face the fact that it was actually one among equals.”[10]

Central Asia ca. 1030 CE

The booming economy and the intensified connections with the vast Islamic commonwealth could not fail to stimulate intellectual life. It is striking how many of the great Muslim scholars and scientists of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries lived and worked in Central Asia. Among them we encounter the astronomer and mathematician Al-Khwarazmi (780–850), born in Khwarizm, south of the Aral Sea, who introduced Indian numerals, including the groundbreaking concept of zero, into Arabic science. Next, we can think of Al-Bukhari (810–870), who compiled and edited the Hadith, the canonized collection of sayings of Muhammad and probably the most authoritative Muslim text after the Quran itself. Another major thinker from the region was Al-Farabi (872–961), a highly influential philosopher whose ethics and political theory built on the works of Aristotle. Some of his studies, such as his comments on Plato’s ideas on political justice, were highly influential throughout the Muslim world. His work on musicology has influenced European students of music of later ages.[11]

The most renowned scholar from the region was Ibn Sina (980–1037), also known by his Latinized name, Avicenna. He was born near Bukhara, which was then the administrative seat of the Samanid dynasty, one of the offshoots from the Abbasids. After studying Aristotle, Euclid, and Ptolemy, Ibn Sina turned to medicine, reading Arabic translations of the works of Hippocrates and Galen and the medical writings of Al-Kindi and the Persian physician Al-Razi.[12] Ibn Sina’s medical writings were read all over the Islamic world and, in Latin translations, in medieval Europe. He corresponded with many other scholars. In 998, when he was eighteen, he entered into an exchange of views on a wide variety of questions, from astronomy to physics and anthropology, with another young man, Abu al-Rayhan al-Biruni, who was then twenty-five and lived in Gurganj, some two hundred miles to the northwest of Bukhara.[13]

Al-Biruni’s Conception of India as a Hindu Civilization

Al-Biruni (973–1048) is often catalogued as an “Arabic” philosopher, but apart from the language that label is misleading. He was born to an Iranian family in Gurganj.[14] In 1017 the town was invaded by Mahmud of Ghazna, a prince of Turkic descent, and added to the latter’s burgeoning empire, which by then included Afghanistan and eastern Iran.[15] The Ghaznavid state exemplified the political trajectory of steppe peoples who entered the borderlands of the steppe and the sown as slave soldiers, converted to Islam, evolved into an autonomous power in their employers’ state, and in the next generation established themselves as the masters of an independent territorial state. In such surroundings, Islamization proceeded haltingly. In the late tenth century, Dakiki, a court poet in Ghazna, could still sing:

Of all that is good and bad in the world,

Dakiki has chosen four things to himself:

A woman’s lips as red as rubies, the melody of the lute,

The blood-coloured wine, and the religion of Zoroaster.

Edward Sachau, Al-Biruni’s translator, who cites these lines, comments that at the court of Mahmud such verses would probably have proved fatal to their author.[16]

Mahmud’s invasion proved a turning point in Al-Biruni’s career. At the age of forty-four he was a mature scholar who had worked in several fields, notably astronomy, mathematics, and history. In 999 he had completed The Chronology of Ancient Nations, a study of the calendars and religious rites of the major nations of Eurasia.[17] On his return to Ghazna, Mahmud carried off a number of elite hostages, Al-Biruni among them. Enforced patronage is probably the best characterization of his position at court.[18] At Ghazna, Al-Biruni enjoyed the use of the sultan’s library as well as the leisure to study and write. Most important of all, Mahmud’s policy of conquest opened the door to India for him. According to Edmund Bosworth the vast amounts of bullion and other spoils Mahmud seized in India made the Ghaznavid Empire “the most dynamic power known in eastern Islam since the Arab conquests.”[19] Between 1000 and 1025, the king mounted no less than seventeen campaigns into India, one of which—the sack of the great Shiva temple of Somnath in Gujarat—yielded a booty of 6,500 kilos of gold, not to mention the slaves, arms, richly ornamented robes, precious jewels, tapestries, and war elephants brought to Ghazna by Mahmud’s victorious army.[20]

Al-Biruni accompanied his master on several of these campaigns. While Mahmud regarded India mainly as a source of plunder, Al-Biruni took up a fascination with the scientific and religious culture of the Hindus that was to dominate his scholarly work for the next fifteen years. To obtain firsthand knowledge of Indian scientific and religious texts he learned Sanskrit. There, and much less in the political history of India, lay his chief interest, clearly professed by the full title of his book on India: Researches on Indian Thought of All Categories: Those That Are Admissible to Reason as Well as Those That Must Be Rejected.[21] Al-Biruni started his research shortly after his arrival in Ghazna and he finished the book in 1030. It was the first extensive study of Indian thought and Hindu religion made by a non-Indian scholar since the Indica drafted by the Seleucid ambassador Megasthenes in the third century BCE.[22]

Al-Biruni’s methodology was probably indebted to the rationalist approach to historical inquiry expounded in the writings of the great tenth-century historian Al-Mas’udi. According to Al-Mas’udi, history produced knowledge of fact as well as useful judgments: “Noble and lofty morality is acquired from it and the rules of royal government and war are sought in it.” Both natural science and history, he explained, have proofs, the proofs of reason and causality in the first case and the evidence of authenticity in the second. Finally, Al-Mas’udi contended that “the sciences progress without end because the last discovers what the first has missed.”[23]

Going by the introductory part of his study of India, Al-Biruni would have largely agreed with the above. In his opening lines, he declares “that in questions of historical authenticity hearsay does not equal eye-witness.” But he goes on to observe that written tradition is “the most preferable,” because it offers information about the times past, something eyewitnesses cannot do. Nonetheless, it must be sifted critically because its veracity depends on “the character of the reporters, who are influenced by the divergence of interests and all kinds of animosities and antipathies between the various nations.”[24] The investigation of the reliability of spokespeople and the process of transmission in which sources were orally handed down, a method known as isnad criticism, was the first rule of method established in classical Islamic historiography, where it emerged from the investigations of the corpus of the Hadith, sayings attributed to Muhammad which were often of doubtful authenticity.[25]

As his insistence on the animosities between different nations shows, Al-Biruni was well aware of the obstacles standing in the way of an impartial investigation of the ideas and customs of a foreign people. Especially when religious differences play a role, he warns his readers, people are prone to condemn practices and ideas of which they are wholly ignorant. In his opening chapter, he formulates a general maxim about the ubiquity of ethnocentrism. Interestingly, this comes in a critical discussion of Hindu prejudices against Muslims, where he asserts that “in all manners and usages they differ from us to such a degree as to frighten their children with us, with our dress, and our ways and customs.” The maxim he then formulates seeks to persuade his readers to discover themselves in the mirror of Hindu ethnocentrism:

By the by, we must confess, in order to be just, that a similar depreciation of foreigners not only prevails among us and the Hindus, but is common to all nations towards each other.[26]

In his book on ancient chronologies, Al-Biruni recounts the diverging opinions on the Deluge in the traditions and holy books of different nations. While Jews, Christians, and Muslims recognize the Deluge as a historically verifiable event, the Persians, Medes, Indians, and Chinese categorically deny its reality.[27] On the other hand, the vision of hell as a place of dreadful punishment is found among all peoples.[28] Generally, Al-Biruni proposes to distinguish the different world religions by their foundational tenets: “As the word of confession, ‘There is no god but God, Muhammad is his prophet,’ is the shibboleth of Islam, the Trinity that of Christianity, and the institute of the Sabbath that of Judaism, so metempsychosis is the shibboleth of the Hindu religion. Therefore he who does not believe in it does not belong to them, and is not reckoned as one of them.”[29]

Coming back to the Hindus, he summarizes their ethics in nine commands: do not kill, do not lie, do not steal, do not whore, do not hoard up treasures, always practice holiness and purity, perform the prescribed fasting, dress modestly, hold fast to the adoration of God, and finally always be mindful of ôm, the word of creation, without ever pronouncing it. He explains to his readers that the first command includes a ban on killing animals and is a special part of the general rule “to abstain from doing anything hurtful.” These precepts are illustrated by several passages from the Bhagavad Gita.[30] Finally, Al-Biruni observes that some passages in the Hindu system suggest that they believe in a pantheistic union of God and humanity.[31] However, he also mentions polytheistic beliefs in Hinduism and compares them to Greek views on Zeus and the other gods.[32]

After his explication of Hindu theology, Al-Biruni proceeds to their social doctrines, focusing on the caste system. While his discussion of Hindu religious ideas is respectful and open-minded, he cannot hide his deep dislike of the caste system. Right at the beginning, he declares that the social ideology of caste represents the greatest obstacle to any understanding between Hindus and Muslims. Caste denotes an essential inequality between different categories of people, but “we Muslims, of course, stand entirely on the other side of the question, considering all men as equal, except in piety.”[33] There follows a concise enumeration and characterization of the four castes as well as different categories of casteless people. Ideas of merit are entirely absent from the Hindu system. To obtain paradise and bliss, everyone must perform the duties assigned to their caste and cultivate the requisite virtues. In Al-Biruni’s analysis the caste system is presented as an integral part of the Hindu religion. Even so, he alludes to an important disagreement among the Hindus about caste. According to some, he asserts, only the Brahmans and Ksatriyas are capable of ascending to spiritual liberation, but according to several Hindu philosophers, liberation is attainable by “the whole human race,” if only their intention to obtain it is “perfect.”[34] Here, Al-Biruni appears to distinguish between a socially exclusive as well as a universalist vision of humanity in the Hindu religion.

He further remarks on a certain similarity between Hindu and Christian ethics. Both religions enjoin their followers to abstain from killing, to offer the other cheek, to share your worldly goods with your fellow human beings, even when they are hostile to you, and to bless your enemies and pray for them. Al-Biruni expresses his admiration for such a “noble philosophy” but rejects it as impracticable. Most people, he argues, are not philosophers and consequently they can only be governed by “the sword and the whip.” The political regimes instituted by the Christians themselves demonstrate this truth, for “ever since Constantine the Victorious became a Christian, both sword and whip have ever been employed, for without them it would be impossible to rule.”[35]

Generally, Al-Biruni discusses the ethics and the social order of India in the context of the Hindu religion. He describes the marriage laws of India, comparing them with those of the pre-Islamic Arabs, the ancient Persians, and the Jews. The discussion is neutrally formulated, but the conclusion represents a bow to orthodoxy: “We have here given an account of these things in order that the reader may learn by the comparative treatment of the subject how much superior the institutions of Islam are.”[36] Elsewhere, however, we come across a starkly condemnatory discussion of Hindu gender and sexual customs, which asserts that men and women copulate standing and that men who cannot cohabitate with women practice a form of auto-fellatio (in Sachau’s translation these passages are in Latin).

Al-Biruni also relates that men in India wear female clothing, use cosmetics, and adorn themselves with earrings. The Hindu gender regime suggests a reversal of the “proper” sexual roles. In another example, he reports that women are consulted in emergencies. However, in the next sentence, he relates that a newborn boy is valued more highly than a girl.[37] Interestingly, he introduces the subject with a theoretical observation on the concept of strangeness:

The strangeness of a thing evidently rests on the fact that it occurs but rarely, and that we seldom have the opportunity of witnessing it. If such strangeness reaches a high degree, the thing becomes a curiosity, or even something like a miracle, which is no longer in accordance with the ordinary laws of nature, and which seems chimerical as long as it has not been witnessed. Many Hindu customs differ from those of our country and of our time to such a degree as to appear to us simply monstrous.[38]

In the concluding observations of the chapter, Al-Biruni reminds his readers that the “heathen Arabs” of pre-Islamic times were also given to crimes and obscenities, so that it would be unreasonable to blame solely the Hindus for such practices. In the final sentence, however, he returns to the orthodox fold, thanking God that Islam has abolished all those things among the Arabs, “as it has also abolished them in those parts of India the people of which have become Muhammadans.”[39]

Al-Biruni also seeks to explain the origins of idol-worship. Everywhere, he posits, the popular mind leans toward the world of the senses and has an aversion to abstract thought “which is only understood by highly educated people.” The common people’s craving for pictorial representations of the divine, he adds, has induced many religious leaders to adopt such imagery in their books and their houses of worship. This has happened to the Jews, the Christians, and above all to the Manichaeans. Frequently, idols began their careers as “monuments in honour of certain much venerated persons … to keep alive their memory when they are absent.… But when much time passes by after the setting up of the monument, generations and centuries, its origin is forgotten, it becomes a matter of custom, and its veneration a rule for general practice. This being deeply rooted in the nature of man, the legislators of antiquity tried to influence them from this weak point of theirs.”[40]

Finally, Al-Biruni notes that India is a small part of the whole inhabited world and the Hindus represent only a minority of the world’s population.[41] He devotes an entire chapter to the Oikumene, the Greek term for the inhabited world.[42] Here, he obviously relies on Arab geographers who had amassed a far greater knowledge of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia than their Greek predecessors. His description of India, however, is much more detailed than the information offered by previous geographers. The “surrounding sea” called Okeanos by the Greeks he thinks not navigable, but he makes an exception for the Indian Ocean. He further points out that the Chinese Sea is also navigable. China itself is briefly discussed but the chapter does not contain any information about its geography or inhabitants. The black skin of some categories of slaves is mentioned but not discussed or explained. Apart from the passage on slavery, skin color and physiognomy are not mentioned at all. The inhabitants of the regions of the world are routinely classified by their national and ethnic names, and in many cases also by their religious beliefs. On political regimes Al-Biruni has much less to say. His book has no chapter on the political regimes of the states in India.

Surveying Al-Biruni’s study of India, he offers his readers an entirely serious discussion of the customs and the mind of India. He obviously admires many of the scientific accomplishments of the Indians, showing a particular interest in their measurement of space, their numbers, their geometry and mathematics, their chronology, and their astronomy. His lengthy treatment of the canonical books of the Hindu religion and his brief discussions of the caste system and Indian gender relations and sexual practices are likewise serious and fairly objective, though interrupted by vehement professions of Islamic orthodoxy and depictions of Indian practices as inversions of Islamic “normality.”

Al-Biruni’s meta-textual observations on cultural difference are noteworthy. His theoretical and historical explanation of the origins of idolatry demonstrates how pictures and statues of dead prophets and sages are transformed into holy symbols, making it thinkable to discuss religion as a historically evolving human artifact. His maxim on the ubiquity of ethnocentrism is remarkably similar to that of Herodotus. His discussion of “strangeness” goes further, proposing to explain why people consider the customs of others “strange” or “monstrous.” These theoretical observations stand in tension with his apodictic condemnatory utterances about non-Islamic religions.

The final point is the great number of comparative observations found throughout the book. Al-Biruni thus draws the reader’s attention to the plurality of customs and religions in the known world. He presents the Hindu religion as an integral system, comprehending doctrines, cultic practices, and social norms. As we have seen, he classifies religions according to their foundational tenets. His notion of religion as a coherent system cannot be found in the Indica of Megasthenes, an early third century BCE text. Megasthenes has Indians worship Dionysus and Hercules, ascribes Greek pantheism to them, and discusses bits and pieces of Hinduism as “the philosophy of the Brahmans.”[43] His Greek understanding of religious matters assumes the translatability of the gods. For Megasthenes, Hindu gods and cultic practices are imagined as parts of a worldwide polytheist continuum. For a Muslim, such an ecumenical approach to Hindu cults and beliefs is unthinkable. Consequently, Al-Biruni proposes a classification premised on difference rather than continuity. Of course, he often sought to make sense of Hindu practices and concepts by comparing them with Muslim notions, but he always acknowledged their distinctness and autonomy.

A Sufi Approach to Religious Difference

Sufism emerged as an identifiable current in Islamic religious practice and thought in the ninth century CE. The etymology of the term Sufi derives from wool (suf), a reference to the robes of coarse wool worn by many Sufis. Such garments indicated an austere lifestyle that sometimes turned into an extreme asceticism. The movement originated in Iraq, but in the early tenth century it gained major footholds in Iran, whence it penetrated into Central Asia.[44] Sometimes stigmatized as heretics, Sufis always sought recognition as a legitimate current in Sunni Islam. While mainstream Sunni Islam centered on morality, legal matters, and theology, Sufis privileged religion as a spiritual experience, an adventure of the mind. The forms of such spiritual adventures could vary across a wide spectrum, from world-renouncing mysticism to philosophical reflections on religious truth and the nature of God. The main tenet of Sufism was that only God truly exists; all other things, matter as well as the human mind, are emanations or “shadows” of God. Consequently, it became thinkable to view revelation and scriptures as human approximations of the divine, of which the true essence was ultimately hidden from human reason. The final consequence of that line of thought would be a relativist view of religious difference. We shall see that Sufis sometimes came close to such a “tolerant” view but that they never expressed it openly. In the Sufi orbit the limit of the thinkable was an Islamocentric tolerance.

Although they always recognized Islam as the “best” religion or, when speaking in public, as the only true religion, Sufis were frequently accused of heterodoxy by mainstream Muslims.[45] Sufis usually gathered in confraternities under the leadership of a recognized master (sheikh). Members of these sodalities of the adept had to go through a process of spiritual training and were bound by rules of secrecy. The masters of the Sufi orders forged their own faith, making for a broad plurality of Sufisms. When they committed their teaching to writing, Sufis frequently preferred poetry to the systematic language of theology. The famous thirteenth-century Persian Sufi poet Rumi called himself “the Nightingale of the Merciful” (“the Merciful” being one of the standard Quranic metonyms for God, although Rumi refers in particular to Sura 55, “The Merciful”).[46] However, the large corpus of Sufi texts also comprised hagiographical memorials of Sufi “saints.” Over the centuries, these memorials constituted an authoritative tradition that enabled Sufis to hand down their ideas and practices to succeeding generations.[47]

The esoteric nature of Sufi religious thought should not be taken as evidence of an elitist sect. In medieval Islam, Sufism reached out to ordinary people as well as the literate elites. Sufi masters were often approached as miracle workers, and meetings would use different media, from formal recitations and sermons to chanted poetry and music. In Iran and Central Asia, Sufis used Persian as their main language of written and oral communication. By 1500, hundreds of Persian Sufi texts circulated among a broad public, and Sufism had become an integral part of Persian and Central Asian literature. Publicly recited poems glorified the love of God. Their language frequently evoked an erotic imagery that would speak to the urban artisan as well as the learned man of letters.[48] Far from being a marginal minority of otherworldly mystics, Sufism represented one of the main currents of Islam.

Farid al-Din Attar (Nishapur, 1145 or 1146–1221) was the foremost Sufi poet of his time. All later Sufi writers looked up to him as an authoritative example. According to Leonard Lewisohn, “the literary edifice of medieval Persian Sufism was to a large degree set down on the foundations of Attar’s bold ‘religion of love’ poetry.”[49] For Attar, mere cerebral reasoning cannot access the divine essence, for true union with God is only possible as a result of a burning love that sets on fire the soul and the body alike. Like Al-Biruni, Attar’s intellectual trajectory fits into the Central Asian connection. In the Hudud al-Alam (The Regions of the World), a book on the geography of the Islamic world compiled in 982–983 in Afghanistan, Khurasan, the region comprising eastern Iran and Afghanistan, is described as “a country with much wealth … situated near the centre of the Inhabited Lands of the world,” and Attar’s home town Nishapur as “the largest and richest town in Khurasan.”[50] In Attar’s time Nishapur harbored a number of important Sufi fraternities. Attar’s open-minded view of other religions accords well with the composition of the population of Nishapur. In the twelfth century, Muslims constituted the majority, but there were sizable Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Christian communities.[51]

The plot of Attar’s best-known poem, The Conference of the Birds (Mantiq al-Tayr, 1187 CE) turns on the quest for self-knowledge through a vision of God, but it also contains philosophical reflection and social critique. The poem tells the story of the birds which, alone among all the nations of the world, are lacking a king. How shall they remedy this sorry state of affairs? It is the hoopoe, a beautiful reddish-brown bird with black and white stripes on its wings, who proposes an answer. The birds, he explains, actually have an august and wise king, the Simorgh, but they have forgotten his existence. The figure of the Simorgh, a mythical bird with stupendous powers, comes from the Shanameh, the Persian national epic written down by the poet Firdawsi around 1000 CE, but in Attar’s religious vision the quest for the Simorgh is an allegory for Muslims who have “forgotten” their God and need guidance to return to Him.

Right at the beginning, the hoopoe warns his fellow birds that it will not be easy to find the Simorgh, for his abode is far and far away, on a high mountain in a remote country. Long and arduous the journey shall be, and not all the birds will reach the final destination. Only those who keep a steadfast faith in the face of adversity will make it to the end. The reader soon discovers that more than one bird is reluctant to leave home. One of the first stragglers is the nightingale. He is in love with the rose and cannot part from her: “If she should disappear the nightingale would lose his reason and his song would fail.” The hoopoe will have nothing of this and severely reprimands the fainthearted bird:

Dear nightingale,

This superficial love for which you quail

Is only for the outward show of things.

Renounce delusion and prepare your wings

For our great quest; sharp thorns defend the rose

And beauty such as hers too quickly goes.

True love will see such empty transience

For what it is—a fleeting turbulence.[52]

Here is the perennial trope of the hollowness of sense experiences and transient pleasures, the “fleeting turbulence” of human life. The poem takes up this trope over and over again. The multifarious pretexts of the wavering birds are allegories of the whole range of passions and desires by which humans are led astray. In the poem, birds who are fettered by invisible chains to the transient pleasures of their earthly lives are invariably admonished to seek the true essence of things and to persevere in the quest for the Simorgh.

However, it is not only birds we encounter. The hoopoe tells his companions several stories about humans, in particular the high and mighty, and their failure to distinguish between inner truth and mere outward appearances. One of these human beings is none other than King Mahmud, whom we have already met as Al-Biruni’s patron. A wise man, “advanced along the Way,” one night conversed with Mahmud in a dream, querying the king how he looked back on his life from beyond the grave. Mahmud’s reply is tinged with the bitterness of the sinner whose atonement comes too late:

I have no majesty since I have died;

Your greetings pierce my soul. That majesty

Was only ignorance and vanity;

True majesty belongs to God alone—

How could a heap of dust deserve the throne?

Since I have recognized my impotence,

I blush for my imperial pretence.[53]

His true identity, Mahmud now realizes, is “unfortunate one,” not “king.” Had he gone through life as a wanderer begging for his food, he could have hoped for an auspicious end, but now he is beyond redemption and Hell’s devils lie in wait for him. In these lines, Attar is condemning the overweening pride of princes who cannot see that in the eyes of God they are no better than the lowliest of their subjects.

As the birds continue their journey, quite a few of them abandon the quest. And so it is only a small company of thirty birds that finally makes its way to the remote abode of the Simorgh. At the last moment, however, they are stopped by a herald who bids them to wait. Each of the birds receives a written page and has to read it before being admitted to behold the majesty of the king. Reading their pages, each of them is amazed to find the story of “all that their souls had ever been or done.” After accomplishing the duty of introspection and review of their less than immaculate lives, a “new life” flows into them and then, at last, the dazzling vision of the Simorgh is revealed. And what is it the thirty birds behold? They see thirty birds: “They gazed, and dared at last to comprehend they were the Simorgh and the journey’s end.” In the silence of the mind the shining Lord explains the meaning of their vision:

I am a mirror set before your eyes,

And all who come before My splendour see

Themselves, their own unique reality.

…

Though you have struggled, wandered, travelled far,

It is yourselves you see and what you are.[54]

What humans will find in God is the knowledge of their own true selves. That message is encoded in the Quran but not easily understood by carnal and ignorant human beings. The long voyage of the birds is an allegory of the spiritual struggle to understand the hidden meaning of God’s message. What Attar seeks to set forth in his poem is a hermeneutics of inner liberation, a catharsis of the self, and finally a dilution and immersion of the self in God.

Throughout, Attar seems to assume that the Quran is the most perfect vehicle for his hermeneutics of liberation. He frequently invokes the contrast between Islam and idolatry, so affirming his adherence to the true faith in the One God. Even so, the text of the Conference of the Birds appears to leave room for the righteous followers of other creeds. A striking example is the story of “the faithless Muslim and the faithful infidel.” The scene is one of war. At one moment, the Muslim requests a pause in the fighting to say his prayers. The infidel agrees and calmly waits until his foe has finished. Then the fighting resumes, but soon it is the turn of the infidel to ask for time to pray to his gods. As he bows down to his idol the Muslim raises his sword for the final deadly blow. But then a warning voice from highest heaven resounds:

O vicious wretch—from head to foot deceit—

What promises are these, you faithless cheat?

… The infidel was true;

He kept his promises, and so should you.

You offer evil in return for good—

With others act as to yourself you would!

The infidel kept faith with you, and where

Is your fidelity, for all your prayer?

You are a Muslim, but false piety

Is less than this poor pagan’s loyalty.[55]

Muslims, like the followers of other creeds, have to abide by the Golden Rule. “Our Quran,” the divine voice reminds the deceitful Muslim, says that you should fulfill your promises. If Muslims fail to do so, their piety is mere pretension. The honest loyalty of the “poor pagan” rates higher than the spurious piety of a deceiver.

Elsewhere in the poem, Attar tells a story about Al-Vasati, a Persian Sufi from the tenth century, who once passed a Jewish cemetery and said: “These souls are pardoned and go free; but this is not a truth that can be taught.” His words were reported to the authorities and Al-Vasati was cited before a court where angry judges wanted to know what he meant. The Sufi replied: “Your government accuses them; their pardon’s heaven-sent.”[56] The brief narrative about the extension of God’s mercy to the deceased Jews reflects the inner thrust of the entire poem. Al-Vasati’s warning that God’s mercy for Jewish souls is not a truth that can be taught bespeaks Attar’s authorial prudence.

Attar’s Sufism is suffused with a powerful vision of common humanity. In the prologue to the story of the birds, he celebrates the truth of Islam and the sublimity of its prophet, but his message is always inclusive and ever searches to include every soul willing to surrender itself to the truth: “Because the prophet’s light was sent for all, all follow it when it is visible. And he was sent to all, of every clime, to all mankind until the end of time” (note the analogy with Second Isaiah).[57] The same message, but in a slightly different mode, is conveyed in the allegorical language of the birds’ quest for the Simorgh:

Our pathways differ—no bird ever knows

The secret route by which another goes.

Our insights come to us by different signs;

One prays in mosques and one in idol’s shrines—

But when Truth’s sunlight clears the upper air,

Each pilgrim sees that he is welcomed there.[58]

This comes close to saying that the doctrinal differences between religions represent no more than the “different signs” followed by different peoples in their quest for the same Truth. Such a vision would accord with Attar’s repeated warning that mere humans, specks of dust animated by the sovereign power of the deity, must beware of the hubristic pretention that their puny reason can apprehend the real nature of God.[59]

Interestingly, a similar view is found in Attar’s writings on Sufi saints and their encounters with the adherents of non-Islamic creeds—the Tadhkirat al-Auliya (Memorial of the Saints). An important theme in these hagiographies is how the Sufi saint has liberated himself from earthly concerns and entered the path of wisdom. We encounter a beautiful example in the life of Shaqiq, a prominent Sufi adept from the ninth century. In his early days, we meet with Shaqiq as a Muslim merchant from Balkh who journeys to Turkestan to do business. On his way there, he enters a Buddhist temple where a worshipper is bowing down before an image of the Buddha. Shaqiq accosts the praying Buddhist with the standard Muslim criticism of idolatry: why does he waste his time worshipping an idol when there is a living omnipotent God who is the Lord of all human beings? The Buddhist, however, asks a question in return: if Shaqiq’s God is truly all-powerful, He will provide for him wherever he goes; so why does he seek to eke out a living by traveling to sell his wares in distant lands instead of staying home and putting his trust in God? The merchant realizes the truth of the Buddhist’s observation and at once decides to return to Balkh.

On his way home, he meets a Zoroastrian who wants to know what his business is. Learning that he is a trader, the Zoroastrian “advises him that if he has not been destined to receive something, he may seek until doomsday and will never attain it and that whatever has been ordained as his share will come to him without his seeking it. Upon hearing these words, Shaqiq undergoes a spiritual awakening and ceases to be concerned about the affairs of this earthly life.”[60] In the story written down by Attar, the Muslim Shaqiq is guided to understand the core Sufi notion of an unconditional reliance on God by two non-Muslims, a Buddhist and a Zoroastrian. Of the thirty-eight life stories of Sufi masters in Attar’s book, six present Zoroastrians as sources of spiritual guidance. To preclude an overly ecumenical reading of Attar we must note that four of the six stories end with the conversion of the Zoroastrian to Islam. According to Harry Neale, Attar’s Zoroastrians function as a literary device to produce estrangement and wonder in his readers, inducing them to ponder the mysteries of God’s will.[61]

That is not to say, however, that Attar reduces religious difference to mere convention. He sincerely believes in the truth of Islam. One of his stories recounts the debasement and emasculation of an old Muslim man who is enamored of a young Christian maiden and does away with the obligations of Islam to win her heart, only to be rebuffed and finally to return to the fold of Islam. Apostasy is here equated with unmanliness.[62] Even so, Attar’s writings suggest a modicum of tolerance toward the followers of other creeds. Islam may be superior to other religions, but that does not imply that individual Muslims are always better than individual Zoroastrians, Jews, or Christians. The lesson Attar seeks to impart is not a relativistic tolerance but humility and respect for religious others who honestly pursue virtue and justice. However, some of his comments suggest the more daring theory that all religions are no more than human approximations, or “signs,” of the “hidden God,” whose deep truth will forever elude human understanding. The following lines in particular have baffled his contemporaries as well as later commentators:

That ancient Zoroastrian

I am. It’s me who raised on high

The idol-house—pagoda—then

Upon its roof I gave a cry,

Declaimed to all the world’s folk,

Sounding ‘infidelity’ abroad:

O Muslims! Those idols I’ve rebuilt,

Put varnish on their fusty paint again.[63]

What to make of this? In line with Attar’s other utterances on religious difference we might understand these lines as an invitation to empathy. Dressing himself up as a Zoroastrian, Attar urges his readers to look at themselves through Zoroastrian eyes and to see the truth as it is expressed in the “signs” of a foreign creed. Elsewhere, Attar warns his readers not to lay claim to religion “without having first passed through and transcended infidelity.” In another place he contrasts the higher morality of a Christian child’s faith with the formalism of a Muslim pietist.[64]

On a higher level of abstraction, this brings us back to the empathy with the religious other. But who or what could be the object of such empathy? Lewisohn, from whose reading of Attar the above is taken, never pauses to consider that Zoroastrianism was not just a relic of the Persian past but also a thriving community in Nishapur. To Attar, Zoroastrians were not just a construct of the religious imagination but living people you might meet any day in the marketplace. One of his Sufi saints, Ahmad ibn Harb, was an inhabitant of Nishapur living next door to Bahram, a Zoroastrian merchant who has just lost all his wares to thieves. Ahmad at once commanded his disciples to condole with the unfortunate Bahram, saying: “Even though he is a Zoroastrian, yet he is a neighbour.”[65] This is not about the nature of the hidden God but about elementary obligations of common humanity that also apply across religious boundaries. Likewise, many of the stories in the Memorial of the Saints recount acts of charity to the poor and destitute as “signs” of saintliness. Admittedly, the obligation to almsgiving (zakat) was simply the third pillar of Islam, but Attar seems to think that most Muslims are unaware of its profound significance.

The social critique woven into these tales also appears from Attar’s comment on Rabe’a al-Adawiya, the only female saint in his Memorial. Anticipating resistance against the very notion of a woman Master, Attar declares: “If anyone says, ‘Why have you included Rabe’a in the rank of men?’ my answer is, that the Prophet himself said, ‘God does not regard your outward forms.’ … When a woman becomes a ‘man’ in the path of God, she is a man and one cannot any more call her a woman.”[66] The point here is not to portray Attar as some sort of proto-feminist but to underline that his religious imagination enabled him to cross boundaries others thought unsurmountable. That common humanity was important in its own right is apparent from Attar’s story of the fight between the Muslim and the infidel in the Conference of the Birds, where he categorically states that reciprocity, truthfulness, and abiding by promises are universal values without which all outward piety degenerates into vain posturing.

A century after Attar, Rumi, perhaps the most famous of all the Sufi poets, advocated a broad policy of toleration. According to Rumi unaided human reason is incapable of apprehending the divine truth—only religious wisdom can accomplish that. While previous Muslim authors mostly limited themselves to a plea for toleration of the different currents within Islam, Rumi harbors no such reservations. Truth is one but the ways to it are many. When a person beholds the essence of the soul, Rumi declares, “He sees Moses and Muhammad as the same.” This statement can be read as restricted to the peoples of the book, who enjoyed a limited toleration in most Islamic states, but Rumi’s vision is more encompassing than the traditional privileges of the monotheists under Islamic tutelage. All religious traditions have their sacred books, and all praise the love of God. In the final analysis, the essence of all religions is the same:

Since the beloved is only one,

Religions are nothing but the same.

…

If there are a hundred books, they are nothing but the same chapter.

The hundred directions taken are to the same altar.[67]

Elsewhere, Rumi declares that people should speak freely to God, “the way that children talk to their father,” loving and respectful, but not afraid to express what is on their mind.[68] Everyone who seeks to approach God must start somewhere and people begin their quest in different places. In a typical Sufi oxymoron, Rumi says that people who maintain that all religions are true are stupid, while those who say that they are all false are miserable. Relativism in regard to the Truth of God comes down to self-denial, but the different institutional religions in the world cannot claim to possess the sole and exclusive truth. If Muslims want to convert others, they must practice charity and lead exemplary lives that will attract non-Muslims to the truth of Islam. According to Rumi, cultural difference is part of the order of created being (in accordance with the Quranic dictum on cultural difference and unity in Sura 49:13). At one point, he quotes God speaking to Moses:

In everyone I have put a different disposition.

To everyone I have given a different logic.

What is extolling for him is reproaching for you.

What is nectarine for him is poison for you.[69]

Here Rumi and Attar appear to join hands. They share a basic approach to truth and cultural difference. Truth is one but cultures are many. God is One but religions are manifold. Every human being has to find a personal pathway in the dialectic of unified truth and the multiple avenues to attain it. Both the one truth and the many cultures are integral parts of God’s providential design for humanity. Admittedly, all Sufi sages reach out to universal truth and common humanity from an Islamic center, but their poetic language time and again decenters and destabilizes the proud “central” edifice of Islam. Their religious visions seem to suggest, but never explicitly proclaim, an Islamocentric universal toleration.

Ibn Khaldun and a New Theory of World History

Coming to Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), the major theorist of history in classical Islam, we move from Central Asia to the western marches of the Islamic commonwealth. In the fourteenth century, the Maghrib (the western part of North Africa) was ruled by Berber dynasties. The “Berbers” were the native inhabitants who had been pushed into the interior by the Arab conquerors. As always, the written sources are overwhelmingly on the side of the sedentary who coined a concept of “pure” nomadism that never matched any historical reality. Berber, the word indiscriminately used to refer to the people of the hinterland, is derived from the Roman barbarus, which, like its Greek counterpart, can be translated as “foreigner” as well as “barbarian.”[70]

Following time-worn stereotypes of nomadic life, eleventh- and twelfth-century Arabic geographers, such as Al-Bakri and Al-Idrisi, described the Berbers as “nomads who do not stay anywhere permanently.… They live on meat and milk as well as on grain which the earth produces without being tilled … and they have many camels.”[71] The similarity with ancient sources on the steppe nomads is striking. Just as in Herodotus and Sima Qian, a close reading of the Arabic geographers reveals that the “nomadic” economy was a mixed one, based on transhumance and including agriculture and horticulture.[72] Actually, the Arabic term badw, often rendered as “Bedouin,” has a broader meaning than “nomad.” A thirteenth-century Arabic-Latin dictionary, published in Andalusia, translates the adjective badawi as rusticus—that is, “belonging to the countryside.” It would thus include settled villagers as well as desert nomads.[73] Ibn Khaldun’s concept of badiya, often translated as “desert,” actually denotes the open country outside the towns and refers to various modes of social organization, a “continuum of rural and nomad ways of living.”[74] We shall shortly see that Ibn Khaldun’s theorization of the “Bedouin” is less stereotypical than the ancient views.

In the early eighth century the Berbers converted to Islam, making them potentially equal partners in the Umma of the Arab invaders. In the mid-eighth century, their great revolt coincided with the Abbasid revolution, resulting in an upgrading of their status. While Berbers had previously often been enslaved, they now engaged in the slave trade that supplied the Arabic economy with black slaves from sub-Saharan Africa. They were thus instrumental in the incorporation of the Sahara and West Africa into the transcontinental Islamic commonwealth.[75] Like the Scythians and the Xiongnu, the Berbers created powerful tribal federations. The first real Berber dynasty governed the Almoravid Empire that rose to power in the eleventh century and reached its greatest extension in the early twelfth century, when it included southern Spain and the entire Maghrib. In the twelfth century, the Almoravids were supplanted by Almohads, who controlled southern Spain and the Maghrib from Morocco to Tripolitania. Their empire was headed by a caliph who ruled in consultation with family members and the chiefs of the founding nomadic tribes.[76] Torn apart by the Christian resurgence in Andalusia, internal conflicts, and desert revolts, the Almohad state collapsed in the 1260s. Henceforth, rival Berber dynasties, frequently involved in bloody internecine struggles, ruled the Maghrib. Their fortunes provided the setting of Ibn Khaldun’s political career in the mid-fourteenth century.

Ibn Khaldun’s father and his maternal grandfather were councilors and ministers of the Hafsid dynasty.[77] Before writing his history, Ibn Khaldun was employed as councilor, minister, and military recruiter by various Berber princes. In a rather wayward fashion, he frequently changed patrons and equally frequently fell into disgrace. Over the years he spent quite some time in prison, but after each imprisonment came a new office in the service of a Maghrib sultan. Raising troops among the desert tribes, he acquired valuable firsthand experience of nomadic life. He learned the lessons of politics the hard way: his autobiography tells a grim story of political infighting, treason, conspiracies, falling into disgrace, imprisonment, and participating in hopeless battles. In 1372, when he was just over forty, Ibn Khaldun’s party was ambushed by a rebellious chief, robbed of their saddles and all their victuals, and left in the desert. They had to find a way back in the open desert without food, water, or shelter for two days before rejoining their companions in a mountain hamlet. Ibn Khaldun recounts the episode in a matter-of-fact manner, but one gets the impression that it was a narrow escape.[78]

Fortunately for Ibn Khaldun, who from boyhood was always thirsting for knowledge, such risky ventures alternated with calmer times, mostly devoted to administration, legal matters, and study. His father had exchanged military affairs for a life of seclusion and study, with a religious sympathy inclined to Sufism that would pass to his son. However, when Ibn Khaldun was sixteen his father, mother, and many of his relatives and teachers died in the plague, the great fourteenth-century epidemic that started around 1340 in Central Asia and was carried along the Silk Road to the Mediterranean. The Khaldun family was hit in 1348, the year the plague also swept through southern Europe. Henceforth, he had to fend for himself. Some ten years later, he married the daughter of a renowned Hafsid general. Even so, much of his life was marked by solitude.

Despite these tragic events, Ibn Khaldun got a fine education with excellent teachers. He reports with great delight that the library of Al-Hadrami, the secretary of the Sultan of Tunis, held more than 3,000 volumes. His philosophy teacher, Al-Abili, taught an Aristotelian curriculum that would certainly have included the great commentary of Ibn Rushd (Averroes). A lot of time was devoted to the Islamic schools of law, in particular the Maliki School. Of the four schools of Islamic legal theory, the Maliki and the Hanifi were the most flexible, recognizing non-Quranic sources of law, such as custom and the public interest, and thus more open to innovation.[79]

In 1374, after more political adventures and misfortunes, he and his family found sanctuary in the fortified village of Qalat Ibn Salâma (south of present-day Oran) under the protection of the powerful tribe of Awlaad’Arif. There, he began to assemble and organize his historical knowledge into a systematic ensemble. Not unlike Machiavelli in a later age, he felt the need to retire and reflect on the deeper historical patterns underlying the incessant alternation of prosperity and misfortune he had experienced over the past twenty years. Ibn Khaldun stayed four years at Ibn Salâma. In that remote desert stronghold he wrote the first draft of the Muqaddimah, a theoretical analysis of history that sought to uncover the underlying forces determining the rise and fall of dynasties and states.

After his sojourn in Ibn Salâma, Ibn Khaldun went to Cairo, where he remained the rest of his life. During the following twenty years he got embroiled in political intrigues, and, as before, his fortunes alternated between disgrace and various offices and teaching positions. In 1401 he visited Damascus on the eve of the sack of the city by Tamerlane, the last of the great Mongol conquerors. Ibn Khaldun had a series of long discussions with Tamerlane, who wanted information about the political situation in North Africa.[80] Thereafter, the Mongol prince gave him permission to return to Egypt. In 1406, he died and was buried in a Cairo Sufi graveyard.

Ibn Khaldun’s affinities with Sufism merit a brief discussion. Fromherz mentions in his Egyptian period he became the sheikh of a Sufi center of worship.[81] The discussion of Sufism in the Muqaddimah treats it as a legitimate current in Islam and shields it against the criticisms most frequently leveled at it. The Sufi mystical experiences, he notably observes, “are sound ones. Their realization is the very essence of happiness.”[82] From his writings we know Ibn Khaldun as a man weary of fanaticism and dogmatism. Sufi teachings about the need to penetrate beyond superficial appearances to knowledge of God and oneself may have attracted a man who had to weather many storms in his life. Tarif Khalidi conjectures that Sufism may have stimulated his historical thinking in an indirect manner, observing that the Sufis, “by denying that the present was fully real or intelligible and emphasizing transcendence, helped to diffuse the contrast between appearance and reality in an age when many historians could barely contain their amazement at the speed and scale of events and the ambiguity of their significance.”[83]

During his Egyptian years, Ibn Khaldun gathered much new historical and geographical material, both in the great libraries of Cairo and in conversations with scholars, merchants, and travelers. In one place he states that his informants about Central Asia included people from China “whom I have met.”[84] Keen to understand the historical background of the threatening Mongol invasion of Iraq and Syria, he investigated “how the kings of these Tatars from Jenghiz Khan on, happened to rule the world, much to the astonishment of the Islamic peoples.”[85] He collected information about Asian geography from the works of the great geographer Al-Idrisi, as well as from Ibn Battutah’s famous travelogue. He also became interested in comparative religion. We may conclude that his research in Cairo enabled Ibn Khaldun to transform himself from a historian of the Maghrib into a historian of the entire known world.

The World of Ibn Khaldun

To understand Ibn Khaldun one must appreciate his way of thinking and writing. As a clue to his state of mind during the crucial months when he wrote down the first version of his theory of history, his autobiography explains that “torrents of words and ideas were pouring into my mind and were sifted and agitated there until I had extracted the best from them and worked out the results.”[86] He must have written at a frenzied pace, for the Muqaddimah is a massive text, running to almost 1,500 pages in Franz Rosenthal’s English translation. Having no library at his disposal, Ibn Khaldun had to work from memory. He formulated, recombined, and reworked his ideas as he went on. The first draft of the Muqaddimah was written in Ibn Salâmah, but the work was revised and expanded during his stay in Cairo.[87] Many students of Ibn Khaldun have commented on the different, sometimes diverging explanations and theories found in his work, and he has been taken to task for misinterpreting the wellsprings of the political crises of his time.[88] In my opinion, we should not criticize him too harshly for such inconsistencies but rather realize that he was groping toward a completely novel vision of history.

The Dynamics of World History in Ibn Khaldun

Like Herodotus, Sima Qian, and Tacitus, Ibn Khaldun is keenly interested in the great frontier of the sedentary and the nomadic, but unlike his predecessors he theorizes the sedentary-nomadic dialectic as the engine of history and seeks to write history with a worldwide perspective.

. To put his approach in proper perspective let us briefly survey his writings. First comes the Muqaddimah, sometimes called prolegomena, where the author unfolds his theory of history. The next part deals with the history of the non-Arab and non-Muslim peoples. The other parts mainly discuss the eastern part of the Islamic commonwealth, ranging from Egypt through the Middle East into Central Asia. These volumes also include much material on the history of the Mongol Empire. Finally, a number of books deal with the history of the Berbers, structured around the genealogies of the main Berber nations and tribes rather than a continuous chronology. A further source of valuable information is Ibn Khaldun’s autobiography.[89] The overall title of the history, the Kitab al Ibar, is usually rendered as The Book of Instructive Examples. The term Ibar is derived from a verb meaning “to pass from the outside to the inside of a thing” or, metaphorically, to penetrate its inner meaning. Musin Mahdi, on whose discussion of Ibar I am drawing, cites a saying from the Hadith enjoining Muslims to “learn from the world and not [merely] pass through it.” It encouraged historians to look beneath the surface of events to deeper patterns and lessons. To historians familiar with Greek and Islamic political history it suggested that narrative history opened the way to universally valid knowledge, as in the famous maxim of Dionysius of Halicarnassus that history is “philosophy teaching by example.”[90]

“History,” Ibn Khaldun declares in the opening lines of the Muqaddimah, “is a discipline widely cultivated among nations and races.… Ordinary people aspire to know it. Kings and leaders vie for it.”[91] In his study of the history of Arabic historiography, Tarif Khalidi distinguishes four succeeding schools, of which the latter two were of particular import for Ibn Khaldun. The third school was characterized by hikma—that is, “sound judgement” or “wisdom.” Scholars who took this road valued rules of inquiry and pointed out that historians should digest and, if need be, criticize the work of their predecessors. Applying insights from Greek philosophy and geography they adopted the seven climate zones for the classifications of peoples. Generally, hikma scholars distinguished seven nations skilled in theoretical learning: the Indians, Persians, Chaldeans, Hebrews, Greeks, Byzantines, and Egyptians. The Chinese are mentioned less often.[92] As so often in history, intellectual innovation was conditioned by cross-cultural exchange. In this connection, the tenth-century historian Al-Mas’udi is of special interest because we know that Ibn Khaldun greatly valued his work.[93] He lauds his comprehensive treatment of “the conditions of nations and regions in the West and the East.” Drawing on Al-Mas’udi, Ibn Khaldun formulates a paradigm for future historians:

When there is a general change of conditions, it is as if the entire creation had changed and the whole world been altered, as if it were … a world brought into existence anew. Therefore there is need at this time that someone should systematically set down the situation of the world among all regions and races, as well as the customs and sectarian beliefs that have changed for their adherents, doing for his age what al-Mas’udi did for his. This should be a model for future historians to follow. In this book of mine I shall discuss as much of that as will be possible for me here in the Maghrib.[94]

The critical transformation Ibn Khaldun is referring to was the great plague of the mid-fourteenth century that decimated populations everywhere. Interestingly, he next states his intention to limit his history to the Maghrib, apparently not yet confident that an analysis of the changes in the entire world is feasible for him. However, surveying the entire Kitab al Ibar, we can see that as soon as he got access to the relevant sources Ibn Khaldun sought to realize the model set forth in his comment on Al-Mas’udi.

The fourth school of history in classical Islam was concerned with Siyasa, that is to say, “rule” or “politics.” This school emerged in the final decades of the eleventh century, in response to the increasing bureaucratization and militarization of the Islamic states, which were in turn connected to the terrifying incursions of Christian crusaders and Mongol conquerors in the Dar al-Islam. In a nutshell, political crises stimulated a keen interest in state formation, and in particular in the causes of the breakdown of political order.

The sense of crisis is well conveyed by an exclamation of the thirteenth-century geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi: “In the year 616 [1219–1220 CE] there occurred events the like of which have not happened since the creation of the heavens and the earth. I refer to the arrival of the Mongols, may God forsake them, from the land of China.” In a similar vein, the historian Ibn al-Athir, a contemporary of Al-Hamawi, comments that “neither ancient history nor modern records any event similar to what happened with these Mongols, namely that a group of people would emerge from the frontiers of China and within one year would reach Armenia from one direction and approach Iraq from another.”[95] To put it strongly, Muslim historians acquired a fresh interest in political crisis and world history because world history, in the guise of the Mongol armies, was breaking and entering the House of Islam. Such a cataclysmic event called for a rethinking of the foundations of history and the fate of states. The art of secular government (Siyasa) became the chief subject of history, leaving Sharia to the theologians.

Considered as a whole, Ibn Khaldun’s writings offer the reader a world-historical approach to the Afro-Eurasian Islamic commonwealth of his time, but with a particular focus: like the Siyasa historians discussed above, he was above all interested in the causes of the breakdown and collapse of states. His main accomplishment was a new social explanation of the rise and decline of states. There is perhaps no better illustration of the world-historical vision and the focus on decline than the opening chapter of the History of the Berbers, where Ibn Khaldun briefly sketches the formation of the great Islamic Empire but immediately goes on to observe that the imperial venture finally consumed the energy of all the Arab tribes which had assisted in its creation. Many of them perished in the great battles that were still remembered in Ibn Khaldun’s time, but the really fateful factor was that “the Arab people forgot the desert life and lost the faculties which had enabled them to come to power and to subdue the nations.” The new Arab princes tolerated no equals at their side, sidelined the traditional chiefs, and organized armies of slaves and mercenaries recruited among “strangers.” Consequently, the reins of power passed into other hands: “Thus, in the Orient, the Deilemites, the Seljuks, the Kurds, the Ghozz, and the Turks, peoples of foreign descent, have, one after another, imposed their rule on the Islamic empire, up to our times. Likewise in the Occident, where the Zenata and the other Berber peoples have in turn seized power, and are still ruling today, as we will recount in this book.”[96]

The Concept of Asabiya and the Rise and Fall of States

Asabiya is the key explanatory concept underpinning Ibn Khaldun’s theory of history. The term is derived from the Arabic root asab, which means “to tie together.” According to Ibn Khaldun, no human community can endure without asabiya. Variously translated, De Slane, Khaldun’s nineteenth-century French translator, rendered it as esprit de corps; Franz Rosenthal opts for “group feeling”; Abdesselam Cheddadi uses esprit de corps as well as solidarité. Most recently, Fromherz translates it as “tribal solidarity.” I shall leave it untranslated, because Ibn Khaldun employs it in a rather flexible manner.[97]

Ibn Khaldun argues that asabiya is in the first place based on blood relationships in extended families, because respect for blood ties comes naturally to all people. They feel shame when their relatives are unjustly treated or attacked and seek to help them to ward off the danger. This is a “natural urge” in all human beings. However, asabiya can also arise on a larger scale—namely, among tribes, clients, and allies. Client relationships, Ibn Khaldun posits, lead to close contacts in approximately the same way as common descent.[98] This gives us a clue to his understanding of state power: a state is essentially a network of clients held together by a ruling elite that itself is united by the ties of kinship. The Almohad Empire is a good example. At its apex stood a prince who ruled in concert with a restricted council of family members and a larger council of the fifty chiefs of the founding tribes of the empire. The tribes themselves were also held together by ties of kinship and clientage. A larger state could thus subsist by means of a multitiered system of blood relationships and clientage. Asabiya is a social force that cannot be summoned at will by a ruler, however magnificent his status and lineage.

The basic axiom underpinning Ibn Khaldun’s theory is that the differences of condition among people are the result of the different ways in which they make their living. As he distinguishes between a life of agriculture and pasturage on the one hand and an urban economy on the other, it follows that the people living in the countryside and the sedentary urban people “are natural groups which exist by necessity.”[99] According to Ibn Khaldun, the desert people, and more generally the inhabitants of the countryside, “are the basis of, and prior to, cities and sedentary people.” This is so because humans begin with the bare necessities, and only later acquire comforts and luxuries. He also calls the desert “the reservoir of civilization and cities.” Still thinking of the Maghrib, he argues that his thesis will be confirmed by an investigation of the inhabitants of any city. Most of these, he posits, “originated among Bedouins dwelling in the country and villages of the vicinity.” The formulation shows that Bedouin can refer to the villagers in the immediate hinterland of the cities as well as to the desert nomads. Actually, he explains that people “living by agriculture or animal husbandry cannot avoid the call of the desert, because it alone offers the wide fields, acres, pastures for animals … that the settled areas do not offer.” Here, the “desert” obviously includes the sown.

Cities emerge when the people of the countryside have gathered enough wealth to desire a more comfortable way of life. For Ibn Khaldun, this proves that the countryside is primary in a historical as well as a demographic sense. The relation between countryside and town is not, however, a symmetrical one. The “Bedouin,” Ibn Khaldun declares, strives after comfort, and when he has obtained enough “he enters upon a life of ease and submits himself to the yoke of the city.” This is the case with all Bedouin tribes. Sedentary people, on the other hand, have no desire to return to a rural lifestyle.[100] It seems probable that Ibn Khaldun generalized from the evolution of the Berber groups who staffed and governed the states of the Maghrib in his time, although he also refers to the Turks, the Turcoman tribes, and the Slavs.[101]

Ibn Khaldun’s evaluation of the virtues and vices of people living in the countryside and the inhabitants of the towns destabilizes any fixed hierarchy in terms of higher and lower, or civilized and barbarian. The Bedouin are depicted as physically robust, beautiful, resourceful, and virtuous, but also as unkempt, “wild,” and “almost like animals.” The townspeople are portrayed as civilized, ingenious, learned, and industrious, but also as unhealthy, ugly, effeminate, and lacking in solidarity and virtue. The chapter discussing the qualities of the two groups is titled “Bedouins Are Closer to Being Good Than Sedentary People.”[102]

The maxim that luxury corrupts runs through the entire Muqaddimah. Ibn Khaldun uses a biological metaphor to diagnose the typical evolution of urban life. Maturity is inevitably followed by decline and senility. Comfort and luxuries undermine the health of the soul. There is never enough and people compete for riches. The results are immorality, wrongdoing, insincerity, trickery, lying, gambling, cheating, fraud, theft, perjury, and usury. Immorality and obscene talk, even in the company of women, grow apace. Next, people resort to adultery and homosexuality, undermining the ties of kinship, because there is no certainty that the son is really sired by the father.[103] The analysis is highly dialectical, for the strengths of cities, such as prosperity, industry, trade, skills, and ingenuity, are precisely the wellsprings of their corruption. Ibn Khaldun’s own attitude was equally ambiguous. His dismissive critique of urban culture did not prevent him from living in cities for the greater part of his life. Moreover, he was a man obsessed by the acquisition of ever more knowledge. Cairo, where he spent the last twenty-three years of his life, is characterized as “the mother of the world, the great center of Islam, and the mainspring of the sciences and the crafts.”[104] That is hardly the language of a man who despises urban culture.

Moreover, at the beginning of his detailed discussion of the sciences Ibn Khaldun declares that the ability to think is what distinguishes humans from animals. God planted the seed of perfection in humans by endowing them with reason.[105] Observing that the sciences are more advanced in the east—he mentions Cairo, Iraq, Khurasan, and Transoxania—he adamantly rejects the opinion that the eastern peoples are by nature more intelligent than the inhabitants of the Maghrib. The true explanation, he concludes, “lies in the additional intelligence that accrues from the influences of sedentary culture.”[106]

In the end, the Arabs managed to establish dynasties in the Maghrib, but within two centuries their states disintegrated and were supplanted by the Berber dynasties Ibn Khaldun knew so well. Above, we have cited his summary explanation of this transition in the opening chapter of the History of the Berbers. The Muqaddimah seeks to construct a generalized theoretical exposition of why this was bound to happen sooner or later. The attentive reader, however, soon discovers that Ibn Khaldun actually offers three explanations for the rise, staying power, and decline of dynasties. The first one relies entirely on asabiya, the second one adds a theory of how custom can become a second nature, and the third one invokes the unifying power of religion.

In the first and main explanation, Ibn Khaldun depicts the “natural” transition from nomadic to sedentary culture as a contradictory historical dialectic in which the nomads are civilized but also progressively divested of their primordial asabiya. Once a dynasty is founded the process of decay inevitably unfolds. The founder of the dynasty retains his desert customs and leads in battle, which gives him the authority to rule and the skills to keep the state together. His son has learned the trade under his guidance and follows his example. The next ruler thrives on imitation and “tradition” but has come under the spell of urban culture. Meanwhile, luxury has sapped the fighting spirit of his followers, who would rather hire mercenaries than ride out to battle themselves. The money to pay the hirelings is collected by taxation and confiscation, which further saps the body politic. The man of the fourth generation is a weak leader, who fancies that governmental authority is his birthright. Ibn Khaldun calls him “the destroyer,” because his inept leadership usually brings about the collapse of the dynasty. Its gravediggers are already waiting in the wings. The mercenaries, on whom the military might of the dynasty now relies, are recruited among the desert tribes. Sooner or later they revolt, depose the “destroyer,” and elect one of their leaders to take over the reins of the tottering dynasty. New blood and fresh asabiya restore the vitality of the state and the stage is set for the next dynastic cycle to run its fateful course.[107] In this condensed form, the explanation focuses on the psychology of the leader, but Ibn Khaldun applies the same reasoning to the mentality of the ruling stratum of a dynasty, suggesting that it may “contaminate” the entire body of the townspeople, who fall into selfishness and quarreling, thus preparing the ground for a new group to take power.[108]

This explanation makes up the core of Ibn Khaldun’s theory of dynastic cycles, but in asides and what sometimes look like afterthoughts he invokes two other explanations of political authority. One is rooted in custom. For example, he observes that when royal authority has been passed on by inheritance over many generations the obligation to obey the royal family becomes “a firmly established article of faith” and by that time the rulers will be able to maintain their power without much asabiya. But not forever, for these remarks are followed by a brief analysis of the Abbasids from their original glory through their reliance on Persian, Turkish, and other clients to their final undoing at the hands of the invading Tatars.[109] One gets the impression that Ibn Khaldun briefly glimpses the hold of tradition on the popular mind but then reverts to his main theoretical line, suggesting that the utmost tradition can accomplish is to postpone the day of reckoning.

The third source of authority Ibn Khaldun invokes is religion. It can call forth political energy by taming the excessive wildness of unruly desert people. The weak point of the Bedouins is their propensity to overestimate the autonomy of the tribe, but a prophet or a holy man can unite them and make them submit to truth and right guidance. The great successes of the Arabs in the first centuries after Muhammad, he maintains, could not have come about without the unifying force of Islam.[110] However, in other discussions of the role of religion he seems to take back what he offers here. There he defends the thesis that “every mass undertaking by necessity requires asabiya,” and that this also applies to religious movements. The chapter closes with some examples of holy men and self-proclaimed prophets who dismally failed for a lack of popular following, anticipating Machiavelli’s famous dictum that only armed prophets are successful.[111]

Ibn Khaldun thus frequently analyzes religion like any other historical source of power, but as a believing Muslim he also acknowledges the working of God’s Providence in history. Islam, Musin Mahdi posits, “added new dimensions to the meaning of history by deepening its moral aspects.… It presented the believer with the whole compass of universal history, from Creation to the coming of Islam” and finally to the Day of Judgment.[112] To Muslims, Ibn Khaldun explains, holy war is a religious duty because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam, “either by persuasion or by force.” This also explains why royal authority and the caliphate are united in Islam, whereas religious and political leadership are separate among the Jews and the Christians.[113] In line with these statements, Ibn Khaldun explains the extremely rapid expansion of early Islam in terms of its divine origin, even though asabiya is not entirely absent from the story.[114] Considered in this perspective, the historical role of Islam cannot be entirely reduced to the effects of asabiya. In this connection it has also been argued that Ibn Khaldun recognized the positive role of Islam in the struggle to unify the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula and to overcome their tribal parochialism.[115] This leads to the view that Islam began its career as a local creed, then grew into a religion of all the Arabs, and finally became a universal “imperial” religion thanks to the Arab expansion into Eurasia and Africa.

Ibn Khaldun, we may conclude, accepts Islam as a revelation realizing God’s design in history. However, he also regards it as a historical phenomenon interacting with other historical factors, of which asabiya is by far the most important. Accordingly, he explains the rapid worldwide expansion of Islam as the effect of divine Providence, but also as the outcome of the asabiya of the Arab tribes. Interestingly, a similar duality appears in his view of the nature of the Quran. The orthodox view was that the Quran was timeless, the uncreated word of God, and consequently could not have a history. Ibn Khaldun subscribes to this view, but then makes an important qualification. The Quran, he explains, is a term with a double meaning: “It is primeval and persisting in the essence of God.… But it is (also) created, in as much as it consists of combinations of letters (sounds) produced in the recital by human voices. When it is called primeval, the first thing is meant. When it is called recitable or audible, this refers to its recitation and written fixation.”[116] Such a twofold interpretation of the Quran is in line with the distinction Ibn Rushd (Averroes) made between the theological and philosophical roads to the truth.

Visions of Common Humanity in Ibn Khaldun

The bulk of the peoples and tribes discussed by Ibn Khaldun, whether nomadic or sedentary, inhabited the temperate zone comprising the three middle bands of the seven climate zones. These peoples have a history, and without taking into account the nomadic as well as the sedentary peoples in the moderate zone the course of world history cannot be explained. The moderate zones thus represented the orbit of “civilization” and “humanity” in a broad sense.

When we move south beyond the Sahara or north beyond the steppe, the picture changes. Ibn Khaldun’s treatment of the sub-Saharan Africans calls to mind the scattered observations of Herodotus about the lands north of Scythia, Sima Qian’s brief remarks about the far north, or Tacitus’s judgment of the northeastern barbarians living beyond Germania. About the black Africans Ibn Khaldun has this to say:

Their buildings are of clay and reeds. Their foodstuffs are durra and herbs. Their clothing is the leaves of trees … or animal skins. Most of them go naked. The fruits and seasonings of their countries are strange and inclined to be intemperate.… Their qualities of character, moreover, are close to those of dumb animals. It has even been reported that most of the Negroes of the first zone [the tropics] dwell in caves and thickets, eat herbs, live in savage isolation and do not congregate, and eat each other. The same applies to the Slavs.[117]

The brief reference to the Slavs demonstrates that “savages” are found in the subarctic climate zones as well as in the tropics.

Drawing on Greek and Arabic geography, Ibn Khaldun explains the physiognomy and the customs of the peoples of the world according to the climate zones they inhabit. In the three middle zones, we encounter the peoples, both sedentary and nomadic, who receive a detailed treatment in his history. The middle zones are the home of animal husbandry, agriculture, urban culture, and learning. By contrast, virtually all the inhabitants of the intemperate zones in the north and the south “are ignorant of all religion … [and] all their conditions are remote from those of human beings and close to those of wild animals.”[118] Skin color is likewise determined by climate. The biblical exegesis that the blackness of Africans is due to Noah’s curse of Ham is scornfully dismissed. According to Ibn Khaldun, the Torah says nothing about blackness, and apart from that it is an unscientific explanation.[119] The widely held theory that the biblical genealogy of humanity, starting from the three sons of Noah, explained physical and cultural difference, he likewise rejected. “The genealogists,” Ibn Khaldun posits, “were led into this error by their belief that the only reason for differences between nations is in their descent.”[120] In reality, he adds, descent is only one of the factors accounting for such differences, the others being climate, environment, religion, and custom. As all these factors change over time, a simple genealogical explanation is bound to fall short of the mark.

Ibn Khaldun had good reasons to criticize the myth of the Sons of Ham. From the eighth century onward, the Arabs had imported slaves from two regions: black slaves from sub-Saharan Africa and white slaves from Europe and Western Asia. The white slaves, later called mamluks (literally “owned ones”), were employed in a broad range of capacities, from soldiers and servants to high political offices. Female white slaves, notably from Circassia, were used as prostitutes, courtesans, and household servants. Furthermore, white slaves were used in prisoner exchanges with European states. Many of them converted to Islam, and as their children or grandchildren were frequently emancipated, they assimilated into the Umma. The fate of black slaves (called abid, the classical term for slave) was less fortunate. They were put to work on the fields, in land reclamation projects in Iraq, and in the copper and salt mines of the Sahara. The myth of Ham served as a justification of the harsh treatment of the African slaves. By his refutation of the Hamitic myth Ibn Khaldun cleared the way for his own theory of African inferiority in terms of climate and “savage” rudeness.

It is quite clear that Ibn Khaldun’s information about these “savages” was exceedingly thin and forms a stark contrast with the wealth of information he had gathered about the temperate zones. His notion of humanity included the inhabitants of the temperate zones, nomadic as well as sedentary. Common humanity thus included the Arabs and the Berbers, the Rum (the Romans, inhabiting the remnants of the Byzantine Empire), Christian Europe, the Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Israelites, the Persians, the Indians, the peoples of Central Asia, the Chinese, and, albeit with some hesitation, the Mongols. According to Ibn Khaldun, ocean currents may make some southern regions, such as the Arabian Peninsula and Abyssinia, more moderate than their latitude would suggest. In some cases, such as Abyssinia and Mali, he regards religion as another moderating influence. In this connection he made no difference between Islam and Christianity: both were considered carriers of civilization. His climatic determinism is thus somewhat mitigated by the inclusion of cultural factors in his classification of peoples.

As a believing Muslim, Ibn Khaldun never contradicts the unity of humanity, but his discussion of the peoples of the world suggests that the common humanity of the savages living in the intemperate zones did not amount to much and certainly would not afford them protection against maltreatment. In light of such judgments, the enslavement of “savage” Africans would appear as quite acceptable. In this respect there is not much to choose between Ibn Khaldun and the three historians discussed earlier.

We may conclude that the sedentary and nomadic peoples inhabiting the moderate zone constitute the core of Ibn Khaldun’s conception of humanity. By now it will also be clear that we cannot ascribe a vision of a complete equality of sedentary and nomadic peoples to Ibn Khaldun but neither can we find a clear hierarchy of the two cultures in his work. Fuad Baali and Ali Wardi remark that “his intimate relationships with the men of knowledge on the one hand and with the tribal chieftains on the other left him … perplexed.”[121] That seems a fair diagnosis. Ibn Khaldun’s lengthy discussions of the two social milieus constantly navigate between admiration and critique. What sets him apart from Herodotus, Sima Qian, and Tacitus is his steady focus on the evolving interactions between the two cultures. Admittedly those historians also highlight interaction between the nomads and the sedentary people, but these relate to war, trade, and the voyages of merchants, pilgrims, diplomats, and explorers. To them, the anthropological turn centered on the recognition of the autonomous functionality of the nomadic way of life. In Ibn Khaldun’s history, on the other hand, the patterns of interaction deeply affect the history and the “nature” of the two groups. He studies the histories of the nomads and the urban people as interlocking parts of an overarching sociocultural process that is the “engine” of history and that provides him with an explanatory theory. Consequently, the nomads are not portrayed as deviations from the “normal” civilized case but as one of the two “natural groups” inhabiting the moderate climatic zone. The nomads fully partake in common humanity even though they are not entirely accepted as “equals.”

The crucial point is that in Ibn Khaldun’s history the nomads and the sedentary people no longer represent clearly demarcated social ensembles. There is a continuous human stream from the desert and the steppe to the urban zones, a movement maintained by acculturation processes among the nomads and the dynastic cycles of sedentary states. In Ibn Khaldun’s historical analysis, we can usefully distinguish between the underlying social ecology and the political phenomena. The structural divide between nomadic and sedentary spaces is environmentally and climatologically determined, and remains in place over the centuries. Dynasties, states, and empires may rise and fall, but agriculture, roads, and towns there will always be, just as the desert perpetually endures.

Probably stimulated by his experience of the Berber dynasties, Ibn Khaldun’s self-imposed assignment was to give a reasoned historical account of the nomadic-sedentary interaction. Starting from the Maghrib, he extended his view eastward and sought to include the rise of Islam and the historical trajectories of the Eurasian steppe peoples in his theory. His dynamic approach represented a step beyond the far more static visions of the nomadic-sedentary interaction set forth by his ancient predecessors. Just as Frederick Jackson Turner declared in his famous 1893 lecture that the frontier “explains” American development, so Ibn Khaldun might have said (if he had used our terminology) that the nomadic-sedentary frontier “explained” world history.[122] The nomadic-sedentary dialectic was envisioned as an irresistible oscillating dynamic that never attains equilibrium. All putative hierarchies of sedentary and nomadic culture are continuously destabilized in an ever-ongoing historical movement. That is the core of the anthropological turn in Ibn Khaldun’s theory of history.[123]

Let us now attempt to summarize Ibn Khaldun’s view of common humanity. In his writings we can identify three languages of common humanity. The first is an Islamic universalism. Humanity is one because all humans are created by God and stem from the same primeval couple. The kernel of humanity is the Islamic Umma which all others can join by converting to the true faith. Ibn Khaldun’s history centers on the Islamic commonwealth but also reaches beyond it, including various non-Islamic regions. As we have seen, religious fervor and leadership play a significant role in Ibn Khaldun’s explanation of the victorious expansion of Islam in its first centuries. This, then, yields a religious language of common humanity, an Islamocentric historical vision comparable with the Christian success story.

The second language of common humanity we can characterize as a modified Aristotelianism. Aristotle’s priority of the polis is supplanted by a dual model in which both the urbanites and the countryside population are defined as groups that exist by natural necessity, tied together by the demographic dynamics and the political interactions of Ibn Khaldun’s theory of the rise and fall of states. The ensemble of the sedentary and the nomadic constitutes the ambit of civilization, but within this ensemble the urban population represents the cultural center. The sedentary-nomadic complex is defined in climatological terms. The core of humanity is found in the middle, “moderate zone” of the Northern Hemisphere, extending from east to west throughout Eurasia and North Africa. Beyond it lie the lands of the northern peoples and sub-Saharan Africa, designated by Ibn Khaldun as “savages.”

The third language of common humanity—suggested but not theoretically elaborated by Ibn Khaldun—defines humanity as the ensemble of clans, tribes, cities, states, and empires participating in worldwide connections and exchanges. It was the vast tricontinental extension of the Islamic commonwealth that made such a perspective thinkable. We have encountered its most pregnant expressions in the discussions of global crises by Ibn Khaldun and some of his contemporaries. The bubonic plague that swept through Eurasia and the devastating incursions of the Mongols brought about “a general change of conditions … a world brought into existence anew.” In such terms, Ibn Khaldun expounded the global conflagrations future historians ought to study and explain. The known world is redefined as a community of fate. It includes all peoples affected by worldwide epidemics, migrations, trade flows, wars, and the politics of empires.

The Unity of Creation and the Diversity of Cultures

Let us start from the often-quoted Quranic verse on the unity of humanity: “People, We created you from a single man and a single woman, and made you into nations and tribes, so that you should recognize one another.”[124] The three thinkers in this chapter would all have recognized these lines as revealed truth, but when asked to explain their meaning and purport their answers might well have diverged.

I think that Attar’s answer would have been the most straightforward. For him, the verse would have confirmed his basic conviction that the diversity of customs, languages, and creeds belonged to the outward phenomenology of this world. In order to know themselves and God, human beings must penetrate beyond such superficial appearances. Finally realizing that God is the mirror in which they can behold their own true nature, like the birds facing the Simorgh, they cannot fail to acknowledge the humanity of others as equally partaking in the divine. Attar’s God bears some analogy to the cosmic logos of the Stoics. It is by the recognition of their participation in something that is higher than themselves and beyond ordinary understanding that humans come to comprehend that their own humanity is predicated on the humanity of their fellow human beings.

Beyond that, Attar’s exemplary stories and his biographies of Sufi masters demonstrate that he wanted them understood as a correction of parochial ethnocentrism. His vision of God includes a universalist notion of justice and honesty, as demonstrated by the story of the fight between the Muslim and the infidel. When the chips are down, the faithful infidel is a better man than the faithless Muslim. Likewise, the role of Zoroastrians and Buddhists in his Sufi biographies shows that the apprehension of the innermost Truth about the human dependence on God is not the monopoly of any religion, not even of Islam. While affirming the ultimate truth of Islam, Attar’s writings warn individual Muslims that they are as likely to fall short of the mark as the followers of any other creed. Organized religion offers a point of entry, but each individual has to embark on the quest for the truth and each individual shall stand alone on the Day of Judgement.

The religious creeds of Al-Biruni and Ibn Khaldun may well have overlapped with Attar’s vision of God—let us recall Ibn Khaldun’s affinities with Sufism—but their writings, while giving Islam its due, open up cultural and historical paths to understanding a culturally pluralist world. Like Attar, Al-Biruni’s maxim on the ubiquity of ethnocentrism invites his readers to look into a mirror, but it is a mirror of their own making rather than a divine one. His serious and honest engagement with the culture of Hindu India invites readers to familiarize themselves with cultural otherness and to imagine, albeit only for a fleeting instant, what it would mean to be an Indian or a Hindu. Moreover, his appreciative discussion of Indian mathematics and astronomy demonstrates that “idolaters” may well equal, or even surpass, Muslims in the scientific field. In some respects, his treatment of India recalls Herodotus’s ethnography of Egypt. In both cases, we meet with a careful investigation of a civilization the otherness of which at times confounds the author, but which he nonetheless takes seriously and sometimes even admires. The difference is that Herodotus assumes the translatability of the gods, a road that is not open to a Muslim.

Al-Biruni’s numerous observations on comparative religion go beyond the acceptance of cultural plurality. He frequently compares across a broad range of civilizations. His discussion of Hinduism as one religion among a number of others and his classification of religions according to their fundamental tenets became possible by the expanded geographical horizon of the medieval Islamic commonwealth, which had established communications with all the major civilizations of the Old World, from West Africa to China and the Indian Ocean. Al-Biruni’s version of the anthropological turn emerged out of his Central Asian experience and his association with Mahmud of Ghazna, but it would not have been possible without the impressive amount of geographical, ethnographical, and historical knowledge accumulated by scholars in the vast Islamic commonwealth of his time. For all their erudition and wide experience, such a vast storehouse of knowledge was not available to Herodotus, Sima Qian, or Tacitus. Even so, Al-Biruni’s vision remains Islamocentric and it stops short of the “hard” cultural relativism of Herodotus.

Finally, there is Ibn Khaldun. At first sight, his historical and anthropological interests make him akin to Al-Biruni, but the resemblance is deceptive. Insofar as Al-Biruni includes history in his book on India it is annalistic and antiquarian. Ibn Khaldun, on the other hand, invents a totally different kind of history. The focus is on the rise and fall of states and the scope is world-historical. Like Herodotus and Sima Qian he displays a keen interest in the “nomadic other,” but his investigation of the relationships between the sedentary and the nomadic peoples breaks new ground. While both Herodotus and Sima Qian theorized nomadic society in terms of its internal logic and its functionality in the steppe ecology, Ibn Khaldun uses his new concept of asabiya to bring to light the logic of the entire sedentary-nomadic “system.”

For the historians of antiquity the frontier was a borderland between cultures and social systems, but for Ibn Khaldun it becomes the linchpin on which the entire world history of the moderate zone turns. His approach destabilized the notion of sedentary and nomadic society as autonomous systems. Instead, they become more like networks in flux. Like his predecessors, he assumed that the nomads were there to stay, but instead of putting the nomads and the sedentary side by side, he makes their interaction into the moving force of world history. The upshot was that the nomads, who were accorded a certain autonomy by Herodotus and Sima Qian, now acquired world-historical agency on a par with the sedentary peoples.

Finally, we must look at the temporal regimes of the writings discussed. Attar’s Sufi vision largely abstracts from the world of the senses and is therefore basically atemporal. History is not suited to answer the kind of questions Attar deems essential. For Al-Biruni and Ibn Khaldun, on the other hand, history holds center stage. Both take the Creation as the beginning of history and the coming of Islam as its major turning point. Al-Biruni studied the chronology of ancient nations, but his book on India contains relatively little history, except for its quotations from ancient Sanskrit texts. Insofar as he mentions political history, we encounter the usual comings and goings of princes. Even so, he probably believed that the cultural differences between the major civilizations were a permanent feature of human history.

Ibn Khaldun, on the other hand, theorized political history as cyclical, but explained the cycles in terms of an underlying ecological structure that persisted over the centuries. But he also assumed that at some junctures world history passed through a cataclysm of crisis and upheaval. Going beyond his ancient predecessors, he made thinkable the notion of devastating and frightening crises on a global scale. His conversations with Tamerlane near the end of his life are perhaps a fitting epitaph to his unceasing intellectual endeavor to understand the deep forces driving human history. To Ibn Khaldun, common humanity was not only a religious and philosophical category but also denoted an interdependent network of peoples, cities, states, and empires in continual flux. Unlike later Enlightenment theorizations of history, the flux is envisioned in a language of cyclical rise and decline, and displays no progression from lower to higher stages.

5

THE ATLANTIC FRONTIER AND THE LIMITS OF CHRISTIAN EQUALITY

WHEN COLUMBUS, believing he had found a western route to Asia, made landfall on American soil, he set in motion a chain of events that would transform a continent and, eventually, the world. The European invasion of America created a new frontier quite unlike the frontiers discussed earlier. The military superiority of European warships, firearms, and iron weaponry over the mostly wooden and stone arms of the Native Americans brought about a culture shock that went deeper than the encounter between urban-agrarian empires and the peoples of the steppe and the desert. Emboldened by their victories, the European invaders were wont to look down on the vanquished, who were routinely classified as “barbarians” or “savages.”[1] Moreover, the Europeans frequently made good use of the enmity between native peoples, a tactic that first proved its mettle in Cortez’s conquest of the Aztec Empire.

The Europeans soon began to build a type of settler colonialism that went far beyond the policy of containment and control of the ancient empires. The main difference was that the European settlers were above all interested in the land occupied by the native peoples of America.[2] When their attempts to use the “Indians” as a servile labor force, combined with the impact of European illnesses, decimated the native population, they resorted to the importation of African slaves. Henceforth, the Native Americans were mostly seen as an impediment to Euro-American imperial ventures.

Another unique factor was that the Europeans introduced diseases against which the natives lacked immunity, which caused untold numbers to die. Such a biological gap did not exist between the settled and nomadic peoples of Africa and Eurasia. However, the older view that European diseases accounted for 90 percent of the Native American population loss has been reconsidered in the recent historical demography of sixteenth-century America, giving warfare and mass murder a more sizable role in the demographic decline. Nonetheless, these catastrophic dynamics, combined with the demographic pressure exerted by European settlers who progressively pushed Native Americans off the most fertile lands created a very different sort of frontier.[3]

Moreover, the Europeans entering the New World came from a continent torn by religious strife. Their religious fervor, at times spilling over into an apocalyptic mood, affected the entire colonial enterprise, in particular when they encountered native religious practices that seemed hideous and enigmatic to them. To the Spaniards, the persecution and expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, the struggle against the Muslims, and the confrontation with the Native Americans represented parts of a worldwide contest between the true Catholic faith and an array of satanically inspired forces of evil.[4] The onset of the Protestant Reformation, which coincided in time with the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, perfectly fitted into this Manichaean worldview. So did Columbus’s final project, to sail over the Western Ocean to Asia in order to assist in the recovery of Jerusalem for Christendom.[5] The religious factor was probably strongest in the Spanish case, but that is not to say that it was absent from the colonial ventures of the other Atlantic Rim European states.

The debates on the nature and the common humanity of the Native Americans in sixteenth-century Spanish and polemics display a recurrent tension between serious efforts to understand and appreciate the rationality of the Native Americans and an ironclad defense of the absolute truth claims of the Catholic Church. Virtually all critics of the colonial system were clerics, who had somehow to combine their defense of native rights and culture with their duty to convert the natives to Christianity. Even so, the conquest of America presents us with the first time in world history when a major imperial venture was criticized on the principled grounds of common humanity and equality. The reach as well as the limits of that critique are the main focus here.

The first protest against the Spanish treatment of the Native Americans was voiced by the Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos on Hispaniola in 1511. Next, I discuss the balance of justification and critique of the Spanish-American Empire in the lectures of Francisco Vitoria, the founder of the School of Salamanca, the main repository of the doctrine of Christian natural law in sixteenth-century Europe. Then, I turn to the most passionate critic of Spanish rule in America Bartolomé de Las Casas, whose efforts to “save” the Native Americans and to abolish the system of forced labor spanned the period from 1514 to his death in 1566. José de Acosta’s Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590) is another important milestone. His great handbook is written in two languages: a language of providential Christian sacred history and a historical and ethnographical language discussing the peopling and evolution of the American continent. It laid the groundwork for most seventeenth-century research and writing about America. Finally, Michel de Montaigne, a contemporary of José de Acosta but moving in an altogether different intellectual universe, highlights the enigmatic and disconcerting novelty of America and the failure of the European invaders to understand what they encountered there. At the same time, he deconstructs the notion of the “barbarian” against the backdrop of the atrocities of the European religious wars he knew from firsthand experience.

The First Spanish Debates on the Native Americans

Spain was the first European state to establish a territorial empire in America. In the first half of the sixteenth century, the Spanish colonial empire came to include Middle America from southern California to Panama, a sizable part of the Caribbean archipelago, and Peru. In the same period the Portuguese seized territories on the Brazilian coast. In due course, the Spanish crown became financially dependent on the Atlantic plantation economy and the steady inflow of American silver. After 1550, the revenues of the American colonies were indispensable to the maintenance of Spanish power in Europe.

Diseases and maltreatment of the native population soon brought about a demographic disaster. Estimates of the population of Hispaniola, the first seat of the Spanish colonial government, range from 300,000 to 500,000. By 1540, less than 500 of them were left.[6] In those early days the Spanish colonists possessed only scant knowledge of the native inhabitants. The travelogues of Columbus, Vespucci, and other early explorers mentioned “naked savages” who lived in primitive conditions, adored idols, and had no writing.[7] Some travelers painted a picture of paradisiacal innocence, but others offered less appealing images of the natives, alluding to human sacrifices and cannibalism.

The missionaries who came to America to convert the “heathen Indians” faced formidable problems, the first of which was the language gap. They had either to learn the native languages or to teach Spanish or Latin to the native population. Furthermore, it proved essential to their conversion efforts to gather information about the religious rituals and beliefs of the Indians. Consequently, the Catholic missionaries were the first to learn the native languages and to collect ethnographical information in a systematic way. The Spanish state, for its part, also began to collect information. In 1511, the crown installed a Council of the Indies to assist the king in the government of the new colonies. The colonial possessions in America were administered by centrally appointed governors, with a viceroy presiding over them. The Indians were inserted in the new political edifice. Spain was the only European colonial power to define the legal status of the Native Americans as subjects of the crown.[8] The colonial law courts, also created in 1511, served to settle disputes between colonists, but they were also authorized to hear cases on the rights and obligations of the colonists in their dealings with the natives.

Meanwhile, the colonists were not inclined to let legal niceties stand in the way of their unceasing search for wealth. The use of violence against the natives became a routine habit. Sometimes, natives were killed or tortured because they were unwilling, or unable, to divulge the location of the gold they were presumed to possess. The colonists were a motley collection of adventurers, fortune hunters, erstwhile mercenaries, impoverished gentlemen, and a sizable number of criminals who obtained early release on the condition of emigration to America. Virtually all colonists regarded the natives as savage heathens with weird and incomprehensible customs. Back home, the Spaniards were used to looking down on people with Moorish or Jewish blood. Spanish anti-Semitism was racialist from its inception. In his history of racism, George Frederickson has called the resulting mentality the caballero-complex, a deeply ingrained conviction that in relation to racial others every white man was a “lord” and “gentleman.”[9] Unfortunately, the colonial labor regime gave such “gentlemen” a free hand to exploit the native population. The governor of a colony conferred on each colonist a so-called repartimiento, allotting to him a number of Indians who were obliged to work for him. In return, the colonist had to take care of protection and religious instruction. The system did not include any guarantees against arbitrary maltreatment.

However, not all the Spaniards residing in the new colonies were happy with the treatment meted out to the native population. Many catholic clergy, in particular, were shocked by the bloodshed and brutality they daily witnessed. The first to sound the alarm was Antonio de Montesinos, a member of the Dominican Order, which had established a small “monastery,” scarcely more than a hut, on Hispaniola. On 30 November 1511 he delivered a thundering sermon in the wooden church on the island, indicting the reprehensible behavior of the colonists in the strongest terms. Among his audience was virtually the entire colonial elite. Montesinos spoke on the scriptural passage “I am a voice crying in the wilderness” (John 1:23):

In order to make your sins against the Indians known to you I have come up on this pulpit, I who am a voice of Christ crying in the wilderness of this island.… This voice says that you are in mortal sin … for the cruelty and tyranny you use in dealing with these innocent people. Tell me, by what right or justice do you keep these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged a detestable war against these people, who dwelt quietly and peacefully on their own land? … With the excessive work you demand of them they fall ill and die, or rather you kill them with your desire to extract and acquire gold every day. And what care do you take that they should be instructed in religion? … Are these not men? Have they not rational souls? Are you not bound to love them as you love yourselves? … Be certain that, in such a state as this, you can no more be saved than the Moors or Turks.[10]

Montesinos’s sermon shocked his audience. The colonists fully understood that his indictment targeted the core of the new colonial order. After the sermon some prominent men, led by Governor Diego Columbus himself, at once hastened to the Dominican house to demand a retraction. To their dismay Vicar Pedro de Córdoba declared that all the Dominicans agreed with the sermon. The next Sunday Montesinos upped the ante, threatening to withhold the sacraments from the colonists if they persevered in their sinful behavior. Thereupon the outraged colonists sent a letter of protest to Spain. In March 1512 King Ferdinand directed Diego Columbus to bring to reason Montesinos and his Dominican colleagues. This directive proved the first move in what was soon to become a transatlantic debate on the ethical and theological justification of the fledgling Spanish Empire.

Diego Columbus did not accomplish anything. The Dominicans stuck to their guns and persisted in their condemnation of the inhuman treatment of the Native Americans. The final verdict had to come from the crown. The colonists dispatched the Franciscan Alfonso del Espinal to Madrid. The Dominicans sent Antonio de Montesinos. The king interrogated both parties. Montesinos’s horrifying report on the sufferings and complaints of the natives disquieted him so much that he appointed a committee of clerics and senior civil servants to conduct an inquiry and recommend suitable measures. These proceedings resulted in the Laws of Burgos and Valladolid, issued by the Spanish crown in 1512 and 1513. The new laws rejected the doctrine that the natives were “natural slaves,” but the economic regime they installed remained a system of forced labor. In one respect, the new dispensation actually aggravated the lot of the Indians: it introduced a system of forced deportation of the native population to settlements under the close surveillance of the colonists.

The colonists and the Dominicans deeply disagreed about the “nature” and the capacities of the native inhabitants. The new laws contained elements of both views. The foundation of the repartimiento, the allotment of a fixed number of Indians to each colonist, remained in force, but the rights and duties of both parties were henceforth circumscribed in more detail. The new dispensation was named the encomienda, an ancient legal concept that enshrined protection as well as dominion. The natives were not slaves, but neither did they enjoy full personal liberty. They were not allowed to work for another master. Bound to master and soil, their status closely resembled that of serfs in a feudal economy. The preamble of the Laws of Burgos, enacted in December 1512, justifies this arrangement in the following terms: “It has become evident through long experience that … by nature they are inclined to idleness and vice.”[11] These words reflected the colonists’ interpretation of their failure to discipline the natives.

The first article of the Laws of Burgos declared the intention of the King “to remove the … Indians and have them dwell near the Spaniards.” It was further stipulated that the villages of the Indians would be set on fire after their departure, “so that they will have no reason to return.”[12] The colonists were ordered to remove the Indians “with the least possible harm.” That the legislators in Madrid were aware of the mentality of the colonists is clear from a paragraph which decreed “that no person or persons shall dare to beat any Indian with sticks, or whip him, or call him dog.” Colonists who beat and insulted the natives would be fined.[13] Punishment of recalcitrant Indians was reserved to the visitadores, officials put in charge of the inspection of the new settlements who were also entrusted with the task of hunting down fugitive Indians. The new laws thus prescribed a policy of forcible deportation, all the while upholding the legal fiction that this could be done without the use of violence.

Admittedly, the Laws of Burgos conferred some rights on the natives too. Apart from the tribute they had to deliver to their new masters the Indians would enjoy the fruits of their own land which would be their property and of which no one was allowed to despoil them. In legal terms, the natives were thus judged capable of dominium, a concept that, applied to private persons, denoted the mastery over property. The encomendero had to take care of clothing, regular meals, and rest days. Henceforth, a native man would not be permitted more than one wife. The women could not be put to work in the gold mines, unless their husbands took them along. Furthermore, the encomendero was required to erect a church and to see to regular church attendance. All children were to be baptized within a week after birth, on pain of a fine of three gold pieces. Moreover, the masters of the settlements would select the most suitable and intelligent young man of every group of fifty natives. The men so selected would be taught to read and write, so that they could receive religious instruction and finally would be able to instruct the other Indians. The sons of the Indian chiefs were to be handed over to the Franciscans, who would instruct them in literacy and religion, on the obvious assumption that when the native elite adopted Christianity the common people would follow their example.[14]

According to the letter of the law the Indians thus had rights as well as duties, but on the ground the protective clauses of the Laws of Burgos were mostly honored in the breach. The Indians had no knowledge of the legal safeguards that were supposed to protect them, and even if they had known they lacked the legal means to enforce their claims. The law did not define them as free persons but as serfs who were not allowed to leave their newly erected “model villages.” The laws seemed to take it for granted that the Indians’ subjection to the regime of forced labor was there to stay. However, the additional articles promulgated by the Spanish crown in July 1513 in Valladolid seemed to open a door to freedom. These articles stipulated that when “the Indians will become so apt and ready to become Christians, and so civilized and educated, that they will be capable of governing themselves and leading the kind of life that the Christians lead here, we declare and command … that those Indians … shall be allowed to live by themselves.”[15] This was, to put it mildly, a rather restricted form of liberty. The authority to decide whether some Indians were sufficiently civilized and educated to govern themselves lay with the Spanish authorities. The Indians are awarded the status of free persons, on an equal footing with the colonists, if they demonstrate that they are able and willing to adopt the ways of the Europeans. They can become “equals” by becoming like the Europeans who already are “equal.” In the colonial legal matrix, equality is defined as sameness.

When the Laws of Valladolid had been in force for three years, the Spanish cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros sent three Jeronymite friars on a fact-finding mission. Arriving on Hispaniola in the spring of 1517, they interviewed colonists and clerics but no natives. Bartolomé de Las Casas, who had arrived on the same ship, attempted to convince them to pay more attention to the Indians’ dire need, but to no avail. “The fathers heard me,” he bitterly commented later, “but they did not do anything.”[16] The leading query of the Jeronymite investigation concerned the capacity for freedom of the natives:

Does the witness know, believe, or has he heard it said, or observed, that these Indians, especially those of Hispaniola and women as well as men, are all of such knowledge and capacity that they should be given complete liberty? Would they be able to live politicamente as do the Spaniards? Would they know how to support themselves by their own efforts … spending only for necessities, as a Castilian laborer would?[17]

Virtually all the colonists, well aware of what was at stake, answered that the Indians were incapable of living in freedom. Only one of them, Gonzalo di Ocampo, admitted that the natives must have had some aptitude for self-government because they tilled the land, constructed houses, made clothing, and lived in good order under their native chieftains before the arrival of the Spaniards. To most colonists, however, freedom simply meant “living like the Spaniards.” One of them, Miguel de Pasamonte, long-time treasurer of the king in Hispaniola, expressed his fear that the Indians, if granted liberty, would make common cause with the large number of black African slaves on the island. Several others contended that free Indians would soon revert to savagery, descending into “idleness, nakedness, drunkenness, improvidence, gluttony, dancing,” and eating spiders and snakes. The colonists’ dim opinion of the Indians was “confirmed” by the dismal failure of a model community of “free” Indians managed by Governor Nicolás de Ovando from 1508 to 1514.

Meanwhile, the concentration of Indians in the new villages had caused a smallpox epidemic that killed a great number of them. The results of the Jeronymite mission were thus mostly negative. Even so, the evidence collected by the friars, some hundred pages of interviews, would be cited more than once in the controversies occasioned by Bartolomé de Las Casas’s vehement campaign against the maltreatment of the Native Americans.[18] But to put Las Casas in the proper context we must pay attention to the critique and justification of Spanish imperialism in the language of Christian natural law, which was, after all, the most authoritative legal doctrine in sixteenth-century Spain.

Christian Natural Law and the Spanish Empire

Apart from golden economic opportunities the American empire confronted the Spanish crown with serious political, moral, and theological problems. In Spain itself, the crown had succeeded in putting an end to the autonomy of towns and feudal lords. The last revolt, the uprising of the Castilian towns, was crushed in 1521, the year Hernán Cortez devastated the Aztec Empire. The uniform legal framework of the colonial administration was meant to forestall the emergence of self-governing feudal polities in Spanish America. This was one reason why the Spanish monarchy sought to put its sovereignty over the newly acquired American territories beyond all doubt.[19] The other, and ideologically more challenging reason, concerned the right to enter and take possession of inhabited lands on another continent. It was far from self-evident how the armed subjection of peaceable natives could produce a just title to sovereignty over their land. To understand how the Spanish state tackled this issue we must take a brief look at late medieval legal and political thought.

The authoritative political theory in late medieval Europe was the philosophy of Christian natural law. In a nutshell, it was an Aristotelian theory of politics set in a Christianized version of the Stoic doctrine of the universal Law of Nature. The Law of Nature expressed the indwelling normative order of God’s creation accessible to human reason without the help of a special revelation. All humans shared a common nature, because all descended from the primeval couple and all were endowed by God with an immortal soul. It followed that the Law of Nature was truly universal and valid for all the people inhabiting the world, whether Christian or not. Unbelievers as well as Christians were capable of rational thought and had access to the truths of natural law.[20] According to Thomas Aquinas, the Golden Rule, to do unto others as you would have done unto yourself, provided the foundation of the Law of Nature. In De Regimine Principum (On the Monarchical Regime) Aquinas further contended that political authority was a natural institution and monarchy the best political regime because it was more conducive to concord than an aristocracy or a popular government.[21] The universal validity of the Law of Nature led to the momentous conclusion that political authority, being a natural institution, did not stand in need of a specifically Christian justification. Consequently, the authority of non-Christian princes was as valid as that of Christian ones. It followed that without a cause for a just war a Christian prince could not rightfully invade and take possession of the land of another prince, however idolatrous or anti-Christian the latter might be.

In the mid-thirteenth century, Pope Innocent IV had examined the lawfulness of conquering infidel lands. According to Innocent, the election of Saul as king of Israel demonstrated that all reasonable creatures had the right to select their own rulers. No special divine dispensation was needed nor was this right confined to the biblical Israelites. Consequently, the authority of non-Christian princes was legitimate, and the care of all human souls entrusted to the Christian church did not authorize Christian states to deprive infidels of their lordship or their property simply because they were infidels.

In matters of religion, however, different rules applied. Because Christ had commanded the apostles to bring the faith to all peoples, the pope enjoyed a “spiritual sovereignty” over the entire world. Accordingly, Innocent claimed universal papal jurisdiction in religious matters. The pope, he argued, could correct Jews who failed to keep their own religious laws. Furthermore, he could punish people who indulged in unnatural sexuality, the divine punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah providing the biblical precedent. Idolatry constituted another sin against the Law of Nature, because all rational humans could know that there was only one God. The last tenet opened the way to the punishment of animists and polytheists, calling to mind the Muslim distinction between peoples of the book and all other creeds.

Passing beyond these special cases, Innocent contended that the papal responsibility for universal salvation gave him the right to send missionaries to the lands of the infidels. If a non-Christian prince refused entry to the missionaries, or if he persecuted the Christians in his lands, the pope could authorize a Christian prince to wage war against him. Innocent expressly warned that only the pope could authorize warfare in such cases. Secular rulers should not use religion as a pretext for aggrandizing their own realms. Moreover, conversion always had to be a voluntary act and should not be enforced under the threat of violence. Finally, Innocent discussed the question whether infidel princes possessed the right to send their preachers to Christian lands. His answer was a resounding no, “because they are in error and we are on the righteous path.”[22] As secular rulers, infidel princes were on a par with Christian princes, but in matters religious Christians could claim a superior status.

Francisco de Vitoria’s Critique and Justification of the Spanish-American Empire

How were the precepts of Aquinas and Innocent applied to the new problematic of the colonial empire? The first to examine the problem in a systematic fashion was the theologian and jurist Francisco de Vitoria. A member of the Dominican Order, Vitoria studied and taught from 1506 to 1533 at the University of Paris. Back in Spain, he first accepted a teaching position in Valladolid, the city where the Council of the Indies resided. Thereafter, from 1526 until his death in 1546, he occupied the most prestigious chair of theology in Spain, at the University of Salamanca. The other chair of theology at the university went to Domingo de Soto. Among their pupils we find two of the most influential political theorists of the next generation, Luis de Molina and Francisco Suárez, who founded the intellectual tradition usually called the School of Salamanca.

Ever since Antonio de Montesinos made his passionate call for justice, the question of the treatment of the Native Americans had become a contentious issue. After the conquest and destruction of the Aztec (1521–1522) and Inca (1531–1532) empires, Spanish policies in America became even more controversial. The Dominican Order was deeply implicated in the conversion of the Native Americans, and, as we have seen, it was one of their members who first took exception to the colonists’ cruel treatment of the Indians. Vitoria was profoundly shocked by what had happened in Peru. The very mention of Pizarro’s murderous campaign, he wrote to Miguel de Arcos in November 1534, makes “my blood run cold.”[23] Vitoria’s judgment of the legitimacy of the conquest of Peru was cautious but unmistakably censorious:

I do not, indeed, dispute the fact that the Emperor can conquer the Indies, for I presume that, strictly speaking, he can do so. But I infer from the accounts of those very persons who took part in the recent battle with Tabalipa [a misspelling of Atahualpa Inca], that neither Tabalipa nor his people had at any time or in any way injured the Christians, or committed any act for which war might justly be waged against them.[24]

A year later, Vitoria’s colleague Domingo de Soto publicly declared that he had no idea on what grounds the Spaniards could claim jurisdiction over the Native Americans.[25]

Vitoria continued to keep himself informed about the new Spanish Empire, although he never visited America. In the winter of 1539, he devoted an entire series of lectures to it, entitled De Indiis. Right at the beginning, he considered the question if there really was a pressing need to discuss the politics of empire. Had not many prudent men assured him that Spanish policy in America was fully in accordance with the canons of justice? Vitoria professed that he did not yet know what to think of the treatment of the American “barbarians.” It seemed to him that there were arguments on both sides. “At first sight,” he admitted, “we may readily suppose that, since the affair is in the hands of men both learned and good, everything has been conducted with rectitude and justice. But when we hear subsequently of bloody massacres and of innocent individuals pillaged of their possessions and dominions, there are grounds for doubting the justice of what has been done.”[26] For all his scholarly detachment, Vitoria was well aware of what the conquistadores were doing.

To situate Vitoria’s theoretical approach to the colonial question we have to consider the justification of its American conquests by the Spanish crown. The story begins immediately after Columbus’s first voyage. In the bull Inter Caetera of 1493, Pope Alexander VI conferred on Spain the right to rule over “all islands and mainlands” in the Atlantic beyond the meridian a hundred miles to the west of the Azores (the Treaty of Tordesillas concluded between Spain and Portugal in 1494 shifted the line 270 miles westward, giving the Portuguese the right to seize the eastern coast of Brazil). Though the pope presented the preaching of the Christian message as the primary goal of the enterprise, the wording of the bull allowed for a far broader interpretation, going almost all the way to full Spanish sovereignty in the Americas—but not all the way, for the lawyers drafting the document were aware of the opinions of Aquinas and Innocent and avoided a direct denial of infidel dominium.[27] Others were less scrupulous. In 1519, Emperor Charles V confidently declared: “By donation of the Holy Apostolic See and other just and legitimate titles we are lord of the West Indies, the islands and mainlands of the Ocean Sea already discovered and to be discovered.”[28] In their public declarations, the colonists frequently referred to the papal donation as the chief justification of Spanish rule in America. When the Spaniards invested a village or town in America, they read aloud a document, the Requerimiento, invoking the papal donation to “the Catholic kings of Spain” and summoning the natives to recognize the superiority of Christianity. Failing their submission a just war against them could be started.[29]

Vitoria first discussed the extent of the spiritual and temporal power of the Church in a series of lectures delivered in 1532. There are many canon lawyers, Vitoria reminded his audience, “who think that the pope is lord of the whole world properly by temporal dominion, and that he has temporal authority and jurisdiction over all princes in the world.” But their view, Vitoria concluded, “is manifestly false.” Most jurists, and even Saint Thomas, “have never attributed such sweeping dominion to the pontiff.”[30] According to Vitoria, it was only in spiritual matters that the pope enjoyed a universal authority to which all Christian princes had to submit. But even in this field, the pope was not entitled to use armed force or abrogate civil laws on his own. The most he could do was to order Christian princes to do so. In exceptional and extreme circumstances, and only to further spiritual ends, the pope might even depose princes and install new ones.[31] In his lectures on the American Indians, Vitoria examines the extent of the power of the pope over the infidels. There he underlines again that the pontiff is not the civil or temporal master of the whole world.[32] He goes on to argue that the pope has neither temporal nor spiritual power over unbelievers: no spiritual power because they are not part of the Christian community and no temporal power because the only temporal powers popes may claim are adjuncts to their spiritual power. The papal donation of dominium over America to the Spanish crown is therefore null and void, for the simple reason that the pope cannot give what he does not possess.

Another argument rejected by Vitoria is that the Native Americans were not fully rational and thus naturally unfit to govern themselves. The “barbarians” may differ from us in many respects, he admits, but for all that they partake in common humanity: “The proof of this is that they … have judgment like other men. This is self-evident, because they have some order in their affairs: they have properly organized cities, proper marriages, magistrates and overlords, laws, industries, and commerce, all of which require the use of reason. They likewise have a form of religion, and they correctly apprehend things which are evident to other men, which indicates the use of reason.”[33] Vitoria concedes that the natives often seem “insensate and slow-witted,” but he explains that by “their evil and barbarous education,” and he reminds his audience that many European peasants are hardly any better. He concludes that, before the coming of the Spaniards, the barbarians undoubtedly possessed true dominion on a par with Christians. Consequently, they could not be robbed of their property, either as private persons or as princes.[34]

Reasoning along these lines, Vitoria easily disposes of four other claims.[35] The first is that the Spaniards held dominion by the right of discovery. However, he counters, the natives being rightful owners, their lands were not terra nullius, and therefore the right of discovery does not apply. The next claim he refutes is that the Native Americans may be subjected because they refuse to accept the faith of Christ. Vitoria expresses his doubts that Christianity has thus far been preached to the Indians with sufficient patience and clarity. But even if that were the case, he continues, conversion has to be voluntary. The next title the Spaniards have invoked is their right to punish the natives for their sins against nature, such as cannibalism, sodomy, lesbianism, incest, and buggery with animals. In this connection, Vitoria reminds his students that the pope may not make war on Christians even if they are fornicators or sodomites, for if he could, kingdoms could be exchanged every day, since every country is full of sinners.

Vitoria also rejects a quite different Spanish contention, namely that their empire was established by the voluntary consent of the native inhabitants. He concedes that such agreement has been given by the natives in several cases but questions its validity. Most of these requests for submission, he tells his audience, came down to the reading of the requerimiento to “a fearful and defenseless crowd” surrounded by heavily armed Spaniards. According to Vitoria, this does not really look like voluntary consent, and it is also doubtful whether the natives understood what the Spaniards were asking of them. But even if they voluntarily gave their assent, this would still not provide a legitimate title to the Spaniards, for, “since the barbarians already had their own true masters and princes … the people cannot without reasonable cause seek new masters, which would be to the detriment of their previous lords.”[36] Arriving at this point, Vitoria changes tack and announces that he will now proceed to a discussion of the just and legitimate titles of Spanish rule in America.

The first and most consequential title is derived from natural law and the law of nations. According to Vitoria, all humans have a natural right to travel and trade everywhere, on waterways and on land, provided they do not harm others. Besides, they have a right to appropriate goods that other have not yet taken possession of. Gold in rivers and soils as well as wild plants and animals count as res nullius and belong to the first comer. The American natives are obliged to treat peaceful strangers in a humane way. Consequently, Europeans have the right to enter America and to take domicile there. When the native inhabitants are hostile or seek to expel the European travelers, the Spaniards have the right to defend themselves. When attacked, they may counterattack. The right to travel and trade, Vitoria concludes, is supported by “the consent of the greater part of the world.”[37]

Vitoria is interpreting the right to travel and trade in an extremely charitable fashion. One of his pupils, Friar Melchor Cano, who sympathized with Bartolomé de Las Casa, sarcastically asked if anyone would have described Alexander the Great as a harmless traveler. The Spanish, Cano contended, “did not come as pilgrims but as true invaders.”[38] In his Historia de las Indias, Las Casas would put it more forcefully: “By natural law every commonwealth can defend its land from a foreign people from fear of the harm that may come from them,” thus countering Vitoria’s natural right to travel and trade worldwide with another natural right.[39] From the Native American side similar observations were made. The Aztec narrative recounts the march of the Spaniards to Tenochtitlan in these words:

[The Spaniards] came grouped, they came assembled, they came raising dust. Their iron lances, their halberds seemed to glisten, and their iron swords were wavy.… Their cuirasses, their helmets seemed to resound. And some came all in iron; they came turned into iron; they came gleaming. Hence they went causing great astonishment; hence they went causing great fear; hence they were regarded with fear; hence they were dreaded.[40]

One may well ask what the Aztecs would have said about the theory that it was their duty to receive the Spanish invaders as benevolent travelers. Vitoria himself must have felt some doubts for he admonishes his countrymen to proceed with the utmost moderation and care, explaining that “the barbarians may still be understandably fearful of men … who they can see are armed and much stronger than themselves.” If these understandable fears impel the natives to attack the strangers, the Spaniards may defend themselves, but once victory has been won they may not exercise the other rights of war such as putting their enemies to death or looting and occupying their dwellings. Vitoria’s certitude of a Spanish victory in any encounter with the Native Americans betrays his awareness of the real nature of these European “travelers.” Finally, Vitoria concludes that only when all else had failed could the Spaniards resort to the ultimum remedium of conquest and subjection of the Indians.[41]

The second thesis advanced by Vitoria is the Spaniards undoubtedly have the right to preach the gospel to the Native Americans, even against their will. If the common people or their lords obstruct the missionaries, peaceful remonstration is the prudent course, but when persuasion fails, the Spaniards may take up arms and declare war. Once more, Vitoria’s cautious tone gradually hardens and ends with the drastic conclusion that, “if the business of religion cannot otherwise be forwarded … the Spaniards may lawfully conquer the territories of these people, deposing their old masters and setting up new ones.”[42] This is admittedly followed by another counsel of prudence and moderation, but even so it remains a brief for colonization. As if this is not enough, Vitoria adduces several other lawful grounds for armed intervention, such as the need to protect converts and the defense of the innocent victims of human sacrifice (this argument displays some analogies with present-day discussions of humanitarian intervention). If a great part of the native population has adopted Christianity, the pope might even be in his rights to impose a Christian prince upon them.

Finally, when one of the parties in a war between native states calls upon the Spaniards to help them, the Spaniards may enter the war and, in the case of victory, share the spoils. To illustrate the point Vitoria points to the alliance the Spaniards concluded with the Tlaxcaltecs in the war against the Aztecs. To make things clearer—or worse—he explains that the Spanish enlistment of allies follows the example of the Romans, “who extended their empire in just this way.” The Roman Empire, he adds for good measure, was declared legitimate by Augustine as well as Aquinas.[43] Such reasoning transforms a policy of divide and rule into an exemplary case of just war.

At the end of his lectures Vitoria comes back to the issue of the rationality of the “barbarians.” He mentions the opinion that the Native Americans are partly or entirely subrational but immediately adds that it is questionable, that he does not dare to affirm it categorically, and that he only mentions it for argument’s sake. However, if all the rightful titles proved inapplicable, if the barbarians gave no just cause for war and did not want to have Spaniards as princes, the whole colonial enterprise would cease. That, Vitoria resignedly states, “would mean a huge loss to the royal exchequer, which would be intolerable.” So the show must go on, however much Vitoria deplores its grim script. Whatever course is taken, he declares in his final pages, it should be implemented “for the benefit and good of the barbarians, and not merely for the profit of the Spaniards. … It is in this latter restriction that the whole pitfall to souls and salvation is found to lie.”[44] These words, it would seem, express the travails of a tormented soul who has failed to carve a straight road through the political and intellectual maze created by the Spanish invasion of America.

Vitoria’s theorization of empire, if we can call it that, is deeply ambivalent. On the one hand he clearly abhors the cruel and immoral practices of the colonists, and his judgment of the Native Americans, though vacillating and hesitant, inclines to a vindication of their full humanity and capacity for self-government. On the other hand, his interpretation of the natives’ obligations under the ius gentium gave sufficient justification for a continuation of the colonial enterprise.[45] After all, the power to deliver authoritative interpretations of natural law lay with the Spanish monarchy and its colonial administrators. In the political language of those times, the community of the world (communitas orbis) denoted the European powers who had appointed themselves as the collective guardians of the law of nations with the right to send armed “travelers” and warships to every corner of the world. That this policy met with success in America, and not in China or Japan, had nothing to do with legality and everything with military power.[46] The weak link in Vitoria’s reasoning is his inability to see that the entry of the Spaniards into the lands of the Native Americans by itself amounted to an act of war. Within the European state system this was well understood. Every European prince knew that sending armed troops into the lands of another prince constituted a casus belli, but on the other shore of the Atlantic such diplomatic common sense could be set aside with impunity.

Like Vitoria, the men who held power in Spain disliked and feared the cruel and violent style of the transatlantic parvenus, but, again like Vitoria, they were well aware of the growing dependence of Spanish power on the revenues of the American empire. After 1530 the import of American silver increased at a dazzling pace.[47] Even so, there were Spanish clerics who deemed Vitoria’s approach to these matters much too timid and who were convinced that the interests of the American natives stood in need of a far more principled defense. Their foremost spokesman was another Dominican friar, Bartolomé de Las Casas.

Bartolomé de Las Casas’s Denunciation of the Colonial Order

Bartolomé de Las Casas’s first encounter with American affairs came at the age of eleven. His father Pedro took part in Columbus’s second voyage that carried American slaves on the return journey.[48] Pedro de Las Casas presented one of these slaves, a little boy, to his son. In 1502, father and son sailed for Hispaniola. Bartolomé, then eighteen years old, began his transatlantic career not as a friar but as a colonist. Like his father, he received a repartimiento of Tainos, the native people of the island.

Between 1502 and 1506 Las Casas made several trips in the interior. Sometimes he stayed with Taino families, and he observed that, contrary to the stories told by many colonists, the Tainos were not savages. They tilled their fields and tended their gardens; they lived in villages where they governed themselves in good order.[49] These observations accord with many other eyewitness accounts. European travelers time and again reported that many Native Americans were not primitive hunter-gatherers but practitioners of agriculture and horticulture. The contention that America was a terra nullius, an uncultivated homeland of wandering savages, was an invention of European armchair ethnographers.[50] For Las Casas, these observations were the beginning of his open-minded appreciation of native culture. But what was really decisive for the turn his thought would soon take was his personal encounter with the greed, lust, and cruelty of the colonists. Deeply shocked by the mass killing, torture, and rape he witnessed almost daily, Las Casas sourly noted that the “shepherds” who were supposed to protect and civilize the native population behaved in reality like insatiable predators. Because his reports of cruelties stand at the origin of the “black legend” of Spanish atrocities in the New World, they have often been downplayed as exaggerations meant to blacken the colonists. While it cannot be denied that Las Casas freely used passionate and condemnatory invective, it is not clear that the atrocities he describes are pure invention. He may have exaggerated here and there, but the indiscriminate violence of the colonists is confirmed by many other sources.

In 1506 Las Casas crossed the Atlantic and visited Rome, where he was ordained as a priest. By the beginning of 1508 he was back on Hispaniola. The little group of Dominicans, headed by Pedro de Córdoba, arrived two years after him. As we have seen, one of them, Antonio de Montesinos, was the first to speak out against the maltreatment of the Indians. In the autumn of 1510, Las Casas celebrated the mass, the first mass said in the New World according to himself. The next year he was deeply moved by Montesinos’s sermons (Las Casas’s History of the Indies is our only source for them). Looking back on these years much later, he declared that “Divine Providence brought the Dominican Order to this island to bring it out of the darkness.”[51]

Toward the end of 1511 Governor Diego Columbus launched an expedition to conquer Cuba, but its first objective was to hunt down Hatuey, a Taino chieftain who had fled with many of his people to escape the murderous raids of the Spaniards. Las Casas was invited to join the expedition. In his Brevíssima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies), he tells the story of the capture and execution of Hatuey. The latter had warned the Cubans that the Spaniards adored only one god, namely gold, for whom they were ready to commit the most heinous crimes. Once captured, Hatuey was condemned to be burned alive. When he was tied to the stake, a Franciscan friar approached him, presented the essentials of the Christian faith, and explained to Hatuey that if he would convert right there, he would go to heaven but would otherwise endure everlasting torment in hell. “The Lord Hatuey,” Las Casas recounts, “thought for a short while and then asked the friar whether Christians went to Heaven. When the reply came that the good ones do, he retorted, without need for further reflection, that … he chose to go to Hell to ensure that he would never again have to clap eyes on those cruel brutes.” This is an example, Las Casas sarcastically concludes, “of the reputation and honour that our Lord and our Christian faith have earned as a result of the actions of those ‘Christians’ who have sailed to the Americas.”[52]

The mass killings he witnessed during the Cuban campaign were the last straw. The deciding event may have been the massacre of Cuban natives at Caonao where hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Indians were “senselessly murdered in an unexplainable orgy of violence prompted by either panic or the blood lust of the conquistadores.”[53] For Las Casas the moment to speak his mind had arrived. His opportunity came when Governor Velázquez asked him to celebrate mass and preach to the Spaniards at the newly founded city of Sant Espiritus in south-central Cuba. For his sermon, Las Casas selected Ecclesiasticus 34:19–21: “He that sacrificeth a thing wrongfully gotten, his offering is ridiculous; and the gifts of unjust men are not accepted.” In his sermon he admonished his audience to take that lesson to heart. As Christians they stood under the obligation to treat the Indians as fellow human beings instead of exploiting and killing them. Thereupon he announced that he had given away all his Indians and that he refused to continue the sinful life of an encomendero. “You cannot be saved while still holding Indians,” he exclaimed to his dumbfounded public.[54] While it must have been a sobering experience for his audience, it was a cathartic moment of liberation for Las Casas.

Governor Velázquez and his men were shocked, but it was obvious that they would not mend their ways. Moreover, they lacked the authority to abrogate the Laws of Burgos which had introduced the labor regime of the encomienda. Only the king and the Council of the Indies could do that. Accordingly, Las Casas decided that it was his duty to sail back to Spain to remonstrate with King Ferdinand. Father Córdoba assigned Antonio de Montesinos to accompany him. In early October 1515 the two men arrived in Sevilla. Las Casas managed to get an audience with Ferdinand, but the king was mortally ill and died shortly afterward. Adrian of Utrecht, the future Pope Adrian VI, and Cardinal Francisco Ximenéz de Cisneros became co-regents to await the arrival of King Charles. They were willing to listen to Las Casas and they quickly sidetracked two powerful ministers who supported procolonist policies in America. In these years, Las Casas also suggested the importation of African slaves to alleviate the lot of the natives. That proposal has induced his critics to accuse him of hypocrisy and to cast doubt upon the sincerity of his defense of a universal humanity. Later, however, Las Casas recognized that all kinds of slavery were equally immoral, and he deeply regretted his ignorant opinions on the enslaving of Africans, expressing fear that he would have to answer for it before the judgment seat of God.[55]

How would the new king shape the politics of empire? After several years of tergiversations Las Casas finally got his chance to discuss the affairs of the Indies with the young prince. Their meeting took place in December 1519, six months after Charles was elected Holy Roman emperor. All the great councilors were present. The first to speak was Juan de Quevedo who had spent four years in America as bishop of Darien and who sympathized with the colonists. “As for the Indians,” he declared, “based on my experience and the reports of others, they are born to serve. They have much gold … and to obtain it from them, it is necessary to be very industrious.” When it was Las Casas’s turn to speak, he began with a passionate account of the crass exploitation and the mass killings of innocent Indians. Responding to Quevedo’s assertion that the Native Americans were born to serve, he sought to convince the emperor that they were fellow human beings who were “capable of reason” and “by nature free.” Moreover, “they have their own kings and natural lords who govern politically.”[56] What he sought to demonstrate was that the Native Americans were capable of self-government in the Aristotelian sense of the term. At the end of the session, Las Casas, armed with his official title of “protector of all the Indians,” had the impression that the emperor understood his viewpoint and was willing to improve the lot of the Indians. A year later, however, Charles had not made any definite promise to end the encomienda system. His only hard commitment was a land grant to Las Casas on the northern coast of South America. There the colonists would not be allowed to enter. There Las Casas would be free to convert the native inhabitants and found model communities.

Back in America, Las Casas forthwith started work on a model community in the region of Cumana, on the coast of present-day Venezuela. The project proved a catastrophe. After almost three decades of bloodshed and robbery the natives mistrusted all Spaniards. They destroyed two missionary stations. The Franciscan friars assigned to the missionary work in Cumana were shipwrecked and never arrived. Meanwhile, the slave raids along the coast continued, making the Indians still more reluctant to enter any settlement run by Spaniards. On top of that, support from Spain ceased because of the revolt of the Castilian towns in 1521. Thereupon, Las Casas left for Hispaniola, hoping to enlist the assistance of the governor. In his absence, his lieutenant, Francisco de Soto, made common cause with the slave traders, but in the end he was killed in a new Indian revolt. These events heralded the inglorious end of the entire enterprise. Las Casas was plagued by deep remorse because the attempt to realize his ideas had cost the lives of so many innocent people. His mind darkened, dragging him down into a profound mental crisis.

His psychological crisis, sometimes considered his second conversion, impelled him to enter the Dominican Order and to join the friars on Hispaniola. For Las Casas it signified a temporary retreat from the world of politics. It became a four-year period of study and contemplation, an agonizing reappraisal of eight years of failed attempts to protect the Indians. In the end, he could hardly do otherwise than to resume the fight. Beginning in 1526, he took part in the agitation against slavery. In 1531, he approached the Council of the Indies, denouncing the misdeeds of the colonists and the reluctance of the crown to punish them. His proposed remedy, however, closely resembled his own failed project in Cumana. The defects of the prevailing labor regime he continued to paint in the darkest colors. Some years later, his protests and memorandums reached Rome. The bull Sublimus Deus, promulgated by Pope Paul III in 1537, was probably influenced by his remonstrations. According to the pope, the Indians were rational human beings who could not be arbitrarily exploited and divested of their rights.

In 1542, the tide at last appeared to turn. Charles V convened a special council to consider reform of the Laws of Burgos. Las Casas was among those summoned to inform the emperor about events in America. He expounded the lamentable treatment of the Indians in a memorandum of atrocities, buttressed by documentary evidence presented by two aides, a friar and a Native American. The memorandum was actually the draft of the Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies he would publish ten years later. Vitoria, another witness called by the emperor, admitted the evidence adduced by Las Casas, but argued that abandoning the Indies amounted to giving up the evangelization of the Indians. Having heard these arguments, Charles issued new Laws for the Indies on 20 November 1542. The new laws prohibited further wars of conquests, but their most crucial provision concerned the encomienda system: henceforth, no new encomiendas were to be created while any existing one would revert to the crown on the death of the present holder.[57] In 1543, at the behest of Las Casas, the new laws were tightened even more.

To Las Casas, the demise of the forced labor system now seemed only a question of time. In this, however, he was sadly mistaken. When the new laws were divulged in America the colonists were outraged. Threatened with rebellion by the encomenderos, the Spanish officials in the colonies caved in. The special representative of the crown, sent to America to implement the reforms, instead suspended their publication until further notice. It was in these circumstances that Las Casas was appointed bishop of Chapia, a newly created diocese in southern Mexico. He withheld the sacraments from colonists who refused to free their Indian slaves, but to no avail, for even some of his own clergy disobeyed and he was threatened by armed colonists in his own church. Back in Spain the emperor, faced with open rebellion in Peru and smoldering discontent in Mexico, in 1547 repealed the most severe articles of the new laws. The “triumph” of Las Casas had been short-lived.

The colonists now sought to press their advantage and demanded that encomiendas henceforth be granted in perpetuity, making them for all practical purposes into heritable property. To convince the crown, they contended that the Indians were much better treated under the new laws. Las Casas, for his part, continued to bombard the Council of the Indies with testimonies to show that the rosy picture painted by the spokesmen of the colonists was a travesty of the truth. In 1549, the council seemed to support Las Casas’s position, expressing the opinion that the new laws were not obeyed in America.[58] On the council’s recommendation the emperor convened a special committee of jurists and theologians to consider the matter. In an unprecedented move, Charles suspended all further conquests until the committee clarified the legality and justice of the Spanish regime in America.

The main witness against the encomienda system was, of course, Las Casas. He would not only speak on behalf of the Native Americans but also act as their representative. In his classic study of the debate, Lewis Hanke reports that the Indians of Oaxaca and Chiapa gave him and his companion Friar Rodrigo de Andrade “legal authority to represent them before the Council of the Indies.”[59] To defend their viewpoint the colonists had enlisted one of the most renowned jurists and political theorists of Spain, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. The sessions were presided over by Domingo de Soto, a pupil of Francisco Vitoria. Attending were the emperor and members of the Council of the Indies and the Council of Castile, as well as several noted jurists and theologians. The committee opened proceedings in August 1550 in Valladolid to decide the question: “Is it lawful for the King of Spain to wage war on the Indians, before preaching the faith to them, in order to subject them to his rule, so that afterward they may be more easily instructed in the faith?”[60]

Valladolid and Its Aftermath

Valladolid marked the zenith of Las Casas’s influence at court, but it was an inconclusive victory that would not last, least of all on the ground in America. According to Lewis Hanke, the most hotly contested issue turned on the Aristotelian theory of natural slavery, embraced by Sepúlveda and rejected by Las Casas.[61] Aristotle’s theory is notoriously vague. He posits that the free rules the slave, just as the male rules the female and the adult the child.[62] But that does not of course answer the question why some people are slaves by nature. Aristotle’s answer is that natural slaves lack the deliberative faculty of the soul. They can understand commands but they are unable to think autonomously. Elsewhere, Aristotle refers to people “by nature incapable of reasoning … like certain tribes on the borders of the civilized world.”[63] Admitting that no consistent theory of natural slavery can be found in Aristotle, Peter Garnsey highlights two features of the Aristotelian natural slave: first, the slave is subhuman and, second, the slave/master relationship is mutually beneficial rather than exploitative. He adds that in practice most slaves in Greek cities were foreigners, since the Greeks balked at enslaving fellow Greeks.[64] Prima facie, it seems, the image of the natural slave conforms to the standard representation of the “remote barbarian.” We shall now see how Sepúlveda applied this style of reasoning to the Native Americans.

Unlike Las Casas, Sepúlveda never crossed the Atlantic. His opinions on the Native Americans mainly rested on the early Spanish histories of the conquest. Some of these had glorified Spanish bravado while painting a degrading picture of the Native Americans. According to Sepúlveda, the Indians were given to unrestrained passions and abominations, including cannibalism and “incredible sacrifices of human beings.” Before the arrival of the Spaniards they waged interminable internecine wars. However, Sepúlveda continued, one should not believe that the Native Americans are brave men. The ancient Scythians, he reminded his audience, were cannibals too, but they were fierce and redoubtable warriors. The American Indians, on the other hand, are cowards, for several times a few hundred Spaniards had routed many thousands of them, “who fled like women.”[65] Here the Spanish victories are adduced as evidence of American cowardice. On the American frontier, contempt for the vanquished translated into a doctrine of their natural inferiority. On the steppe frontier in the Old World, a reverse effect translated respect for the staying power of the nomads into an image of manly autonomy. In Sepúlveda’s remark on the Scythians we hear a distant echo of Herodotus, but his views on the Indians are couched in the novel language of the American frontier.

We can usefully contrast the above with the use Las Casas made of ancient evidence. Las Casas cited Herodotus’s account of Scythian human sacrifices in an attempt to show that such practices were found among many peoples in antiquity, including the inhabitants of pre-Roman Spain. These practices, he submitted, cannot be excused in the sight of God, but humanly speaking they are “probable errors” sanctioned by custom and law among most ancient nations. According to Benjamin Keen, his most daring argument was that the “painful and horrendous sacrifices” of the Aztecs demonstrated their deep and sincere religiosity and their “natural understanding of God.” What is needed in such circumstances, Las Casas argued, is patient education, not brute force.[66]

In his attempt to account for human sacrifice, Las Casas partook in the anthropological turn, a way of looking at the Native Americans that is completely absent from Sepúlveda’s argument. Throwing back Sepúlveda’s arguments in his face, he further observed “that more human victims had been sacrificed by the Spaniards to their beloved Goddess of Greed every year since the discovery of America than by the Indians to their gods for a century before that event.”[67] Whereas Sepúlveda had dismissed the civilization of the Aztecs as primitive and insignificant, Las Casas highlighted their architectural and artistic achievements which he considered in several respects superior to the ancient civilizations of the Old World. Their religion he rejected, but he nonetheless highlighted their “good reasons” to follow a demonically inspired false creed.

According to Sepúlveda, the defects of the Native Americans, far from being the effect of historical contingencies, reflected their essential nature. Some years before Valladolid, he had even questioned the humanity of the Native Americans:

These barbarians of the New World … are as inferior to the Spaniards as are children to adults and women to men. The difference between them is as great as between a wild, cruel people and the most merciful, between the grossly intemperate and the most continent and temperate, and, I am tempted to say, between men and monkeys.[68]

Comparing the Native Americans to children, women, and monkeys, Sepúlveda gradually pushed them further down the chain of being. Children are inferior to adults, but their subjection is transitory. Women are human, but their inferior status is a lifelong predicament. Children and women partake in common humanity, albeit in a lower division than adult males, but monkeys stand outside the widest circle of common humanity. Having established the subhuman status of the Native Americans, Sepúlveda proceeded to the Aristotelian theory of natural slavery. Such inferior people, he asserted, “require, by their own nature and in their own interests, to be placed under the authority of civilized and virtuous princes.”[69] Sepúlveda further argued that the Spaniards had brought many useful European products to America and had bestowed upon the Indians the supreme gift of the Christian religion, a benefit far surpassing all the others.

Las Casas categorically denied that the theory of natural slavery was applicable to the Native Americans. Above all, he criticized the blanket notion of “barbarians” taken for granted by his opponent.[70] Las Casas proposed to distinguish four kinds of barbarians. In the first place there is the common-sense notion of the word, referring to “any cruel, inhuman, wild, and merciless man.” This notion may be applicable to individuals but Las Casas thought it extremely implausible that entire peoples would consist of such deranged individuals. The second meaning pertains to peoples without a written language, or to people whose language is unfamiliar. Here Las Casas invoked Saint Paul’s dictum that there are many kinds of voices in the world and none of them is without signification: “Therefore, if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me.”[71] The apostle obviously plays on the ambiguity of the Greek term barbaros. In this perspective, the concept of the barbarian necessarily is a relative one.

The third meaning of barbarian refers to “those who, either because of their evil and wicked character, or the barrenness of the region in which they live, are cruel, sottish, stupid, and strangers to reason.” Such barbarians are mostly defined by the civilized attributes they lack. According to Las Casas this is “the proper and strict meaning of the word.” He then invoked divine Providence to demonstrate that such barbarians are freaks of nature and therefore small in number. To assume that an entire continent peopled by such freaks was needlessly created, as Sepúlveda maintains, betrays a deep irreverence toward God and a contemptuous view of nature which is his handiwork.[72]

Finally, Las Casas discussed a fourth genre of “barbarians.” These are simply all those who do not believe in Christ, whether out of ignorance or unwillingness.[73] This is obviously the only sense in which the Native Americans can be collectively defined as barbarians, but Las Casas underlined that it is not permitted to kill and enslave entire nations because they are not Christian (here his argument is close to Innocent and Vitoria). He filled many pages to prove that conversion cannot be effected by force. As Sepúlveda also invoked Vitoria, Las Casas had to confront Vitoria’s arguments for a limited imperialism. He first triumphantly marshaled Vitoria’s critique of colonial wars but then felt the need to correct the second part of Vitoria’s reasoning which, to his taste, left too much leeway for wars of aggression.[74]

Observing that his opponent had never visited America and mostly relied on hearsay, Las Casas vindicated the common humanity of the Native Americans.[75] Armed with the impressive amounts of information on the customs and achievements of the Indians he had collected over the years, he contended that they were fully rational human beings who fulfilled all the Aristotelian requirements for the good life:

They are not ignorant, inhuman, or bestial. Rather, long before they had heard the word Spaniard they had properly organized states, wisely ordered by excellent laws, religion, and custom. They cultivated friendship and, bound together in common fellowship, lived in populous cities in which they wisely administered the affairs of both peace and war justly and equitably, truly governed by laws that at very many points surpass ours, and could have won the admiration of the sages of Athens.[76]

As we noted above, Las Casas was inclined to place the Native Americans higher than the ancient Greeks and Romans. He pointed to the education they gave their children and their reasonable marriage arrangements. The temples of Yucatán, he asserted, were not less worthy of admiration than the pyramids of Egypt.[77] On the esthetic achievements of the Native Americans, his opinion was in line with Albrecht Dürer who had expressed his admiration for the “amazing artistic objects” crafted by “the subtle ingenuity of the men in these distant lands.”[78]

When Sepúlveda and Las Casas had delivered their lengthy depositions the committee convened, but it failed to arrive at a final judgment. Even so, there are indications that the majority was unwilling to go along with Sepúlveda. Sepúlveda was not granted permission to publish his deposition, while Las Casas could freely publish his defense of the Native Americans. That is not to say, however, that his critique had much practical effect. During the remainder of the sixteenth century, the exploitation and maltreatment of the Indians continued unabated. These results must have been hard on Las Casas. That probably explains the bitter and sometimes resentful tone of the Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies he finally published in 1552, a year after the inconclusive end of the Valladolid dispute. It was to become Las Casas’s most widely disseminated tract. Before the end of the century Dutch, French, English, German, Italian, and Latin translations were published. The Short Account was written in a vivid and accessible style, indicating the author’s desire to reach a broad public. The Dutch translation of the Short Account went through thirty reprints during the Dutch revolt against their Spanish overlords. Whether this really reflected Dutch empathy with the Native Americans is open to doubt.

One of the most striking instances of Las Casas’s emphatic approach to native culture is his biting comment on the practice of the requerimiento:

What he did in practice whenever he [the Spanish governor of a district] or the bandits in his employ learned that there was gold in a particular town or village, was to get his gang of robbers to make their way there at the dead of night, when the inhabitants were all in bed and sound asleep and, once they got within, say half a league of the town itself, to read out the terms of this edict, proclaiming (and only to themselves): ‘Leaders and citizens of such-and-such a town of this Mainland. Be it known to you that there is one true God, one Pope, and one King of Castile who is the rightful owner of all these lands. You are hereby summoned to pay allegiance etc. Should you fail to do so, take notice that we shall make just war upon you, and your lives and liberty will be forfeit.…’ Then, in the early hours of morning, when the poor people were still innocently abed with their wives and their children, they would irrupt into the town, setting fire to the houses.[79]

In the same vein, Las Casas inquires how John Major, whose justification for enslaving the Indians was cited by Sepúlveda, would react to the ruthless warfare of the Europeans if he was a Native American: “If Hungarians and Bohemians, of whose language he would be ignorant, were to despoil him of his dignity or rule … upsetting everything and terrifying his provinces with the tumult of war, even if they were motivated by a good cause, would he graciously and joyfully accept that good cause?”[80] With such gripping images, Las Casas invites his readers to imagine what the requerimiento would look like to the average inhabitant of a Native American village. Such language marks his distance from Vitoria, who seemed utterly unable to imagine how the Spanish conquest was experienced by the Native Americans. In the same vein, Las Casas justifies the defensive measures taken by the Aztecs during the Spanish attack on Tenochtitlan: “The locals got wind of this, catching up with many as they fled across the causeways that span the lake and killing them in great numbers, as, indeed, they had every right to, given the attacks we have described that had been made on them: a reasonable and fair-minded man will see that theirs was a defensive action and a just one.”[81]

Bernardino de Sahagún and the Aztec View of the Spaniards

We encounter a similar balancing act between equality and difference in the work of a contemporary of Las Casas, the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, who spent several decades in Mexico. Unlike Las Casas, Sahagún was not a radical activist, but his study of the native culture went much deeper. He learned Nahuatl, the main language of the Aztec Empire, and with the help of native assistants he systematically collected information about native beliefs, customs, and traditions. He also developed a Christology in Nahuatl, predicated on the metaphor of the “Solar Christ.” Whether his flock always understood the subtle theological distinction between the Solar Christ and the visible sun in the sky, traditionally deified by the peoples of Mexico, is not clear.[82] Sahagún’s aides conducted lengthy interviews with village elders and other knowledgeable persons. This oral history was instrumental in his missionary work, but it also made him more receptive to the native culture. How he maintained the balance between his missionary assignment and his ethnographical investigations is not always clear. Sahagún was not the only friar to learn Nahuatl and to collect ethnographic and historical information. Eventually, the collaboration between the Franciscans and their native disciples resulted in the emergence of Nahuatl as a literary medium that enabled the native elite to maintain their cultural identity to some extent.[83]

But Sahagún also had to participate in the cruel side of the conversion effort. He recounts the tragic end of Carlos Ometochtzin, a scion of an aristocratic Mexican family who had converted to Christianity but had subsequently returned to his ancestral religion and, as lord of Texcoco, exhorted his subjects to do likewise.[84] According to Spanish law this made him culpable of the capital crime of apostasy. In 1539, Sahagún was appointed as interpreter in the prosecution of Ometochtzin by the Inquisition. Under interrogation, he declared that his grandfather and father “were prophets who knew what had to be done and what had been done.” They had never spoken about this new divinity, so that there was no good reason for his people to change their religion. Even among the friars, he argued, there were different forms of religion, so why was there no place for his ancestral beliefs and practices? We see, Ometochtzin pointed out to the inquisitors, “that the friars of Saint Francis have one manner of doctrine and sort of life and style of dress, and the followers of Saint Augustine have another, and the followers of Saint Dominic have another, as we all see, and thus it was among those who attended the gods among us: those from Mexico had … one manner of prayer and offering … and in other nations another; in each town they had their own way … and that is the way the friars and clerics do it because no one agrees with the others.”[85] These were the words Sahagún had to translate from Nahuatl into Spanish. Ometochtzin’s defense fell on deaf ears. He was burned at the stake on 30 November 1539.

Sahagún’s research gives us a glimpse of how the Aztecs experienced the conquest of their empire by Cortéz. We know that in precontact times the Aztecs harbored a deep concern for their past. Miguel León-Portilla reports that “a considerable number of texts, some accompanied by images and glyphic writing, have come down to us. A few were carved in stone, such as the so-called Tizoc Stone, on which the conquests of the Aztec ruler Tizoc are registered by means of images and glyphs.” By the third decade of the sixteenth century, a number of Nahuas, under the guidance of Sahagún, had learned to read and write alphabetically.[86] They drafted an account of the siege and destruction of the magnificent city of Tenochtitlan by Cortéz and his native allies. It has to be stressed that their story was written down more than ten years after the events. Moreover, the final editing was probably done by Sahagún. Even so, the text bears the imprint of the native experience of the annihilation of their empire. The traumatic language in parts of the narrative attests to the grief of those who lost their beloved and their homes. “All this has happened to us,” they lament, “that which we have seen and beheld. That what has afflicted us and made us so sorrowful and anguished.”[87]

Inga Clendinnen rightly warns historians to approach the narrative with some caution. Like the Spanish accounts of Cortéz and Diaz del Castillo it was put together with the benefit of hindsight. In particular, Clendinnen questions the portrayal of Moctezuma. Right from the start, after Cortéz’s landfall has been reported to him, the Aztec ruler is depicted as downcast and terrified by what he learns about the effects of the Spanish artillery. His conduct in the first stage of the war is described as vacillating and cowardly. Clendinnen suspects that the authors sought to attribute the final outcome of the war to Moctezuma’s failure of leadership, in order to make sense out of a messy sequence of events that were incomprehensible in terms of the Aztec rules of warfare. She further contends that the stories of Moctezuma believing the Spaniards to be almost superhuman, perchance even “gods,” fit all too well in the triumphal Spanish narrative of European victory over superstitious “natives” (much later, Sahagún would produce a revised account that justified Cortéz and presented the entire conquest as “providential”).[88] That before the fall of Tenochtitlan the Spaniards were not overconfident is also clear from Cortez’s second letter to Charles V, where he extols the incredible beauty and wealth of the great city and the royal pomp and splendor of Moctezuma.[89] Likewise, Díaz del Castillo recalls that he felt some uneasiness approaching Tenochtitlan, noting that “in front of us stood the great city of Mexico, and we—we did not even number four hundred soldiers.”[90]

Reading the native narrative one is nonetheless struck by the contrast with the Spanish histories of Oviedo, Gomera, Diáz, and others. The Spaniards set down a narrative of exploration, conquest, and glory, including descriptions of Aztec wealth, craftsmanship, and military prowess to impress their masters in Europe. The Aztec story, on the other hand, recounts the deepest trauma of their recent history, the cataclysmic end of their familiar and trusted world brought about by the Spanish invasion. The account of the conquest of Mexico opens in a mythical key. During the ten years before the arrival of the Spaniards evil omens appeared, ranging from fires, comets, and thunderstorms to the appearance of monstrous beings.[91] The Aztec history thus starts in a mood of dark foreboding. Clendinnen is surely right to distrust the scapegoating of Moctezuma and the alleged emotional despondency of the Indians, but is not a traumatic narrative of doom exactly what we should expect in a history written well after the destruction of Tenochtitlan, a city of 200,000 inhabitants, the greatest city in the Native American “known world”?

To the Indians, the appearance of the Spaniards, even without supernatural overtones, definitely destabilized the normality of their world. No one had ever entered their realm from the sea and the Europeans were unlike any people they had encountered before. Quite apart from the mythical beliefs about gods returning from the ocean, the Spaniards’ arrival caused deep feelings of insecurity, anxiety, and fear. With his early demonstration of cannon fire Cortéz played on this. The attire and physiognomy of the Spaniards impressed the Aztecs as utterly strange and unfamiliar: their iron harnesses, their white skin, their long beards and hair, their strange food; everything about them was disconcerting. And so were their big horses and their large, fearsome dogs with “fiery eyes.”[92]

The Aztec image of the Spaniards depicts them as dangerous beings and powerful enemies, but when Moctezuma dispatches emissaries presenting the strangers with golden ornaments, the language of the narrator suddenly changes. The Spaniards, he reports, threw themselves upon the gold:

As if they were monkeys they seized upon the gold. It was as if their hearts were satisfied, brightened, calmed. For in truth they thirsted mightily for gold … [and] they lusted for it like pigs.… It was as if they babbled. What they said was gibberish.[93]

All at once, it is as if the tables are turned. Now it is the Aztecs who depict the Spaniards as monkeys, pigs, and babbling barbarians. Within a few lines, the Spaniards descend from a redoubtable grandeur to the realm of the subhuman. Whatever they signified to the Aztec chroniclers, they most certainly were not above critique.

What is also abundantly clear from the Aztec account is that the outcome of the final contest in Tenochtitlan hung in the balance for almost a year. There was no Spanish walkover, no easy victory over a bunch of “demoralized natives.” At one moment, in the infamous noche triste, the Spaniards were ousted from the city, many of them were killed, and had the defenders pressed their advantage, Cortez’s military machine might well have been damaged beyond repair. But they did not. And here we are faced with a difference between Cortéz’s European tactics and the Aztec code of honor. Given the opportunity, the Spaniards always killed as many Indians as they could, reckoning that numbers were against them. The Aztecs fought in an entirely different manner. To mow down a fleeing enemy they considered dishonorable. Instead, they waited for a mighty Spanish warrior to face one of them and engage in ritualized personal combat. When military necessity compelled the native warriors to kill defeated Spaniards they finished them off by smashing the back of their heads, a dishonorable death reserved in Tenochtitlan for criminals.[94] The Spaniards’ conduct of war, like their piggish gluttony for gold, must have debased them in Aztec eyes. Possibly, they were the “barbarians” in the Aztec worldview.

Whatever opinion of the Spaniards the Aztecs harbored, it was not that they were invincible gods. They could be killed and after the infamous and unprovoked Spanish massacre of the people celebrating the Feast of Huitzilopochtli a massive battle cry went out that they should be killed. When one of Moctezuma’s grandees (according to the native account) commanded his compatriots to cease their attack on the Spaniards, “the Mexicans raised a clamor … then flew into great fury,” accusing the grandee of cowardice and the Spaniards of treachery.[95] But for the return of Cortéz with fresh Spanish troops and very numerous Tlaxcallan and Cempoallan allies the Spanish campaign might have ended then and there. While it is true that their superior weapons and tactics saved them from annihilation at several critical turning points, ultimately the heavily outnumbered Spaniards could not have prevailed without their native allies. The mass killing of defeated Aztecs, including women and children, was mainly the work of the Tlaxcallans, who exacted a terrible retribution for the long years they had been oppressed by the ruthless rulers of Tenochtitlan. Their murderous rage during the last days of Tenochtitlan was such that even Cortéz qualified it as “fierce and unnatural cruelty.”[96]

The literary expressions of Aztec loss and grief that have come down to us are of a somber, heartrending beauty, as in the famous elegy of the broken spears:

Broken spears lie in the roads;

We have torn our hair in our grief.

The houses are roofless now, and their walls

Are red with blood.

…

We have pounded our heads in despair

Against the adobe walls,

For our inheritance, our city, is lost and dead.

The shields of our warriors were its defense,

But they could not save it.[97]

In such poetic language the Aztecs sought to convey the traumatic experience of defeat at the hands of incomprehensible invaders from an unknown outside world. Knowing what was yet to come, we can only conclude that the elegy of Tenochtitlan understated the depth and irreversibility of what its mournful poets were living through.

The Limits of Las Casas’s Conception of Common Humanity and Equality

Las Casas has been criticized for painting the Native Americans in too rosy colors and portrayed as a naïve admirer of “noble savages.” Some of his writings do indeed convey such an impression. For all that, it would be unfair to depict him as a naïve ethical relativist. He sometimes minimizes or overlooks the defects of the Indian cultures, and it is true that he often invites his European readers to consider the habits and ancestral beliefs of the Indians before condemning them. Likewise, he urges them to look at the Spanish invasion through the eyes of the Indians. But even so he categorically declares that cannibalism and human sacrifice are inadmissible before God. Never does Las Casas explicitly condone such practices. What he maintains, however, is that the slaughter of entire towns to put an end to human sacrifice makes more innocent victims than the idolatrous practice itself, and has therefore to be condemned (echoing a well-known argument of Thomas Aquinas against the catastrophic consequences of violent uprisings to depose a tyrannical ruler).

For all that, the truths of Christian theology stand forth as an absolute yardstick to which even the most heartfelt sentiments of the Native Americans must yield. The difference is defined in a passage of Las Casas’s argumentation in Valladolid that might be read as naïve relativism but in fact says the contrary:

Does the Indian who has never heard the name of Christ believe any less, at least in a human way, that his religion is true than the Christian does of his religion?[98]

The key to his intention is the qualifier “at least in human way.” Humanly speaking, the sincerity and the truth-experience of the natives stand on the same level as those of the Christians, but theologically such an equation cannot apply. In his exculpatory discussion of human sacrifice, mentioned above, he praises the Aztecs for their “natural understanding of God.” But natural theology, the capacity of all humans to know that there is a God, does not have the same stature as the Christian Revelation, of which the Bible is the repository and the Church of Rome the guardian. Theologically speaking, the contrast is not between two religions but between absolute truth and absolute error. The distance between human empathy and theological truth demonstrates the limits of Las Casas’s notions of common humanity and equality.

Neither Sahagún nor Las Casas were in a position to contest the authority of the Church to punish Native Americans who relapsed from Christianity into their ancestral faith. Doing so would justify apostasy and ultimately redefine the Roman Catholic Church as a voluntary organization people could enter and leave at will. Fully acknowledging the common humanity of the Indians in secular matters, they could never grant them an autonomous will in matters of faith, a degree of freedom they could not even claim for themselves. For the same reasons Las Casas, despite his deep-seated aversion to the colonists’ exploitation of the native population, could not bring himself to advocate the abandonment of the entire colonial enterprise, because that implied withholding the message of Christ from the Native Americans. Las Casas upheld the sacred duty to Christianize the natives, although a few days before his death, in July 1566, he called for a restitution of all native property and a restoration of their self-government.[99]

For men like Las Casas and Sahagún, the core definition of humanity included a universal right to gain entry to the Kingdom of Heaven—that is, a “right” to be converted. Human beings were equals in the sense that they possessed immortal souls and were created in God’s image. Whether and, if so, how much the Native Americans desired to be converted is an open question. Patricia Seed has argued that the scholastic thesis that the Native Americans possessed a “rational soul” entailed the missionaries’ assumption “that anyone who was ‘rational’ would find their religion ‘obvious’ and so convert.” Hence, Seed concludes that the conception of native rationality advanced by Las Casas and his allies logically led to a definition of their humanity centered on their capacity to be baptized and enter the Christian fold.[100] There is a kernel of truth in Seed’s argument, but she is wrong to reduce Las Casas’s notion of native rationality to its theological side. Las Casas, we should recall, also defined native rationality in Aristotelian terms as their capacity for political deliberation and good government. His opinion was that the Native Americans should be voluntarily converted but otherwise left free to govern their own affairs.

Sabine Maccormack’s discussion of conversion practices in sixteenth-century Peru discloses a similar ambiguity. The Dominican friar Domingo de Santo Tomás waxed lyrically about the elegance and regularity of the Inca language, which demonstrated the high level of their civilization. Like Las Casas he underlined that before the Spanish conquest the Inca lived in a well-ordered state, thus meeting the Aristotelian standard of civilization. When it came to the Andean religious practices, however, encomium gave way to aggression. “The opening of most missionary campaigns,” Maccormack relates, “consisted of first discovering what were the holy places and holy objects of any given region, and then destroying them.”[101]

Given these limitations and tensions, it is not surprising that recent historians have arrived at diverging appraisals of Las Casas’s life and work. Lawrence Clayton has portrayed him as pioneering “a new understanding of human rights” and as the “quintessential anti-Conquistador.” Examining the sources of Las Casas’s long struggle for indigenous rights, Clayton identifies “a spiritual awakening” rooted in the reformist Christian milieu of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain.[102] Considering Las Casas’s intentions and his unceasing insistence on the native rights to life and liberty, Clayton is surely right. On the other hand, a quite different interpretation has been advanced by Daniel Castro who characterizes Las Casas as a paternalistic reformer who sought to promote a “benevolent ecclesiastical imperialism” as an antidote to the murderous imperialism of the colonists.[103] However, Las Casas’s two major objectives, voluntary conversion and native self-government, represented a wholesale rejection of the religious as well as the economic strategy of Spanish colonialism. “Ecclesiastical imperialism” is, I think, a misleading label for Las Casas’s long struggle for native rights.

Las Casas’s notion of common humanity, then, oscillated between two poles. In his denunciation of the colonial regime, it was directed against the unjust and unreasonable usurpation of native freedom by the colonists, but as a harbinger of Christian universalism it put definite limits on the liberty of the natives: admittedly, conversion had to be voluntary but once within the Christian church there was no exit except in death.

José de Acosta Situates America in Sacred and World History

Like Las Casas and Sahagún, José de Acosta’s writings originated in his missionary work in America. But unlike them, he was a member of the Jesuit order and he spent his American years not in Mexico but in Peru. Born in 1540, he belonged to a younger generation; he arrived in Peru in 1572 and returned to Spain in 1587. Whereas Las Casas had lived through the conquest and the first stage of colonization, Acosta took part in the consolidation of empire. In the year of his arrival, Tupac Amaru, the last claimant to the Inca throne, was captured and publicly beheaded in Cuzco on the orders of Francisco de Toledo, the recently appointed energetic viceroy of Peru.

Toledo ruled Peru from 1569 to 1581. He sought to create a new political and social order under the firm control of the Spanish magistrates, curbing the autonomous power of local encomenderos and caudillos. The solemn and frightening execution of the “Last Inca” on the central square of the city was witnessed by over a hundred thousand Amerindians, along with the colonial settlers. In a deadly silence, Tupac Amaru spoke his recognition of the Christian god. For days on end, the missionary priests had kept him under intense pressure to achieve this public recantation of his ancestral religion, hoping to convince the population of the demise of their ancient gods.[104] The Jesuits built their church in Cuzco on the foundation of the palace of Guayna Capac, the last Inca before the arrival of the Spaniards. The visible authority of the Christian church was to usurp the seat of Inca authority.[105] Despite such efforts the Peruvian population persisted in its resistance to the imposition of Christianity.

Acosta arrived in Lima in April 1572.[106] Perhaps he was present at Tupac Amaru’s execution. He was a sober and grave man, not given to the millenarian expectations about the impending return of Christ so popular among his Franciscan brethren. To Acosta, the justification of the Spanish Empire had become self-evident. Some of his Jesuit colleagues in Peru voiced doubts about Spanish rule, but Acosta, while not denying that the conquest had been marred by many instances of unjust violence, argued that as things now stood subverting the Spanish Empire was a recipe for new and greater disasters.[107] As we shall shortly see, he was aware of the critique of Las Casas and his Dominican colleagues but dismissed it as well-intentioned but misguided.

When Acosta arrived in Peru, the colony counted well over a million Native Americans, 25,000 Europeans, 70,000 people of mixed descent, and a growing number of African slaves. Many of the Indians were regrouped in towns, laid out in rectangular grids with churches on their central squares. The natives had to deliver taxes and labor services, and annual levies of over 13,000 peasants were commandeered to work in the silver mines of Potosi.[108] Acosta was much closer to the colonial government than Las Casas, who always had to work through his connections at the court in Spain and was sidelined by the colonial elite. The view from the top may explain why Acosta’s main publication, the Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias, did not come in the format of a narrative history or a treatise on justice and policy, but as an encyclopedic synopsis that sought to assess the nature of the New World and the results of almost a century of Spanish rule.

Acosta drafted the first part of the Historia during his stay in America and completed it after his return to Spain. Published in Sevilla in 1590, the book was well received and soon translated into Italian, French, German, English, Dutch, and Latin.[109] The Historia was the product of Acosta’s mature reflection on what he had seen in America. In a Latin tract, De Temporibus Novissimis, published in Rome in the same year, he tells his readers that “the things of the Indies seemed after I had had personal experience of them to be both the same as I had heard and not the same. Indeed I found them the same in that those who told me about them had not actually lied to me about them; but nevertheless I judged them to be different and very unlike what I had first thought.”[110] The American experience thus had in some way modified Acosta’s perspective on America and its inhabitants. Not so much in his aversion to their “idolatry,” which never relented, but rather in his appreciation of the level of civilization attained by the Native Americans, and in particular the inhabitants of Mexico and Peru.

One of the reasons for writing his book, Acosta explains, was “to confute that false opinion many doe commonly holde of them, that they are a gross and brutish people.” The underestimation of the achievements of the Indians, he continues, has led many Europeans to commit “excesses and outrages” against them, to treat them like mindless beasts, and to consider them “unworthy of any respect.” Admitting that the Indians had many “barbarous things,” Acosta underlines that many of their achievements were “worthy of great respect.” In some ways, he assures his readers, they surpass “our commonweales,” and the Greeks and the Romans would have esteemed several of their accomplishments.[111] This critique of the vulgar view of all Native Americans as “savages” is placed at the beginning of Book VI of the Historia where it introduces the ethnographical part of the work. Later on, after his discussion of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru, Acosta warns his readers not to underestimate the valor of the Indians. Had Moctezuma in Mexico or the Inca in Peru been resolute in resisting the Spaniards, he contends, Cortez and Pizarro would have achieved but little, “although they were excellent Captaines.”[112]

The Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias moves in two temporal frameworks, a temporality of Christian sacred history and a temporality of development from savagery to civilization. Sacred history belongs to the discipline of theology, while secular history takes its cues from natural history, political theory, ethnography, and geography. The new mode of investigation it introduces is a language of comparative ethnology.[113] Acosta does not always clearly distinguish the two frameworks, but in broad outline we can say that Book V, which is devoted to the religious beliefs and rites of the Native Americans, is largely dominated by the theological frame, whereas the other books display a logic of secular inquiry, albeit without ever severing the ties between the secular and the sacred.

In the opening pages of Acosta’s discussion of native religion he announces that he wrote it not solely to provide information about events in the Indies but also to assist the Indians to save their souls and to sing the glory of the “Creator and Redeemer.”[114] Reading these chapters, one immediately notices that his judgment of the native religions is far more severe and less emphatic than Las Casas’s approach. According to Acosta, the “religions” of the Indians are not true religions at all but devious phantasms employed by the devil to lead the people astray. Sahagún had sometimes excused the Aztec parents who sacrificed their children to the gods, arguing that Satan was the real culprit, but such reasoning did not come easily to Acosta. At most, he was willing to consider the idea of sacrifice as a point of entry for conversion to the Christian doctrine of sacrifice.[115] Even so, the ultimate cause of idolatry was the unceasing effort of Satan “to make himself equall unto God, and to imitate him in his Sacrifices, Religion, and Sacraments.”[116]

As the devil’s seduction of humanity dates from the Fall of Adam and will continue until the second coming of Christ, idolatry has no history in the secular meaning of the term. Acosta’s description of temples, priests, and rituals in Peru and Mexico includes isolated observations about Japanese, Lebanese, and Egyptian religion. The Chinese are singled out as the least idolatrous of all the peoples apart from the three monotheisms, in accordance with the Jesuit hopes of converting them by capitalizing on the alleged affinities between Confucianism and Christianity. All of this has nothing to do with history. In these chapters, the American, Asian, and African varieties of idolatry stand side by side in an atemporal continuum beyond the intellectual space of secular history.

When we turn to Acosta’s historical vision, the contours of a quite different vision of America emerge. To begin with, he explains that America is an integral part of the world, a continent among the other continents. It consists of the same four Aristotelian physical elements and the same natural orders—mineral, vegetal, animal—as the Old World. The same climate zones that divide Eurasia and Africa run through America. In this connection, Acosta criticizes the ancient opinion that the extreme heat of the torrid zone made it unfit to sustain life. Lima lies only 600 miles south of the equator, but in March the weather was very cold. Consequently, Aristotle’s contention that in the tropics people would perish from overheating had to be discarded. Acosta attributed the moderate climate in Peru to the Pacific Ocean, the wind system, and the high altitude.[117] Jokingly he observed that in Lima he was an antipode of the Asiatic lands, but that he did not walk upside down.[118]

Likewise, the Native Americans have their own history, preserved in codices and oral memory, making them part of world history.[119] Like Las Casas and Vitoria, with whose work he was familiar, Acosta accepted the common humanity of all peoples, rejected the theory of natural slavery, and explained cultural differences in terms of history and the natural environment. Furthermore, he was convinced that converting the Indians was impossible without knowledge of their languages, customs, and mentality.[120]

Accepting the book of Genesis as true history, Acosta posited a single Old World origin of humanity. When he was writing, the question of the origin of the Native Americans had been debated for almost a century. Various theories were proposed, ranging from Carthaginians and survivors of Atlantis to Vikings and the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.[121] Acosta thought the Jewish hypothesis most improbable, because there were no traces of Jewish customs and beliefs among the Indians, while the Jews were known to cling to their traditions wherever they wandered. Starting from the Deluge, Acosta drew two conclusions. In the first place, Noah’s ark stranded on Mount Ararat, and it was from there that the earth was subsequently populated. Second, the book of Genesis clearly states that the creation was finished in the first six days. It followed that no new animal species were created after the Deluge. Therefore all the animals found in America originated in the Old World.[122]

Using his reading of Genesis as a research hypothesis, Acosta rejects all theories that the Americans had arrived by sea. The ancients had no magnetic compass and could not cross the oceans. Moreover, the animals could not have reached America by sea, for why should sailors have burdened their ships with harmful and useless animals, such as wolves and poisonous snakes.[123] The only remaining explanation, Acosta submits, is that both humans and animals reached America by a land bridge, or perhaps a very narrow strait. Such a passage, he adds, might well exist in the Arctic, for no European has as yet visited the northwestern regions “above Florida.”[124]

Acosta next investigates the history and the origins of the Native Americans. They arrived in successive waves and their arrival in the New World was “not many thousand years past.”[125] The first settlers, he conjectures, were “savage men and fugitives” who had no cities, no polities, and no writing.[126] In this way, he can place the savage state at the dawn of American history, all the while upholding the message of Genesis that the real beginning of history was made by Noah and his family, who worshipped the One God and spoke Hebrew. The first inhabitants of America, he states, were hunters who did not sow anything. They wandered from place to place while their food ranged from hares and birds to snakes, lizards, locusts, and worms. The women shared this way of living with the men. Finally, they did not worship any gods nor had they any religious ceremonies.

Even today, Acosta observes, such savages are found in some parts of Mexico. To preach the Christian faith to them is useless; they must be taught “that they are men” before they can become Christians.[127] As so often, the notion of the savage is constructed as a series of absences. They lack most of the attributes that define a regular social order. They are depicted as nomadic rather than settled, as areligious rather than idolaters, and as lawless and in a stage where reason has yet to make its appearance. Finally, their culture is hardly gendered, exhibiting a primitive sexual sameness. Starting from this savage state, some of the Native Americans have traveled the path of civilization, but none have attained the level of the sixteenth-century Europeans. That is not to say, however, that the Native Americans are entirely mired in savagery. The savage state represents the baseline of their history. It is the condition of the Asiatic settlers when they arrived in America or, Acosta repeatedly intimates, into which they relapsed as they had to survive in the severe conditions of the arctic regions. In the Historia Natural y Moral, savagery is explained as a consequence of the migration experience of the Native Americans and does not represent their essential nature. Furthermore, it is not a static condition but the first stage of a history. In the course of time, Acosta argues, some of these savages, “excelling others in force and wit,” came to lord it over their less endowed neighbors and erected the kingdoms of Mexico and Peru. These nations could still be classified as “barbarians” in a generic sense, but they far surpassed all the other Indians.[128]

Perusing the Historia Natural y Moral, the reader soon discovers that lawless savagery and the monarchies of the Aztecs and the Inca did not exhaust the range of political regimes in precontact America. Once more, Acosta begins with an apodictic axiom, observing that the political regime of the “barbarians” is tyrannical and their rulers seek to be revered like gods. Many Indians, Acosta then explains, did not put up with such tyrants, but “live in commonalities, creating and appointing Captains and Princes for certaine occasions onely, to whome they obey during the time of their charge.” In the greater part of the New World, he concludes, the people govern themselves in this manner, although there usually are some lords and patricians raised above the common men. Among the countries governed in this way are Chile, Guatemala, Florida, and Brazil. He contrasts these regions with Peru and Mexico: the Mexican kingship was elective, like the Roman Empire, while the Peruvian monarchy was hereditary, as in the kingdoms of Spain and France.[129] What Acosta tells about the election of the Aztec kings has a whiff of Tacitus’s Germania: “This election in the beginning was by the voyce of commons, although the chiefe men managed it.”[130] Even though Acosta’s reports on the political regimes of the Native Americans are not fully consistent, his classification seems to be in three types that correspond to three historical stages. The earliest stage is lawless savagery, the second are loose commonwealths we may characterize as aristocratic republics, and the third and highest stage are the monarchical states of Mexico and Peru.

To put this in perspective, we must realize that Acosta also applied the barbarian label to the Chinese. In his time, he adds, the historical records of the Mexicans were not so “subtill and curious” as those of China and Japan, but they had letters and books wherein they preserved the deeds of their predecessors.[131] Unfortunately, many of these Aztec records were burnt by overzealous Spaniards who believed that they contained nothing but useless and possibly dangerous superstition. In reality, Acosta observes, many of the memorials of ancient and holy things would have been extremely useful for the Spaniards to understand the intricacies of the native culture. He then recounts how a Jesuit in Mexico assembled the old and wise men of several towns and had them explain the notation of their histories and calendars. The elders related how they measured historical periods and dates. Acosta further relates that the Mexicans instructed their children to learn by heart the major orations and dialogues preserved in their ancient records. What is more, the Mexicans managed to translate Christian notions, such as confession, sin, God, and the Trinity, into their sign language, a feat Acosta recounts with great admiration, remarking that they could not have done it without “an excellent conception of what was taught them.”[132] In such exemplary stories, Acosta frequently conveys a far more favorable impression of the intellectual and literary abilities of the Indians than in his generalizing nostrums about their “barbarian” customs.

Like most European travelogues, Acosta also discusses the gender regime of the Americans, in particular that of the Inca. All the men could practice the crafts they needed and constructed their own houses, and likewise the women, who understood most things and were not brought up in idleness. Consequently, they served their husbands assiduously. Murder, theft, adultery, and incest with first-degree relatives were capital crimes. But for men to have concubines was not considered adultery. Women found with other men were not subject to the death penalty, except those who were the chief and lawful wife. In such cases, the male adulterer was also punished. When her husband passed away, the chief wife had to mourn for a year, but thereafter she could remarry.[133] Acosta’s account of the Inca gender regime is not condemnatory. Of course he does not condone polygamy, but his observation that the women are not idle but industrious and intelligent bespeaks admiration rather than censure.

Modern research has found that the gender regime of Inca society was based on parallel and complementary roles for men and women. With the exception of the summit of the imperial hierarchy, Inca society functioned in parallel male and female hierarchies: property was owned and inherited in separate male and female lines. Likewise, women as well as men officiated as priests in parallel rituals. In Acosta’s time the Spanish authorities were already at work to Christianize the system, which in practice amounted to the dismantling of the female hierarchies. While Acosta fails to notice the gender balance in the traditional Inca system, he seems to appreciate what was left of the autonomous economic role of women in Inca society.[134] Let us recall that transgression of the Christian gender regime was a feature of numerous European travelogues about the Orient. Acosta’s blanket condemnations of the Native Americans look like the application of preexisting European prejudices about “barbarians,” but when he presents detailed ethnographical data, the stereotype of the barbarian, though not abandoned, recedes into the background.

In the opening pages of his discussion of the nature and development of the religious cultures of the Native Americans, Acosta warns his readers not to condemn the Indians because of their abject and “devilish” beliefs. Let us remember, he declares, “that the same things, yea, worse, have been seen amongst the Greeks and Romans, who have commanded the whole world.”[135] Acosta’s outline of the history of American religion begins with the lawless savages who have no religion at all. In a second stage, one encounters the veneration of natural objects, animals, and sacred places. The third stage arrives when Indians begin to adore the celestial bodies, and in particular the sun. The highest form of religion the Native Americans can attain is the natural theology of One Creator God. Accordingly, they can attain the knowledge of a supreme Lord and Author of all things.[136] The examples Acosta adduces mainly come from Peru and Mexico, and he warns that this natural theology of One Creator God remains adulterated by many manifestations of idolatry, including the hideous human sacrifices practiced by the Aztecs.

This fragmentary history of native religion is framed by a comparative perspective. Acosta repeatedly points to parallels between the religions of the New World and those of the Greeks, the Romans, and the Chinese. What he says about the religious history of the native peoples follows the same evolutionary perspective as his ethnographical and historical vision of America discussed above. Joan-Pau Rubiés has, rightly I think, observed that “what is most remarkable about Acosta’s account is the way he combined his emphasis on a negative supernatural agency with underlying assumptions about the natural apprehension of monotheism by human reason and the irrationality of idolatry.”[137]

We can usefully contrast Acosta’s views with his contemporary, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. Garcilaso was born in 1539 of a Spanish father and an Inca mother. His father, a corregidor of Cuzco, had married an Inca princess, Isabel Chimpu Occllo, a granddaughter of Tupac Inca Yupanqui. Later on, however, he left her for a Spanish noblewoman. Garsilaso thus grew up in two worlds. From his mother’s relatives he ingested much knowledge about the Inca past, while his later instruction in Spain gave him a thorough humanist education. Garcilaso’s publications about the Spanish conquest bear the marks of his double descent. His first book, La Florida del Inca (1605), recounted the ill-fated expedition of Hernando de Soto to what is now the southeastern United States, a campaign that left no lasting results and was mainly noted for its destructive brutality. Garcilaso depicted the natives of Florida as a semicivilized people, largely free of the vices so often attributed to them by Spanish chroniclers.[138] Even more significant, he took great pains to give the Native Americans a voice in the story, mainly by having their chiefs make eloquent speeches indicting the greed and violence of the Spanish conquerors, much in the style of Tacitus’s barbarian chieftains. In the final balance, however, Garcilaso also lauded the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru, expressing the hope that greater empire would be theirs in the future.[139]

The Comentarios Reales de los Incas (Royal Commentaries of the Incas, 1609) are presented to the reader as a correction of the extant Spanish accounts of the Inca Empire.[140] Garcilaso makes a sharp distinction between two eras of Peruvian history. In the first era the inhabitants were savages given to cannibalism, human sacrifice, and devil worship. They went about naked, had no houses, and did not till the soil. The women were as cruel as the men and delighted in feeding their babies human blood.[141] The turning point came when the sun-god took pity on the people and sent down his son and daughter to Lake Titicaca to teach them the virtues of a civilized life. So the Inca Empire emerged. The son of the god was Manco Capac, the first Inca.[142]

According to Garcilaso it is of the highest importance not to conflate the two eras of Peruvian history. The Spanish historians have failed to do so, ascribing the cruel idolatry of the barbarians of the first age to the Inca. Garcilaso refers respectfully to Acosta, but the thrust of his narrative of Inca history, which he attributes to an uncle from his maternal family, runs counter to Acosta’s insistence on Inca idolatry. Moreover, he pushes back the beginning of Inca rule some 300 years further than Acosta, creating a much longer civilized native past. In Garcilaso we encounter a vision of native pride and grandeur that was beyond the intellectual horizon of Acosta.[143]

For all that, Acosta’s book is not a monolithic treatise on demonology. In his view, the native natural theology was a precious discovery, for it provided the obvious point of entry for the Christian labor of conversion. When we examine Acosta’s vision of common humanity, there is a significant difference between the ethnographical and the theological parts of his book. Where the theological perspective dominates, the judgment of the Native Americans is more condemnatory and the discourse of common humanity correspondingly weaker. In the historical and ethnographical chapters, the Indians are often placed on a par with the nations of the Old World, while the theologically framed chapters tend to portray them as satanically inspired “others.”

For Acosta himself, the temporality of sacred history provides the ultimate foundation. It frames his entire discourse and it enables him to justify the Spanish conquest as the outcome of divine Providence. He has written the history of the Indies, Acosta declares in the concluding pages of his book,

to the end that we may know how our Lord has hath a care to favour the faith and Christian religion, defending those that maintained it, although perhaps by their workes they deserved not so great favours and benefites from heaven. And therefore we ought not to condemne all these things of the first Conquerours of the Indies, as some religious and learned men have done, doubtless with good zeale, but without any moderation. For although, for the most part, they were covetous men, cruell and very ignorant in the course that was to be observed with the Infidels, who had never offended the Christians, yet we cannot deny but on their part there was much malice against God and our men, which forced them to use rigor and chastisement. And, moreover, the Lord of all (although the faithful were sinners), would favour their cause and partie, even for the good of the Infidels, who should be converted unto the holy Gospel by this means, for the waies of God are high, and his paths wondrous.[144]

The “religious and learned men” who are berated for their lack of moderation are undoubtedly Las Casas and his Dominican associates. Acosta acknowledges their critique, but marginalizes it by his recourse to providential history. Likewise, he exculpates the colonists: first by pointing out, much in the spirit of Vitoria, that they were forced to respond to the “malice” of the Indians and, second, by portraying them as the blind and sinful instruments of divine Providence. In the end, the bloodshed and suffering of secular history are justified by the higher rationality of sacred history. For Acosta, the religious results of the conquest fulfilled the prophesy of Second Isaiah that the true religion of the One God would be extended to the extremities of the earth (with the Spanish monarchy conveniently standing in for Cyrus). The political unification of the Inca and Aztec empires had created the conditions for the speedy dissemination of Christianity, a clear parallel, as Anthony Pagden has observed, to the role of the Roman Empire in paving the way for Latin Christendom.[145]

Acosta as well as Las Casas affirmed the full humanity and rationality of the Native Americans. Their notions of common humanity displayed the same formal structure. Beyond that, however, their ways parted. In the first place, Las Casas used common humanity to launch a frontal attack on the entire colonial enterprise while in Acosta the critique of the colonists’ misdeeds appeared as a cautious subtext. Second, Las Casas believed that the violence and greed of the colonists subverted the conversion effort, making for superficial conformity instead of real faith. Acosta, on the other hand, thought the violent pacification of the natives a precondition of successful conversion. For both of them, sacred history provided the ultimate rationale for the conquest of America, but Las Casas was unwilling to let the Native Americans be killed and exploited to save their souls.

For Acosta, sacred history was the bedrock of the history of humanity. Even so, his Historia offered an outline of the secular history of America. The Native Americans were inserted in the biblical genealogy of humanity, but at the same time they were situated in a new narrative, a conjectural history of human migrations in world history. Beyond sacred history, Acosta laid the groundwork for America as an integral part of human history. The elements of comparative ethnology he offered were not rigorously theorized, to put it mildly, but they provided the stepping stones for others to advance further along similar lines. The Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias, soon translated into the major European languages, became a standard reference for seventeenth-century geographers, ethnologists, and natural historians.

Michel de Montaigne and the Deconstruction of the Barbarian

José de Acosta and Michel de Montaigne lived in the same century, but it is not clear that we can call them intellectual contemporaries. Montaigne was a scion of a wealthy bourgeois family from Bordeaux who had amassed their fortune in viniculture and fishing. His father belonged to the local elite and became burgomaster of the city. Montaigne was brought up in the milieu of the noblesse de robe and served for many years as a member of the Parliament of Bordeaux, one of France’s twenty-three sovereign courts. His education was not dominated by theology but by the law and the humanist canon of Greek and Roman classics. We may characterize his Weltanschauung as a skeptical humanism. Apart from his beloved Plutarch the most cited author in Montaigne’s Essais is Lucretius, whom many contemporaries considered an atheist.

That is not to say, however, that religion was of little interest to him—quite the contrary. He was born in 1533, a year before the affaire des placards when Calvinist broadsides were distributed in many French towns. The affair heralded the beginning of the religious wars that almost tore the French kingdom apart. In Spain, the expulsion of the Muslims and the Jews had ushered in a massive Catholic consensus, but in sixteenth-century France religion became a source of bitter conflict.

Montaigne began drafting his Essais in 1572, the year of the Saint Bartholomew massacre, when many thousands of Protestants were lynched in a few weeks, including a few hundred in Bordeaux. Montaigne’s family was divided: His father had remained a Catholic, while his mother came from a Jewish family who had fled Spain to escape the Inquisition. Even so, she eventually became a quite fanatical Catholic. Several of Montaigne’s brothers and sisters, however, converted to Calvinism. He did not take that perilous step, but he always remained on speaking terms with his Protestant relatives. During the religious wars he repeatedly served as a negotiator between the contending factions, because he was “one of the few people in France to have good relations with both sides in the conflict.”[146] Montaigne sympathized with the politiques, who thought peace and political stability more important than the imposition of religious orthodoxy.[147] In sixteenth-century Spain, religious homogeneity was a feasible objective, but in France it proved a recipe for civil war. Montaigne came to detest nothing so much as cruelty and fanaticism.

As a colonial power, France was dwarfed by Spain. Even so, some 150 French vessels per year sailed to the Canadian coasts, where they traded with the native inhabitants.[148] Other merchants equipped ships for the Caribbean and the South American littoral. From 1550 to 1560, the French maintained a small settlement, named La France Antarctique, on an island at the entrance of the bay of Rio de Janeiro. In the hinterland they encountered the Tupinamba, a people frequently at war with their neighbors. The Tupinamba were known as cannibals because they used to fatten and finally eat enemy prisoners of war. The French presence was short-lived, but on their return to Europe two colonists published books that informed the French public about the Brazilian coasts and their inhabitants. The first was Les singularitez de la France Antarctique (1557) by André Thevet; the second was Jean de Léry’s Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (1578). Montaigne possessed both books.[149]

Like the Spaniards, French expeditions repeatedly transported Native Americans to Europe. In 1550, the year of the great debate in Valladolid, Henry II, who had acceded to the French throne three years before, was accorded a magnificent entrée royale in the port city of Rouen. Among other items, the program featured a mock battle in an imitation Amazonian forest performed by fifty Tupinamba.[150] Thirteen years later, the legal majority of the new king Charles IX was also celebrated in Rouen. Once more, a number of Tupinamba took part in the festivities. Three of their chiefs were presented to the young king.

Montaigne, who was present at the occasion, was able to converse with them with the help of an interpreter. Upon the question what they found most wondrous in France they said that they were very astonished that so many strong and heavily armed men subjected themselves to a little boy. In those days French kings attained their majority at the age of thirteen. Would it not be preferable, the Tupinamba inquired, to have one of those valiant men—they probably meant the Swiss guards—as king? Furthermore they were struck by the great disparity between the rich and the poor in France. They found it hard to understand why the poor did not cut the throats of the rich, or put their mansions to the torch.[151] He also relates that one of his servants spent more than ten years in the land of the Tupinamba. Montaigne claimed to have interrogated him thoroughly, but some commentators have questioned the very existence of the servant.[152]

Besides some scattered observations in other essays, Montaigne’s reflections on the New World are mostly found in “Des cannibales” and “Des coches” (“On Coaches”). The former was included in the first, 1580 edition, of the Essais; the latter only appeared in the 1588 edition. Meanwhile, Montaigne had read Las Casas, whose Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies made a lasting impression on him.[153]

Unsurprisingly, the cannibals of “Des cannibales” are the Tupinamba. The essay can be read as a meandering critical review of the European use of the notion of the “barbarian.” It opens with a story about the Hellenistic king Pyrrhus who, surveying the Roman legions sent against him, observed: “‘I do not know what barbarians these are’ (for so the Greeks called all foreign nations), ‘but the formation of this army that I see is not at all barbarous.’” Commenting on the episode, Montaigne declares that “we should beware of clinging to vulgar opinions, and judge things by reason’s way, not by popular say.”[154] The Greek lexicon of the barbarians as strangers and the barbarians as barbarians recurs throughout the essay.

After these introductory remarks Montaigne voices his doubts about the European capacity to understand the New World they are still exploring: “I am afraid we have eyes bigger than our stomachs, and more curiosity than capacity.”[155] Thus he warns the reader not to draw hasty conclusions. To understand something really new will take an intellectual effort. As we will shortly see, it also requires a hard look at your own civilization. Coming to the Tupinamba, Montaigne coolly observes that “there is nothing barbarous and savage in that nation, from what I have been told, except that each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice.” It seems, he goes on to say, that “we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in. There is always the perfect religion, the perfect government, the perfect and accomplished manners in all things.”[156] This calls to mind the language of Herodotus, but with one capital difference. Herodotus considered such ethnocentrism understandable and worthy of respect, but Montaigne dismisses it as a blinkered parochialism.

Next he invokes the concept of the “natural” to destabilize the notions of savagery and barbarism. The Native Americans, he now argues, are “wild” like the fruits of nature while the Europeans have been led astray by their artificial customs, and therefore might be called veritably “wild.” Moving to a temporal framework, Montaigne locates the barbarian at the dawn of human history. The Tupinamba, he conjectures, “have been fashioned very little by the human mind, and are still very close to their original naturalness.” All our artificial distinctions are unknown to them; they live in a very pleasant and temperate climate, they cook wholesome fish and meat for their food, and they are in excellent physical shape, even at an advanced age. The morality of the Tupinamba is as simple and natural as their cuisine. It can be summarized in two commands: “valor against the enemy and love of their wives.” They believe in the immortality of the soul. Those who have deserved well of the gods will come to rest in the Eastern Heavens where the sun rises, while the damned end up in the abode of the setting sun.[157] Situating the Amerindians in the most remote past comes close to Acosta’s comparison between the Native Americans and the earliest stage of Greek culture, but with one significant difference: Acosta highlighted the primitive inferiority of the natives, and in particular of the tribal communities, while Montaigne forcefully denies the “vulgar” opinion of European superiority. In some respects, his language seems to convey the commonplace of the noble savage, but he mainly deploys such language to tease his European readers.

In Montaigne’s discussion of cannibalism, the noble savage quickly fades away. The Tupinamba make prisoners in their wars with neighboring peoples. For a time, the prisoners are treated well and given as much food as they like. But then the day of reckoning arrives. In an elaborate and extremely painful ritual, the prisoners are hacked to pieces, roasted, and finally consumed during a festive banquet. Montaigne insists that this type of cannibalism has nothing to do with hunger or food scarcity, as among the ancient Scythians. It is rather an extreme form of revenge on a hated enemy. Recently, he reports, the Tupinamba discovered an even crueler way of killing prisoners used by the Portuguese. Thereupon they immediately adopted the Portuguese method. According to Montaigne, this demonstrates that revenge is the overriding motive.

The question then arises what to think of such cruel practices. At this point, Montaigne directs the reader’s attention back to Europe, to the religious civil wars of his native France, which he as well as his readers knew from their own experience. He assures his readers that he does not at all deplore that “we” abhor the barbaric cruelty of the Tupinamba. But what I do deplore, he adds, is that we are so blind to our own defects while brazenly condemning theirs. For what would be the upshot of an honest comparison of Tupinamba cannibalism with the conduct of the civilized French? Montaigne’s answer invites the French to take a hard look at themselves before they condemn the ways of others:

I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; and in tearing by tortures and the rack a body still full of feeling, in roasting a man bit by bit, in having him bitten and mangled by dogs and swine (as we have not only read but seen within fresh memory, not among ancient enemies, but among neighbors and fellow citizens, and what is worse, on the pretext of piety and religion), than in roasting and eating him after he is dead.[158]

Eating human flesh Montaigne deems not intrinsically evil. He memorizes that “our ancestors”—he is referring to the Gauls—consumed the bodies of oldsters and women when Alesia was encircled by the legions of Julius Caesar. What Montaigne unreservedly condemns is arbitrary bloodthirstiness and cruelty. His conclusion about the Tupinamba is crystal clear: “So we may well call these people barbarians, in respect to the rules of reason, but not in respect to ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarity.”[159]

Just as in Herodotus, Montaigne’s cultural critique does not entail ethical relativism. He absolutely refuses to condone the cruelty of the Tupinamba. The idealization of the Native Americans sometimes found in Las Casas is entirely absent from the Essais. In “Of Moderation,” written between 1580 and 1588, he describes the human sacrifices among the Aztecs in no uncertain terms: “All their idols are drenched with human blood, often with horrible cruelty. They burn the victims alive, and take them out of the brazier half roasted to tear their heart and entrails out. Others, even women, are flayed alive.” On the other hand, Montaigne attributes his own standard of humanity to imaginary Mexican ambassadors who are reported to have addressed Cortéz in the following words: “Lord, here are five slaves; if you are a cruel god that feeds on flesh and blood, eat them, and we will bring you more. If you are a good-natured god, here are incense and plumes. If you are a human being, take these birds and fruits.”[160]

Unfortunately, Montaigne observes, such practices are not confined to the American natives. These horrendous rituals rest on a very ancient idea, the conviction “that we gratify heaven and nature by committing massacre and homicide, a belief universally embraced in all religions.”[161] In the “Apology for Raymond Sebond” Montaigne relates that Amastris, the mother of the Persian king Xerxes, at one time had fourteen young men of the best houses in Persia buried alive “to gratify some subterranean god.” In the same pages he mentions the sacrifice of Iphigeneia by Agamemnon and quotes the famous dictum of Lucretius: “Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.”[162] Whether Christianity is included in these reflections on the bloodthirstiness of “all religions” Montaigne neither affirms nor denies.

Heroes the European conquerors were definitely not. To Montaigne, the conquest of Mexico and Peru looked more like robbery and mass murder on a huge scale than a serious military enterprise. His account of the cruel and indiscriminate killing by the Spaniards is clearly influenced by Las Casas, but his argument takes a quite different turn. Why, Montaigne wonders, “did not such great change and alteration of so many empires and peoples fall into hands that would have gently polished and cleared away whatever was barbarous in them … not only adding to the cultivation of the earth and the adornment of cities the arts of our side of the ocean, in so far as they would have been necessary, but also adding the Greek and Roman virtues to those originally in that region? What an improvement that would have been, and what an amelioration for the entire globe, if the first examples of our conduct … had set up between them and us a brotherly fellowship and understanding.” What really happened, Montaigne goes on to say, was exactly the contrary: “We took advantage of their ignorance and inexperience to incline them the more easily toward … every sort of inhumanity and cruelty, after the example and pattern of our ways.” What made the horrors of the conquest even more despicable in Montaigne’s eyes was that it was all done for greed and gain: “Who ever set the utility of commerce and trading at such a price? So many cities razed, so many nations exterminated, so many millions of people put to the sword, and the richest and most beautiful part of the world turned upside down, for the traffic in pearls and pepper! Base and mechanical victories!”[163]

In these lines the condemnation of the European misconduct in America is far more bitter than in the essay on the cannibals written almost ten years earlier, before Montaigne had read Las Casas. Moreover, there is no mention at all of the bringing of the message of Christ to the Native Americans, which for Las Casas, Acosta, and all the other Spanish authors was the ultimate justification of the conquest. For Montaigne, the religious civil wars in Europe have obliterated the foundations of sacred history. Neither can we reduce his vision to a cultural relativism that opposes the American noble savage to the decadent corruption of the Old World. The noble savage cannot save the world, for the “rules of reason” enjoin us to condemn the cruelties of the “savages” as strictly as our own crimes. What standard of civilization remains?

At times it seems as if Montaigne invokes the example of antiquity, but even the ancients cannot provide him with an impregnable rock to build on. Ultimately not even the Roman virtues were sufficient to withstand the self-destructive cycles of greed and violence. To entertain the Roman senators as well as the common people, the gladiators fought themselves to death in the arena. David Quint has argued that Montaigne’s gladiators resemble his cannibals. Both display fortitude and Stoic indifference in the face of physical pain and death. At the center of both Tupinamba and Roman culture is “a ritualized spectacle of bravery.”[164] However, the temporality of the Roman case is different. While Tupinamba society ceaselessly follows the same rhythm, Roman history is a lesson of decline and corruption. The early Romans, Montaigne tells us, used criminals for the gladiatorial games, “but later they used innocent slaves, and even freemen who sold themselves for this purpose; finally Roman senators and knights, and even women.”[165] For all that, in a brief essay on the greatness of Rome, Montaigne had only scorn for “the simplicity of those who compare the pitiful grandeurs of this time with those of Rome.”[166] But his emphatic condemnation of cruelty and wanton violence sit ill with Rome as model for historical emulation.

In “Of Coaches,” also written later than the essay on the cannibals, Montaigne still refers to the primitive customs of the American natives, but he is much less sanguine about European superiority. His vision of world history is skeptical and resigned:

And of this very image of the world which glides along while we live on it, how puny and limited is the knowledge of even the most curious. Not only of particular events … but of the state of great governments and nations, there escapes us a hundred times more than comes to our knowledge. We exclaim at the miracle of the invention or our artillery, of our printing; other men in another corner of the world, in China, enjoyed these a thousand years earlier. If we saw as much of the world as we do not see, we would perceive, it is likely, a perpetual multiplication and vicissitude of forms.[167]

Historical knowledge, it would seem, is not likely to mend the ills of Montaigne’s world. Christian sacred history has discredited itself in the wars of religion. Montaigne’s vision of history is a secular one, but a philosophy of history as development and progression remains outside his purview.[168] In the Essais, the temporality of history is a dark tunnel, where everything, or nothing, is possible. The only certainty is that there is no exit from the stream of time. What remains is the condemnation of cruelty and arbitrary violence: not solely those of the “barbarians” but also, and in the first place, those of the allegedly superior Christian Europeans. Montaigne’s version of the anthropological turn comes down to his insistence that we apply our ethical standards fairly and impartially, so that we shall be able, both in our own culture and in that of others, to value what is valuable and to censure what has to be rejected. His critique of European ethnocentrism creates an intellectual space for new languages of common humanity and equality.

The Atlantic Frontier and the Limits of Common Humanity

Whether the cultural distance between the Europeans and the Native Americans was greater than that between the sedentary and nomadic peoples of the Old World is difficult to say, but it cannot be doubted that the military, technological, and economic divide was far wider. With the exception of Sepúlveda, all the thinkers discussed here advocated a notion of common humanity that included the Native Americans, but our discussion of them has shown how hard it was to think equality across the Atlantic frontier. In one way or another, all of them struggled with the “strangeness” of America. With the exception of Montaigne, all of them clung to a scenario of Christian conversion. All of them arrived at a vision of common humanity that allowed for cultural difference, but none of them arrived at a balanced synthesis. Perhaps that was an impossible assignment anyway. The European intellectual horizon was dominated by two overwhelming presences: the Christian canon and the legacy of antiquity. Both offered intellectual tools to “understand” America, but their notions of equality remained wedded to the Christian and Aristotelian models of civilization.

Moreover, their critique proved unable to tame the colonists. The voices of Montesinos, Vitoria, Las Casas, Acosta, Garcilaso de la Vega, and Montaigne were certainly heard by many on both sides of the Atlantic, but taking a slightly different perspective we may also observe that they were continually silenced by the unceasing din of violence and robbery. What our discussion has further shown is that seeing the Native Americans as human beings is important and valuable, but rarely sufficient. The theological or philosophical vindication of the humanity of others is surely preferable to Sepúlveda’s denial of their human status, but it does not guarantee an emphatic intellectual engagement with their way of life. Of the authors discussed, Bernardino de Sahagún had undoubtedly made the most penetrating study of Amerindian language and culture, based on the research of his native assistants in Mexico. Garcilaso de la Vega got to know the native mind in a different, more intimate way. His vision is marked by the stories he heard from the relatives of his Inca mother. José de Acosta amassed an encyclopedic knowledge of America, but emotionally he remained more aloof and he seldom viewed events from the perspective of the native inhabitants. Antonio de Montesinos and Bartolomé de Las Casas displayed far more empathy with the Native Americans. Admittedly, they sometimes idealized the Indians, but that was no more than the flip side of empathy. For Montesinos and Las Casas, notions of common humanity and equality were concepts of action. They, and several of their fellow Dominicans, were the only ones who actually attempted to do something for the native population. They saw the slow genocide for what it was, and sought to halt it. That their efforts ultimately met with failure does not detract from their merit.

Of the authors discussed here, Vitoria and Montaigne were the only ones never to set foot in America, but the intellectual roads they took were far apart. Vitoria was a late medieval scholar who was appalled by the greed and violence of the colonists but whose mind remained caught in a balance of critique and justification of the emerging Spanish-American Empire. After the expulsion of the Muslims and the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula the mental horizon of Spain underwent a closure. More than ever, it was dominated by the ideal of a homogeneous Catholic world. As we have seen, even Las Casas felt unable to question the sacred duty to bring the message of the Roman Church to the New World. Amidst the violence and murder going on all around him, the idea that returning to Europe and letting the Native Americans pursue their own history might be the better alternative sometimes crossed his mind, but he was, I think, unable to propose abandoning the conquest because that would imply giving up the conversion of the natives. It is important to see that his refusal to envisage an end to conversion did not automatically follow from his European culture but rather from his place in the field of that culture. In Counter-Reformation Spain certain thoughts were virtually unthinkable.

Here Montaigne presents us with a counterpoint. Las Casas was a traveler who, theologically speaking, never left home. Montaigne spent most of his time at home, often in his famous tower, but mentally he was a curious man who crossed the vastness of space and time. It was the dissident intellectual position he took within Europe that enabled him to arrive at another perspective on America. The frontier is a material and imaginary site where new visions of common humanity and equality may become thinkable, but not every frontiersman is able or willing to do that. Montaigne’s critique of the colonial empire became possible, not because he took his distance from European culture but because he penetrated deeper into it.

Although Las Casas’s critique was not forgotten, Acosta and Montaigne were the two authors who would be most influential in the next century, albeit in entirely different ways. Acosta’s Historia became a handbook from which numerous seventeenth-century thinkers began their quest to understand and explain “America.” What was of lasting influence were not Acosta’s religious and political opinions but his systematization and classification of the multiplicity of peoples, things, and events that constituted the theoretical object “America.” In Montaigne we encounter a far different approach. Encyclopedic knowledge of America was not his strong suit, to put it mildly. But his Essais were read by virtually every seventeenth-century European who set out to explore new avenues of thought and action. The echoes of his lapidary dictum that everyone calls barbarian whatever deviates from his own customs are found in numerous seventeenth-century discussions of cultural difference, in particular those that are at the present time regarded as the early harbingers of the Enlightenment.

6

GLOBAL EQUALITY AND INEQUALITY IN ENLIGHTENMENT THOUGHT

THE ENLIGHTENMENT represents the second major turning point in the history of common humanity and equality. In the Axial Age, discourses of common humanity acquired authority within as well as across civilizational boundaries, but strangers were seldom treated as equals. Imagining the humanity of strangers was thinkable but imagining a world of equals was not. The Enlightenment notion of universal natural equality, which I define as modern equality, destroyed the traditional underpinnings of inequality and radically changed the terms of the debate about common humanity and cultural difference.

The question how far and to which domains of human endeavor equality would extend was at the heart of all Enlightenment debates about the prospects of European civilization, its relations to the inhabitants of other continents, and the legitimacy of its expanding colonial empires. Thinkers championing common humanity and natural equality always had to reckon with others endorsing racial and civilizational hierarchies. It is important to see that the ensuing debates and polemics were internal to Europe as well as projected on a global theatre. Controversies that were “internal” to Europe incessantly intersected with disputes about the merits and defects of empire.

Today we use “Enlightenment” as an umbrella term for the vast intellectual transformations Europe underwent from the mid-seventeenth century onward. Traditionally, Europe, or even France, was seen as its epicenter, but critics of the Euro- and Francocentric views have pointed out that the European settler colonies in the Americas forged their own Enlightenments.[1] The heyday of the European Enlightenment was the eighteenth century, but in a world-historical setting it is vital to underline that virtually all the nineteenth-century reform-minded intellectuals and political actors in Asia and Africa appropriated themes and ideas from the European Enlightenment and reworked and radicalized them in their struggles to reassert their dignity and autonomy in a world increasingly dominated by European imperial power.[2] Considered as a turning point in world history, the Enlightenment, like the religions and philosophies of the Axial Age, has a “beginning” but no well-defined “end.”

As Louis de Jaucourt expressed it in the entry on equality according to “natural right” in Diderot’s Encyclopedia, “natural equality” was the equality that existed among all human beings on the sole grounds of their humanity.[3] Attributing equality to the individual human person paved the way for a critique of all extant social hierarchies, whether based on rank, gender, race, or religion. Permanent and unalterable boundaries between social groups became profoundly questionable. To put it in a nutshell, henceforth equality received the benefit of the doubt while inequality had to be justified by rational argument.

Taken as a whole, however, Enlightenment social and political thought was Janus-faced: from the outset, the invention of modern equality was paralleled by the invention of new and equally modern discourses of inequality. The Enlightenment discredited the traditional and theological justifications of inequality, such as divinely sanctioned and functionally ordered ranks and estates, biblical justifications of male supremacy, the authority of older men over all others, and the divine and hereditary right of kings, but at the same time it invented new languages of inequality. Altogether, we can discern four modern discourses of inequality: political economy, a new science that justified social inequality in terms of utility and productivity; biopsychological theories of gender, built on the tenet that women were not inferior to men but “naturally” different and complementary to the “opposite” sex; racial classification, a theory that treated humanity as part of the animal kingdom and therefore subject to the taxonomies of natural history. Usually, it posited a “natural” hierarchy of races, with white Europeans at the top. The fourth, and in the long run the most consequential new language of inequality turned on a philosophy of history that arrayed humanity on a temporal scale, ordering the multifarious modes of subsistence and attendant customs found around the globe in a spatiotemporal matrix of more and less “advanced” stages of human development.

For the problematic of this book the third and fourth new languages of inequality are of particular significance. Privileging physical anthropology over culture, racial classification grounded inequality in an underlying biocultural ontology of the human. The new philosophy of history, more dynamic than racial classification, conceived of time as “progression,” “advancement,” and “the progress of the human mind.” Extra-European peoples could join the march of progression by “becoming enlightened.” That is, by adopting the ideas of the European Enlightenment. Notions of development and progression underpinned a new temporality of history in which Europeans represented the vanguard of humanity while other peoples were depicted as lagging behind at greater or lesser distances. Consequently, this new language of inequality could underpin an “enlightened” civilizing mission that acknowledged the equality of non-Europeans as generic human beings but downgraded them as imprisoned in primitive and backward cultures.

The dialectic of modern equality and modern inequality was at the core of Enlightenment political thought and has persisted into our time. It accords with the view, nowadays accepted by most historians, that the Enlightenment was not a harmonious collection of concepts and theories but rather an ongoing series of debates and controversies, in which a number of ideas and themes recur but are also continuously contested, redefined, and redeployed.[4]

Consequently, natural equality was a powerful but also an essentially contested concept. It could be deployed in a critique of the existing regimes of inequality, but it was also seen as the natural regime of the “savages” living in the infancy of humanity. In most debates on natural equality and European superiority the “American savages” were invoked as an object of comparison and as a window on Europe’s remote past. The notion of the “noble savage” could be used to criticize European civilization, but it was also used to demonstrate that the savages dwelt in a precultural “natural condition” and thus lacked historical agency. We have seen how Montaigne sought to deconstruct the notions of the savage and the barbarian. Enlightenment thinkers pursued the same problematic in a more systematic and historically reflexive manner, laying the groundwork for a comparative global history centering on economic, political, and cultural interactions across oceans and continents.

The principle that common humanity and natural equality trumped cultural difference was advanced in the early Enlightenment debates on religious toleration. Hugo Grotius, Richard Simon, and John Toland used it in their pleas to admit Jews as members of European societies. One step further, Spinoza advocated a “freedom to philosophize” that would include atheists, and Pierre Bayle posited that a society of virtuous atheists was a feasible objective. François Poulain de la Barre and John Locke remained in the fold of a rational Christianity but nonetheless advocated toleration as a benchmark of freedom. Poulain, perhaps the most radically egalitarian thinker of the early Enlightenment, grafted natural equality on a Cartesian theory of mind and body. His main objective was to defend the equality of the sexes, but he also hinted at an egalitarian critique of noble privilege and of the Europeans’ pretentions to be more rational than “Turks, barbarians, and savages.”

However, it was only in the late eighteenth century that natural equality was deployed in critiques of European colonialism by thinkers as diverse as Denis Diderot, Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperon, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Adam Smith.[5] The European interest in colonies, world politics, and world history was stimulated by the Seven Years’ War, the first European war with global ramifications, in which the foundations of the British Empire were laid while France lost its positions in India and Canada.[6]

Of the critics of colonialism, I will give pride of place to Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and the Trade of the Europeans in the Two Indies), the first attempt to write a history of the new world system created by European expansion. Moreover, it was the only book in which the anti-imperialist argument predominated from cover to cover. The Histoire, to which Diderot contributed much, is the sole eighteenth-century text offering a systematic discussion and global survey of European colonization on all continents. It did for the eighteenth-century world what José de Acosta had done at the end of the sixteenth century for the Americas. In its opening pages the Histoire des deux Indes sketched the contours of what we today would call “globalization.” Calling to mind how Ibn Khaldun had interpreted the Mongol invasions as a cataclysm that ushered in “a world made anew,” Raynal diagnoses the conquest of the New World and the opening of the Indian Ocean to European shipping as a world-historical turning point:

It was the beginning of a revolution in commerce, in the power of nations, in the customs, the industry & the government of all the peoples. It was then that people from the most distant lands were joined together by new connections and new needs. The products of the equatorial regions are consumed in climates near the pole; the produce of the North is transported to the South; the raiments of the Orient have become the luxuries of the Occidentals, & everywhere men have mutually exchanged their opinions, their laws, their customs, their diseases, their remedies, their virtues & their vices. Everything has changed, and must change yet more.[7]

Raynal and Diderot put colonialism as an object of historical research and philosophical critique on the intellectual agenda of the Enlightenment. Moreover, the Histoire des deux Indes was one of the great bestsellers of the late eighteenth century; the book was read and commented on throughout Europe and its colonies. It invited Europeans to reflect on their place in the emerging world of transcontinental trade and communications. Henceforth, the concept of humanity oscillated between imperial projects centered on Europe and the ideal of a worldwide community of peoples, all of whom could claim a “natural” or “human” right to the pursuit of happiness according to their own lights.

Furthermore, European expansion facilitated in-depth investigations of the languages, philosophies and religions on other continents, giving rise to a more balanced view of world history and the achievements of extra-European peoples. Below, I will discuss Bernard and Picart’s massive book on the religions and ceremonies of all the peoples of the world and Anquetil-Duperron’s critique of the doctrine of Oriental despotism as well as his vindication of the cultural worth of the arctic peoples as fascinating examples of the cultural decentering of Europe. Ironically, the same period saw the ascendancy of racial classification, a theory of world history that upheld the global superiority of the white race. Philosophical history frequently included a critique of empire, but it was invariably framed by a temporality of development and progression (though not necessarily of moral progress) that depicted Europe as the most advanced civilization in the world.

To frame these debates it is of great importance to see that the natural equality of all humans on the planet admitted of imperialist as well of anti-imperialist interpretations. In the first case, people became “equals” as they adopted Enlightenment reason and therewith a European notion of what it meant to be human, a philosophical move comparable to the imperial thrust of Roman Stoicism. In the second case, equality denoted an equal right to the pursuit of happiness that could only be limited by the right of others to do likewise. Imperial equality looked forward to a culturally homogeneous world community, while anti-imperialist equality envisaged cultural difference as an enduring feature of global humanity.

The Double Problematic of Religious Conflict and Global Encounters

Taking cultural difference in a broad sense, Europeans confronted a double challenge. At home, the legacy of a century of religious wars called for a solution. Globally, Europeans faced a welter of creeds and customs that increasingly called into question the traditional view of Christianity as the center of the world and the ultimate standard of civilization.

Some of the key features of the new “science of man” (or “human science,” in gender-neutral terms) of the Enlightenment arose out of different approaches to this double challenge. The encounter with extra-European cultures gave the debates an extra dimension that affected the arguments of all concerned. Conversely, without the grim legacy of the Wars of Religion European thinkers would probably have been less self-critical in their judgments of other cultures.

Moving from the Wars of Religion to the encounter with extra-European peoples, we meet with natural equality in another guise. Trying to ascertain what humanity would be like in its “natural” state, many political theorists drew on travelogues and ethnographies, in particular about the “savages” of the New World. Such people were now assumed to represent the dawn of history when humans were still living according to “nature.” In this connection, natural equality was often depicted as a primitive condition from which humans had to escape to attain security and prosperity. Most political theorists of modern natural law referred to America at some point. Thomas Hobbes admitted that his natural state of equality and war had never existed all over the world, but added that there were countries where people still lived in such a state, in particular among “the savage people in many places of America.”[8] Locke likewise declared that “in the beginning all the World was America, and more so than that is now.”[9] The real beginning of humanity, Locke intimated, was even more primitive than life among the American savages. An acquaintance of Locke, the French traveler François Bernier, declared that the Europeans had recently discovered “entire nations” who lived “like our distant ancestors.”[10] In such arguments, natural equality was far from a desirable ideal. As Hobbes memorably observed, in the natural condition of humanity life was “nasty, brutish, and short.” In other words, to take the road to civilization one must leave natural equality behind. The ignoble savage, as Ronald Meek demonstrated long ago, dominated the field.[11]

In the eighteenth century, however, dissenting voices made themselves heard. The most vociferous dissenter of all was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who systematically turned the tables on the encomium of civilization. Where others saw order, he saw cutthroat competition; where others saw progress, he saw corruption; where others saw an increase of material comfort, he saw the multiplication of artificial needs. In his prizewinning Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750), Rousseau answered the question whether the revival of the sciences and the arts since the Renaissance had contributed to the improvement of morality with a resounding no. The gains in knowledge and material comfort, he asserted, were no more than “the garlands of flowers adorning the iron chains” of humanity, bewitching people to the extent of falling in love with their own slavery.[12] In his next treatise, the Discours sur l’inégalité, Rousseau extolled the noble and simple life of patriarchal families in a remote golden age before the advent of private property. Property, in particular landed property, he diagnosed as an unnatural usurpation by a cunning minority at the expense of the overwhelming majority of humanity. Rousseau was the most influential but not the only eighteenth-century author to contest the conflation of civilization and progress found in so many other Enlightenment authors. The critique of civilization often went together with a greater appreciation of the accomplishments of extra-European cultures.[13]

Another way to criticize European complacency was to imagine how foreigners “looked back” at Europe. The most popular instance of such an inversion of the gaze was Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1720), a well-crafted assemblage of letters sent back home by Persian travelers to France. One of them characterizes the Pope as “a great magician” who can bewitch even the king of France into believing that three equals one and that the wine one drinks is not wine. This ironical joke at the expense of the Trinity and the Eucharist was perhaps not so imaginary at all, for the Muslim critique of Christianity regarded the Trinity as an instance of polytheist idolatry and the Eucharist as akin to magic. A prominent topic in the Lettres persanes is gender. Montesquieu presents the well-known Orientalist trope about the liberty of European women versus the despotic subjection of women in the East. Rica, one of his Persian travelers, considers the question whether the subjection of women is decreed by the law of nature. The other day, he tells Ibben, who is residing in Smyrna, I met a very gallant philosopher who told me that nature has never decreed any such law. The empire we have over women, the philosopher declared, “is a veritable tyranny.”[14] Montesquieu’s Persians sprang from his imagination, but Mehmed Efendi, the Ottoman ambassador sent on a fact-finding mission to France in the year the Lettres persanes went to the press, commented on the status of women in French society in similar terms. France, Mehmed reports, is the paradise of women; it is said that they obtain their wishes and desires without any resistance whatsoever.[15] The French, equally curious about Istanbul as the Turks were about Paris, had the envoy’s report translated in 1725, although it was only published in 1757.[16]

Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century Europeans went global. In 1741, Vitus Bering crossed the strait that was to be named after him, reached the shore of Alaska, and identified it as a part of America.[17] Thus, Acosta’s conjecture about the closeness of Asia to America was finally verified. Bering’s expedition was part of the Russian colonization of Siberia that accelerated after the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk had settled the Russo-Chinese border in Central Asia.[18] We have already noted that the Seven Years War was the first global military conflict, in which British and French fleets and armies confronted each other in Europe as well as in Asia, America, and Africa. The voyages of Cook, Wallis, and Bougainville in the South Pacific and their encounter with Polynesian culture in the 1770s, attracted great interest across Europe. The colonization of Australia began in 1788 with the founding of a penal colony in Botany Bay. Thereafter, only the polar areas and large parts of the continental interiors remained unknown to Europeans.

While the Atlantic frontier was still on the move in America, trade and colonization continuously created new frontiers in other parts of the world. The Indian Ocean had become a meeting place, and often a battleground, of Europeans, Arabs, Iranians, Indians, Chinese, and Southeast Asians.[19] Oceans were central to the emerging European empires. The historians of antiquity mainly conceived of empires as extensive territorial polities, but the eighteenth-century European empires are better visualized as chains of coastal settlements and port cities connected by the oceanic sea lanes through which the European powers projected their sovereignty.[20] On the mainland of Asia and Africa European encroachment seldom reached far beyond coastal settlements, trade emporiums, and navigable rivers. It was only in the final decades of the century that Britain acquired a sizable empire in the Indian subcontinent, slowly eroding the authority of the indigenous princes and inaugurating a new stage of territorial colonialism.[21]

Their increasing knowledge of the world enabled Europeans to envisage a truly global ethnography, doing worldwide what Muslim geographers had done for the medieval world system. In 1777, “Edmund Burke congratulated William Robertson on his new History of America. Readers of such works, Burke wrote, would find that ‘the Great Map of Mankind is unrolled at once’ for their consideration.”[22] The worldwide reach of European power and knowledge transformed the contours and the meaning of humanity. Without travelogues and the global vistas they opened up the Enlightenment is hardly thinkable. Travel stories and ethnographic treatises found a ready market throughout Europe and its colonial settlements.

Since the sixteenth century, most literate Europeans knew that the entire world was habitable and that Europe contained only a small part of the world’s population. Consequently, the traditional Christian views of “world” or “universal” history no longer sufficed to understand the global world that now appeared on the horizon. Less than half of the seventeenth-century “universal histories” discussed China, but the great majority of eighteenth-century world histories included it.[23] In 1756, Joseph de Guignes published the first comprehensive history of the steppe peoples, criticizing historians who deemed the “Turks” and the “Huns” not worth mentioning.[24] Enlightenment thinkers were able to achieve a new global vision because in the eighteenth century, Europe evolved into a vast storehouse of knowledge from all continents. Diderot’s Encyclopedia contained countless entries on the customs of peoples from all corners of the globe. Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, perhaps the greatest instauration of biological and geological knowledge published in the eighteenth century, emphatically included humanity. His anthropology contained an extensive essay on “the varieties of the human species,” on which many entries in Diderot’s Encyclopedia relied.[25] The inclusion of humanity in the animal kingdom was a powerful trend in eighteenth-century natural history that theoretically underpinned the new conceptual tool of racial classification.

Voltaire made fun of historians who pretended to write universal history while being totally ignorant of the history of three-quarters of the globe.[26] His vision of world history was marred by anti-Judaism, but his critique of the Christocentric “universal histories” was certainly to the point. Voltaire’s own history, presented in the Essai sur les Moeurs, still gave pride of place to Europe but sought to encompass Asia and the other continents. What is significant for our problematic is the vulgar Eurocentrism Voltaire assumed as a matter of course in his audience. What he is saying to them is, look, there is a vast panorama of peoples and histories out there; divest yourselves of your European blinkers, and you shall see the world as it really is and, into the bargain, understand your own continent better.[27] The new world history of the eighteenth century was part of an opening up of the European mind, moving beyond the ancient canon of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome.[28] After mid-century, European philologists began to study the languages and religions of Asia, such as ancient Persian and Sanskrit.

There was, however, far more at stake than a quest for encyclopedic knowledge. In Mapping the Renaissance World, Frank Lestringant has shown that sixteenth-century geographers were unable to cope with the enormous amount of new material. Consequently, their books became “rudimentary montages of heterogeneous data … incessant short-circuits between distinct languages, images and sciences by which Renaissance science came to resemble a disconcerting bricolage.”[29] The sheer variety of customs and ideas called into question received certainties. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke deftly exploited this multiplicity to refute the traditional tenet of universal moral principles. That there are no principles upon which all humans agree, he submits, will be clear to all men “who have been but moderately conversant in the History of Mankind, and look’d abroad beyond the Smoak of their own Chimneys.” One of Locke’s illustrations presented, once again, the Brazilian Tupinamba. The virtues whereby they believed to merit paradise, Locke tells his readers, “were Revenge, and eating abundance of their enemies. They have not so much as a Name for God … no Religion, no Worship.”[30]

How to account for the plurality of customs and moral precepts without destroying the very foundations of ethics? The standard answer was, of course, recourse to the truths of Christianity, but after more than a century of religious wars that was no longer sufficient. Instead of offering the solution religion had become part of the problem. Beyond the issue of normative standards loomed the problem of taxonomy. How to classify the global multiplicity of humanity? And finally there was the search for intelligible patterns in history that would situate and explain the disparate historical trajectories of the peoples of the world. Order was a keyword. Ephraim Chambers, the editor of the 1728 Cyclopaedia, the first encyclopedia and the original model for Diderot’s great enterprise, extolled Locke as “that great Master of Order.”[31] The foundations of order were increasingly sought in systematic classifications as well as in “natural laws” that were supposed to govern the universe as well as human society.

Christian and Secular Concepts of Human Nature and the Question of Toleration

What did it mean to confer foundational status on nature? The majority of Enlightenment thinkers continued to conceive of nature as God’s creation. To most of them, the very existence of laws of nature was unthinkable without a divine legislator. Of all the Scholastic proofs of the existence of God, the argument from design enjoyed the greatest popularity. Accordingly, natural laws were the rules governing God’s creation that could be known by unaided human reason.

What was at stake became apparent in an infamous passage in one of most famous treatises on natural law, Hugo Grotius’s De Jure Belli ac Pacis, published in the Dutch Republic in 1625. Grotius’s treatise marked a new departure. As Richard Tuck observes, it represented “a public break with both Aristotelianism and skepticism,” replacing these with “a minimalist morality and theology” that was meant to overcome the relativist deadlock that threatened in the wake of the Wars of Religion.[32] According to Grotius, the ultimate foundation of morality and politics was the natural law of self-preservation, which was only limited by the precept not to harm others. To preserve oneself was the primordial obligation as well as the most basic right of every individual. Seeking to underline the absoluteness of these truth claims, Grotius asserted, in a phrase that would become notorious, that the laws of nature would remain valid “though we should even grant, what without the greatest Wickedness cannot be granted, that there is no God, or that he takes no care of human affairs.”[33] Only a hairbreadth seemed to separate Grotius’s position from a purely secular deduction of the law of self-preservation. Abstracting from religious difference and the society of orders built on Aristotelian organic functionalism, the philosophy of modern natural law proceeded to reconstruct society on the twin foundations of natural liberty and equality by means of one or another variety of a political contract. Its most controversial corollaries were the autonomy of politics and the secularization of virtue.

We may conclude that by the middle of the seventeenth century, nature could mean two things: it could refer to the order of created being as knowable by human reason, or it could simply mean the basic stuff and ordering of the material world. In practice the two notions of nature overlapped, but philosophically and theologically they were quite distinct. Less and less could operational knowledge and rules for the good life be culled from the Bible, for most Enlightenment thinkers, in the wake of Grotius and Descartes, espoused a rigorously minimalist exegesis.[34] In the next generation, Hobbes and Spinoza dismantled the scientific and political authority of scripture still further. Consequently, the concept of nature continuously tended to widen its scope, so that the final result was that virtually everything came to be seen as part of “nature” and thus subject to “natural law.” Spinoza’s equation of God and nature (deus sive natura) represented the ultimate consequence of this trend, but in the seventeenth century very few philosophers were willing to accept the Spinozist solution.

With the exception of a small minority of materialists, most philosophers before the mid-eighteenth century clung to God as creator of nature, but the main trend was a steady shift from theology to philosophy. By the second half of the eighteenth century, philosophy could stand on its own feet, and was well under way to becoming the new master discourse. Believing in a “philosophical God,” rational Christians and deists retained a dualist view of human nature, joining an incorporeal soul to a material body. The materialists argued that nature could go it alone, increasingly turning from a mechanistic biology to an evolutionary cosmogony.[35] While the two currents disagreed about theology, both embraced the notion of the natural equality of all humans. What they agreed about were two tenets. In the first place, all humans were “naturally equal” because they shared a number of faculties, such as reason (whether natural or God-given), language, and basic bodily needs. Second, they concurred in the tenet that inequality was not “natural.” Consequently, the authority of some people over others was “artificial” and had to be justified by rational argument. In this way, natural equality was the thin end of the wedge that opened the door to a critique of all established social hierarchies, including the superiority of Europe over other civilizations.

The ultimate consequence of Grotius’s imprudent thesis on the unconditional validity of natural law would come down to a wholesale secularization of morality, but in the seventeenth century that was a liminal position. Even so, the need for a toleration regime that would end the civil wars between Catholics and Protestants was felt by most political theorists. The solution was to remove the religious dynamite from the body politic and to redefine the legitimacy of the political regime in secular terms.

European tolerance thus began as an intra-Christian affair, but already in the seventeenth century more audacious regimes of toleration were suggested in some quarters. The inclusion of the Jews, the most important non-Christian minority in Europe, was a harbinger of future times. In the Dutch Republic, Hugo Grotius had justified the admission of the Jews as early as 1615, arguing that they should obtain full economic rights as well as the right to publish books, but no access to political office, and that conversion of Christians to Judaism would be a felony. One of his arguments drew on the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which Christ taught that all humans, regardless of their religion, are your neighbors. Another was that there exists a “natural community which is between all men.”[36] In 1648, during the radical phase of the English Revolution, a council of artisans in Whitehall went a step further, adopting a resolution demanding “toleration of all religions whatsoever, not excepting Turks nor Papists nor Jews.”[37]

In 1681, Richard Simon, a French Catholic and one of the pioneers of biblical criticism, published a translation of the Historia de gli riti hebraici (History of the Hebrew Customs) by a Venetian rabbi, Léon de Modena. To his translation Simon appended a comparative treatise on the Jewish and Catholic ceremonies and rites, in which he refuted the most common anti-Jewish prejudices. This may well have been one of the first Christian publications to discuss Judaism in a fair and open-minded way. According to Simon, many of the alleged defects of the Jews were the consequences of their oppression by the Christian majority.[38] Simon also published a broadside against anti-Jewish agitators in Metz, refuting common Christian prejudices. A generation later the Irish freethinker John Toland advocated the admission of the Jews as fellow citizens. In his Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews (1714) he asserted that there certainly were swindlers and crooks among the Jews but that this was equally true of all other denominations. The Jews, to put it in a nutshell, were no worse and no better citizens than others.[39] Grotius, Simon, and Toland supplanted the fixation on the otherness of the Jews by a search for commonalities.

In the same vein, it became thinkable to reconsider the religious differences between Europeans and the inhabitants of other continents. Several pamphlets from the English Revolution advocated tolerance of Muslims, admittedly only a small minority in Europe but nonetheless followers of a religion most Europeans regarded as the most redoubtable enemy of Christendom.[40] Finally, there was the issue of atheism. In 1683, Pierre Bayle, a French Protestant who had found refuge in the Dutch Republic, shocked the European reading public with his thesis that a nation of virtuous atheists was a feasible project. Of course, he assured his readers, such an atheistic commonwealth would need severe penal laws, but, he went on, it is common knowledge that neither can any Christian commonwealth subsist without such laws.[41] In the second edition (1702) of his widely read Dictionnaire historique et critique, Bayle feigned to appreciate the shocked reactions of many readers, but then commented that, all things considered, the existence of virtuous atheists was perhaps less shocking than the well-known fact that many believing Christians were not virtuous.[42] Bayle started from the axiom that all people, regardless of their belief or unbelief, mostly acted in their own interest or out of fear of the powers that be. Humanity, it seemed, respected a kind of universal practical ethics. Bayle’s observations lacked the philosophical rigor of Grotius, but they partook in a similar discourse on human nature. Twenty years later, one of Montesquieu’s Persians would calmly observe that “even if there were no God, we should always adore justice.”[43]

In the eighteenth century, Bayle’s secularization of virtue suffused Enlightenment visions of what it meant to be human. Religious diversity was balanced by a universal morality. In the words of Voltaire: “Les rites établis divisent aujourd’hui le genre humain, et la morale le réunit.” The true lesson of world history, he asserted, was universal toleration. All religions contained numerous absurdities, but their moral precepts were everywhere the same: “Soyez equitable et bienfaisants.”[44] Voltaire’s deism was probably the prevailing form of belief among late Enlightenment philosophes. Atheism remained a minority phenomenon and to identify oneself as an atheist was virtually unthinkable—and extremely risky. The existence of God thus remained a near certainty, but Christianity was losing its monopoly on the title of religion. The collection of ever more knowledge about other religions enabled lettered Europeans to see Christianity in a new light. Bernard and Picart’s great book on the religious ceremonies of all peoples in the world (of which more below) demonstrated the ability to extend the anthropological turn to the subject of religion and to discuss Christianity on a par with other creeds, something that had been unthinkable to Acosta and Bartolomé de Las Casas.

Admittedly, these were minority opinions. The great majority of the people, even in France, remained within the fold of the churches. However, the churches were outflanked by a steadily expanding multiplicity of new media: academies, colleges, salons, learned journals, popular magazines, reading clubs, coffee houses, encyclopedias, dictionaries, observatories, and laboratories.[45] In the second half of the century, the neologism public opinion was coined. Some observers felt that it was on its way to becoming a fourth power in the state, beside the three identified by Montesquieu.[46] All over Europe the churches continued to wield great moral and political power, but they were losing their grip on the cutting edge of intellectual culture.

The Invention of Modern Equality

Modern philosophy begins with Descartes. The first generation of Enlightenment thinkers usually started from Descartes and subsequently criticized or amended his thought in different directions. So I propose to begin the discussion of modern equality with the Discours de la méthode, which today is often seen—rightly, I think—as the opening salvo of the Enlightenment.

The Discours de la méthode opens with the ironical observation, borrowed from Montaigne, that reason is the best-apportioned thing in the world, since everyone is convinced that he has enough of it.[47] Descartes’s intent, however, is not ironical for he goes on to say that the faculty of judgment “is naturally equal in all men.” Admittedly, some people think more clearly than others, but that is because they use their reason with more application and method. Method is not naturally given, but it can be learned, in principle by everyone. Descartes illustrates the point with an example that highlights its egalitarian implications: “Those who have the best arguments and who put their thoughts in the best order … will always be the most persuasive, even though they speak only in a provincial dialect [bas breton] and have never been instructed in rhetoric.”[48] The choice of bas breton looks like a deliberate provocation, for to the French elite the Celtic patois spoken in Brittany exemplified rural backwardness. Another experience that undermined received truths was travel. On his voyages, Descartes professed, he had learned “that all those who have opinions that greatly differ from ours, are not therefore barbarians or savages, but that several of them use their faculty of reason as well as or better than we.” Opinions vary with time and place. A child educated among the Chinese or the cannibals will arrive at different ideas than an infant brought up in France or Germany.[49]

In his famous entry and exit from hyperbolical doubt, Descartes posited the human mind as the ultimate arbiter of knowledge. In the process of doubting everything the mind grounds itself. Admittedly, Descartes needs God to guarantee the reliability of sense experience, but it is the human mind that establishes the existence of God. True knowledge is only attained after questioning all received truth claims. Every human person is capable of sifting the evidence and distinguishing truth from error. The human mind is absolutely free to decide such matters: formally, though not materially, the freedom of the human mind is as great as the freedom of God himself.[50] In Descartes the autonomy of the mind is truly staggering.

Descartes’s egalitarian ideas display a definite affinity with modern natural rights theories in political thought. Just as the latter posit that there is no natural authority in the body politic, Descartes demonstrates that there is no natural authority in the realm of the mind. The Cartesian notion of reason was potentially subversive of the established social and political order for the elementary reason that most traditional claims to authority could not be demonstrated with sufficient logical rigor and conceptual clarity. I am not saying that Descartes was a democrat, but his theories of mind and body and his epistemological and moral egalitarianism opened up certain avenues of critical thought that were developed further by some of his followers in the 1660s and 1670s, when Cartesianism established itself as “the new philosophy.” The most radical of these was François Poulain de la Barre, a dropout student of theology who published three treatises on the equality of the sexes in the 1670s. Disillusioned by the Scholasticism taught at the university Poulain turned to Cartesian philosophy and modern natural law around 1665.[51] While social and political issues did not rank high on Descartes’s intellectual agenda, Poulain concentrated on such matter and put together a social critique along Cartesian lines. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see Poulain’s thought as one of the first recognizable Enlightenment social philosophies.

Poulain challenges the philosophers of natural law, who justified male supremacy as “natural,” to explain in clear and distinct language what they mean by nature in this connection. These philosophers, he concludes, have unthinkingly attributed to nature a distinction that is merely grounded in custom. According to Poulain, the subjection of women, just like all other forms of human dependency, is caused by “chance, power, and custom” and has no foundation whatsoever in nature.[52] Starting from Descartes’s thought, he reworks the earlier feminist arguments of the querelle des femmes, a fairly continuous current of European thought that can be traced back to the writings of Christine de Pizan in the early fifteenth century.[53] Poulain develops a general critique of prejudice and custom, wedded to an environmentalist social psychology. The title of his first book, published in 1673, is programmatic: “A Physical and Moral Discourse on the Equality of the Two Sexes in which One Sees the Importance of Overcoming Prejudices.” Poulain invites his readers, and in particular his female readers, to judge for themselves whether the gendered social conventions of their time are grounded in reason and nature: “You are endowed with reason,” he exclaims, “use it, and do not sacrifice it blindly to anyone.”[54] The Cartesian autonomy of reason is thus turned into a vehicle of social critique.

Poulain’s critique of the subjection of women is often summarized in the terse formula “the mind has no sex whatsoever,” but that is misleading. Actually, Poulain states as his aim to demonstrate that men and women are equal in body and mind.[55] It is true that he begins with the thesis that the incorporeal mind has no sex, but this is immediately followed by its materialist pendant, that anatomical research has failed to discover any difference between the male and the female brain. Relying on Descartes’s mechanistic explanation of human physiology, Poulain rejects the Aristotelian, Galenic, and Hippocratic theories that dominated medical teaching. Those theories defined the nature of women in terms of their “cold” and “wet” bodily fluids, in contrast to men who were supposedly “hot” and “dry.” This, Poulain objected, was “pushing sexual difference too far,” for apart from the reproductive organs the bodies of men and women functioned in exactly the same manner. Poulain’s argument for equality thus relies on both rationalism and biology: the immaterial mind has no sex, the brain has no sex, and, with the exception of the reproductive apparatus, the body has no sex. What makes us human are the faculty of thought and the biological mechanisms that drive the body. In Cartesian terms, the external shape and physiognomy of the body are secondary qualities that do not affect our basic humanity.

Obviously, this calls for an explanation of the highly unequal gender regimes found in all climes and continents. Here, Poulain expands Decartes’s scattered remarks on the power of custom into an environmentalist psychology. Silently dropping Descartes’s theory of innate ideas, he depicts the mind of a newborn child as a tabula rasa. Embarking as infants on the journey of life, he declares we are “like strangers deposited by the sea on the shores of a new world of which we know nothing, neither the things found there, nor the peoples living there, nor the language they speak, nor the laws they obey.”[56] This sounds more like Locke than Descartes. It accords well with Poulain’s dismissal of ethnocentrism (probably taken from Montaigne):

Everyone believes that his country is the best because he is used to it; and that the religion in which he is reared is the true one that must be followed, even though he has perhaps never paused to examine it or to compare it with others. One always feels more amity for one’s countrymen than for strangers.[57]

To account for the subjection of women, Poulain then outlines a conjectural history of humanity. At the dawn of history, he explains, there was no institutional inequality: in that distant age, there was no government, no science, no employments, no established religion; men and women were simple and innocent, engaged in agriculture and hunting, “as the savages still do today.”[58] Natural equality thus obtained in the first stage of human history.

Poulain then goes on to show how inequality emerged. As society became more complex, the simple partnerships of men and women gave way to extended families, clans, and tribes. Population increased, scarcity made its appearance, and struggles over land and goods erupted. Physically stronger, men gained power over others by means of violence and intrigue. Being physically weaker, women had no part in these military ventures and were consequently excluded from the seats of power and authority. Men who managed to conquer greater territories considered women as part of the spoils and looked down on them, as conquerors always look down on the conquered. Mesmerized by their greater bodily strength, men imagined that they could lord it over women in all things. Consequently, the institution of marriage underwent a fateful change: in the beginning women had married men from their own extended family who treated them as sisters, but henceforth they were betrothed to strangers who were more likely to treat them as servants. From this time, Poulain argues, dates the belief that women are inferior to men.

The regime of voluntary reciprocal dependency now gave way to a harsh regime of coercion and intimidation, of which the major institutions were the patriarchal family, private property, and the state, soon capped by organized religion. Like everything else, religious institutions were governed by men. About Christianity and its special place in history Poulain keeps a prudent silence, but his observations about the male monopoly of the priesthood will have reminded his readers of the hierarchy of the Christian churches and in particular of Roman Catholicism. Poulain represents history as the growth of inequality and oppression, a grim story in which some men, abusing their power and leisure, conceived the design to bring others into subjection, thus transforming the golden age of liberty into an iron age of servitude. Oppression confused interests and goods to such an extent that one man became dependent on another for his livelihood. As the state of innocence and peace receded into the past, the confusion increased yet more, engendering greed, ambition, vanity, luxury, idleness, arrogance, cruelty, tyranny, falsehood, quarrels, wars, insecurity, and anxiety—“to sum up, almost all the illnesses of body and mind we are plagued by.”[59] This pessimistic vision of history anticipates Rousseau (who had probably read Poulain’s work).[60]

Just like heliocentric astronomy, Poulain’s historical conjecture corrects ordinary common-sense experience. People who unthinkingly accept what they “see” take it for granted that the sun moves while the earth remains at rest, and they likewise take for granted that the behavior and the mindset they observe in the women around them are a faithful reflection of female “nature.” What Poulain seeks to demonstrate is that the ways of seventeenth-century women are not reliable indicators of female nature but the result of countless centuries of oppression and miseducation. In modern terms, gender is produced in the historical making of a gender regime.

Gender is the focus of Poulain’s egalitarianism, but he also applies his critique of inequality to rank and, most relevant to this book, to the dimension of cultural difference. In line with his Cartesian critique of tradition, he deflates rank, asserting that the “exterior estates established by man … only confer a new name on those who are invested with them, without changing their nature.” Elsewhere he asks “why it is that the artisans, the farmers, and the merchants, who contribute the greater part of the state’s revenues, are held in less esteem than the nobles, who do nothing.”[61] On the other hand, the downtrodden, who are commonly despised, may have unsuspected capacities: “How many people are groveling in the dust who might have made their mark with a little help? And peasants, who would have become great professors [grands Docteurs] if given the opportunity to study?”[62] The upshot is a meritocratic critique of rank.

Coming to the subject of global cultural difference, Poulain applies the same reasoning. Louis de la Forge, who published a sequel to Descartes’s Traité de l’homme in 1666, declared that no dog could learn languages, but that “on the other hand there is no Tupinambu who will not, as a little child, learn French as well as we do.”[63] In the same vein, but rather more forcefully, Poulain declares:

Popular views hold that Turks, barbarians and savages are less adept at [learning] than Europeans. Nevertheless, should five or six of them turn up with this ability, or with a doctorate, which is not impossible, this opinion would definitely be corrected, and we would concede that these peoples are human beings like us, with the same abilities, and that, if educated, they could equal us in any respect.[64]

The common people, Poulain reminds his readers, habitually call the men and women of the first age of the world “savages” because their way of life differs from their own and because they have heard others call them by that name.[65]

In his theorization of history, however, Poulain is not consistent. Besides his critique of modern civilization, he also seems to put modern Europe in the front line because of the greater liberty enjoyed by European women compared with their Oriental sisters. Alluding to footbinding in China and the confinement of women to their homes in Turkey, he concludes that “almost all the nations of Asia, Africa, and America treat their women as servants are treated here.”[66] Then, almost as an afterthought, he remarks that the lot of women in Italy is not much better. That leaves only France, or perhaps northwest Europe, as the abode of female liberty. Poulain’s dim opinion of the gender regimes of the Orient reflects the judgments of contemporary travelers, such as François Bernier’s gruesome stories of widow burning in India and Jean Thévenot’s assertion that according to Muslim beliefs women are not admitted to paradise.[67]

Anticipating theological objections to the equality of the sexes, Poulain cites Saint Paul’s well-known sayings that in Christ there is neither man nor woman, Jew nor Gentile, slave nor master. Furthermore, he cites the account of creation where man and woman are created simultaneously (Genesis 1:27) and points to the passage where God bestows domination over nonhuman nature on Adam and Eve—that is, on all men and all women yet to come. Coming to the Fall, Poulain outlines several objections to a male-supremacist reading of the story, but finally concludes, in line with the Cartesian critique of narrative history, that the particular actions of Eve in remote antiquity cannot establish any general prescription for women at all. When thoroughly examined, he declares that “this kind of reasoning proves nothing at all.”[68]

Having thus cleared the decks, Poulain has yet to confront the hard misogynist passages in the Bible, in particular Paul’s command to women to keep silent in the church. To get around such passages, Poulain invokes the hermeneutics of accommodation. Speaking about the Jewish laws in the Old Testament, he declares that these were “for the most part national, that is, founded on the specific mentality [genie] and the customs of the people for which they were made.” Next, he subjects the Pauline prescriptions on female behavior to the same critique:

Like all the Orientals as well as the Romans, the Jews were extremely jealous of their authority, and as they were the masters of their women, it is no wonder that the apostle, pursuing his altogether Christian policy of accommodating everyone, counseled submission and silence to the women, for the sake of peace in the family, enjoining them to wear a veil, and even maintaining that it would be a shame and an ignominy against nature to do otherwise.[69]

It is true, Poulain admits, that scripture censures women’s failings in more severe language than men’s, but that is only because the sacred authors uncritically adopted the prejudices of the poets and orators among “the Greeks, and the Asian peoples to which the Jews used to belong.”[70] Poulain’s biblical criticism is strikingly akin to Spinoza’s approach in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, published only two years before. Just like Spinoza, Poulain characterizes the Jewish laws as historically specific and refuses to attribute any universal validity to the social and cultural teachings of the Bible.[71] He thus simply discounts most of the social teachings of the Bible because they do not accord with his Cartesian and egalitarian theory of human nature. The social prescriptions of scripture are discarded on the sole authority of Cartesian reason. The only thing that remains, it would seem, are the universal ethical principles of the Bible, such as charity and justice.

To sum up, Poulain was the first thinker to formulate a social philosophy grounded in a universalist notion of equality that he put to work in a radical critique of the three main dimensions of inequality: gender, rank, and global cultural difference. His writings provide us with a window on the limits of the thinkable in the late seventeenth century. In a sense, Poulain was a marginal radical, but on the other hand we know that he was read by Montesquieu and Rousseau and that many eighteenth-century authors cited him, demonstrating knowledge of his writings if not of his name.[72]

Natural Equality and Cultural Difference in Diderot’s Encyclopedia

In the course of the eighteenth century, modern equality gained increasing traction across the spectrum of Enlightenment thought. Traditionally, equality in dictionaries and encyclopedic manuals denoted a mathematical concept, but Diderot’s Encyclopedia added an entry on equality as a social and political concept. But how far would such equality extend? Would women, or non-Europeans, or non-Christians, or nonwhites enjoy natural rights on a par with white male Europeans, or would the universal rights be deuniversalized in the process of their implementation?

As mentioned above, the Encyclopedia entry on natural equality was written by Louis de Jaucourt, Diderot’s most prolific collaborator, whose contributions amounted to approximately a quarter of the Encyclopedia. His writings thus represent more than the views of an incidental contributor. Jaucourt came from a French Calvinist family. His parents sent him to study in Geneva, and in the penultimate class of the collège his teacher was none other than François Poulain de la Barre.[73] Jaucourt was a freethinking Protestant who finally arrived at a deist morality, expressly affirming that morality was more essential than faith, though he did not go along with Diderot’s radical materialism. According to Jaucourt, all civilized nations agreed on the essential articles of morality, while they disagreed on those of religion.[74] Privileging morality over religion thus underpinned a strong commitment to common humanity, but the reference to “all civilized nations” suggested that some peoples on the planet might be less equal than others.

The entry “Égalité naturelle” exemplifies Jaucourt’s approach. “Natural equality,” he declares, “is that which is found among all men solely by the constitution of their nature.… Natural or moral equality is therefore based on the constitution of human nature common to all men, who are born, grow up, subsist, and die in the same way.” Natural equality, Jaucourt adds, is the principle and foundation of liberty. It entails “that everyone must value and treat other people as so many beings who are naturally equal to himself, that is to say, as men like himself.”[75] From natural equality, he further argues, derive “all the duties of charity, of humanity, and of justice that all men are obliged to practice towards one another.” Civil and political slavery, he next posits, are a violation of natural equality. In another entry, discussing the slave trade, he declares that the purchase of black Africans to sell them into slavery “violates religion, morals, natural law, and all the rights of human nature.”[76] Here he probably relies on radical critiques of slavery advanced by authors in Britain and North America.[77]

In countries subject to arbitrary power, Jaucourt finally submits, the grandees possess all the riches of the nation, while the rest of the citizens have only the necessities of life and the common people groan in poverty (wisely, he leaves it to the reader to decide whether this applies to the French monarchy). In the concluding paragraph, however, Jaucourt assures his readers that he disapproves of the fanatical chimera of an “absolute equality” and that he knows only too well the need for different ranks, grades, honors, distinctions, prerogatives, and subordinations that exist in all political regimes. In the state of nature, he concludes, men are truly born into equality, but in the formation of society they lose that equality, only to regain it by the law. In line with these considerations, Jaucourt’s judgment of democracy is mixed. He thinks it unsuited to large states, but nonetheless he sees much good in it, because in a democracy access to honorable positions is open to all citizens. The spirit of equality is valuable but should not be pushed to extremes, he warns, lest democracy degenerates into mob rule.[78]

Jaucourt also contributed the entry “Femme (Droit naturel).” There he briefly indicates the prevailing rule that the man is the head of the family. Next, however, he submits “that it would be difficult to demonstrate that the authority of the husband comes from nature, because this principle is contrary to the natural equality of men.” Likewise, scripture only stipulates what the civil laws of biblical times prescribed. It follows “that there is no other type of subordination in marital relations than that of the civil law, and, as a consequence, the only things preventing change in the civil law are particular conventions, and that natural law and religion do not determine anything to the contrary.” Even so, Jaucourt concedes that “ordinarily” it will prove expedient to make men head of the family.[79] We may conclude that he refuses to ground male supremacy in nature, and yet endorses it as a prudential maxim.

A veritable natural equality, Jaucourt suggests in the entry on equality, only obtained in an early stage of human history in which the savages were still dwelling in the eighteenth century. In the entry “Sauvages,” Jaucourt defines the savages as “barbarous peoples who live without laws, without government (‘police’), without religion, & who lack a fixed domicile.” “Natural liberty,” Jaucourt goes on to say, “is the only object of the regime of the savages,” whose life is wholly dominated by nature and the climate.”[80] The natural equality obtaining among these peoples is thus a primitive “sameness” that precedes the rise of larger communities and states (much like Tacitus, well known to Jaucourt, had argued about the ancient Germans). Presented in this way, natural equality is hardly an attractive prospect, and Jaucourt seems to agree with Hobbes’s dismal picture of the state of nature. Elsewhere, however, and more like Locke, he paints the state of nature as one of perfect liberty and equality, but not of a lawless license because it is governed by natural law.[81] Likewise, some of his entries on American tribes are less primitivist, as witnessed by his observation that among the Iroquois their general affairs are handled by assemblies of elders.[82] Jaucourt’s somewhat uneven stance on equality is found in many eighteenth-century French dictionaries and reference works. Apart from Rousseau, there are very few authors who advocate wholesale social equality, but most of them nonetheless uphold equality as a moral principle.[83] Thus, rank and gender, two of the chief notions of inequality underpinning the social order of Old Regime Europe, became essentially and publicly contested concepts.[84] We shall now see that a similar tension runs through the Encyclopedia entries relevant to the global implications of natural equality.

In the Encyclopedia, the “savages” are frequently situated on the margins of humanity. This is particularly clear in the article on the law of nations by Antoine Gaspard Boucher d’Argis. Like Jaucourt, he was a prolific author, contributing over 4,500 entries, mostly on law and jurisprudence. He defines the law of nations as “a jurisprudence established by natural law pertaining to certain matters among all men & which is observed in all nations.”[85] It can be seen as coeval with natural right, since both are based on the natural light of reason. Some of the major issues covered by the droit des gens are respect for property and contracts, good faith in observing treaties and covenants, the basic conventions of war and peace, love of country, and the duty of children to obey their parents. Next, there are rules of humanity and justice: to spare women, oldsters, and children in wartime; to respect and protect ambassadors; not to poison sources; not to desecrate temples. According to Boucher d’Argis, most states tacitly consent to these rules.

So far, the law of nations is defined as truly universal: it is based on natural reason and it is binding on every human being. But as we read on, Boucher d’Argis introduces an important qualification. “The well-ordered nations [nations policées],” he posits, “observe more or less common rights with certain peoples than with others, insofar as those peoples themselves are more or less civilized, & are cognizant of the laws of humanity, justice & honor.” His first example concerns the “savage man-eaters” who live in utter ignorance and without any form of government. With them, there is hardly any communication and they offer no guarantees whatsoever. Consequently, other men are permitted to keep them at bay by force, as one does with “ferocious animals,” even though one ought never to inflict more harm on them than is needed for protection. Finally, one can sojourn in their lands in order to till the soil, and if they want to trade with “us” we may instruct them in the true faith and inform them about the comforts of life. With the “barbarians” who have states, Boucher d’Argis continues, one can deal in the same manner as with civilized peoples. The Muslims, he observes, respect the droit des gens, but they base it on the Quran instead of the Bible.

Boucher d’Argis’s discussion of the law of nations brings to mind Vitoria’s defense of the natural right to travel and trade. Boucher does not question the human nature of the savages, but he definitely relegates them to a lower rung of humanity. They are defined by what they lack: they are ignorant, they have no regular government, and they hardly communicate with other peoples. Finally, some of them practice cannibalism and other “unnatural vices.” The Europeans, as well as other civilized nations, have the right to enter their lands, to use violence in self-defense, to cultivate the unoccupied soil, to trade, and to acquaint the savages with the benefits of civilization. The same tenet is found in the 1758 handbook on the law of nations by the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel. His Droit des Gens was the most authoritative treatise on the subject in the late eighteenth century. According to Vattel, there is a universal “obligation to cultivate the earth.” Consequently, nations can only have sovereignty over a territory that is really settled and used by their people. Applying this rule to America, Vattel drastically curtails the rights of the Native Americans: “Their unsettled habitation in those immense regions cannot be accounted a true and legal possession; and the people of Europe, too closely pent up at home … finding land of which the savages … made no actual and constant use, were lawfully entitled to take possession of it, and settle it with colonies.”[86] Elaborated along these lines, the law of nations is turned into a brief for the conquest and seizure of an entire continent.

Apart from the exclusion of the savages, Boucher d’Argis situates the law of nations in historical time. Many learned men, he reports, maintain that the veritable origin of the droit des gens dates from the Carolingian Empire because before the ninth century the European nations were hardly civilized and respected few common standards. The upshot seems to be that the law of nations is to some extent identified with the development of European civilization, but perhaps not entirely if we reckon with Boucher’s brief remark on Islamic civilization and “barbarians,” the latter term probably referring to the steppe nomads.

However, another influential author, the Genevan patrician Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, whose Principles of Natural Law and Politic Law were published in London in an English translation in 1763, rejects an imperialist interpretation of the law of nations. He warns that it is unjust “to invade the rights and the liberty of a people under a pretext of their not being so polished in their manners, or of such quick understanding as ourselves.” It would also be unjust, Burlamaqui further states, to conquer a nation by force “under pretence of its being their interest to be governed by us.”[87] As Jennifer Pitts observes, eighteenth-century theorizations of the ius gentium “always existed in a space of tension between the European and the universal.”[88]

The entry on Europe, another of Jaucourt’s contributions, likewise underlines European superiority, endorsing Montesquieu’s statement in the Esprit des Lois that eighteenth-century Europe had attained an unprecedented degree of wealth and power. In his Description de la Chine (1735), Jean-Baptiste du Halde had estimated the interior commerce of China as greater than that of Europe, but Montesquieu objected that only Europe traded with the three other continents and thus surpassed China.[89] Jaucourt concludes that Europe is the most considerable of all the continents on account of its commerce, its sea power, its enlightenment, the industry of its peoples, its arts and sciences, its trades, and above all its Christian religion.[90] A similar glorification of European civilization is found in the preliminary discourse of the Encyclopedia, where d’Alembert extols the progress of Enlightenment since the days of Descartes, culminating in “the wealth we now possess.”[91] In a literal sense, this “we” signified the enlightened vanguard, but in a world-historical framework it stood for Europe.

Jaucourt’s entry on the Jews accords well with his condemnation of intolerance. It introduces Judaism as the mother religion of the two great monotheist branches, Christianity and Islam, which have converted a large part of the world. Entirely omitting the defamation of the Jews found in so many Christian pamphlets of those days, the entry describes and condemns the Christian persecution of the Jews. “They had their goods confiscated when they accepted Christianity,” Jaucourt indignantly exclaims, “and they were burned when they did not want to accept it.” Nowadays, he concludes, many Frenchmen regret the expulsion of loyal subjects of the crown, “whose belief differed in a few points from that of the prince.”[92] He thus reduces the belief in Christ as the Messiah to one of the “few points” on which Christianity differs from Judaism. Like John Toland in the early eighteenth century, Jaucourt focuses on the commonalities of the Jews and the Christians and minimizes their otherness.

In the same vein he professes to see several similarities between the Europeans and the Japanese, similarities that spring from “human nature.”[93] Jaucourt is probably drawing on Voltaire’s Essai sur les Moeurs, where the Japanese are portrayed as a people who cultivated reason. The widespread belief that they were “nos antipodes en morale” was sheer nonsense according to Voltaire. Generally, the philosophes, while extremely critical of some aspects of Japanese culture, highly appreciated others, in particular the peaceful coexistence of different religious and philosophical traditions, such as Shintoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. They did not imagine Japan in terms of the comprehensive otherness found in so many nineteenth-century European representations.[94] We may conclude that many of the Encyclopedia entries on Japan strike a balance between alterity and common humanity. The same is true of the treatment of China. Both sinophiles and sinophobes contributed to the Encyclopedia. Some of them considered Neo-Confucianism an atheist moral wisdom that proved Bayle’s contention that virtue could flourish without religion. With Voltaire, many discussions of the Chinese political regime classified it as an enlightened monarchy, but others followed Montesquieu’s opinion that it was a despotism based on fear.[95] Diderot, for his part, highlighted the alleged similarities between Chinese philosophy and the system of Spinoza.

On the Islamic world, Jaucourt’s views are likewise mixed. The Quran, he contends, is full of “contradictions, absurdities, and anachronisms.”[96] Elsewhere, however, he praises the civilization of the Arabs, mentions the numerous academies that rescued Greek and Roman learning from oblivion, speaks highly of their skills in medicine and astronomy, and finally observes that many Jews who were everywhere persecuted found refuge in Arab lands. Jaucourt further remarks that the Arabs were fanatics and the conflation of religious and political power in the hands of the caliphs made their rule a despotism.[97] Diderot, Jaucourt, and several other contributors recalled that throughout the Middle Ages Arabic learning was greatly superior to what passed for science in Europe and that it had stimulated the revival of scholarship in Renaissance Europe.[98] The upshot of these entries is a sincere appreciation of the Arab contribution to science and philosophy juxtaposed with an extremely critical view of their religion and political regime. On closer inspection, most Encyclopedia treatments of the major civilizations of the world are similarly Janus-faced.

Recently, Devin Vartija has compared the entries on Africans and Native Americans in Diderot’s Encyclopedia with those in the Encyclopédie d’Yverdon, a publication modeled on Diderot’s enterprise but edited by Swiss Protestants who weeded out much of the anticlerical and materialist material. This encyclopedia was widely read in Protestant Europe.[99] Predictably, it seeks to ground natural equality in scripture, but its treatment of the natives of Africa and America displays the same ambiguities as the Paris original. The slave trade is condemned in equally strident terms in both encyclopedias. The importance of climate for an explanation of racial variation is indebted to Buffon, as it was in the original. The entry on “savages” in the Yverdon encyclopedia is much longer than the original one by Jaucourt, and it is more balanced, comparing the savage and the European way of life and apportioning praise and blame to both. Another entry, however, follows the reasoning of Cornelius de Pauw’s degeneration theory of the Native Americans. Several entries on slavery and colonialism draw on Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes (of which more below), echoing its radical critique of inequality. Fortunato Bartolomeo de Felice, the editor of the Yverdon Encyclopedia, enlarged Jaucourt’s original entry on natural equality. Like Jaucourt, he unreservedly defends a universalistic concept of natural equality, although he puts somewhat more emphasis on the natural sociability of all humans. The main difference is that De Felice assures his readers that the maxims of natural right accord perfectly with those of the gospel. This finding contradicts Jonathan Israel’s contention that materialist philosophical positions always lead to more egalitarian conclusions than Christian ones.[100]

Many of the major Encyclopedia entries on political subjects are either by Jaucourt or by Diderot himself. Both men regarded natural equality and liberty as the foundational principles of political science. Diderot’s entry on political authority begins with the assertion that “no man has by nature been granted the right to command others.”[101] Writing in 1754, Diderot declared that the expression droit naturel was “used so frequently that there is scarcely anyone who is not convinced in his own mind that he knows just what it means. Such an inner conviction is common to the philosopher and the unreflective man alike.”[102] Commenting on this passage, Lynn Hunt identifies this “inner conviction” as the most important quality human rights acquired in the second half of the eighteenth century. She quotes the assertion of the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, discussed above, that “such proofs of feelings are above all objection and produce the most deep-seated conviction.”[103] In the late eighteenth century, it would seem, the natural equality of all humans acquired the status of an emotional truth, a habit of the heart. Somehow, the conviction that everyone had the same basic rights converged with a sense of individuality predicated on a notion of the self as a private space others were not allowed to invade, an argument that was also marshaled by the opponents of torture. Here philosophy, politics, and psychology were fused in an extremely powerful defense of liberty and equality.

For Diderot, however, this inner conviction was not sufficient. The unreflective man, he posits, will be bereft of words and ideas, but the philosopher will be moved to deeper refection, not least because he is aware of the grave objections that can be brought against the very idea of natural rights. Of course the world would be a better place if all hearts were brimming with benevolence and good will. But taking a hard look at ourselves, Diderot argues, a less flattering portrait emerges:

Our existence is mean, contentious, uneasy. We have passions and needs. We wish to be happy, and yet the unjust and impassioned man constantly feels impelled to do unto others what he would not wish them to do unto him. This is a judgment he proclaims in the depths of his soul, and from which he cannot escape. He sees his own nakedness and must either admit it to himself or accord to everyone else the same authority as he assumes.[104]

How to resolve such antinomy? Diderot suggests that the solution can be found by moving from the individual to the whole: “If we deny the individual the right to determine the nature of justice and injustice, where shall we plead this great question? Where? Before humanity [le genre humain]”[105]

Private wills, Diderot thinks, are suspect, for they may be either good or bad. “But the general will is always good.” An individual has “the most sacred natural right to everything that is not resisted by the whole human race.” Diderot calls upon every human to say to himself: “I am a man, and I have no other truly inalienable natural rights except those of humanity.” The true natural rights, then, are those that correspond to the general will of the entire human species, and they will be evident to anyone who uses his reason. Whoever chooses not to reason, Diderot darkly concludes, forfeits his human status and ought to be treated as an unnatural being (un être denaturé).[106] Here, we can discern a vague anticipation of the far more rigorous reasoning Immanuel Kant would later employ to sustain the categorical imperative.

On closer inspection Diderot’s formulation is deeply ambiguous, leaving room for imperialist as well as anti-imperialist interpretations. As we will shortly see Diderot takes the anti-imperialist side in the Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville. We may conclude that natural equality is used to criticize slavery and all other modes of oppression, but that its universality can also be used to exclude people who are deemed not sufficiently reasonable. Likewise, the language of the ius gentium is universalistic, but its universalism is civilization centered and can be used to justify European imperial ventures.

Philosophical History

Montaigne, Poulain de la Barre, and a host of seventeenth-century authors and travelers argued that the savages represented the “infancy of humanity” or the first stage of human history. Others contended that climate explained the primitive ways of the savages, sometimes highlighting the excessive heat of the tropics and at other times the extreme cold of the arctic regions. Comparisons with antiquity abounded, often identifying similarities between the Native Americans, the beginnings of Greek civilization, and the Germanic tribes portrayed in Tacitus’s Germania.

In De l’origine des fables, drafted in the 1690s but only published in 1724, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, one of the emblematic figures of the early French Enlightenment, identified mythology as an essential feature of the savage mind. It is true, he further adduces, that climate which determines plant life will also affect the human brain, but one should be careful not to overrate its effects. This suggests a global equality, but precisely on that issue Fontenelle seems unable to make up his mind:

It thus follows that climate differences are of no account, on the condition that minds are otherwise equally well cultivated. At most, one might conjecture that the Torrid Zone and the two Glacial Zones are not so suitable to the sciences.… Perhaps it is no coincidence that they have remained between the Atlas Mountains and the Baltic: we do not know if those are boundaries drawn by Nature, and if we can hope ever to see great Authors amongst the Lapps and the Negroes.[107]

According to Fontenelle, not climate but the stage of a people’s development provided the basic explanatory framework. Norse mythology showed the same type of superstitious imagination as the stories of spirits and gods of nature found in the tropics. There was, he contends, “an astonishing conformity between the myths of the Americans and those of the Greeks.” All peoples, he concludes, began their historical career with myths, and the early Greeks had been savages just as the American savages in his own time.[108]

Fontenelle emphatically affirms the full humanity of the Native Americans, but at the same time his argument exposes the cruel logic of world history. The Americans, he declares, “would finally have come to think as rationally as the Greeks, if only they had been left the time.” Looking back at two centuries of European colonization of America, Fontenelle and his readers knew full well that the “time” for autonomous development was precisely what the Native Americans had been robbed of. The European conquest obliterated their future and identified their present with the distant past of Europe. They were physically present in the world of the eighteenth century but philosophically their time was over.

In France, the theorization of history as a linear sequence of stages went by the name of histoire philosophique, while in England and Scotland it was known as “conjectural history.” One of its key master concepts, coined by Fontenelle, was “le progrès de l’esprit humain,” the progress of the human mind, which became a standard expression in Enlightenment historical terminology.[109] Its advancement might be temporarily halted, or even reversed, but in the long run it would prevail, because it was nothing less than the unfolding of human reason. World history is theorized as the past of an enlightened future that is yet to be enacted. That is the philosophical core of “philosophical history.”

That is not to say, however, that the new vision of history could be reduced to a narrative of intellectual advancement. The four main stages of history were defined in socioeconomic terms. As Adam Smith, one of its main exponents in Britain, tersely summarized it in his Glasgow lectures on jurisprudence, delivered in the 1750s and 60s: “The four stages of society are hunting, pasturage, farming, and commerce.”[110] So formulated, it looks like a temporal sequence, but at the same time it represented a spatial pattern, the “great map of mankind.” Hunting stood for a mode of subsistence based on hunting animals and gathering plants and fruits that predominated in a part of America as well as in the sub-Arctic and in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Pasturage primarily referred to the peoples of the Eurasian steppe. Farming denoted the great civilizations from ancient to early-modern times, societies in which the great majority of the people were peasants and farmers, dominated by a minority of townspeople and literati. Geographically, it denoted the broad band of civilizations and empires that extended from East Asia through India, Iran, the Middle East, and thence to the Mediterranean lands. Sometimes, Peru and Mexico were also designated as civilized. Finally, commercial society was dominated by market relationships and included a growing sector of artisans and manufacturers. Its location was the Atlantic rim of Europe.

Consequently, the progression of humanity concerned not only reason but rather a complex ensemble of economic, political, and cultural elements, including gender regimes. Productivity increased from one stage to another, and so did power and knowledge. One of the wellsprings of philosophical history was the quarrel of the ancient and the moderns that began in the 1670s in France and extended to other parts of Europe, notably Britain, in the early eighteenth century. In science and technology, the moderns contended, Europe was now surpassing Greco-Roman antiquity. The ancients, so the argument went, had no telescopes and no microscopes. Their technology was likewise superseded. According to the prestigious Journal des Savants, which was read throughout Europe, The Canal de Languedoc, which connected the Mediterranean with the Atlantic Ocean, would have left the Romans speechless.[111] The Renaissance sought to emulate antiquity; the Enlightenment was surpassing it. Many Europeans still believed that China was a great civilization, but the Chinese “had no Newton.”[112]

We have seen that Montesquieu judged the power of eighteenth-century Europe the grandest the world had ever seen. In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith made the same argument in different terms: A frugal European peasant, Smith confidently asserted, enjoyed more material comfort than “many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages.”[113] Smith wildly exaggerated, but his assertion rested on an economic philosophy. European commercial society, Smith argued, originated in the “tacit consent” to attribute value to money, to transform communal into private property, and to respect the property rights that emerged from that transition. Ultimately, Smith’s reasoning depended on a history of property pioneered by Grotius, Pufendorf, and Locke, who had argued that property developed “spontaneously” and that respecting property rights was a law of nature antedating the political contract.[114]

The economic component of philosophical history had momentous consequences for common humanity on a global scale. Humanity was universal but economic rationality was not. No Enlightenment thinker exemplifies this better than John Locke. His theory of property had an enormous influence in eighteenth-century Europe. For the problematic of this book Locke is of paramount importance because he developed his doctrine of private property in land with an eye to both European and American conditions.[115] Locke offers a new reading of the biblical doctrine that God gave the earth to all of humanity. According to Locke, God’s intention was that humans would labor and cultivate the soil. He gave the world to “the Industrious and the Rational (and Labour was to be his title to it), not to … the Quarrelsome and Contentious.”[116] When people by tacit consent introduce money greater possessions become feasible. Without money, produce that the owner and his family could not consume would rot away, which contravenes the duty of good stewardship. Enclosing land in the interior of the New World where no money exists would be perfectly useless, because nothing can be done with the surplus. Arrived at this point, Locke pauses and imagines a new future for America: “Thus in the beginning all the World was America and more so than that is now; for no such thing as Money was any where known.”[117] In Locke’s perspective, the introduction of a European money economy in America would have far-reaching consequences, transforming the communal transhumance of the Native Americans into a system based on the exchange value of landed property.

Locke was well informed. He had read Acosta, Montaigne, Jean de Léry’s travelogue on Brazil, and several other books about the Amazon region, the Caribbean, Peru, Canada, and the British colonies in New England.[118] Moreover, from 1668 to 1675 he acted as secretary of the Lords Proprietors of Carolina, the governors of a plantation worked by African slaves.[119] He also owned shares in the Royal African Company and in another company trading in the Bahamas, both of which were involved in the slave trade. Locke’s interest in America was thus practical as well as theoretical. The link between the two was the imperative to increase productivity, the hard core of Locke’s theory of property. In America land was plentiful, but the native inhabitants did not heed God’s command to make the earth a flowering garden. Well, Locke concluded, land that is not used productively, even if enclosed, is “still to be looked on as Waste, and might be the possession of any other.”[120] In other words, land not “productively” used can be regarded as terra nullius. We have seen that Vattel’s extremely influential handbook of the law of nations would make precisely the same point.

It is of vital importance to see that Locke’s and Vattel’s tenets were not based on accurate reporting. Many early-modern travel accounts mention well-tilled lands and intensive horticulture feeding a numerous native population. This was true of New England as well as Canada, but Antoine de Montchrétien, author of the first European treatise of political economy (1615), asserted that the natives of La Nouvelle France were indolent and wasteful.[121] Stuart Banner argues in his study of land rights in colonial North America that Locke must have known he was wrong. The colonists were aware of native agricultural skills, and they regularly bought land, thus acknowledging native property rights.[122] Even so, as Banner himself demonstrates, such land sales were unequal in various ways. Most of them were legally correct, but Indians often sold because no alternative seemed left, because of English population pressure, ecological destruction, and foreclosures on loans they were unable to pay back.

Seen in this light, Locke’s theory was not a recipe for colonial land policy but rather a retroactive justification of its final results: a dwindling native population holding less and less land, side by side with a fast-increasing settler population holding most of the fertile land and engaging in “modern” agriculture. The link between colonial legal practice and Enlightenment culture is beautifully exposed by Banner, who concludes: “The fact that transactions were enforced by English law was no cause for soul-searching. English property law was understood, by the English, as reason itself.”[123]

In 1777, William Robertson, a contemporary and acquaintance of Adam Smith, David Hume, and other Scottish luminaries, published his History of America, probably the most influential account of the New World published in the eighteenth century. The English original was a bestseller, the French translation went through nine editions in three years, and the first American edition came from the press in 1812.[124] In the late Enlightenment, Robertson’s book had an influence comparable to Acosta in the seventeenth century.

The History of America has a laudatory chapter on Columbus, followed by a narrative of the first stage of Spanish colonization. Robertson is well aware of the harsh treatment of the Indians on Hispaniola, and he cites the protests of Montesinos and Las Casas. However, while lauding Las Casas for his humanist compassion he dismisses his projects as unrealistic because he failed to reckon with “the natural aversion of the Indians to any laborious efforts,” thus endorsing the colonists’ view.[125] The discussion of Las Casas is somewhat malicious, paying little attention to his arguments, enlarging on his project to import African slaves, but omitting his later retraction and remorse. In Robertson, the colonists get the benefit of the doubt—Las Casas does not.

After this, the reader gets a chapter on the origins and the customs of the Native Americans, followed by chapters on the conquest of Mexico and the destruction of the Inca realm. A dim opinion of the abilities of the Native Americans runs through the entire History of America. Without the arrival of the Europeans, Robertson submits, America would have languished in a lethargic stagnation. That is, in terms of philosophical history it was going nowhere. With the exception of Mexico and Peru, Robertson contends, the condition of America bordered on a pristine virginity: “The rest of this continent was possessed by small independent tribes, destitute of arts and industry, and neither capable to correct, nor desirous to meliorate the condition of that part of the earth allotted to them for their habitation. Countries occupied by such people, were almost in the same state as if they had been without inhabitants.”[126]

Robertson, a moderate Protestant who sought to reconcile philosophical history with the working of divine Providence, upheld the unity of humanity and endorsed Acosta’s theory of the peopling of America by migrants from Siberia. The Native Americans, he concludes, were savages whose way of life was “extremely rude” and who still dwelt in the first stage of humanity.[127] According to Robertson, the Native Americans had “no solicitude about futurity, and little curiosity concerning what is past.”[128] Robertson’s judgment of the Aztecs and the Inca is only a shade more favorable. He admits that these nations had cities and artisans, regular monarchical government, and that they observed religion and obeyed laws. Compared to the Old World peoples, however, their achievements did not amount to much. Metallurgy and the domestication of draft animals, the chief conditions for further progress, were missing. Robertson reminds his readers that long after they domesticated animals and mastered metallurgy, the peoples of Europe remained in the second, “barbarian” stage of history. At the time their states were overthrown, the Aztecs and the Inca had not progressed beyond the beginnings of the barbarian stage. The final conclusion is that neither the Aztecs nor the Inca can claim to stand on the level “with those nations which merit the name of civilized.”[129]

Generally, Robertson’s judgment of the Aztecs and the Inca is far more disparaging than Acosta’s, who admired their architecture and governance and situated them at a cultural level close to the Greeks and Romans. Another difference from Acosta is his portrayal of all the inhabitants of America, except for Mexico and Peru, as an indiscriminate homogeneous mass. Their particularities, he avers, are so trivial that he will refrain from boring his readers with them.[130] Adam Smith, while more critical of the injustice of colonialism than Robertson, refers to the bulk of the Native Americans as “naked and miserable savages” and dismisses the Spanish accounts of the grandeur of Tenochtitlan as wild exaggerations.[131] Acosta, by contrast, distinguished between the small tribes subsisting on hunting and gathering and the further developed nations organized in villages and cultivating the soil. Acosta’s America has a history; Robertson’s and Smith’s do not. It is as if their application of the four stages theory blinds them to the plurality of Native American culture.[132]

Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Robertson’s History of America were European bestsellers, synthetic books built on the geographical, ethnographical, and historical knowledge Europeans had amassed since the Columbian Exchange. Their theories of the historical evolution of property stemmed from natural rights philosophy, but the four stages conception of the history of humanity subtending them was unthinkable without the exploration of America and the increasing European knowledge of Asia and Africa. By contrast, the fourth stage of human history, commercial society, basically represented a global extrapolation from the recent history of Europe’s Atlantic rim. It is hardly coincidental that the four stages theory rose to prominence in the mid-eighteenth-century decades, when political economy boomed on both sides of the English Channel. In the first half of the eighteenth century, French publications in political economy appeared at a rate of seventy-six per decade; after 1750 they skyrocketed to over four hundred per decade.[133] The background idea was that markets and trade were somehow “natural,” arising spontaneously from humanity’s “natural propensity to truck, barter and exchange,” as Adam Smith famously put it.

Philosophical history was predicated on a temporal regime of progression and development. It arranged the world in a seamless spatiotemporal grid from which no escape was possible or even thinkable. It was, however, not necessarily a temporality of moral progress. Apart from douceur and civilization, commerce could be associated with greed, inequality, and corruption. In this dialectic, Rousseau represented the bad conscience of philosophical history. Where others expressed cautious misgivings about the downside of commercial civilization, Rousseau pronounced the peremptory judgment that corruption and effeminacy had already entrenched themselves in the heart of European culture. His opposition to political rights for women is fully consistent with his critique of civilization.

Consequently, it is all the more fascinating that Rousseau was unable to get rid of the temporal framework of philosophical history. He did not believe that modern European civilization represented moral progress, and his views on commerce and morality were almost the opposite of Adam Smith’s theory of enlightened self-interest, but their well-known discord easily hides from view what they have in common. They shared a basic notion of historical time as development. Just like the theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment, Rousseau conceives of humans as inventive and innovating beings. In his essay on the origin of languages, he contrasts human speech to the communication of animals. Human languages, he observes, are not instinctual but conventional: “That is why humans make progress for better or for worse, and why animals do not.”[134] Again like the Scots, Rousseau distinguishes several stages in the evolution of humanity: first appear the “savages” who are hunters; next come the “barbarians” who are pastoral nomads and then the “civilized men” who are tillers of the soil.[135] And more recently, as Rousseau knew all too well, commercial society had arrived. Likewise, Rousseau’s historical conjecture about the origin of private landed property in the Discourse on Inequality, though miles away from the Scots’ validation of it, nonetheless agreed with them that it represents a significant and irreversible turning point in the history of humanity.

We may conclude that the temporal frame of philosophical history was shared by most Enlightenment thinkers regardless of their religious or philosophical affiliations. It provided the men and women of the eighteenth century with a broad grasp of world history, and at the same time it enabled them to classify the manifold cultures of the world into four basic socioeconomic, political, and cultural patterns, each linked to a specific gender regime.

Gender as a Category of Analysis in Philosophical History

Philosophical history invariably included a history of gender regimes. In French and Scottish conjectural history, it was generally assumed that the status of women, the regulation of marriages, the rules governing sexuality, and the virtues and manners of both sexes would vary with the stages of history.[136] Most authors argued that the savages, being naturally lazy, oppressed their women, compelling them to do all the hard work. Among peoples with states (peuples policés) the men, as they were the strongest, dictated the laws that harmed women in proportion to the rudeness of mores and manners. It was only in nations of civilized politeness, the French naturalist Buffon declared, that women had obtained the “equality of condition” that is “so natural and so necessary to the douceur of society.” Buffon added that the politeness of mores was mainly due to the agency of the women who by their modesty had brought men to recognize the empire of beauty as a countervailing power to the force of arms.[137]

The conviction that the savages tyrannically lorded it over “their women” we have already encountered in Poulain de la Barre and Bernier. Interestingly, other thinkers had reported a primitive sexual sameness among some savage peoples, in particular in the far north. In the late seventeenth century the French medical doctor Pierre Petit and the traveler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier had explained the female warriors among the Amazons and the Kalmuks in such terms.[138] In regions “where human nature is less developed the characters and habits of women and men are harder to distinguish,” declared Petit, especially “in cold climates,” pointing to the examples of Lapps, Samoyedes, Scythians, Siberians, Norwegians, Icelanders, and Zemblians.[139] Savages, it seems, were invariably primitive, but their gender regimes might be either extremely oppressive or “too equal.”

In the second half of the eighteenth century, the sexual sameness in primitive societies was quietly “forgotten” and the progress of humanity was henceforth associated with the improvement of the status of women and the attendant civilizing of the male sex. The Histoire des deux Indes (1780) by the Abbé Raynal, coauthored by Diderot, presents a good example. This massive book—discussed more extensively below—presented the first history of European global expansion. It was, moreover, one of the great bestsellers of the late Enlightenment. Raynal depicts the condition of women among the “savages” in the first stage of history as akin to slavery, but he considers the second stage a definite improvement. The pastoral nomadic societies, he argues, amassed great wealth and constructed extensive empires. Wealth ensured leisure and the production of objects of refined beauty. Consequently, women were appreciated for their elegance and ornamental attire, transforming them from beasts of burden into objects of desire. The third stage of history, the agrarian civilizations, occasioned a further advancement of the condition of women. The introduction of private property in land made monogamous marriage into a valued and strategic institution, enhancing the dignity of women and giving them a more central position in the social order.

After this, we would perhaps expect Raynal to conclude his history of gender with a glowing encomium of commercial society. But what we actually find in the Histoire des deux Indes is a deeply ambiguous tableau of the modern European gender regime. In the first stage of commercial society, Raynal declares, the virtue and elegance of women increase, but in later times elite women as well as men are spoiled by luxury and leisure. With the perfection of the arts and the cultivation of politeness, women become both the objects and the subjects of new desires and tastes. No longer content with a life of domestic care and private enjoyment, they demand “a more resplendent role … in the limelight of the world.” Raynal is obviously thinking of French salon society. In commercial culture, women as well as men are ensnared by luxury, children are entrusted to the care of hirelings, and constancy gives way to a dissolution of the bonds of matrimony. This, Raynal laments, is “one of the principal symptoms of a general corruption & the annihilation of all honest affections.”[140]

Even so, the emerging European gender regime was favorably contrasted with that of earlier times or of contemporary savages and barbarians. Comparing sexual passion across cultures, William Robertson contended that the male Native Americans “treat their women with coldness and indifference. They are neither the objects of that tender attachment which takes place in civilized society, nor of the ardent desire, conspicuous among rude nations.”[141] This looks like a sexual pendant of the theory of the moderate climate. The tender sexual affection of European males for “their” women is represented as a mean between the lack of sexual passion of the American savages and the licentious sexuality of the rude nations in Africa and the Oriental despotisms of Asia. Here Robertson’s America and Montesquieu’s imagined Persians join hands, with the signal difference that in the final episode of the Persian Letters, Oriental female autonomy is depicted as a counterpoint to Oriental despotism. The story concludes with the suicide of Roxana, the first wife of Usbek, the master of the harem. In her final letter to Usbek, the proud Roxana asserts that the oppressive regime of the harem has neither destroyed her sexual autonomy nor the independence of her mind.[142]

The enlightened civilization of the fourth stage of human history appears to achieve a comfortable but precarious balance. European masculinity is represented as a mean between sexual coldness and license, as well as between the political psychologies of beastly masculine power and Oriental despotism. What men should avoid were the twin perils of savage rudeness and licentious despotism. Historical advancement is theorized in terms of achieving a moderate balance. By contrast, the gender regimes of the peoples of America, Africa, Asia, and frequently also Mediterranean Europe are diagnosed as anthropological pathologies.

In her study of the Scottish Enlightenment, Silvia Sebastiani underlines the limits of female liberty in its vision of the future of commercial society. The Scots, she observes, regarded the “improvement of the condition of women … first of all, as a function of the completion of the humanity of men.”[143] Accordingly, they saw the model of the monogamous companionate marriage as the terminus of the historical advancement of women. Defining the capacities of men and women as complementary, their ideal was not equality but a civilized difference that put definite limits to women’s access to the public sphere of politics, science, and higher education. Otherwise, women might become too free, leading to an effeminacy of men and an excess of luxury and hypocrisy. The Scots associated the healthy scenario with northern, mainly Protestant Europe, while its dangerous antonym was associated with France and southern Europe.[144] Linking gender to race, Sebastiani concludes that to the Scots, “northern Europe was the place of ‘love,’ in opposition to the sexual deficiency of Amerindians, the animal nature of Africans, Oriental luxury, and the libertine degeneration of southern Europe and France.”[145]

Consequently, the equality of condition evoked by Buffon should not be confused with the equality of the sexes advocated by feminist authors from Marie de Gournay to Mary Wollstonecraft. It was not built on equality but on the notion of complementary roles of the two sexes, who were considered as equally dignified but also as essentially different. Women acted as civilizing agents through companionship. By contrast, women who claimed comprehensive equality were damaging rather than sustaining the delicate balance of civilization. Sebastiani concludes that “the appreciation of female qualities was constantly accompanied by distinctions expressing a need for control.”[146]

How did gender become so problematical for eighteenth-century theorists of society and history? In Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, and Condorcet gender has lost the status of an unquestionable foundation of the social order. It had become an “essentially contested concept” in a way it never was to the foremost thinkers of the mid-seventeenth century, such as Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza. The encounter with the “deviant” gender regimes of the extra-European peoples is not sufficient to explain this destabilization of gender, for it also fed upon a deep apprehension over the European present and, above all, the European future. Ultimately, the roots of the transformation of gender must be sought in European history.

In my opinion the deconstruction of gender should be seen as the cumulative effect of more than three centuries of feminist critique. From Christine de Pizan around 1400 to Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges at the end of the eighteenth century, numerous early-modern feminists expressed visions of the dignity and excellence of women, of the equality of the sexes, and demands for access to higher education, the world of letters, and finally politics. A nonexhaustive count of publications about the “question of women” in France from 1600 to 1790 by Jeannette Rosso yielded 235 titles, 30 percent of which can be qualified as pro-woman.[147] Another prolific genre comprised the numerous catalogues of learned women published all over Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. By now, a considerable historiography demonstrates that early-modern feminism was far more than a scattering of marginal publications.[148] Rousseau championed the equality of the sexes in his early writings, Montesquieu had read Poulain de la Barre, and Jaucourt was a pupil of Poulain in the Genevan collège.[149] The feminist critique sapped the old certainties of masculinity and femininity and made the equality of the sexes into a thinkable, albeit highly contentious ideal, most audaciously expressed in Mary Wollstonecraft’s “wild wish” to “see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behavior.”[150] We may conclude that early-modern feminism decisively contributed to the universalization of modern equality along the gender dimension.

In a world-historical perspective it must be underlined that the discourse of the equality of the sexes was confined to Europe. Early-modern European feminism deployed a strong language of equality, a philosophical meta-text imagining a future gender regime that went beyond the demand for a place in the world of letters and learning. A brief comparison with women writers in early-modern China may serve to demonstrate this. The participation of Chinese women in literary life was at least as important as in Europe. The Qing Dynasty (1645–1911) counted more than three thousand women poets. Over two thousand anthologies of their poems were published, many in printed editions.[151] Finally, women’s poetry clubs proliferated, establishing what the sinologist Dorothy Ko has called a “female counter-space” in Chinese society. By what they said and did, the women in these female networks questioned the Confucian dictum that in women virtue and talent were mutually exclusive. Instead, they argued that talent and virtue were compatible or even mutually reinforcing.[152] In their poems, women complained that they lacked the authority of the male sex, claimed to be “not second” to their brothers, and dreamed about more lofty careers. To give just one example, let me quote from a poem by Luo Qilan, writing in the 1790s:

In my dream I headed the imperial troops

…

At the border I displayed my heroic tactics

On the dome of the sky I wrote my ambitions.

Until suddenly I awoke to the sound of a bell,

To find myself still wearing three-inch shoes.[153]

When Luo Qilan was criticized for writing poetry and socializing with male literati she retorted that more than half of the 300 songs in the Book of Songs—the Chinese classic of poetry (ca. 600 BCE)—were composed by women.[154]

A popular novel, published around 1800 by a man, Li Ruzhen, describes Chinese literati visiting the “Country of Women,” where women govern and take male concubines, and men are subjected to foot-binding. The author apparently had no feminist intentions, for his Amazon story concludes with the men restoring order.[155] Nonetheless, the arbitrariness of the Chinese gender regime is exposed and an inversion of the Confucian gender ethos enters the realm of the thinkable. We may conclude that a sizable body of women’s writings in early-modern China navigates between the inescapable reality of female subjection and imagined worlds of freedom and female agency. What these texts lack, however, is a meta-text expressing a strong language of equality, comparable to the equality of souls created in God’s image or as human beings enjoying “natural equality.”

Early-modern European feminism introduced a mode of critique that was not universally present in the world. Consequently, there is a European exception in the early-modern intellectual history of gender, one that can be framed in different ways. In both frames, gender became a “useful category of historical analysis”—to borrow Joan Scott’s well-known phrasing. Even so, there were definite limits to the gendering of progress. Philosophical history combines two contradictory views of the condition of women in European civilization. Moving gender from nature to history, it posits the changeability of gender regimes, but it then seeks to arrest and “re-naturalize” the future history of women. It can thus be read as a script for women’s emancipation but equally well as an extended polemic against the feminist alternative. As Condorcet and Olympe de Gouges demonstrated with their advocacy of women’s citizenship, philosophical history can yield an agenda for women’s rights. However, it can also bring about a white male scenario of “modernizing” masculinity, global European superiority, and imperial expansion.

Racial Classification

Racial classification began as the application of the taxonomic method of natural history to humanity. Human beings were rational language- and tool-using animals. As sentient animals humans could be included in the subject matter of the burgeoning science of natural history. Racial classification solved two problems: in the first place, it offered a fairly simple conceptual tool to order the multiplicity of nations, tribes, and clans. Second, it made anthropology a branch of natural history amenable to the scientific practices of measurement and causal explanation.

In 1684, the French traveler and Gassendist philosopher François Bernier proposed to order humanity into four or five “races” or “species.” Bernier was a transitory thinker and his taxonomy was a far cry from the more systematic schemes of eighteenth-century human science, but he had connections to scholars working on animal and plant classification and his way of looking at humanity was clearly affected by the concerns of natural history.[156] Fifteen years later, Edward Tyson published the first systematic comparison between the anatomy of a human and an orangutan. In his 1735 classification of the anthropomorpha, Carolus Linnaeus divided Homo sapiens (his new name for modern humans) into four subspecies: the white European, the reddish American, the dark-brown Asiatic, and the black African.[157] As a matter of course, Linnaeus included judgments of the characters of the four “races.” Europeans were ingenious, sanguine, and governed by law; Americans were liberty loving, happy with their lot, and governed by custom; the Asians were melancholy and governed by opinion; the Africans, finally, were lazy, careless, and governed by caprice.[158]

The Africans were followed by the higher apes. Some human groups, it seemed, were closer to apes than others. How close was less clear. After Linnaeus, many other racial classifications were proposed. They differed in many respects, both in the number and the description of the various races, but a recurrent feature was the polarity between the white Europeans, always placed at the summit of the racial hierarchy, and the black Africans, usually situated at the bottom. When the classification was extended to the primates, the Africans always ended up closest to the great apes. In the late seventeenth century, racial classifications were a novelty, and not widely disseminated, but in the eighteenth century they became one of major tools to understand and evaluate human diversity.[159]

Probably the two most influential theorists of human diversity in the eighteenth century were the Frenchman Georges-Louis Leclerc, count of Buffon (1707–1788), and the German professor Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840). They can stand for two succeeding generations working in a period when racial classification acquired increasing intellectual traction. Both naturalists had an enormous influence: their works were read all over Europe and in the colonies. Blumenbach, beginning his scholarly career in the last decades of the eighteenth century, constructed a science of race that served as a template for nineteenth-century scientific racism.

Classification, not race, was the foundational concept. Classifications were primarily made according to visible physical features, usually skin color, hair type, skull form, facial expression, and body proportions, but they also included cultural and esthetic criteria. Buffon used the term race to designate an ensemble of these features.[160] To avoid an anachronistic notion of “pure biology” we must bear in mind that eighteenth-century natural history also discussed animals in moral and esthetic terms. Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, an enormous compendium of the history of the earth and its living organisms, routinely ascribed good and bad “characters” as well as beauty or ugliness to animals. The lion, Buffon asserted, presents us with “an imposing figure, a confident gaze, a proud allure,” and the body of this “noble species” is agile and well-proportioned. His character is equally admirable, joining nobility, clemency, and magnanimity. By contrast, the tiger displays a vile ferocity joined to cruelty without justice. His unsavory and haggard looks reflect his mean character.[161]

Many naturalists explained “biological” racial features as the results of long-term environmental factors, of which climate was by far the most important. Such an ecological approach to race was a far cry from the nineteenth-century insistence on blood and heredity. For all that, its fluidity should not be overstated, as the emergence and transformation of racial traits was assumed to evolve at a slower temporal rhythm than political and cultural history. On the hypothesis that in the beginning of time the earth was very hot, and calculating the rate of its cooling, Buffon put the age of the earth at about 75,000 years (later he arrived at much higher estimates).[162] Though subject to long-term ecological change, “races” were thus relatively stable formations in historical time. From the foregoing it should be clear that Enlightenment racial classification was biocultural with esthetic, moral, and political overtones. Europeans, for instance, were represented as white, well-proportioned, and beautiful, but also as intelligent, rationally governed, and fit to rule peoples belonging to other races.

In the introduction to Volume 9 of the Histoire naturelle, Buffon summarizes the gist of his classification of humanity: “Man, white in Europe, black in Africa, yellow in Asia, and red in America, is always the same man, taking his color from the climate.” Humans, he goes on to say, are made to govern the earth and nature enables them to prosper in all environments and climes. As animals are more affected by climate than humans, their varieties, both within and between species, are more marked than the differences within the human species.[163] Here, as elsewhere, Buffon forcefully affirms the unity of the human species. Despite occasional lip service to the Christian genealogy of humanity, his real criterion is biological. Nature, not God, is the grand demiurge.[164] Buffon defines a species as a group of animals that can produce fertile offspring through sexual intercourse. The physical state of a species, Buffon declared in 1753, “exists only in considering Nature in the succession of time.”[165] The temporality of natural history was of great import to Buffon, who questioned the eternal fixity of species and was groping toward a proto-evolutionary theory of the earth and its life forms. Nature, Buffon believed, progressed by subtle gradations. Even though his reproduction criterion for species ensured a degree of stability, he always remained attentive to modifications and transitions. According to Phillip Sloan, Buffon’s key importance for Enlightenment biology was to give epistemological primacy to a historical understanding of nature.[166]

In this theoretical framework, then, humanity is, and only can be, one species. Buffon posits skin color as the chief marker of the four “races” he associates with the four continents. Why color should be so fundamental and why “races” should be congruent with continents Buffon fails to explain. The four-color framework represented a departure from earlier taxonomies. Both the “red Indian” and the “yellow Chinese” were eighteenth-century inventions.[167] The Red Indian, interestingly, was independently conceived by European scholars, such as Linnaeus and Buffon, and natives of North America identifying themselves as “red,” sometimes in contrast to the “white” colonists and the “black” slaves they encountered in increasing numbers.[168]

The issue of human diversity clearly fascinated Buffon. His anthropology comprised a long treatise on “the varieties of the human species,” subsequently enlarged by an almost equally long supplement. In Buffon’s view, climate was the principal explanation of color: “For myself, I must confess that I have always felt that the same cause that makes us tan when we are exposed to the air and the burning sun, that makes the Spaniards browner than the French, and the Moors more so than the Spaniards, also makes the Negroes darker than the Moors.”[169]. That is not to say, however, that climate explains everything. Human culture has its part too. Why, Buffon asks, are the Chinese whiter than the Tatars, whom they resemble in all other traits? The answer is that the Chinese live in houses and towns, while the steppe nomads are perpetually exposed to the sun. Further north the extreme cold produces the same effects as the sun, accounting for the tanned skin of the arctic peoples. Such reasoning tends to dissolve racial differences into a gradual spectrum of solar exposition, further complicated by the ways of life of different peoples. Buffon’s general conclusion on “races” accords quite well with this universalistic, and potentially egalitarian, perspective:

Everything thus supports the thesis that humanity is not composed of essentially different species: that on the contrary there originally only was a sole species of men, which, having multiplied and dispersed itself over the entire surface of the earth, has undergone diverse modifications by the influence of the climate, the different diets, ways of living, by epidemical diseases, and also by the endless variety of individuals that are more or less alike; that at first these modifications were of minor import, and only produced individual differences; that in the course of time they evolved into varieties of the species because they became more general, more sensible, and more enduring by the continuous effects of the same causes.[170]

But those continuous effects, Buffon goes on to say, will not endure forever. If the causes that produced them cease their action, or are replaced by other causes, the effects will fade away and give rise to other “racial” traits. What later generations have named “races” are here reduced to the transient outcomes of ever-changing environmental factors and the human ways of coping with them. Far from biological essentialism, Buffon’s reasoning appears to dissolve “race” into the contingencies of ecology and history. To test this potentially universalist hypothesis, we have to take a closer look at Buffon’s treatment of human diversity.

To begin with, we must note that Buffon as a matter of course posits white as the global standard. In the temperate climate of the Northern Hemisphere, he contends, one finds the most beautiful and the finest people, manifesting “the true natural color of man.”[171] All the stocks of humanity, he seems to assume, were originally white. What his climatic theory seeks to explain is how some groups acquired a darker complexion. Only once does he suggest the possibility of a reverse transition. Suppose one transports “negroes” to a Nordic country; “their descendants in the eighth, tenth, or twelfth generation would be much less black than their ancestors, and perhaps as white as the peoples originally inhabiting a cold climate.”[172] This would yield the surprisingly brief time span of some four centuries for an alteration of skin color. On the other hand, Buffon maintains that the Americans inhabiting the tropics are not black because not enough time has elapsed since they entered America from Siberia, suggesting a slower pace of change. In the bulk of the Variétés de l’espèce humaine, all nonwhites are considered as climate-induced deviations from the white original.

Buffon frequently uses the verb degenerate for the process of transition from the white original to the colored derivates. In theory, degeneration could have the neutral meaning of “branching off” from an original model to distinct varieties, but according to Jacques Roger’s great study of the life sciences in eighteenth-century France, dégénérer, the term used by Buffon, generally had a pejorative connotation.[173] As the other three races are depicted as in various degrees inferior to the white Europeans, the evolution of the nonwhite races appears like a descent from a presumed original excellence.

As always, the Africans provide us with a good test case. In his discussion of sub-Saharan Africa, Buffon distinguishes two large subgroups, the negroes (nègres) and the kaffirs (cafres). According to Buffon, all Africans are black, but not all are equally black. That this dark color is seen in a negative light is clear from Buffon’s remarks on the exquisite beauty of the women in Senegal. Among them, he tells his readers, one meets women who are equally beautiful as women in any other part of the world, “if one disregards their color.”[174] Buffon seems to take it for granted that everyone agrees that a white body is more beautiful than a black one. Even so, he is well aware that Africans themselves think differently. The Cape Verde people, he reports, pride themselves on being the most beautiful people in the world because they are the blackest.[175] In his book on Africa’s discovery of Europe, David Northrup notes that Africans encountering Europeans for the first time often found their whiteness ugly and revolting.[176] Buffon further remarks on the lascivious behavior of the Cape Verde women who often have sex with strangers. Excessive and deviant sexual mores are a recurrent theme in his discussion of Africa. Buffon’s general judgment of the “negroes” is mixed, but inclines toward primitivism:

Although the Negroes are not very intelligent, they are sensitive and passionate; they are happy or melancholic, industrious or indolent, friendly or hostile, according to the way one treats them. When one feeds them well and refrains from maltreating them, they are content, gay, ready to perform any task, and their faces radiate satisfaction; but when maltreated they become deeply aggrieved and sometimes they perish from melancholy.[177]

Africans are depicted as people who react to the treatment given them by others. This is unmistakably the language of slavery. Buffon, for his part, condemns the slave trade but does not call for its abolition.

In the historiography the theory of a wholesale degeneration of the Native Americans is sometimes ascribed to Buffon, and some passages in the Histoire naturelle seem to confirm this, but his final judgment is far otherwise. Generally, Buffon considers all Americans south of the Arctic as belonging to “a single human race” which is more or less red or copper-colored.[178] Except the peoples of Mexico and Peru, America is inhabited by savages, who are all “equally stupid, equally ignorant, equally without arts and industry.” The Americans, he goes on to say, seldom congregate in real nations, but rather form “tumultuous throngs of barbarous and independent men.”[179] Even before the European conquest, he further observes, America was far more thinly populated than the Old World. According to Buffon, it is useless to discuss the customs and mores of their “so-called nations” in any detail. Here Buffon anticipates Robertson, and is apparently unaware of the Moeurs des sauvages américains (1724), the great ethnographic work of Joseph-François Lafitau, who, on the basis of his fieldwork in America, distinguished the varying customs of a great number of North American tribes. Surveying Buffon’s description of the Americans, we may conclude that he has a fairly negative opinion of their intellectual, technical, and social abilities. But he never uses the term degeneration when speaking about the common traits of the Amerindian peoples.

The only American peoples Buffon explicitly considers degenerates are the inhabitants of Greenland and the Eskimo, but their degeneration he attributes to the arctic climate. True to his climatic determinism, he includes the peoples of Lapland, the tribes of northern Siberia, and the northernmost Tatars in the category of degenerated peoples.[180] Degeneration there is, but its cause is the extreme climate and it is not confined to America. We find these observations in the lengthy supplement Buffon added in 1777 to his chapter on the varieties of humanity. There he offers a refutation of the degeneration theory of Cornelius de Pauw (Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains, 1768, 1774), which was widely read in Europe and America. De Pauw contended that all Americans were degenerates, going so far as to deny the existence of the great temples and monuments of the Inca and the Aztecs. That, Buffon indignantly retorts, is a ridiculous opinion that can only come from a prejudiced mind. The vestiges of those monuments are there for all to see, and they testify to the “grandeur” of the people who constructed them.[181] The imperfection of its nature that De Pauw attributes to “America in general” Buffon likewise dismisses out of hand. The smaller and feebler fauna of South America he explains, contrary to De Pauw, by a local deluge that killed off the more robust animals of an earlier age. Buffon admits that the damp and suffocating climate of Amazonia has weakened its people, but this has to be explained by “local and particular causes.”[182] The upshot is that Buffon in a generic sense associates the formation of the nonwhite races with degeneration, that he explains its occurrence by climatic influences, but that he absolutely rejects the theory that the American “race” as such is more degenerate than the rest of the world.

Buffon was not the only one to object to the degeneration theory. One of De Pauw’s arguments concerned the alleged beardlessness of the Native Americans. As the beard was generally considered an essential element of robust masculinity, its lack, De Pauw believed, accorded with the notion of sexually cold Americans who were lesser men than European whites. The beardlessness of the Americans, however, met with an empirical refutation published in 1786 in the prestigious Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. It was the collective work of two Englishmen and one Native American. The author of the report was Richard McCausland. He relied on two experts. The first he identifies as Colonel Butler, deputy superintendent of Indian affairs, who had a long and intimate knowledge of the Six Nations of the northeast and their languages. Causland’s second authority is Thayendanega, “a Mohock Indian of great influence.… He was in England in 1775, and writes and speaks the English language with tolerable accuracy.” The Mohawk chief Thayendanega had submitted a written and signed statement, testifying that “the men of the Six-Nations have all beards by nature, as have likewise all other Indian nations of North America which I have seen.”[183] Butler explained that the beardlessness myth came from the native habit of plucking the hairs from their chins. Causland himself, who had resided for ten years in the Niagara region, comments that his sojourn had convinced him “that they do not differ from the rest of men, in this particular [the beard] more than one European differs from another,” and he likewise doubted that the Amerindians were in their nature “more imperfect than the rest of mankind.”[184]

Where does Buffon stand in the dialectic of common humanity and racial difference? Despite his insistence on the unity of the human species, the long ethnographic section of Buffon’s anthropology is entirely predicated on physical and cultural difference. Reading his judgment of the American peoples, the prospect that they might eventually become as civilized and intelligent as the classical Greeks, so self-evident to Fontenelle, dissolves into an empty illusion. Although Buffon condemns slavery, his discussion of the “negroes” shows an unmistakable affinity with the language of the slave trade. He invokes a Cartesian notion of the human mind, but his theory of human nature is predicated on a theory of differential rationality. Savage peoples possess reason, but only in a rudimentary form. In Buffon, the universalist notion of a single human species remains a weak abstraction. His lengthy chapter on human diversity, to which he returned at the end of his long career, combines a strong language of inequality with a weak language of common humanity.

The public career of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach began when Buffon was an old man. Blumenbach read and later taught medicine and anthropology in the famous German university of Göttingen, then part of Hanover, which was linked to Britain by the personal union of its elector also being king of England. The university acquired a vast collection of English books and travelogues.[185] Blumenbach obtained his doctorate in 1775 with a dissertation titled De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa (On the Natural Variety of Mankind) that was published in the same year. From its first edition to the last revised edition of 1795 it was read and discussed throughout Europe. Blumenbach was elected a member of seventy-eight academies and learned societies, in and outside the German lands.[186] Thomas Bendyshe, the editor of an 1840 English translation of Blumenbach’s main writings, declared that his treatise on the varieties of humanity “cannot be considered obsolete even at the present day.”[187] In sum, his European intellectual standing equaled that of Buffon.

In his 1775 dissertation, Blumenbach squarely meets the challenge of polygenism. After an aside against the detractors of scripture who are, he hints, particularly fond of the polygenist theory, he presents his main objection:

For although … you might easily take the inhabitants of the Cape of Good Hope, the Greenlanders, and the Circassians for so many different species of man, yet when the matter is thoroughly considered, you see that all do so run into one another, and that one variety of mankind does so [in]sensibly pass into the other, that you cannot mark out the limits between them.[188]

The argument of the “insensible degrees,” demonstrating that there are no clear-cut boundaries between the “races,” literally reappears in the 1795 edition.[189] The races, then, differ in degree, but all of them display the common traits of humanity, of which reason and the erect position are the most significant. However, Blumenbach does not clinch the argument by Buffon’s definition of species, because he believed that fertile interbreeding could cross species boundaries.[190] Skin color, which he considers the most constant of all the bodily differences between the races, is explained by a combination of climatic influences and the chemistry of the human epidermis.[191]

Let us now consider Blumenbach’s racial classification. In the 1775 edition, he asserts that “colour, whatever its cause, be it bile, or the influence of the sun, the air, or the climate, is, at all events, an adventitious and easily changeable thing, and can never constitute a diversity of species.”[192] But, as we will shortly see, it can constitute a diversity of race. The racial classification Blumenbach then proposes is in some respects close to Bernier. Just like the French traveler, he begins with the “first race,” which comprises “Europe, Asia this side of the Ganges, and all the country situated north of the Amoor [Oxus], together with that part of North America, which is nearest both in position and character of the inhabitants.”[193] In contrast to Buffon, the white (or “first”) race is no longer identified as European but rather as Eurasian, or even as partly American. The second race covers South and Southeast Asia beyond the Ganges, Australia, and the islands of the Pacific. The third is sub-Saharan Africa, and the fourth America except the far north assigned to the first race.[194] The neat congruence of races and continents we encountered in Buffon has disappeared. In particular, the border between Europe and Asia is no longer racially determined.

What happens to racial classification when we turn to Blumenbach’s 1795 edition? Basically three things: in the first place, there are now five races instead of four; second, the first race is renamed, becoming the Caucasian race; and third, the genealogy of racial difference is represented as a two-branched tree with skin color as the chief marker. In the title of the chapter on the classification of humanity, Blumenbach once more underlines the unity of humanity: “Five Principal Varieties of Mankind, One Species.” The five races or varieties are the Caucasian, the Mongolian, the Ethiopian, the American, and the Malay. Briefly describing skin color, type of hair, and cranial form, Blumenbach introduces his five races. The geographical boundaries of the white race are unchanged, except for one addition and one deletion: the Lapps and “the remaining descendants of the Finns” are removed, and North Africa is added. The Caucasian, Blumenbach declares, has “that kind of appearance which, according to our conception of symmetry, we consider most handsome and becoming.”[195] While he refuses to establish a cultural or intellectual hierarchy of races, he has no qualms about an esthetic ordering.

The Mongolian race, colored yellow, comprises the rest of Asia except for the southeast, the Lapps and Finns, and the Eskimo. The third race, the Ethiopian, is black and resides in sub-Saharan Africa. The American race is copper-colored or red and populates all of America save the Arctic. The fifth race, the Malay, is tawny-colored and comprises the people of the Malay Peninsula and the islanders of Southeast Asia and the Pacific (including Australia and New Zealand). The descriptions of the physiognomy of these races are not condemnatory but nonetheless give the distinct impression that they are less handsome than the Caucasians.

To discover the key to Blumenbach’s new classification we have to take a closer look at his Caucasian race, which occupies the central position in several respects. Bruce Baum has investigated the origins of the idea of a Caucasian race. To begin with, it was considered the “primeval” race from which all others were descended. Out of Caucasia was then what out of Africa is now. For Blumenbach, as for Buffon, white is the natural complexion of humanity. Why Caucasian? Blumenbach’s Göttingen colleague, the professor of history Christoph Meiners, had posited in his Outline of the History of Humanity (1785) that the first humans came from the Caucasus Mountains or the region to the south of it. This theory, moreover, seemed to confirm the biblical story that Noah’s ark stranded on Mount Ararat, which is situated south of the Caucasus. Finally there was the tenacious belief, already found in Bernier, that the Circassians, and in particular the Circassian maidens who lived near the Caucasus, were the most beautiful people on earth.[196] The Caucasus thus represented the region from which humanity spread to the ends of the earth, and its inhabitants were a model, or an idealization, of humanity. Finally, the Caucasian theory could also function as a secularized form of the biblical genealogy of humanity, a stage in the long goodbye to Genesis.

Blumenbach did not endorse the crude racial prejudices of Meiners, but apparently he was convinced by the Caucasian theory. It is in that region, if anywhere, he declared, that we must place “the autochthones of mankind.” Moreover, white is the original color of humanity, since “it is very easy for that to degenerate into brown, but very much more difficult for dark to become white.”[197] Here we once more encounter the notion of “degeneration.” In Blumenbach, as in Buffon, it is a highly ambiguous concept. Because Blumenbach, albeit with more circumspection than Buffon, clings to the esthetic superiority and historical primacy of the white race, any deviation from white to darker colors will appear as a change for the worse, regardless of authorial intentions. On the issue of the changeability of skin color, Blumenbach seems to be even more white-centrist than Buffon. The latter contended that a change of climate might transform black skins into white in three or four centuries, but Blumenbach states that turning brown into white is extremely hard, because of his chemical theory of the secretion of a “carbonaceous pigment” deep in the skin. For him, darkness creeps deeper into the body than for Buffon.

Compared to Buffon, Blumenbach’s genealogy of humanity is more race driven. The Caucasian race represents the root of the tree. Its two branches proceed from white to extremes of black or yellow by way of an intermediate color. One branch goes from white by way of brown (Malay) to black (Ethiopian), while the other branch runs from white by way of copper-colored (American) to yellow (Mongolian). Blumenbach provides an illustration with five typical crania, with the Caucasian skull placed in the center, the Mongolian and Ethiopian at the far left and right, and the American and Malay filling the intermediary slots.[198] The etiology of the second branch is somewhat surprising. Given Acosta’s theory of the peopling of America, which was generally accepted in the eighteenth century, it would seem far more plausible to place the “yellow” Asians in the intermediate position and the “red” Americans at the extreme pole.

Blumenbach’s work further exemplifies the rise of craniometry. Buffon was not interested in collecting skulls, but Blumenbach’s generation adopted craniometry as a promising new experimental tool of physical anthropology. The Dutch naturalist Petrus Camper and his English colleagues John Hunter and Charles White also began collecting skulls and measuring their facial angles.[199] In the late eighteenth century craniology represented a marginal innovation, but in the nineteenth century it was to become the key methodology of scientific racism.

On the other hand, Blumenbach’s avowed intentions are clearly more egalitarian than Buffon’s. He approvingly refers to the critics of Robertson’s History of America, and he dismisses the theory of the beardless Americans without much ado. Likewise, he has nothing but scorn for the travelers’ stories that American women do not menstruate. Such fables, he objects, should not be taken seriously by learned men.[200] The last sentence of his 1795 treatise is a ringing affirmation of the unity of humanity. Sara Eigen has demonstrated Blumenbach’s humanistic and egalitarian inclination in a study of the pictures of men from different races in a scientific atlas he published right after his 1795 book. Instead of offering crania or “characteristic” specimens of each race, Blumenbach opted for skillfully executed portraits of quite idiosyncratic, and moreover renowned, individuals.

Instead of a standard northwestern European, the Caucasian race is “represented” by the grave and dignified Jusuf Efendi, the Ottoman ambassador to Britain. Instead of a rowdy Tatar, the Mongolian race is seen in a portrait of Feodor Iwanowitsch, “a generally admired engraver in Rome.” The American in his gallery is none other than the diplomat and Mohawk leader Thayendanega, already discussed. The Malay is Omai, a Tahitian who visited Britain in the 1770’s, amazing London society by his elegant demeanor. The fifth picture shows Jacob Joseph Eliza Capitein, a former African slave, who had published Christian treatises in Dutch and Latin. The portraits, all of them executed by noted painters, show these men as individuals, not as “specimens” of a race. In his comments on the portraits, as in several other places, Blumenbach is at pains to explain that “race” does not annihilate individuality. A person, his message runs, is always more than an exemplar of a race.[201] And yet, Blumenbach, as we have noted above, also pioneered craniometrics, a branch of racial science that tended to reduce the individual to measurable physical traits and that used the skulls of individual persons as representatives of “their” race.[202] The illustrations of crania adorning Blumenbach’s 1795 book tell a different story than the portraits in his 1796 scientific atlas.

In Blumenbach’s pages we find affirmations of common humanity with egalitarian overtones side by side with a racial classification that is poised toward difference and inequality. He questions the assertion that the Africans are “closer to the apes than other men.”[203] Blumenbach’s 1806 Beiträge zur Naturgeschichte has a chapter discussing the intellectual abilities of the “negroes,” where he offers two strong affirmations of common humanity, bordering on equality.[204] The first is that there are no essential anatomical or physiological differences between the black Africans and the other races. The second posits that the Africans possess the same intellectual abilities as all other human beings. Both his own investigations and the reports of reliable explorers, Blumenbach relates, have convinced him of the truth of these conclusions.

Where does Blumenbach stand on common humanity and racial difference, and how does he compare with Buffon? Both men underlined that “races” are products of environmental factors, and both posited that the boundaries between “races” were fluid and dynamic. Paradoxically, both the egalitarian and the racialist elements are more strongly articulated in Blumenbach than in Buffon. His statements on common humanity and intellectual equality are far more outspoken, and his portraits of illustrious persons from all five races demonstrate an honest appreciation of what gifted individuals can achieve, regardless of “their” race. On the other hand, Blumenbach did much to establish the prestige of craniometry as the key methodology of the emergent science of race. His racial classification places the white Caucasians in an even more central position than Buffon did. The Caucasian race is the primeval one in time, standing at the origin of the genealogy of humanity, it is the most beautiful, and at the end of the eighteenth century it is moving toward an ever more domineering position in the world.

The upshot of Buffon and Blumenbach’s theories of race is that races are not natural kinds. Even so, their racial classifications assume that large chunks of humanity, identified by skin color, can be scientifically defined as “races.” In Blumenbach, we find a combination of the following elements: anthropology as a science, racial classification, a concept of race marked by skin color, and craniometry as a new methodology for physical anthropology. Neither Buffon nor Blumenbach can be called “racist” in the nineteenth-century meaning of the word. Even so, Blumenbach’s conceptual apparatus contained all the elements that less than ten years later would be combined by anthropologists such as Julien-Joseph Virey (Histoire naturelle du genre humain, 1801) with the thesis that races were natural kinds, resulting in an essentialist concept of race.[205]

The Janus-faced theories of race and human nature in Buffon and Blumenbach represented the mainstream of Enlightenment thought on racial classification. Other monogenist theorists of race, such as Immanuel Kant and Georg Forster, held views similar to Buffon and Blumenbach, with some leaning more toward universal equality and others privileging racial inequality. Kant is a particularly interesting case, for he first defended the inferiority of Africans but later retracted his theory of essentialist racial difference.[206] As far as I know, the only one to challenge the doctrine of whiteness as the natural and primeval color of humanity was the Dutch naturalist Petrus Camper—another pioneer of craniometry by the way—who posited that racial metamorphosis could equally well go from black to white as from white to black.[207] Between the “Moors” and the whites, Camper believed, there were no essential differences. In a lecture delivered at Groningen University in 1764, he expressed his Christian monogenism in the following terms: “Be Adam created black, brown, tanned or white, his descendants, as soon as they spread out over the wide surface of the earth, necessarily had to change in color and shape, according to how the country, the particular foods and illnesses differed.”[208] The opinion that Adam might have been black was quite exceptional.

Finally, there was a minority of polygenists, of whom Voltaire, Cornelius de Pauw, David Hume, and Henry Home (Lord Kames) were the best known, positing a stark and immutable racial inequality that, in their opinion, indicated separate origins or separate creations of the different races. For example, Lord Kames adduces many exceptions and anomalies to the “empire of climate” in order to demonstrate that Buffon had grossly overrated the impact of climate on racial differences. The existing differences between the races, Kames contends, are much too great to be caused by environmental factors. The only remaining explanation, he concludes, is that different species of humans had existed from the beginning. Sexual unions between whites and blacks, he added, only produce “mongrels.” Originally, Kames assumes, the different “races” or “kinds of men” were placed in the climates most suitable for them.[209] About the Africans, he voices some doubts. Although it is absolutely certain that the “Negroes” are “a different species from the Whites,” Kames is not so sure of their intellectual inferiority. The primitive conditions of their life in Africa do not stimulate the mind, and abroad they are forced to live as miserable slaves, without any opportunity to cultivate their minds. “Who can say,” Kames concludes, “how far they might improve in a state of freedom.”[210] This cautious remark, however, remains an environmentalist aside in an argument dominated by racial determinism.

In the eighteenth century, polygenism, always on the defensive against Christian anathema, was far less influential than monogenism.[211] However, its fortunes were to improve in the nineteenth century. Later we shall see that many nineteenth-century polygenists came to embrace a strong biological racial determinism that left little room for the caveat on the stultifying effects of slavery Kames affixed to his theory.

Global Cultural Difference and Universal Equality

The first major European publication discussing other religions in a neutral comparative framework was the massive seven-volume Cérémonies et coutumes réligieuses de tous les peuples du monde (The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of All the Peoples of the World) published from 1723 to 1737 in the Dutch Republic by Bernard Picart and Jean Fréderic Bernard, a book that was reprinted and pirated all over Europe throughout the eighteenth century. According to Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, it was the first encyclopedic treatment of all the major religions of the world that was not dominated by Christian apologetics, although the Protestant background of the authors did inform their exposition in many places.[212] Picart and Bernard had both come to Amsterdam to escape the regime of religious persecution introduced in France in 1685. That experience made them into outspoken champions of religious toleration, a mental outlook that accounts for their fair and open-minded discussion of the world’s religions.

The Cérémonies heralded the emergence of a new subject, the comparative study of religion. Other religions were simply other religions, and not necessarily pernicious or satanically inspired. Picart, one of the premier engravers of his time, adorned the book with countless attractive illustrations, carefully selected to avoid a sensationalist or condemnatory approach.[213] Even so, Picart and Bernard distrusted priests, from whatever quarter they came. Frequently they depicted them as presiding over absurd or even heinous rituals.[214] Like Montaigne, it would seem, they questioned European superiority without condoning the seamy side of religion, such as human sacrifices and widow burning. Even so, they also sought to make strange and abhorrent rituals, such as found in Mexico, understandable to their readers, showing a possible influence of Bartolomé de Las Casas.[215]

Against the standard denunciations of the idolatry of the American “savages,” Picart and Bernard, following the lead of Fontenelle and Lafitau, underlined the parallels between the religions of America and those of ancient Greece and Rome.[216] Hunt, Jacob, and Mijnhardt note that “in both text and engravings they consistently shine the most favorable light possible on idolatrous customs and practices.”[217] They do not condone the human sacrifices of the Aztecs, but they at once point out that the misdeeds of the Spanish conquerors were equally atrocious. Generally, their portrayal of the peoples of the New World, in particular those of North America, offers praise for their simple virtues in a language that at times comes close to the stereotype of the noble savage.[218]

In the same spirit Bernard (Picart died before the entire series was completed) discusses Islam. In the early eighteenth century, when Ottoman power in the Balkans was retreating, European observers could (but by no means always did) take a more dispassionate stance on Muslim civilization. Bernard, though not an admirer of Muhammad, exemplifies this attitude and seldom misses an opportunity to criticize Christian intolerance. It was well known that the Ottoman sultan, as well as other Muslim princes, tolerated the presence of Christian and Jewish communities in their lands. Why, Bernard asked, should Christian rulers not extend the same kind of welcome to Christians of different persuasions, and finally to Jews and Muslims as well?[219]

Picart and Bernard discuss “idolatry” as a feature of virtually all religions (except Protestantism). Likewise, Hunt, Jacob, and Mijnhardt note, they “exhibit little interest in aligning peoples along a spectrum running from primitive to civilized. They find civility, modesty, and politeness in virtually all cultures … [and] are more concerned with the similarities between peoples than with their differences.”[220] In the general preface to the whole series, Picart and Bernard state the aims of their great work:

It should propose a general idea of the extraordinary practices that men have put into use to serve God and the like, and one is obliged to concede on reading it that, save for the character of revelation that one recognizes in some religions, they all agree on several things and have the same principles and foundations in the mind of the greater part of men, generally hold with the same thesis, advance in the same direction, and march in unison.[221]

Jacques Revel points out that the italicized phrases (in the original) were borrowed from Pierre Charron’s De la sagesse (1601).[222] Via Charron, Picart and Bernard’s thought is indebted to Montaigne’s skeptical humanism that also valued ethics above dogma. In such utterances, the somber memories of the European Wars of Religion are transformed into a global vision of religious differences and the ethical commonalities that enable people to bridge those differences. We have seen that in the Essai sur les Moeurs, published some years later, Voltaire makes precisely the same point.

In their chapter on China, Picart and Bernard again underline the common elements found in all creeds, and then advance an audacious and egalitarian proposal: “All religions resemble each other in something. It is this resemblance that encourages minds of a certain boldness to risk the establishment of a project of universal syncretism. How beautiful it would be to arrive at that point and to be able to make people with an overly opinionated character understand that with the help of charity one finds everywhere brothers.” Picart and Bernard’s universal syncretism seems to be grounded in the conviction that the existence of one God or divine principle could be expressed in the languages of different religions—a strong and more egalitarian version of the Sufi notion of different ways to the “same” God we have encountered earlier. The ideal of universal brotherhood provides a counterpoint to European arrogance and the pretended Christian monopoly of truth, but also to the exclusivist pretentions of all other religions.[223] Given that all religions embrace the same moral principles, an ethics of universal brotherhood becomes thinkable.

We may conclude that Picart and Bernard go beyond religious tolerance. They transform the Christian notion of charity from a personal duty into an ideal of universal brotherhood that embraces all of humanity. With them, the anthropological turn almost becomes second nature, manifesting itself every time they explain to their readers that the practices of this or that religious community, even though strange and repulsive at first sight, are understandable in the historical and cultural context that gave rise to them.

Let us now turn to another European savant with a sympathetic interest in non-Christian religions but with a quite different method of studying them. In 1755 a young Frenchman, Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, set sail for India to collect and translate the ancient Persian writings of Zoroaster. To reach Surat, where most of the Parsees, the latter-day Zoroastrians, resided, he had to make a long journey from Pondichéry, the seat of the French East India Company. In Surat, he translated the Zend Avesta with the help of a Parsi teacher, the Zoroastrian priest Darab Sorabjee Kumânâ. He also collected Sanskrit manuscripts and speculated on the affinities between Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. Anquetil’s project was the first study of an Asian religion in its original language.

Anquetil’s interests, however, were not confined to religion. His travel journal, published in 1771 after his return home, shows a measure of respect for Indian civilization coupled to a hearty dislike of European arrogance and greed.[224] On his passage to India he is shocked to learn that many of his shipmates are released criminals, on their way to become proud colonists. At Pondichéry he is disgusted with the “idleness” and “effeminacy” of the colonial elite. While the colonists are worse than expected, the Indians turn out to be better. When a native of Balesvar returns his lost watch to him, Anquetil is “surprised to see such honesty in a people we regard as barbarians.” At Bhadrakh, Anquetil recounts, “some Indians approached us and the conversation turned on Europe and the different religions with a frankness that I would never have believed to find in the heartland of Indianism.” Later on, he remarks that he is traversing a country where the Europeans are chiefly known for their greed. Upon receiving nourishment and correct route information from a mountain dweller, he observes that in “civilized countries” such an encounter in a remote hamlet might easily have ended in robbery or worse. Anquetil further notes that the Hindu princes tolerate the Christian worshippers in their lands, and he remarks in passing that the Christians in India are no less credulous than the Hindus.[225]

However, the reader of Anquetil’s journal also encounters colonial commonplaces, such as the opinion that Orientals, owing to the hot climate, are prone to laziness, effeminacy, and debauchery. Some of his reactions show racial prejudice, as when he remarks that the exquisite beauty of a girl made him almost overlook her dark complexion. In passing, he explains skin pigmentation, in line with Buffon’s theory, as a consequence of the tropical climate. On the other hand, he is aware of the stereotypical expectations of his European audience, for he includes an account of a suttee (widow burning), which he later admitted never to have witnessed, calling it “a barbarian though religious ceremony.”[226]

Anquetil’s journal displays a curious mixture of Orientalist commonplaces, open-minded curiosity, and the first glimmerings of a critique of European prejudices and arrogance. His intellectual background was somewhat eclectic, composed of Jansenism, skepticism, and a charitable humanism. Among the few books he took to India were the Hebrew Bible, Charron’s Traité de la sagesse, and Montaigne’s Essais. Beyond those, he was conversant with the philosophy of natural law, and he had absorbed insights from Buffon and Montesquieu.[227] Apart from this intellectual luggage, fairly common in eighteenth-century France, we find a young man trying to make sense of what he sees and hears in a bewildering world entirely new to him. That the behavior of the colonists made an unpleasant and lasting impression on him is apparent from his later writings, which are marked by an egalitarian critique of European conquest and colonization.

In Législation orientale (1778), Anquetil vehemently attacks the theory of Oriental despotism found in François Bernier’s 1671 travelogue on Mughal India and popularized by Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois. Citing Mughal legal documents, he demonstrates that private property is guaranteed in India. Broadening the subject, this critique is extended to the cases of Safavid Iran and the Ottoman Empire. According to Anquetil, Bernier and other European visitors underestimated the role of customary law in India; second, they did not understand that the Islamic judiciary functioned as an intermediary power in the state, comparable to the law courts in European monarchies; finally, they mistook the suzerainty of the Mughal ruler over the lords and officers in his realm for an unlimited sovereignty including the ownership of their lands.[228] Anquetil regards the conceit that the sovereign owns all the land as a thinly veiled apology for European conquest and land-grabbing in Asia. Let us conquer those lands and become the new sovereigns, the Europeans imagined, “and we shall at once be the lords of all the lands of Hindustan.”[229]

Anquetil’s moral message amounts to an indictment of the cruelty and the boundless greed of the Europeans. Looking back from eighteenth-century India to sixteenth-century America, he exclaims:

Your gold, one said to the Peruvians, to the Mexicans. Here with the revenues of Hindustan, that is what we demand, even if it will be at the price of rivers of blood.[230]

In the final pages of the Législation orientale, Anquetil reminds his readers of the horrors committed against the Americans—will history repeat itself in Asia? “Frenchmen, Englishmen! I am pleading the cause of humanity. Never was a more important issue laid before the tribunal of the universe.”[231] Anquetil objects to territorial colonialism. India, he posits, is already inhabited so that there can be no right to occupy parts of it without a formal concession by its proprietors, the native peoples, and their rulers. The only type of colonies advantageous to both Indians and Europeans are simple commercial establishments.[232]

Sardonically reacting to Montesquieu’s complaint that the freedom of commerce was not fully respected in the Orient, Anquetil states that there might be some truth in the complaint. The Indians, he goes on to say, apparently have not yet got around to “organize the sale of human flesh on the regular commercial basis that is known in Europe as the traite des nègres. In that respect, they are indeed less advanced than we.”[233] Most Europeans seem to think that people of different color and customs are inferior and can be molested with impunity. They do not consider that beneath the different skin colors there is a uniform human nature: “Behold the poor man, the man of modest means in all nations.… In the greater part of humanity there is a uniformity that may seem astonishing, if one does not pay attention to its cause, the uniformity of needs.”[234] In a later publication Anquetil stated that Europeans who traded with Asians, Africans, or Native Americans never believed that those peoples “absolutely” belonged to their own species.[235]

Interestingly, Anquetil’s critique of imperialism is not confined to a defense of the Asian high civilizations against European encroachment. In the 1770s he started working on a massive treatise on the arctic peoples of America and Eurasia, reacting to Cornelius de Pauw’s degeneration theory of the Native Americans and probably also to Buffon’s critique of De Pauw which rejected the thesis of wholesale American degeneracy but accepted it for the arctic peoples. The greater part of Anquetil’s Considérations philosophiques, historiques et géographiques sur les deux mondes, which was ready for publication in 1799 but never saw print, was devoted to a comparison of Siberia, Alaska, and northern Canada. Its main conclusion is that the way of life, technology, and beliefs of the inhabitants of those regions exhibit a broad similarity, explained by their analogous struggles to cope with the harsh climate as well as by cultural diffusion across the arctic zone. Anquetil reports that Russian ethnographers think it highly probable that communication between Siberia and Alaska had existed since remote antiquity.[236]

The customs of the arctic peoples, Anquetil concludes, actually result from a long history of successful adaptation to an extremely hostile environment. Among his examples are the Eskimo, depicted by Jaucourt in Diderot’s Encyclopedia as “the savages among the savages” and as “veritable man-eaters.”[237] European travelers, Anquetil notes, rarely appreciate that the Eskimo have mastered the skills to navigate the stormy arctic seas. Their ingenuity is further evidenced by their invention of wooden snow goggles, a device also found in northern Siberia but never yet invented elsewhere. Anquetil remarks in passing that such goggles would be very useful to the French soldiers in the blinding glare of the Egyptian desert.[238]

Again and again, Anquetil reverses the usual perspective of sedentary normality and nomadic deviance. Much of what appears primitive to the average European is perfectly appropriate, and often more effective, in the northern environment. Likewise, the reluctance of the northerners to engage in commerce on the unequal terms offered by the Europeans is eminently rational, though many travelers have reported it as yet another sign of their “ferocity.” Pointing to the harsh arctic environment can, of course, be read as exculpatory—they cannot help being “savage”—but that is not what Anquetil has in mind. The Tungesians, he relates, greatly prefer their native ways to those of the Russians. The Kalmuk may seem ugly according to European standards, but not, of course, in their own eyes.[239] Anquetil consistently invites his European readers to question their own ethnocentrism. They should consider that “every nation has its proper theogony, situating the creation, the origin of the world and the human species in its own territory.”[240]

Beyond that, the Europeans should reflect on the disastrous consequences of their conquests. Instead of bringing civilization, they all too often wreak havoc and destruction, above all in the Americas. Much like Fontenelle, Anquetil believes in the Native Americans’ potential for development. The Europeans, he declares, must cease to destroy the land and culture of the Americans. If the native inhabitants could freely dispose of their produce and communicate with the Europeans on equal terms, “their ideas will reach a higher level, and they will become what the Europeans are at present, and perhaps they will even surpass them.”[241] The civilizations of Mexico and Peru, Anquetil muses, might have played a role comparable to the Roman Empire in the west, Persia and Hindustan in southern Asia, and Han China in the east. “Destroying what had been accomplished, the Spaniards … arrested the amelioration that was to extend itself to the rest of the continent.”[242]

Anquetil concludes his survey of the arctic regions with some thoughts about the future of America. European colonization, he fears, is drastically altering the American ecology, particularly in the young United States, and soon “an immense population will cover that vast continent.” Then the human species shall thrive in the New as well as in the Old World—“Will humanity also gain by it?”[243]

Diderot on European and Tahitian Culture

Denis Diderot, the chief editor of the Encyclopedia, was also one of the key figures in the critique of imperialism. He cooperated with Raynal in writing the Histoire des deux Indes, and he offered his own thoughts on European expansion and cultural difference in the Supplément au voyage de Bougainville. Jonathan Israel has shown that Diderot was in many ways the most influential thinker of the Radical Enlightenment in the third quarter of the eighteenth century.[244] Diderot did not publish the Supplément, but it circulated among a “safe” audience, and its main themes are also found, though in less provocative language, in the Histoire des deux Indes. It was one of those texts that only circulated in clandestine media but was nonetheless influential.

When Diderot drafted the Supplément his philosophy had evolved from deism to a materialist monism. Life, including human life, he asserted, was nothing else than complex and highly organized matter. Accordingly, human beings should follow their natural impulses and pleasures, only bridling them in order to respect the natural right of their fellow humans to do likewise. That did not imply, however, a lifestyle of boundless gluttony and debauchery, for human happiness, Diderot assumed, was best served by moderation and a measure of rational self-control. On the other hand, he categorically rejected the vilification of physical enjoyment and the double standard of Christian sexual morality. Bougainville’s account of Tahiti provided him with an ideal case study to combine his critique of Christian morality with a strident anti-imperialist argument.

In the years 1766–1769 the French savant and explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville sailed around the world. The journal of his voyage, published in 1771, included a chapter about Tahiti, in which Bougainville described the unadorned and “natural” way of life of the islanders, dwelling in particular on their “free” sexual mores, including their custom of “offering” their wives and daughters as sexual companions to visiting strangers. Bougainville’s account of Tahiti attracted the attention of readers all over Europe. Diderot, who himself never left Europe, used Bougainville’s story as a foil for a playful philosophical argument, presented in a series of witty dialogues.

Right at the beginning, the moral integrity of the European colonizers is called into question, bringing to mind Anquetil’s indignation about his criminal shipmates destined for a colonial career. Besides such moral strictures, Diderot introduces the temporality of philosophical history, explaining that the Tahitians are close to the origins of the world while the Europeans are approaching its old age.[245] After the introductory dialogue the scene changes dramatically. We find ourselves on the shore of Tahiti. The French are about to leave, saddening the Tahitians. Tears flow copiously, but then an old man severely berates his compatriots:

Weep, wretched natives of Tahiti, weep. But let it be for the coming and not for the leaving of these ambitious, wicked men. One day you will know them better. One day, they will come back, bearing in one hand the piece of wood you see in that man’s belt, and, in the other, the sword hanging by the side of that one, to enslave you, to slaughter you, or make you captive to their follies and vices. One day, you will be subject to them, as corrupt, vile and miserable as they are.[246]

On the Tahitian beach, the truths of philosophical history turn into a prophecy of doom. The old man calls Bougainville a “poisoner of nations” (empoisonneur de nations) and likens the arrival of the French on the island to an infection.[247] Literally, this refers to venereal diseases, but metaphorically to the introduction of European culture. In a language that brings to mind the biblical story of the Fall, the old man bemoans the perversion of the minds of the young Tahitians by European notions of private property and sexual shame.

The other accusation of the old Tahitian exposes the hollowness of European morality. The Tahitians, he declares, have “respected our own image in you,” seeing that we all are “children of Nature.” The French intruders willingly accepted the gifts of the islanders, but when a Tahitian took some “miserable trinkets” from a French vessel, they immediately resorted to violence. In other words, the Tahitians acknowledged the natural equality of all human beings, but the French did not. In a sarcastic inversion of the European ceremonies of possession the old man exclaims:

Orou, you who understand the language of these men, tell us all … what they have written on that strip of metal: This land is ours. So this land is yours? Why? Because you have set foot on it! If a Tahitian should one day land on your shores and engrave on one of your stones or on the bark of one of your trees, This land belongs to the people of Tahiti, what would you think then?[248]

The Europeans lecture about morality, the old man intimates, but at the same time they are plotting to steal an entire country from its rightful inhabitants.

A large part of the Supplément is devoted to a critique of Christian sexual morality. The subject is discussed in a lengthy debate between Orou and the chaplain of the French expedition, interrupted by the nocturnal seduction of the chaplain by Orou’s daughter Thia. At first, the chaplain refuses the offer of sexual hospitality, but finally his libido gets the better of him. Even in Thia’s arms he continues to cry out “but my religion, but my holy orders!” The morning after, Orou wants to learn the meaning of those strange words. Thereupon, the chaplain explains the Christian prescriptions governing sexuality and marriage. Orou at once objects that sexual desire is ingrained in human nature and cannot be erased by laws and decrees. Moreover, sexual attraction is volatile, so that the Christian command of lifelong monogamous marriage will always founder on the rocks of human nature. Finally, Orou concludes, the natural end of sexuality is procreation. A healthy society welcomes children who assure the continuity of its people. Consequently, sex cannot be shameful and sinful. Questioned by Orou, the chaplain has to admit that back in Europe the Christian sexual interdictions are mostly honored in the breach.

On the face of it, the Tahitian morality looks like simply following one’s natural urges. On closer inspection, there turn out to be two “natural” impulses: pleasure and procreation. The Tahitians disapprove of, and sometimes punish severely, sexual relationships that cannot produce offspring. In particular, sterile old women who seek to seduce young men are exiled or sold into slavery. As Sankar Muthu has cogently argued, in Diderot’s view, culture is everywhere and no human society is entirely “natural.”[249] Even so, he is able to argue convincingly that the Tahitian code is less antisexual and therefore closer to nature than the Christian one. He attributes to Orou his own maxim that it is best to judge all cultures by a common standard: “You can’t condemn the ways of Europe in the light of those of Tahiti, nor consequently the ways of Tahiti in the light of those of your country. We must have a more reliable standard, so what will that be? Do you know a better one than the general welfare and individual utility?”[250]

The Tahitian mirror Diderot presents to the Europeans is a fictional one. He does not faithfully follow Bougainville’s travelogue. In the Supplément, Tahitian thinking is depicted as a rationalistic naturalism, while Bougainville speaks of superstition, human sacrifices, and the awesome power wielded by the Tahitian priests.[251] Furthermore, Bougainville’s idyll of innocence and equality was probably colored by the part of the island where he stayed ten days: like most Europeans, he made port in Matavai Bay, where the littoral was home to the Tahitian aristocracy. This may well have induced him to describe Tahitian society as more homogeneous and “paradisiacal” than it really was.[252] Finally, Bougainville’s own journal suggests at several junctures that the sexual hospitality of the Tahitian women was stage-managed by their male relatives, who sought to preclude the kind of armed conflict they had experienced with British visitors a year before Bougainville’s landfall.[253] To what extent Diderot was aware of these complications is not clear. What is clear, however, is that Diderot emphatically rejected all “back to nature” ideologies. To him, Tahiti was a story circulating among the European public on which he could tack his own discourse. Diderot’s Tahiti was not “real,” but his critique of European imperialism and Christian sexual morality certainly was.

The Europeans, Diderot finally concludes, are forced to live by three codes: nature, Christian morality, and the civil laws of the state. Since the three codes contradict one another, the Europeans are inevitably torn asunder by their conflicting impulses. The natural code cannot be abolished, so the only viable solution is to weaken or modify the other two. Consequently, the solution is not to transplant the Tahitian code to Europe but to reform bad laws and to weaken the hold of the Christian churches on public affairs. An interlude in the Supplément tells the sad story of Polly Baker, a New England prostitute who has to stand trial because she gave birth to a child out of wedlock. By a cruel irony, the man who made her pregnant is sitting on the court that condemns her. Polly Baker’s eloquent testimony gives an inkling of the “bad laws” Diderot sought to improve.

What Diderot is saying is not “follow Tahiti” but rather observe, understand, and do not condemn unthinkingly. That the object of understanding in the Supplément is an imaginary one does not diminish the pertinence of Diderot’s reasoning. He counsels his readers to reform their laws according to the maxims of general welfare and individual utility. For Diderot, those maxims possess a universal cross-cultural validity, but their high level of abstraction leaves ample room for diverging cultural elaborations. He formulates a universal standard, but it does not necessarily entail a universal culture. His thought is tentative and empirical rather than deductive and apodictic. Elsewhere, he envisages the possibility of a way of life that would sagely mix “civilized” and “savage” elements.[254]

Even so, the philosophical possibility of cultural hybridity sits ill with the prophecy of doom voiced by Diderot’s old Tahitian. The old sage expects Europe to make over the world in its own perverted image. His dark vision of the future shows that Diderot is well aware of the tremendous might of Enlightenment developmental time, both as a theoretical idée-force and as a metaphor of political and economic power. Contrary to Rousseau, Diderot identifies despotism as the chief corrupting power in history, while he regards “industry” and “the arts” as potentially liberating forces. Perhaps we should see Diderot’s unresolved struggle with the conflicting trends of history and futurity as an indication of a creative tension in Enlightenment thought on history and cultural difference.

An Anti-Imperialist History of the New World System

The Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes was one of the great bestsellers of the late eighteenth century. Its most conspicuous feature was an unrelenting critique of colonialism and slavery. Although Diderot’s contributions were important, amounting to about a third of the definitive 1780 edition, and Raynal did not even appear in the first edition, to most eighteenth-century readers and as considered in this volume, the Histoire des deux Indes was a single book by a single author, Guillaume Thomas Raynal, whose portrait appears opposite the title page of the 1780 edition.

Since the 1760s Raynal’s contacts with officials responsible for colonial affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had spurred his interest in colonial reform, notably the project of a gradual abolition of slavery.[255] But when such plans came to nothing, Raynal, egged on by Diderot, opted for supporting the revolutionary overthrow of slavery by the slaves themselves. That explains why both gradual abolitionism and the call for a new Spartacus are found in the final edition of the Histoire des deux Indes.[256]

The Histoire was widely read and went through numerous editions, not only in France but all over Europe and in the Americas. According to Jonathan Israel, the book reached an even larger public than the Encyclopedia itself. It received lavish praise as well as bitter vilification and formal condemnations by the French authorities. For a time, Raynal had to seek refuge abroad.[257] The condemnations are understandable in the light of the political principles invoked by Raynal to justify the American Revolution. What the British crown chooses to call a “rebellion,” he submits, is nothing less than the “inalienable & natural right” to shake off an oppressive regime. All authority in this world, he adds, originally springs from either the consent of the governed or from the naked power of oppressors.

Raynal’s energy seemed boundless. According to Diderot he was ill at ease when he could not hold forth on colonies, politics, and commerce.[258] The ten volumes of the Histoire des deux Indes offered a global history of European expansion and worldwide commerce. The final volume presents Raynal and Diderot’s judgment of the global results of European expansion and its feedback effects on Europe itself. J. G. A. Pocock has characterized the Histoire des deux Indes as one of the first attempts to write the history of the emerging new world system, focusing on the commercial networks and oceanic empires radiating out from Europe’s Atlantic rim.[259] Sea power is indeed central to Raynal’s story, except for his chapters on the Russian colonization of Central Asia and Siberia. Among the eighteenth-century critics of empire Raynal was the only one to adopt a global perspective on European colonization. This makes the book more significant than other critiques of empire published in the final decades of the eighteenth century. It was in the Histoire des deux Indes that European colonialism first appeared as a definite historical entity and an object of historical analysis and philosophical critique (although the term itself—colonialism—was a nineteenth-century neologism and thus not available to Raynal).[260]

In the opening pages of the Histoire, Raynal depicts colonization as an ongoing activity by all the major European powers on all continents. But, he then asks, do the Europeans know “on what principles” colonies should be founded?[261] The reader soon learns that most Europeans are painfully ignorant of such principles. It is the stated aim of Raynal to show them that the colonization they are practicing is mostly immoral and illegal. He presents the same sarcastic inversion of the European ceremonies of possession Diderot puts in the mouth of the Old Tahitian. These passages have been cited to represent Diderot and Raynal as opponents of any and all colonization, but their position is actually more complicated than that. Raynal distinguishes three cases: inhabited territories, uninhabited territories, and partly inhabited lands. In inhabited countries, he posits, Europeans may only settle with the permission of the local sovereign. In such cases his scornful dismissal of the colonial ceremonies of possession fully applies. If the native rulers tolerate our presence, Raynal declares, we should be grateful but we cannot take offense on their refusal. When the Chinese close the doors of their empire to us, he observes, they may be misguided but they are not unjust: “Their country harbors enough people & we are too dangerous guests.”[262] How dangerous the European “guests” could be readers of the Histoire des deux Indes could learn on any page of Raynal’s detailed narrative of the history of European colonization.

Uninhabited lands are the easiest case. Anyone may settle and take possession in terra nullius. It is the partly inhabited territories that present the crucial problem. According to Raynal it is permitted to colonize the “empty” parts and take possession by cultivating them, in line with Locke’s and Vattel’s justification of colonization discussed above. In such cases the natural limit of colonization is the border of the land already under native rule. Reasonably, the natives can further demand that the European settlers behave as peaceful neighbors and do not build extensive arsenals and fortifications. Neither should they attempt to seize the women, children, and properties of the natives, or pretend to become their legislator. If the Europeans show such aggressive designs, the natives are justified in expelling and even killing them.[263] Only if the Europeans propose an equitable and mutually beneficial exchange of goods and services should their presence be tolerated by the native princes and their subjects.

Raynal appears to take for granted a universal right to travel, trade, and exploit natural resources in “unused” lands, in line with the law of nations, as expounded by Boucher d’Argis in the Encyclopedia, by Vattel in his great handbook of the law of nations, and by Vitoria in sixteenth-century Spain. All those treatises demonstrated the dangerous elasticity of the notion of partially inhabited countries. Raynal assumes a well-defined “border” between the inhabited and the uninhabited parts, but Vattel deploys the concept of nomadic hunter-gatherers to question the existence of clear-cut borders in America, and thereby justifies the virtually unlimited colonization of an entire continent. The prevailing notion of the prepolitical wandering savage thus functioned as the thin end of the colonial wedge.

However, Raynal’s approach is a far cry from Vattel. His strictures about the aggressive behavior of the European colonists were meant to preclude scenarios of wholesale colonization. Generally, the Histoire des deux Indes depicts the colonization of America as a rapacious and illegal usurpation of native rights. While defending the natural right to travel and trade worldwide, Raynal does not endorse a right to establish permanent settlements everywhere. Nor does he accept the identification of all Europeans as civilized and industrious. He observes that, far from sending their best and most industrious men to the colonies, the European states had dispatched greedy adventurers and released criminals. Recounting the conquest of the island the natives called Hayti and the Spanish named Hispaniola, he classifies the native Tainos as “savages” but does not conclude that they had no “real” possession of their lands. Describing the Spanish colonists as insatiable and cruel men who proved unwilling to cultivate the land and by their merciless exploitation drove the Tainos to a suicidal revolt, Raynal rhetorically inquires: “Tell me, reader, are these civilized people who have entered the land of the savages, or savages who have entered the land of civilized people?”[264]

Recently, Anthony Strugnell, invoking Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, has sought to demonstrate that Raynal’s—and Diderot’s—vision cannot be cast as anticolonialist and was at its core “inescapably imperialistic.” According to Strugnell, the Histoire des deux Indes is suffused with an enlightened civilizing mission, in particular in its comments on India.[265] A similar critique is found in an otherwise brilliant essay by Madeleine Dobie on the globalization of Diderot’s thought.[266] I will now show that Raynal, notwithstanding his undeniable Eurocentrism, expounds a radical and consistent critique of the colonialism of his time, and that his alleged advocacy of an enlightened civilizing mission is actually an integral part of that critique. Likewise, his celebration of fair and free commerce as a peaceful force uniting the peoples of the globe functions as a critique of the rapacious and violent behavior of European merchants that is denounced in chapter after chapter of the Histoire des deux Indes. What Raynal proffers can best be characterized as a Eurocentric critique of European colonialism.

The failed attempt of the French to colonize Madagascar in the late seventeenth century is well suited to show this. Raynal reports that many of the Malagasy were dwelling in the savage state, perpetually troubled by internecine wars. Even so, he observes a “beginning of enlightenment & industry” among them, in particular on the western littoral of the island. There the inhabitants were naturally hospitable to foreigners and had mastered the art of writing, possessing books of history, medicine, and astrology. These skills, Raynal further reports, were acquired through their prolonged contacts with Arabic civilization. What a splendid opportunity for the dissemination of enlightenment by patient and sagacious French colonists, Raynal exclaims. With the help of “la supériorité de notre genie,” he muses, we might elevate the entire island “to the rank of the educated and civilized nations.”[267]

Alas, Raynal laments, these auspicious expectations were thwarted by the shortsightedness of the French colonists. Instead of enlightened citizens France sent “vagabonds collected from the gutters of Europe.” Their outrageous behavior provoked a violent retribution from the Malagasy who massacred the entire French expedition. Such was the inglorious end of the first French attempt to found a colony on Madagascar. In Raynal’s narrative, the civilizing mission does not figure as a “realistic” scenario for colonial policy but rather as a counterfactual inversion of the present. That is not to say that Raynal does not believe in the future possibility of an enlightened and mutually beneficial colonial policy, but such benign enterprises, he concludes time and again, are wholly chimerical as long as colonial policies are dominated by short-term money-grabbing and lust for power.

The conquest of Bengal, in the wake of the Seven Years’ War, offered Raynal an opportunity to criticize British colonialism in similar terms. The British secured control over one of the wealthiest regions of India. In terms of eighteenth-century colonial policy it was a resounding success. Warren Hastings, appointed governor-general in 1773, reorganized administration and taxation in the province and created a standing army of 65,000 troops to confront the Indian princes who had succeeded the defunct Mughal Empire. Raynal and Diderot were working on the final edition of the Histoire des deux Indes when Hastings consolidated British authority in northern India. To Raynal, Hastings’s reforms inaugurated a new type of colonization. The East India Company, he concludes, was transformed from a “commercial society” into a “territorial power” that raised taxes and legislated in the manner of a state. The British, he further observes, could now impose far heavier taxes than the multitiered tax-farming systems of the Indian princes. An “arbitrary regime” was thus replaced by “a methodical tyranny” and oppression became “continuous & absolute.” The Bengalis, Raynal predicts, would sooner or later revolt against their new masters.[268]

Thereupon Raynal counsels the French to side with the people of India against the new British despotism. In that way, France might earn the friendship of the Indian peoples and princes. Given the religious pluralism of Indian society, France should adopt a policy of toleration. Furthermore, it should give ear to popular grievances, eradicate corruption and misrule, and levy moderate and affordable taxes. Finally, he recommends a policy of ethnic mixture: “Of all your ships, the vessel transporting healthy and energetic young men and industrious and sage young maidens will bear the most precious cargo. Thus the germs will be sown for an everlasting peace between you and the natives of India.”[269] Here Raynal seems to suggest that peaceful and mutually beneficial colonization should be based on blood relationships between the colonists and the natives. Now, as Raynal knew quite well, sexual liaisons between European men and Indian women were fairly common, but his suggestion that European women should be married out to Indian men went against deeply ingrained European racial instincts and anxieties. All things considered, his proposal looks like another utterly improbable counterfactual that only made sense as part of his critique of British eighteenth-century colonization. His insistence of the new kind of colonial state the British were installing in India gives his critique is historical point.

Raynal’s long discussion of slavery is structured around four focal points: its inadmissibility by natural right, the refutation of the spurious arguments of its apologists, a call for empathy with its innocent victims, and finally—and that was a novel departure—the arresting image of an impending overthrow of the system by the slaves themselves. Raynal presents the case against slavery in a rhetorical crescendo that concludes with a hopeful, but also ominous, finale: “Nations of Europe, if only self-interest moves your soul, heed my words once more. Your slaves have no need of your clemency nor of your counsels, to shatter the sacrilegious yoke of oppression. Nature speaks louder than philosophy and self-interest. Already two colonies of fugitive negroes have been established.… The lightning announces the thunderstorm, & the negroes are only waiting for a courageous leader to direct them to revenge and carnage. Where is he, that great man … where is he? He shall make his appearance, let us not doubt it, he will come forth, he will raise the sacred banner of liberty.… Thus the code noir will disappear & how terrible the code blanc will be if the victor shall solely be guided by the right of retribution.”[270] The mention of the colonies of fugitive slaves shows that Raynal was aware of earlier instances of successful resistance. Consequently, his call for a modern Spartacus was far more than an empty gesture, or threat, even though he was, of course, unable to foresee the outcome. These passages, the story goes—but we have no contemporary source—were read by a young African on the sugar plantations in the French colony of San Domingue, a man who would later become known to the world as Toussaint l’Ouverture, the leader of the first successful slave revolution in history.[271]

Elsewhere, Raynal demonstrates the structural connection between colonization and slavery by a causal sequence that reads like a cruel inversion of the bland commonplaces on the peaceful role of commerce in world history so dear to the protagonists of philosophical history:

Behold the progression of injustice & violence. To conquer the New World it was undoubtedly necessary to exterminate its inhabitants. To replace them it was necessary to buy negroes, as these are the only people that can endure the climate and the labors of America. To transplant those people, which one destined for cultivating the soil without any property for themselves, it was necessary to catch them by force & to enslave them. To keep them in slavery it was needed to treat them harshly. To forestall or punish the revolts provoked by the hardships of servitude, one needed tortures, beatings and atrocious laws to subdue men who themselves had become atrocious.… Such is the concatenation of injustice.[272]

In the opening pages of the Histoire des deux Indes, commerce is indeed extolled as the harbinger of worldwide peace and prosperity, but Raynal knew quite well that European merchants seldom hesitated to use armed force when it served their interests. Referring to the Portuguese sailors in the Indian Ocean, Raynal depicts them as “European barbarians” and “swarms of hungry and cruel vultures” for whom all means were acceptable to satisfy their boundless greed.[273] Elsewhere, he defines them as “a new kind of nomadic savages” cut loose from the moorings of civilization and morality.[274] Like other critics, such as Edmund Burke, Raynal seems to fear a process of de-civilization that will sooner or later infest Europe itself.[275]

The difficulty of the science of commerce, Raynal explains, does not spring from its complexity but from the avidity of those who conduct it.[276] The princes of this world are no better: by their “almost modern envy” they seek to turn the flows of goods and money to their advantage, engendering “a secret conspiracy to ruin all of them.” Wars of commerce, Raynal contends, is an unnatural term.[277] Sadly, recent history seemed to suggest otherwise: “All the coasts and all the seas drenched in blood and covered by cadavers; the thunderstorm of war raging from one pole to the other, across Africa, Asia & America, on the Ocean that separates us from the New World, on the vast expanse of the Pacific: that is what we have seen in the last two wars.”[278] Virtually all of Raynal’s detailed narratives of European commercial practices contradict the celebratory nostrums found in his generalizing statements. Fair trade is his ideal, but he condemns the slave trade, monopolies, and piracy.[279] Together, those three forms of “odious” commerce probably accounted for the greater part of European overseas trade.

How should we read Raynal? Jonathan Israel considers the Histoire des deux Indes a “project of world revolution” with an intellectual and political impact on both sides of the Atlantic, a book that “summoned the world’s oppressed to rise against their rulers in the name of liberty.” Yet he also underlines that Raynal and Diderot depict the prospects of humanity “in a sombre light.” Surveying the globe, they behold a scene of “degradation, superstition, ignorance, and tyranny,” not only among autocrats and priests, or among the colonists and missionaries, but also among the common people who everywhere seemed to oscillate between the indolence of servility and the passions of resentment and rebellion that “usually lead nowhere.” Even so, Raynal, Diderot, and d’Holbach clung to the vision of one universal society including all the inhabitants of the world. Likewise, Israel posits, they were convinced “that true morality is one and must be identical ‘pour tous les habitants de notre globe.’”[280] It would seem, then, that Diderot and Raynal embraced a planetary vision of common humanity and equality but despaired of the ability of princes and common people alike to act upon this lofty ideal, let alone to realize it.

In Israel’s argument, the Histoire des deux Indes appears as a treatise of political philosophy rather than a work of history. John Pocock, discussing Raynal as a contemporary of Edward Gibbon, approaches the book as history. His main questions are to whom this history is addressed and which peoples have agency in it. The answer to both questions turns out to be identical: the Europeans. According to Pocock, the history proposed by Raynal and his collaborators is “a history, both philosophical and political, of Europeans; it denounces them for their invasions and destructions of worlds not belonging to their history, but does not equip those worlds with history, or any positive agency, of their own.”[281] Even though there is much truth in this observation, its stark negation of non-European agency is an overstatement. Raynal may not have granted Africa a world-historical agency on a par with Europe, but he definitely was capable of imagining African slaves in America forging their own future and an African man leading an antislavery revolt. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century anticolonial struggles, European texts about universal liberty and equality were frequently reworked and turned against their European overlords by anticolonial intellectuals. Toussaint l’Ouverture’s reading of Raynal may be seen as one of its first instances. Growing up in a world increasingly traversed by revolutionary ideologies, he could feel that new ideas of equality were in the air and acquired an appeal that had been unthinkable before the 1780s. In this respect, the Histoire des deux Indes was a liminal text, an aspect ignored by Pocock’s reading of it.

Even so, it remains true that Raynal’s primary audience are the Europeans, but, on a careful reading, not only the Europeans. In the final pages of his great work, he looks back on the history of European global expansion. The message of these pages is somber, their tone solemn and resigned. Looking back at the history he has written, Raynal addresses his readers in the first person:

Let us pause here, & let us place ourselves in the time when America & the Indies were unknown. I address myself to the most cruel of the Europeans, & I tell him: There exist countries that will provide you with precious metals, commodious garments and delicious food. But read this history and behold the price of their discovery. Do you want or don’t you want that discovery to be made? Can we believe that there is any creature so infernal as to answer: I WANT IT. Well! In the future, there will not be a single moment when my question shall not have the same urgency.[282]

As Lynn Festa has shown, this is a sentimental language of indignation and empathy, directed at Europeans who are depicted as both agents and perpetrators.[283] The “most cruel” of the Europeans are the bystanders, the men and women who lust after the precious metals, the commodious garments, and the delicious food, but close their eyes to the human suffering that comes with them. After his peroration Raynal goes on to say that he has raised his voice for the benefit of all people without distinction of clime or creed, for all are equals in his eyes, as they are “in the eyes of the Supreme Being.”

We can read the Histoire des deux Indes as two histories wrapped up in one book. The first history is framed by the matrix of histoire philosophique, a spatiotemporal framework in which the various zones of the globe represent different stages of the European past. Only Europe has attained the fourth stage of commercial society and philosophical Enlightenment. Raynal’s evocation of the worldwide spread of commerce and communication, informed by a proto-concept of globalization, provides the bedrock of his vision of the long-run history of humanity. It yields a cautious and moderate optimism. Global improvement is thinkable and will—in the (very) long run—be advanced by enlightened and benevolent people devoted to universal equality and justice.

The second history is the history of colonization, framed by an emergent notion of colonialism as a global system. Raynal formulates strict conditions for the permissibility of colonization, but his historical account of European expansion on all continents presents us with an interminable sequence of the violation of those conditions. Above I have quoted a passage where Raynal represents these outrageous transgressions as another necessary sequence. Grafted upon that history are Raynal’s instances of an equitable civilizing mission as so many counterfactual might-have-been stories that fuel his critique of really existing colonialism. It should be underlined that the concept of commerce itself is also torn asunder by this critical argument. “Good commerce,” characterized by free trade, fair dealing, and mutual advantage, is permanently shadowed by “bad commerce,” typified by monopolies, piracy, unequal exchange, the slave trade, and the wanton use of armed force. Its agents are consistently depicted as greedy and immoral “vultures.”

Perusing the Histoire des deux Indes we see its author(s) unceasingly struggle to reconcile the two historical visions. Both visions are Eurocentric but not in the same way. Raynal, like most Enlightenment thinkers, really believed that the “savages” represented the dawn of humanity and the infancy of Europe. Probably influenced by Robertson’s History of America, he had a definitely dim view of the level of development attained by the Native Americans, even in Mexico and Peru. And yet Raynal also accords agency to the non-European civilizations. The “savages,” he hopes, shall be the objects of a civilizing mission directed by the concert of the civilized nations. Even so, their global mission has to be conducted under the aegis of “philosophy”—that is, according to an enlightened script already written in Europe. Raynal repeatedly underlines that civilization and enlightenment will supplant all the religions and superstitions of the world and that none of the great sages of antiquity, not even Confucius, has the key to the future. In this light, the contribution of Asia to the civilizing of the world seems doubtful and uncertain.

Raynal’s last words are melancholy and resigned: the time of the heureuse revolution he has evoked is undoubtedly far distant and his name shall be forgotten when it ever arrives.[284] Consequently, his hopes for a benign civilizing mission do not soften his critique of eighteenth-century colonialism. Rather than a relapse into colonial aggression those hopes evoke the sole means to pass beyond it. All things considered, I think, it would be anachronistic to dismiss the anti-imperialism of the Histoire des deux Indes by measuring it with the yardstick of Edward Said’s postcolonial critique. In terms of the available discourses of the late eighteenth century, it represented a powerful critique of European colonial expansion that addressed a sizable audience in Europe and its colonies.

European Expansion and the Two Faces of Modern Equality

The Enlightenment concept of modern equality called into question all types of inequality and subjection, within Europe but also worldwide. Before the mid-eighteenth century, however, its reach was usually limited to a critique of absolutism and the slave trade. Only a few radicals, such as Poulain de la Barre, went further than that. From mid-century onward, however, a sea change set about. The Seven Years’ War stimulated a growing interest in “world politics.” Empathy with “overseas” peoples was one of its wellsprings but the consciousness of the growing European entanglement with the world, pertinently expressed in Raynal’s incipient concept of “globalization,” probably had a greater impact. Europe, many politicians and men of letters now realized, was on its way to becoming an “empire.”

As we have seen, several major Enlightenment thinkers criticized the European conquest of the world in no uncertain terms. Most of them shared a deep aversion to slavery. Others invited their readers to imagine how Europe would appear to the peoples who suffered European encroachments and depredations, or to open their minds to the commonalities between all religions instead of unthinkingly repeating their Christian nostrums. The ultimate foundation of their critique was a universalist notion of natural equality grounded in the conviction that there was one human nature shared by all peoples on the globe. It gave an egalitarian twist to common humanity that easily overflowed into the idea of a global equality, and that eventually gave rise to the powerful discourse of “inalienable” human rights.

Where do we go from here? What meanings can we discover in the Enlightenment critique of European expansion? The first thing to notice is that history did not begin with the Enlightenment. Far more than to us, antiquity was a living presence to the men and women of the eighteenth century. It is only against the backdrop of ancient and medieval visions of history that we can fully appreciate the novelty of Enlightenment philosophical history. To historians such as Herodotus, Sima Qian, Tacitus, and Ibn Khaldun, the differences between the sedentary civilizations and the peoples of the steppe, the desert, and the woodlands were of great significance, but none of them looked forward to a future transition from “barbarism” to “civilization.” The boundary zones between the two cultures constituted the Great Frontier of the ancient and medieval world. No one questioned their permanence. Enlightenment thinkers, however, situated the nomadic and woodland peoples not only in space but also in time. They were now lumped together as “barbarians” and assigned to the second stage of the history of humanity.

This represented a new departure with far-reaching consequences. I have sought to show how deeply it constrained the range of future cultural variation in Enlightenment thought, even in the case of radical critics of European imperialism such as Anquetil-Duperron, Diderot, and Raynal. Their critique frequently takes on the hue of an impotent lament about the inevitable destruction of extra-European cultures, as in the resigned statements in the final pages of the Histoire des deux Indes. It is not enough to quote the egalitarian and universalistic declarations of the Enlightenment critics of imperialism. One must also examine their insertion in the new temporal framework of world history. Only then can we fully understand why so much of the empathy with extra-European peoples is sincere and impassionate, but also frequently exculpatory (they cannot help being savages or barbarians), mournful (history may obliterate them in the end), or commanding (they must follow the path of reason, or else). Sometimes, one gets the impression that these peoples are invited to civilize themselves out of existence.[285]

The above is, inevitably, written with the benefit of hindsight. To avoid the pitfalls of anachronism, we should realize that to the men and women of the late eighteenth century—as to us today—the future was opaque and often frightening. To them, the scenario of philosophical history was probable, for many of them also desirable (Smith, Robertson, Condorcet) while to others somber (Rousseau, Burke, Anquetil-Duperron, Diderot, Raynal, Herder), but by no means certain. In this connection, the coexistence of two philosophies of history in the eighteenth century is a telltale sign. One, in the long run probably the most powerful, was the philosophical temporality of progression, but the other, by no means extinct, was the ancient vision of the rise and decline of empires. Let us recall that, next to Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Robertson’s History of America, and Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was one of the great bestsellers of the late eighteenth century. Gibbon reminded his European readers—if they needed reminding—of the precariousness of all world empires, including the post-Columbian European ones. Admittedly, Gibbon pointed to the Russian Empire that now guarded Europe’s steppe frontier: this time, he announced, the barbarians would not come.[286] But not everyone dared to believe him.

Looking back from our time, the advance of Europe to global hegemony may seem inevitable, but to the contemporaries of Gibbon and Raynal the future course of history was not so self-evident. They were living in a world of weak and unreliable long-distance communications. The running horse and the sailing ship were the fastest means of transport imaginable. Transcontinental empires, most observers believed, could not be governed from one center, and if a huge land empire was governable its political regime would necessarily be despotic.

Furthermore, political economy told them that in the last resort prosperity depended on the level of agricultural productivity, which according to Malthus was already approaching its limits in England. The eighteenth-century horizon of economic and technological expectations was limited and frequently pessimistic. It gave the ancient critique of world empires a pertinence that can easily escape us, accustomed as we are to see the Enlightenment as the prelude to the nineteenth-century triumph of long-distance communication and industrial civilization. Beyond these logistic and economic considerations lurked the dangerous imperial feedback on Europe itself. Diderot, Raynal, and Burke were not the only ones worrying about the de-civilizing effects of imperialism on the overseas Europeans and its corrupting feedback on the metropolitan centers.

The questioning mood about Europe and its imperial fate in the late eighteenth century may account for the fascination of so many Enlightenment philosophers with the way of life of the peoples of America, Africa, and Asia. Their writings about these “others” frequently oscillate between wonder, condescension, and critical ruminations on the defects of European modernity. In this light, it is understandable that Enlightenment thinkers kept inventing new versions of the anthropological turn. Some would write about imaginary, and yet not wholly fanciful, Persians or Tahitians looking back at Europe. Others would study the religions, customs, manners, and laws of continents beyond Europe and conclude, as Anquetil-Duperron did, “that every people, even if it differs from us, can have a real value, and reasonable laws, customs and opinions.”[287] Many of the eighteenth-century travelogues, ethnographies, histories, and other studies of non-European cultures included stereotypes and gross prejudices, but they also testified to a genuine attempt to understand foreign cultures “from within,” to recognize their weaknesses but also their strengths and to point out what Europeans might learn from them. Critics would also take a hard look at what European intervention was doing to other cultures and what it was, sometimes unwittingly, damaging or destroying. Major examples of such an approach are found in Edmund Burke’s comments on the British conquest of Bengal and in Anquetil-Duperron’s observations on the same events, put in a longer historical perspective by his comments on the Spanish destruction of the civilizations of Mexico and Peru.

It was the combination of a natural rights ethics with the anthropological turn that accounts for the robustness of Enlightenment anti-imperialism. A moderately positive appreciation of cultural diversity was wedded to a strong affirmation of the unity of humanity at a deeper level. Diderot’s double yardstick of common welfare and individual utility cannot be applied by an observer who is ignorant about the social arrangement people start from and the ecological and geopolitical challenges they are facing. Universal values, such as liberty and equality, are always put to use in specific historical circumstances. To arrive at realistic and reasonable judgments both sides of the equation must be taken into account. Exploring the possibility of a mix of modern European and “savage” values and lifestyles, Diderot feels his way forward along the road of hybridity without ever arriving at a balanced synthesis. Given the historical parameters of his intellectual career, that is precisely what we can expect.

According to Sankar Muthu, Diderot and Kant as well as Herder theorized all peoples, from the dawn of history to their own times, as cultural agents who forged, or at the very least attempted to forge, their own future. Of those three philosophers, Herder was perhaps the most radical in his critique of the homogenizing discourse of philosophical history. Muthu cites the following passage from Herder’s Ideas toward a Philosophy of the History of Humanity:

It has been customary to divide the nations of the Earth into hunters, fishermen, shepherds, and agriculturalists; and … to determine their rank in civilization from this division.… This would be very excellent if these modes of life were determined themselves in the first place, but they vary with almost every region, and for the most part run into each other in such a manner that this mode of classification is very difficult to apply with accuracy.[288]

This is much like Buffon’s discussion of the concept of race, and just as in Buffon, it does not lead Herder to jettison the classification altogether. After all, in the first part of his Ideas Herder expounds a distinctly hierarchical racial classification with the peoples of the Mediterranean and Europe as the originators of civilization while the black Africans are depicted as people who “have discovered nothing for the Europeans.”[289] Nonetheless, Herder’s later critique of such rigid classifications bespeaks an awareness of the hybridity and blurred boundaries of the categories used to classify humanity. Just as in Diderot, it makes thinkable a vision of the future that leaves more room for cultural diversity as an enduring feature of the history of humanity. Perhaps even more than Diderot, Herder is inclined to value each culture in its own terms. And just like Diderot, he combines such relativism with an adamant defense of common humanity at a deeper normative level.[290]

In this connection, modern equality is Janus-faced. One of its possible meanings, perhaps the dominant one, links it to the emergence of a universal culture. All humans will become equals to the extent that they ingest Enlightenment culture. To be equal means to be enlightened—that is, to make oneself over in the image of those who already are “equal.” The alternative defines equality as the equal right to the pursuit of happiness according to one’s own lights, only limited by the obligation to respect the autonomy of others. When we gloss over the distinction between the two faces of modern equality, it will remain a strong but unfocused concept. Such concepts easily lead us astray. They are not good to think with.

Condorcet’s strong version of equality and his equally strong version of developmental time are well suited to elucidate the first meaning of modern equality. Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis of Condorcet, made his mark as a brilliant mathematician and as one of the editors of Voltaire’s collected works. His wife Sophie de Grouchy translated Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and conducted a salon that was at times frequented by Thomas Paine, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson. In 1781 Condorcet published his Reflections on the Slavery of the Negroes, an abolitionist pamphlet that declared that for him all races were equal.[291] Likewise, he defended the political rights of women. To Condorcet, modern equality represented one of the main vectors of modern history. The French Revolution was only the beginning of an epoch of increasing equality on all fronts. Let us recall that his firm belief in historical progress proved unwavering in political misfortune and personal tragedy. He finished his book on the progress of the human mind in 1793, when he was hounded by the Jacobin dictatorship. When it saw print, he had died in his cell.

The Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain expressed the hope and the expectation of “the destruction of the inequalities among the nations” and “the progression of equality within a single people.”[292] Condorcet acknowledged the great material and cultural abyss that existed between the enlightened nations of Europe and the peoples of Africa and Asia, but he believed that with the assistance of the Europeans the Africans and Asians would be capable of rising rapidly to the level already attained in Europe. Admittedly, this forward leap would be difficult and arduous for the savage peoples living in a harsh natural environment, some of whom were perhaps doomed to “disappear in an imperceptible way” or to “lose themselves” in the bosom of the civilized nations.[293] For the existing European colonies Condorcet expressed a profound contempt: these “counting-houses of ruffians” should be torn down and transformed into “colonies of citizens” which were to disseminate in Africa and Asia “the principles and the example of liberty, the enlightenment and the reason of Europe.”[294] Condorcet’s vision of the future shows how easily and “logically” the ideal of a European civilizing mission can be tacked onto modern equality and the temporality of philosophical history. Only once does he mention a case when such a universal dissemination of reason derailed: when the progression achieved by the ancient Greeks was lost for the larger world, which happened because the “tyrannical domination of the Romans” frustrated communication among the peoples.[295] Condorcet seemed confident that no new “Romans” would darken the European sky—six years later Napoleon would come to power in France.

Reading Condorcet’s Esquisse it is difficult not to feel admiration for the intellectual fortitude of its author, who was being trampled underfoot by the revolution he had himself helped to make. For all that, there is a disconcerting undertone in Condorcet’s vista of the coming historical triumph of worldwide equality. Some peoples, he darkly intimates, are not going to make it. They will “disappear” or “lose themselves” in the fulcrum of the Enlightenment’s victory. Moreover, the promise of equality is qualified by the affirmation of a global pedagogical authority of the Europeans in the near future. Let us recall the warning of the Old Tahitian. The French would return. There was no escaping the logic of philosophical history, not even in the remotest corner of the Pacific Ocean. Diderot’s Old Tahitian was proved right: the French did return and what is more, they never left. Today, Tahiti still is a French colony. Under such conditions, equality may well become a receding target, a history under the sign of the “not yet,” as the Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has expressed it.

What about racial classification, the other Enlightenment science of global humanity? As long as it upheld the unity of humanity, it could be included in philosophical history. In that weak version, races were different, but not essentially different. All possessed the same capacities for cultivating their minds and improving their customs and laws. However, as we have seen in Buffon and Blumenbach, the language of racial classification and ethnic difference had a tendency to flow over into rigid notions of racial character, suggesting that the “lower” races might be unable to attain the standards of achievement the Europeans ascribed to themselves. Racial classifications always entailed a hierarchical ordering. A white skin was the default setting of humanity, while all nonwhites were later derivations theorized as “degenerations.” Even when inherent biological inferiority was utterly denied, the key question always remained: can they (the nonwhites) become like us (the whites)? Or, using the metaphor of upward mobility, can “they” elevate themselves to the level “we” have already attained? In a sense, this dynamic conception of race and racial transformation is circular. The white default setting of humanity is theorized as both the origin and the telos of humanity. Transposed to history, it represents Europe as the terminus ad quem of the biophysical as well as the cultural history of humanity.

But, as we know, racial classification could also evolve in the opposite direction, spawning a deadly logic of biological determinism. That is what would happen in the nineteenth century when race became the new master concept in a scientific racism that would flatly deny the capacity of self-development to the nonwhite races. Such hard racialism effectively equated races with species, and it is no accident that it evolved in tandem with polygenism. Race was transformed from a biocultural concept into a static biological category. Then, of course, the entire dynamic of philosophical history would collapse, and civilizing missions would appear as illusory enterprises, unfit to survive the “race wars” announced by many nineteenth-century theorists of race. If that became the dominant doctrine, history would be frozen in a biological matrix from which only the white race, the only one considered fully historical, could hope to escape.

Finally, the global turn of the critics of empire in the late eighteenth century ushered in a new language of common humanity, predicated on the idea of humanity as a worldwide, increasingly interconnected meta-community. The nineteenth century is often, and rightly, defined as the age of nationalism and nation-states. Even so, the new nation-states were also theorized as the components of an international system, centered on Europe but expanding worldwide. Humanity, then, might be represented as a system of competing colonial empires but also as a system of nation-states and peoples which aspired to become nations and to acquire their own states. Henceforth, the meta-community of humanity admitted of two definitions: one was the community of all human beings on the planet; the other was the concert of autonomous nations. Both of these visions of common humanity were at odds with the practice and ideology of empires.

7

MODERN EQUALITY AND SCIENTIFIC RACISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY started with three revolutions that proclaimed the equal rights of all men. To the American revolutionaries of 1776 it was “self-evident” that all men are created equal. The French National Assembly, meeting in August 1789, considered it equally self-evident that “men are born free and remain free and equal in their rights.” Finally, the leaders of the Haitian Revolution of 1791 declared that “by natural right” black Africans were the equals of the white slaveholders.

This was a new departure: never before had universal equality been buttressed by the power and legitimacy of the state. The United States of America was the first state in world history to base itself on modern equality. The American and French Revolutions set the seal on two millennia of political thought that had upheld the tenet that a republican regime was only possible in city-states. The Haitian Revolution destroyed the complacent certainty that slavery, though odious, was an impregnable reality. On both sides of the Atlantic, it compelled the new revolutionary states to rethink the question of black slavery, albeit with opposite outcomes: France abolished slavery, at least for some time, but the United States maintained it. The long-term result, as Seymour Drescher puts it, was to put slavery on the defensive: “It no longer had a virtually unquestioned status in the imagined futures of Atlantic empires and nations.”[1]

Without the Enlightenment discourse of “natural equality,” the ideological agendas of the revolutions of the late eighteenth century would have been hardly thinkable, let alone politically feasible. Lynn Hunt has argued that the act of publicly declaring human rights in the name of the sovereign people deeply changed mentalities and decisively pushed forward the limits of the thinkable.[2] In the Age of Revolution modern equality became a political principle that moved the minds and hearts of countless people on both sides of the Atlantic. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, modern equality was taken up in Asia and Africa as well.

The nineteenth-century advance of modern equality, however, was an intermittent and uneven process. Below we will see that in the French Revolution Jewish emancipation, though fiercely contested, was introduced fairly soon. By contrast, the gender barrier proved unsurmountable. The abolition of slavery was only decreed in Paris when the slaves in Saint-Domingue had already abolished it on the ground. What is striking, however, is that nobody in the French debates over slavery dared to deny the common humanity of black Africans. The contentious issue was if, and to what extent, common humanity would imply equality. In the United States before the Civil War the rise of a hard scientific racism that questioned the full humanity of black Africans made it necessary for the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass to begin his argument for equality and abolition with a demonstration of the common humanity of Africans. In British India we encounter a different situation: Dadabhai Naoroji could take the common humanity of the Indians for granted but had to combat the thesis that Asians were mentally and historically inferior to Europeans. Though British racism certainly played an important role, after the great insurrection of 1857 the civilizing mission became the main justification of British rule in India. The colonization of Africa and the political exclusion of the indigenous peoples in the white settler colonies, by contrast, were justified by scientific racism, as was the continuing segregation of the African Americans after the abolition of slavery in the United States.

While the color line hardened and globalized in the late nineteenth century, women and white working-class men gained rights in the fields of education and politics in Europe and North America, and began to claim rights in some colonial territories as well. Below we will discuss the contradictions in the political thought of John Stuart Mill, who combined a radical feminist argument with a defense of British rule in India based on the civilizing mission. We shall see, moreover, that Dadabhai Naoroji turned the civilizing mission around, arguing that the British colonizers did not live up to their pretention to civilize India. Interpreted along such lines, the civilizing mission could become a double-edged sword.

After Napoleon there also was, of course, a backlash. The challenge to offer rational arguments for inequality was met by the reassertion and renewal of various discourses of modern inequality, such as political economy, the philosophical history of civilization, and biophysical arguments for the rule of men over women. In the nineteenth century, however, the most fateful of all discourses of modern inequality was “scientific” racism, a dogmatization and hardening of Enlightenment racial classification. Today, racism is no longer taken seriously as science, but from the 1840s to the mid-twentieth century it represented an authoritative body of knowledge, published in scholarly books and taught in prestigious colleges and universities in America, Europe, and the European colonial empires. For the slaveholders, scientific racism provided an answer to the rising tide of abolitionism. Scientific research, they could now claim, demonstrated the impossibility of emancipation.

The epicenter of the new egalitarianism was the French Revolution, for the elementary reason that it happened in the most powerful state and the most prestigious civilization of Europe, a state that was, moreover, a colonial power and a major participant in the Atlantic slave trade. The global implications were clear to all concerned. On 24 September 1789, a month after the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Spanish government sent an urgent dispatch “by fast vessels” to its viceroys in America, ordering them to do their utmost “to avoid the spread in our Dominions of the pernicious ideas that certain individuals of the National Assembly of France have attempted to promulgate.” The Portuguese viceroy in Brazil was likewise ordered to counter the spread of the “ideas of liberty, equality, and anarchism” radiating outward from France.[3] The attempts at containment were of little avail. By the end of the year the news from Paris had reached most cities and towns in Middle and South America.

It was not only modern equality that achieved a higher status in the revolutionary era. The revolutionary practice of state-making ushered in a new regime of temporality. As the German intellectual historian Reinhart Koselleck has shown, in the age of the democratic revolutions the temporal dimension of political ideas underwent a decisive change. The derogation of tradition we have encountered in Descartes and in most Enlightenment thinkers now finally penetrated the heart of politics. The nineteenth-century isms, such as nationalism, liberalism, socialism, communism, and even conservatism, Koselleck argued, were “concepts of movement.”[4] To govern a country, it no longer sufficed to uphold an “ancient constitution” or to maintain stability. Political leaders had to work toward the construction of a better society in the interest of the entire people. As Thomas Paine exclaimed, perhaps a bit chargé, in Common Sense (1776), one of the most influential political pamphlets of the American Revolution, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”[5]

All political institutions were henceforth put under a permanent pressure to justify and democratize themselves. In the first year of the French Revolution the main onslaught was directed against aristocratic privilege, but very soon other participants felt the need to advance the rights of women, to claim citizenship for Jews and “colored people,” and to advocate the abolition of slavery. In Britain, the first rebuttal of Edmund Burke’s critique of the “French” theory of human rights appeared in 1790; its author was Mary Wollstonecraft, who followed it up in 1792 with the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Once “declared,” the idea of equality had no natural boundaries: it was up to the new political actors who came to maturity in the fulcrum of the revolutionary age to determine along which dimensions equality would be extended and where it would stop. Consequently, equality was continuously made and remade, but also frequently pushed back, in an unstable balance of advance and retreat.

The conservatives rejected the revolution, but they could not effectively contain its language, and they finally had to accept, albeit reluctantly, the normality of social change. The revolutionary thinkers, on the other hand, imagined the future of the world as the European Enlightenment writ large. In their dynamic recasting of historical time, equality itself became a concept of movement. Alexis de Tocqueville, writing about America but thinking of Europe, would observe in 1840 that “it is thus natural for the love of equality to increase incessantly with equality itself.”[6] Every step on the road to equality called for a further step toward even more equality. Consequently, nineteenth-century languages of equality would more and more conceive of it as an unrealized universal.

I want to be clear about what this means and what it does not. Universals are not teleological by nature. They are not Hegelian entities bringing about their own fulfillment, but, as Joan Scott observes, the abstract and undetermined nature of such concepts opens up a space for the creative imagination.[7] From the Age of Revolution ever more people began to conceive of liberty and equality as universals that stood in need of future fulfillment.

The Uneven Advance of Modern Equality

Although worldwide migration, both coerced and voluntary, had steadily increased since the Columbian Exchange, the size and speed of migration in the nineteenth century were unprecedented.[8] Adam McKeown has calculated that from 1846 to 1940 over fifty-five million people moved from Europe to the Americas; some fifty million from India and China to Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean Rim, and the South Pacific; and nearly fifty million from Russia and northern Asia into Siberia and Manchuria. With the exception of Asian migration these figures do not include migration within continents, regions, and states. Consequently, they underrate the number of people leaving their ancestral lands under the pressure of material distress, war, or persecution, or in search of better opportunities elsewhere.[9]

People, merchandise, money, messages, and ideas circulated in a globalizing space. The new technologies of the nineteenth century affected the psychology and the raw feel of distance and time. In 1840 it took five weeks to send a message from Bombay to London; in 1875 that was reduced to five minutes. “Time itself is telegraphed out of existence,” the Daily Telegraph proudly declared.[10] From mid-century the railway, the steamship, and the electric telegraph knitted the world closer together. From 1780 to 1914, the worldwide print run of newspapers increased a hundredfold (in the same period world population doubled), while papers were printed in a much greater diversity of languages.[11] Most of the 31,000 newspaper titles extant in 1900 were “Western,” but there were 600 in India, 195 in Africa, and 150 in Japan.[12] These figures tell us two things: there was globalization in the nineteenth century, but it was a highly uneven process in which some world regions represented nodal points while other regions were marginal or totally excluded from the emerging global networks.

That being said, it remains true that more and more people positioned themselves in relation to events and ideas in other parts of the world. One of the theoretical points made by C. A. Bayly in The Birth of the Modern World is “that an essential part of being modern is thinking you are modern. Modernity is an aspiration to be ‘up with the times.’”[13] The same is true of globalization. Both modernity and globalization are concepts of movement, built on changing experiences of time and space. That much of nineteenth-century globalization was imagined does not detract from its relevance. Imagined globalization made available a new language to think about history and politics. Advocates of common humanity and equality could argue that their demands were in accordance with the temper of “modern times.” The African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, speaking in the 1850s, told his audience that “time and space, in the intercourse of nations, are almost annihilated.” He likened the sky to a mighty dome “under which a common humanity can meet in friendly conclave.”[14]

This is not to imply, of course, that the nineteenth century was an age of global equality triumphant. In the Americas, a number of European states, and the white settler colonies, lower-class white males and, at a slower pace, women succeeded in achieving citizenship. However, globally speaking, the color of equality was white. The abolition of slavery was a protracted process, and even after emancipation the former slaves seldom obtained the full panoply of civil and political rights. The same was true of the surviving native peoples of the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. Likewise, the indigenous peoples in the growing colonial empires were subjected to the arbitrary power of their European masters and to daily racist humiliations at the hands of petty white men and women.

Intellectually considered, the nineteenth century is likewise Janus-faced. The technological and economic expectations that fed the political imagination of democrats and socialists also fortified the sense of global superiority of white Europeans. The nineteenth century was the heyday of scientific racism. Compared with the relatively flexible racial theories of the Enlightenment, this was a much harder racism, built on the doctrine that skin color was destiny and that the measurement of skulls could determine an individual’s “race.” The measurement and racialization of the human body constituted the centerpiece of nineteenth-century physical anthropology. Furthermore, many nineteenth-century social theorists were inclined to collapse the four stages theory of human development into a dichotomy of “civilized” white people versus “uncivilized” colored people, or at least to downgrade the amount of civilization apportioned to the colored “natives” of Africa, Asia, and America. The very concept of civilization acquired a racial tincture.[15]

Polygenism, the theory that the different races had existed from the beginnings of humanity, became more popular and with it came the conviction that races were frozen in nature’s mold and hardly capable of change. As the American ethnologist Samuel Morton, one of the most industrious skull collectors of the nineteenth century, observed in 1839: “From remote ages the inhabitants of every extended locality have been marked by certain physical and moral peculiarities, common among themselves, and serving to distinguish them from all other people.… The Hindoos have altered in nothing since they were described by the earliest writers; nor have three thousand years made any difference in the skin and hair of the Negro.” The mentality of the Ethiopian race, Morton states, “is joyous, flexible, and indolent,” while some of the numerous varieties of that race represent “the lowest grade of humanity.”[16] He also measured the brain volumes of the five main human races (which he had taken from Blumenbach), unsurprisingly concluding that the Caucasians had the largest brains and the Ethiopians the smallest.[17]

In the nineteenth century more and more human differences, including such as would today be considered ethnic or national, were subsumed under a racial typology. Like nations, races denoted communities of descent. The Dutch opponents of the Belgian revolution of 1830, for instance, as a matter of course referred to “the black and mutinous Belgian race.”[18] In 1850, the British naturalist Robert Knox flatly stated that “with me, race, or hereditary descent, is everything: it stamps the man.” Race, he further asserted, “determines the course of human history.” According to Knox, the “dark races” would lose the struggle for world supremacy and were destined for extinction.[19] Five years later, the American ethnologist Josiah Nott categorically declared that “it will be seen that human progress has arisen mainly from the war of races.” The achievements of all other races, Nott concluded, pale in comparison with the Caucasian’s progression. In his view, China and Japan were no more than “prolonged semi-civilizations.”[20]

Most nineteenth-century scholars continued the Enlightenment’s conception of history as development and progression, but without the self-critical reflections found in many eighteenth-century thinkers. A good example is James Mill’s History of British India (1817). Mill, a Scottish liberal who never visited India and did not read any of its languages, took his distance from William Jones, one of the pioneers of the European study of Sanskrit. Jones, Mill contended, exaggerated the achievements of Indian culture because he lacked a correct understanding of the concept of civilization and the stages of human history.[21] Jones and his British acolytes, Mill argued, “have conceived the Hindus to be a people of high civilization, while they have, in reality, made but a few of the earliest steps in the progress to civilization.”[22] Mill’s History, we should recall, was the standard textbook on Indian history all future colonial officials had to study before sailing to India. Even so, it is important to see that Mill’s approach included the possibility of future Indian improvement, while Knox’s and Morton’s theories froze non-European peoples in an immutable racial hierarchy. What fell by the wayside, however, was the anti-imperialist agenda of many Enlightenment thinkers

Even so, it must be stressed that while such anti-egalitarian views on race and cultural difference commanded an enormous authority, they never monopolized public debate. Antislavery agitation dated from the late eighteenth century, but it gained momentum in the nineteenth century, in particular in Britain and North America where it entered into mutually advantageous alliances with evangelical Protestantism and the nascent feminist movement. Moreover, men and women from the “subaltern” races and peoples increasingly began to reflect on their position in a world dominated by Europe, and after the great mid-century upheavals, such as the Taiping Rebellion in China and the 1857 insurrection in India, Asian intellectuals began to speak back.

The French Revolution Confronts Jewish Difference

Would the universalist concept of equality underpinning the French Revolution include all people living under the sovereignty of the new French nation-state? When it came to drafting a constitution, two restrictions were immediately adopted. In the first place, only males would qualify for full citizenship. Second, all males would enjoy civil rights, but to become a citoyen actif—that is, to obtain the right to vote and to hold political office—one had to meet four qualifications: French nationality, a fixed domicile, to have attained the age twenty-five, and payment of direct taxes equaling the wage of three days. Despite these restrictions the first constitution, adopted on 3 September 1791, gave the vote to some 60 percent of adult males, a fairly large figure considering that the electorate in most early nineteenth-century liberal constitutions remained well under 10 percent.[23]

The issue of Jewish citizenship arose almost immediately. Even though the Declaration on the Rights of Man explicitly forbade religious exclusions, the debates on the making of the 1791 constitution showed that not everyone in France accepted the equality of all creeds. In December 1789 it transpired that several towns continued the exclusion of Protestants from office. Thereupon, Clermont Tonnerre tabled a motion that no citizen meeting the qualifications for active citizenship could be excluded on religious grounds. Immediately, Jean-François Reubell, a deputy from the Alsace, took the floor and inquired if that implied active citizenship for the Jews. Yes, it does, Clermont Tonnerre replied, and I consider it an honor to affirm it.[24] His words occasioned a heated debate. The adversaries of Jewish citizenship argued that the Jews were much more that a religious denomination. They were a “nation” with its own laws and customs, its own peculiar clothing, and its own languages—Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino. Deputies from the Alsace, the region where the great majority of French Jews lived, objected that the Jews did not socialize with their Christian neighbors, never married outside their own community, and even refused to have dinner with Christians.[25]

The Abbé Maury observed that “Jews are not found in agriculture because they rather engage in commerce than till the soil.” As ties with the soil were considered the foundation of the nation, the upshot was that Jews would never become “real Frenchmen.” According to Maury, the Jews held enormous financial power: millions in mortgages on Alsatian lands were in their hands. Give them political rights too, he warned, and in ten years the Alsace would become “a Jewish colony.”[26] The condemnation of money trafficking was rather illogical, as the National Assembly itself had legalized it in 1789.[27] Likewise, Maury’s alarmist prophecy of a Jewish takeover flew in the face of demography. The Jews made up hardly 1 percent of the Alsatian population, and much less in other regions.[28] The adversaries of emancipation further contended that the Jews themselves preferred to live under their own laws and did not wish to become Frenchmen. Furthermore, Reubell argued, their deep yearning to return to Israel made the Jews unfit to be true French patriots.[29]

The advocates of Jewish emancipation retorted that bad habits and parochialism among the Jews certainly existed, but were chiefly caused by centuries of oppression (an observation already made by Richard Simon in the seventeenth century). They pointed out that Jewish banking and money trafficking arose as a consequence of their exclusion from most other professions. They further contended that the Jews assuredly desired to become French citizens and that the Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux and Bayonne already were rightful burghers of their cities. That Jews cherished their own customs and rituals was only normal. No religious community would do otherwise. Referring to Jewish marriages and dietary laws, Clermont Tonnerre exclaimed: “Is there a law that obliges me to marry your daughters? Is there a law that obliges me to eat hare, and to eat it in your company?”[30]

Did this mean that everything would be permitted to the Jews? Not at all, replied Clermont Tonnerre; just like all other citizens they would have to obey the laws. Clermont summarized his opinion on Jewish emancipation in words that were to be cited by many nineteenth-century French liberals:

One must deny everything to the Jews as a nation, and one must accord everything to Jews as individuals. We must not recognize their judges; they must have no others than ours. We must refuse legal protection to the maintenance of the so-called laws of their Judaic corporation; they should not form a political corporation or an estate within the State; they have to be citizens as individuals. But, you will object to me, they do not want it. Well, if they do not want it, let them say so, and then one should banish them. There can be no society of non-citizens in the State, nor a nation within the nation.[31]

However, Clermont Tonnerre went on to say, there is abundant testimony that the French Jews really desire their emancipation. The adversaries of Jewish emancipation did not dare to engage in an open defiance of the rights of man. Instead, they invoked the anti-Jewish sentiments of the inhabitants of Alsace and Lorraine. A hasty decision, they warned, might bring about disturbances of the public order. Their proposal to defer the issue got the support of the center. Accordingly, the Assembly decided on 24 December 1789 to grant political rights to non-Catholics but to adjourn the issue of Jewish emancipation.

The Ashkenazi Jews in Alsace-Lorraine reacted with a lengthy memorandum, refuting the arguments of their adversaries and declaring once again that they wished to become full citizens. The Sephardim in the southwest were more cautious, for they sought above all to keep the rights they had enjoyed under the Old Regime. To the great disappointment of the Alsatian Jews the National Assembly in January 1790 accorded full political rights to the Sephardim. It was a contradictory decision in two ways: in the first place, it introduced a difference between two categories of Jews that sat ill with the principle of equality, and second, it came down to a covert recognition of the Old Regime privileges of the Sephardim, while the National Assembly itself had categorically abolished all privileges the year before.

It was the tiny Jewish community in Paris that finally forced a breakthrough. Parisian Jews were a mixed company of Sephardim and Ashkenazim. The January decree had emancipated the first but not the second group. In close concert with the Alsatian Jews, the Parisian Jews now launched a new campaign for emancipation that gained the support of fifty-nine of the sixty sections of the revolutionary government of the capital. At that time, the Paris Commune represented an extremely powerful pressure group in Paris with which the National Assembly had to reckon. Even so, it was an uphill struggle. Victory came almost unexpectedly when the Assembly has just adopted the new constitution. The constitution enumerated the conditions for nationality and active citizenship without any religious restrictions, and the Jews were not mentioned in it. To Adrien du Port, at that juncture one of the most influential men in the Assembly, this made the decree on the provisional exclusion of the Jews an outrageous anomaly. On 27 September 1791 he proposed to revoke it. Freedom of religion, he declared, does not admit any differences between the political rights of citizens on account of their faith. It is not acceptable, Du Port concluded, that only the Jews will be debarred from the exercise of those rights, “while the heathen, the Turks, the Muslims, even the Chinese, in one word, the men of all sects, are admitted.”[32] The reaction to his words demonstrated that an egalitarian generosity had taken hold of the Assembly. Despite the protests of a few adversaries, the proposal was accepted by acclamation.

That was not, however, the end of the affair. The next day, the adversaries of emancipation reopened the discussion. Now that the Jews are full citizens, they argued, they must give up all their Jewish civil and political laws. When other deputies objected that the Jewish civil laws actually contained the precepts of the Judaic religion, the majority backtracked to a decree, stating that the swearing of the civic oath by the Jews would be regarded as proof of their abandonment of all the privileges and exceptions they had enjoyed under the Old Regime. For Reubell, the fanatical anti-Jewish deputy from the Alsatian town of Colmar, even that was not enough. He demanded a law that the Jews in Alsace-Lorraine should be obliged to hand over a public register listing all their running loans to Christians, in order to ascertain that the debtors were solvent and to propose fitting measures in doubtful cases. The Assembly accepted Reubell’s proposal and so cleared the way for an eventual debt settlement at Jewish expense.[33]

The anti-Jewish agitation earlier predicted by Reubell did not materialize, although a nasty incident occurred in the village of Bischheim where the local Christians attempted to intimidate Jews who were about to swear the civic oath. They demanded that the Jews affirm the oath of allegiance bareheaded, but the Jews refused to take off their yarmulkes. In the end, the quarrel was referred to the departmental authorities, who sided with the Jews. On 30 April 1792, the Jews of Bischheim, who had lived in France for more than a century, were finally allowed to swear the oath and to become full-fledged citizens of their country. David Feuerwerker, who mentions the Bischheim incident in his history of Jewish emancipation in France, reports that in most other Alsatian towns and villages the Jews were not molested.[34] Even so, we must note that of all those born in France solely the Jews had to swear the civic oath. An invisible badge of otherness was thus attached to their citizenship.

How to judge the attitude of the French revolutionaries? Most opponents of Jewish emancipation invoked the traditional Christian prejudices about the Jews, but their repeated assertions that the Jews would forever remain an alien body in the French nation went a step further. Such utterances can usefully be seen as fragments of what was to become modern anti-Semitism, the core of which was the conviction that Jewish identity was inborn and hereditary. The representation of the Jews as aliens, parasites, locusts, and invaders, who had conspired to “colonize” France, likewise fits into anti-Semitism that depicts the Jews as a threat to the nation.[35]

The advocates of Jewish emancipation in France likewise regarded the Jews as “other,” but in their opinion the Jews could be educated and “improved” to become useful and loyal members of the nation. Emancipation itself would provide the solution. A Protestant member of the National Assembly, Rabaut Saint-Étienne, expected the emancipated Jews to adopt “our mores and our customs.”[36] We have already encountered the prospect of a future assimilation in Clermont Tonnerre’s insistence that the Jews might obtain citizenship as individuals but should not seek any kind of collective rights. Accordingly, we must be careful not to depict the advocates of emancipation as champions of cultural diversity. Quite the contrary; many of them held remarkably negative opinions about the culture of French Jewry. One of the foremost spokesmen of emancipation, Henry Grégoire, author of the influential Essai sur la régéneration physique, moral et politique des Juifs (1788), characterized the Talmud as “this sewer in which the deliriums of the human mind are accumulated.”[37] Grégoire started from the unity of humanity so that the Jews partook in the same human nature as all other inhabitants of the earth. In biblical times, he stated, they had been industrious and virtuous tillers of the soil, but in the Diaspora and owing to many centuries of Christian oppression they had “degenerated from their ancient Israelite probity.”[38] “Degeneration” is here blamed on the oppressors, but it remains degeneration all the same. The solution, Grégoire believed, was assimilation, an adoption of French ways that might even result in voluntary conversion to Catholicism (Grégoire’s Catholicism, we should note, was a rather rationalized Enlightenment version). Even so, Grégoire’s model of assimilation was less totalizing than that of Clermont Tonnerre, who was inclined to judge all Jewish community life as retrograde.[39]

In the years leading up to the Revolution, several enlightened sympathizers had published recommendations for the “improvement” or the “regeneration” of the Jews. In 1785, the Academy of Metz, a city harboring a substantial Jewish minority, organized a prize contest for essays on Jewish reform. One of the competitors, a certain Thierry proposed that the Jews should enroll their children in French state schools. The French government, he declared, must “make itself master of the mind and hearts of these children.” Furthermore, the Jews should put an end to their congregation in Jewish neighborhoods. Next, Thierry exhorted Jewish men to shave off their beards and to clothe themselves like other Frenchmen. Jewish women should stop covering their hair. Finally, Jews should not be admitted to the higher public offices.[40] Grégoire, for his part, looked forward to a future when all schools would open their doors to pupils from all religious communities, but for the time being he preferred to send the Jewish children to the state schools and to subject them to its exercises and public examinations. The rabbinate Grégoire would have liked to abolish altogether. His solution was to supplant the rabbis by synagogue directors educated in French state schools and selected in national competitions.[41]

The heated and long-winded French debates on the regeneration of the Jews did not correspond to the demography of late eighteenth-century France. On the eve of the Revolution, French Jews represented about 0.2 percent of the population. The idea that this tiny minority could in any way pose a threat to the French nation attests to a high degree of paranoia, to put it mildly. According to Ronald Schechter’s study of French Jews in eighteenth-century culture the Jews were “good to think about” what it meant to be French in the vast cultural and political upheaval of the Age of Revolution. The real subject of the controversies, Schechter posits, was the future identity of France, defined as the opposite of what the Jews were but should not be allowed to remain.[42] In this, Schechter is surely right, but the fact remains that the debates also determined the form and modalities of Jewish emancipation for a long time to come. Put differently, what was at stake was the meaning and significance of the equality the Jews were about to obtain as citizens of the new revolutionary state. The arguments advanced by the advocates of Jewish emancipation demonstrate that equality did not imply that the Jews would be accepted as they were. Their equality was theorized as the potential to “regenerate” themselves in the likeness of the enlightened citizens who already were “equals.”

The heavy emphasis on discipline and education suggests that the revolutionary politicians and philosophers did not expect the Jews to realize this equality on their own steam. The discourse that acknowledged their equality defined them as the object of a paternalist pedagogy. Their newly achieved equality was a precious asset, but it confined Jewishness to the private sphere and the synagogue.

The Jewish reactions to the challenge of the secular nation displayed profound doubts about the proper course to follow. In a subtle reading of Jewish responses, Frederic Jaher has shown that they ranged from a secularizing Judaism to orthodox intransigence, with some opting for citizenship at the expense of Jewish identity, others retreating into the bosom of orthodox Jewry, and still others searching for a prudent middle course. According to Berr Isaac Berr, a prominent man of letters from Nancy, Jews should take the civic oath and relinquish the “pretended privileges and immunities” they enjoyed under the Old Regime. Instead, they should “appear simply as individuals, as Frenchmen, guided only by a true patriotism.” He reminded his coreligionists that fully accepting the rights and duties of French citizenship entailed the full freedom of religion. Berr further advised caution: the newly emancipated French Jews should not seek to drink down the cup of rights all at once; they should have some consideration for the diffidence of the French gentiles, who needed time to get used to the new Jewish presence in their midst. For all that, he did not endorse wholesale assimilation: Jewish children assuredly should attend French state schools, but in a parallel educational trajectory they would be taught Hebrew and the Torah in Jewish schools. Berr further advocated the maintenance of Jewish communities and the election of rabbis by their members, even if it would stand in the way of Jews holding office in the French state. The combined education of young Jews in public and Jewish schools, Berr believed, would produce “good Jews and good French citizens.”[43]

Other Jewish communities were less confident about harmony. The Jews of Avignon, for example, petitioned in 1794 for a government assumption of Jewish communal debts and underlined the miserable and oppressive nature of Jewish corporate privileges under the Old Regime. Appropriating the secularist national language for their own purposes, they challenged the implicit hierarchy of the new Christian-national France: “All these revolting divisions must disappear … [until] there are no more Catholics, Protestants, Jews, sectarians of any kind, there are only Frenchmen.”[44] The distance between their language and Berr’s discourse is significant: While Berr defers to the supremacy of the secular nation, the Avignon petition uses the civic language to affirm the equality of the Jews and the adherents of the different Christian creeds. Once more, the language of citizenship and modern equality is Janus-faced. The same terminology can affirm equality as sameness and equality as autonomy, depending on the emotional inflection and the rhetorical thrust of words and sentences.

The French case illustrates a general European trend. In early-modern Europe, there were nations and there were states, but there were no nation-states. The fusion of the state, a political institution, with the nation, a basically cultural entity, easily resulted in a vision of the state as a culturally homogeneous space, spawning the novel concept of the national minority, a group of people united by cultural habits who collectively refused to defer to the new sacred body of the nation.

Women, a Different Otherness

In a glaring contrast to Jewish emancipation, the attempts to include women in the body politic met with utter failure. Yet the omission of women was not passed over in silence. In January 1789 an anonymous Pétition des femmes du Tiers-État au Roi demanded that women’s voices be heard in the upcoming meeting of the Estates General and that they wanted to “be enlightened” too. Many more petitions by women were addressed to the Estates General, articulating their social and political grievances. Clearly, the onset of the revolution made women aware of their oppression but also of the opportunities for reform opened up by the new language of equality and rights. In March 1789, a petition called attention to the fact that the Estates General would not represent the entire nation since “more than half of the nation does not sit there.” Yet another pamphlet lambasted “the prejudices that make us slaves” and demanded that “women should be represented only by women” in the Estates General. “Why,” the pamphlet asked, “does one sex have everything and another nothing.”[45] In October 1789, when the revolutionary crisis was in full swing, the “Ladies Request” to the National Assembly directly addressed the representatives: “You have broken the scepter of despotism … yet still you allow thirteen million slaves shamefully to wear the irons of thirteen million despots.” The request urged the National Assembly to pass a decree, modeled on the August decree abolishing all feudal privileges, to the effect that “all the privileges of the male sex are entirely and irrevocably abolished throughout France.”[46]

In the following years quite a number of women’s clubs and platforms addressed the National Assembly, demanding the redress of grievances that ranged from the high prices of bread, the need for a better education for women, and the evils of convent life, to a share in the glories of the revolution and political citizenship for women. Three arguments were advanced over and over again. First, women as human beings shared in the natural right to liberty and equality from which the entire Revolution derived its legitimacy. Second, as the mothers of all citizens women were indispensable to the state. Since the education of future citizens chiefly depended on them, the improvement of women’s education was a vital interest of society. Third, women’s steadfast patriotism contributed to the people’s struggle for liberty.[47]

To a sizable group of women—how many, we do not know—the perennial nostrums of male supremacy had lost their venerable authority, but few men agreed and even fewer were willing to support women politically. Most male politicians and pamphleteers reacted with scorn and ridicule, and several of them immediately called for measures to put an end to the women’s agitation. The overwhelming majority of the French were not ready for the “self-fulfillment” of the universalist concept of equality across the gender barrier. Sieyès belonged to the tiny minority of revolutionary politicians to notice the contradiction and to say so in public. The great majority kept a prudent silence or loudly acclaimed Rousseau’s tenets about female “nature.” By their behavior and mentality they demonstrated the historical contingency of the “development” of universalist ideas.

. In the debates about the new French constitution, women’s rights were advocated by several men and women. Condorcet saw the equality of the sexes as representing an emergent trend of recent history and a core component of times to come. However, his deep-seated confidence in women’s autonomy was fueled by more than reason. Sophie de Grouchy, his beloved wife and intellectual companion, must have deeply affected his sense of what a man and a woman could share. In July 1790 Condorcet published Sur l’admission des femmes au droit de cité (On the Admission of Women to Political Citizenship), a strident critique of the exclusion of women from politics. Human rights, he reasoned, “result exclusively from the fact that they [human beings] are sentient beings, susceptible to the acquisition of moral ideas, and to reason about them.”[48] That is why men are perfectible and able to profit from education and schooling. According to Condorcet, nobody can deny that women possess the same capabilities, lest one would relegate them to the status of animals, an opinion clearly rejected by everyone. To exclude women on the grounds of their pregnancies and menstruation he deemed ridiculous: one might as well withhold citizenship from the large category of men who suffer every winter from gout or who easily catch a cold. Neither was alleged intellectual inferiority a good reason. Numerous members of the male sex were stupid and lacked a good education. Coming to the tenet that women are exclusively guided by their feminine passions, Condorcet retorted that insofar as it is true, it reflects back on their education and the institutional arrangements they are subjected to, but is not a reliable guide to their true nature. In Condorcet’s opinion it was precisely the exclusion of women from politics and the public sphere that had numbed their minds. To limit the franchise to those who already are intelligent and educated, Condorcet warned, would equally imply the curtailment of political rights of men who perform long hours of repetitive work. Such a course would ultimately undermine the very idea of a free constitution.

In December 1790, when the deliberations on the new constitution had started, Marie Madeleine Jodin petitioned the National Assembly on the rights of women. Published by a printer in Angers, her request appealed to the moral sensitivity of the deputies, bemoaning the debauchery, immorality, and sexual license everyday displayed on the streets of Paris. Since public continence and sober morals were necessary for the health of the body politic, Jodin pointed out, both sexes must work together to eradicate vice. To be able to contribute to that worthy cause, women must become citizens. In the middle of her call for moral reform, Jodin invoked the tenet of natural equality:

Love of country, of liberty and of glory animate our sex as much as they do yours, Sirs; we are not, on this earth, a different species from yours. The mind has no sex, any more than does virtue.… A modern writer has dared assert that women can hardly understand a political idea.… Such an opinion is the product of mere prejudice; it is the natural result of despotism and of the yoke imposed on us by an imperious sex which, in the dawning of the world, found itself stronger than the companion bestowed on it by a kindly Nature and therefore decided it must be superior in everything.[49]

These sentences are taken almost literally from Poulain de la Barre’s Égalité des deux sexes. Jodin’s language is suffused with a burning indignation that is absent from Condorcet’s serene prose. Next to the argument from natural equality she pressed home the assertion that women are the guardians of morals while men easily succumb to the seductions of the flesh. She even managed to give an egalitarian twist to Rousseau’s dictum that the morals of one sex always determine those of the other.

Neither Condorcet’s prestige nor Jodin’s impassioned plea for the rights of women convinced the members of the National Assembly. Even though a few members were sympathetic, the issue of women’s citizenship never reached the agenda of the plenary sessions. During the Fêtes de la federation, very popular in the summer of 1790, citizens usually swore the civic oath in public. In Beaune, a small town in Burgundy, the National Guard wanted to include women in the ceremony, but the municipal authorities told the eighty-four invited women that their participation was unacceptable. In Toulouse their presence was answered by turning fire hoses on them. There are some examples of women taking the civic oath, as on the Champ de Maris in Paris in 1791, but these were rare exceptions. Generally, the male revolutionaries set strict limits to women’s participation in formal political gestures in public.[50] During the Terror, Robespierre opportunistically used the agitation of the revolutionary women’s clubs against his moderate adversaries, but when they showed signs of independence the government closed down all the remaining women’s clubs. To drive the message home, some of the most visible feminists, such as Olympe de Gouges, were executed. The Feuille du Salut Public, a government newspaper, associated her execution with those of Marie Antoinette and Madame Roland, concluding that “the Revolutionary Tribunal has given women a great example which will doubtless not be lost on them.” About Madame Roland it said that she had “sacrificed nature, in trying to rise above it; the desire to be learned led her into forgetfulness of the virtues of her sex.… Olympe de Gouges wished to be a statesman.” The author called upon women to be good republicans: they should cultivate modesty, care for the household, and renounce all ambition to speak in public assemblies.[51]

The failure of women’s emancipation is often attributed to the influence of Rousseau’s ideas on femininity and civic virtue.[52] That Rousseau’s ideas were popular with many of the men of 1789 is beyond doubt. To the Jacobins, many of whom hailed from provincial towns, Rousseau gave a philosophical language that fused their aversion to female disobedience with their hatred of aristocratic culture. Even so, we have seen that the Scottish Enlightenment also denied women a place in the public sphere. The overwhelming majority of the male revolutionaries were deeply convinced that female nature was different and that no amount of education or institutional change would ever change it. The utmost they were willing to do was to pass a divorce law and to make sure that daughters would receive a share of their parents’ inheritance, but secondary schooling for girls on a par with boys was out of the question. Feminist criticism and in particular the demand for equal political rights, if they took notice of it at all, they considered an extravagant opinion that went against nature. What may also have hardened them against it was the well-known fact that under the Old Regime, as the pre-1789 era now began to be called, most feminist salonnières and authors belonged to the aristocracy. Feminist opinions could thus easily be associated with the sexual license for which the aristocracy was notorious. It is indeed remarkable how many politically active women were accused of sexual misconduct.

While the revolutionaries felt justified in explaining the otherness of Jews and, as we will shortly see, of black Africans as effects of a lack of schooling and of the oppression they had suffered for centuries, the majority of them persistently argued that the otherness of women was natural and immutable.

The Haitian Revolution and the First Abolition of Slavery

Nowhere did the revolutionary ideas about universal equality have more dramatic consequences than in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the western part of the island of Hispaniola (its eastern half still a Spanish colony). Saint-Domingue was the most opulent colony of the entire Caribbean. Of the 750,000 African slaves shipped to the Americas in the 1780s, 319,000 were destined for Saint-Domingue. Its plantations produced as much sugar as the rest of the Americas combined and about half of all the coffee consumed in Europe. Its produce had to be sold to France whence it was again exported with a handsome profit, accounting for some 60 percent of all French exports. The prosperity of the great port cities of France depended on the slave plantations. In 1789, the 465,000 African slaves made up the overwhelming majority of the population of Saint-Domingue. Facing them were only 30,000 whites and some 28,000 free gens de couleur, people of mixed descent, many of whom owned slaves. Most nonblack male adults bore arms. Owing to diseases and the backbreaking labor regime the slave population had to be regularly replenished from Africa.[53] Mostly male slaves were imported; on average, the Atlantic slave trade transported two men for every woman (by contrast, the Arabic slave trade carried two women for every man).[54]

The gens de couleur, descended from the offspring of sexual unions of white men with African women, occupied an uneasy middle position between the slaves and the white colonists.[55] The Code Noir, promulgated by Colbert in 1685, had decreed that free people of color would enjoy equal rights but should “retain a particular respect for their former masters.”[56] Their ambivalent status in the colonial racial and status hierarchy played a key role in the unfolding of events set in motion by the revolution in the metropolis.[57]

The great planters, many of whom were absentee owners residing in France, were profoundly worried about the rise of abolitionism. In 1788, the adversaries of slavery had founded the Société des Amis des Noirs, several members of which, such as Brissot, Condorcet, Sieyès, Mirabeau, and the Abbé Grégoire, became very influential in the National Assembly. Soon a powerful planters’ lobby emerged to defend the interests of the colonists.[58] The slaveholders demanded a place for the colonies in the National Assembly, even claiming that the number of their seats should be proportional to the number of slaves they “represented.” Mirabeau indignantly retorted that the slaves either were men or they were not: “If the colonists consider them men, let them free them and make them electors and eligible for seats; if the contrary … have we, in apportioning deputies according to the population of France, taken into consideration the number of our horses and mules?”[59]

The news of the revolution in the metropolis soon caused a split in the white ranks in the Caribbean. The petits blancs—petty traders, shopkeepers, and artisans—claimed citizen rights, while the planters, the merchants, and the colonial officials clung to their traditional privileges. Their quarrels occasioned the creation of two representative assemblies for the colony, one in the north, dominated by the old elite, and another in the west that became the bulwark of the less well-to-do whites. What the two parties agreed on was the exclusion of all nonwhites from political rights. Consequently, a new rift appeared. As early as November 1789 the gens de couleur contested the white monopoly. Their representatives in Paris were Julien Raymond and Jacques Ogé, two wealthy planters of mixed descent who adhered to the Société des Colons Américains, a group agitating for equal rights for all free nonwhites. In a petition to the National Assembly they invoked the “inalienable natural rights” proclaimed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Presenting themselves to the Assembly they declared that “they are men, free and citizens, consequently that they are, in spite of their color, the equals of other men, free and citizens, who reside in the islands.” Furthermore, they were men of property and taxpayers. Accordingly, they claimed full citizenship rights.[60]

Many of the people of color were slaveholders. They owned a quarter of the land, though not in the rich sugar fields, and some 30 percent of the slaves on Saint-Domingue.[61] Maintaining a strict boundary between freemen and slaves, they pointed out that the category of freemen included not only whites but also free blacks, mulattoes, quadroons (people with one black grandparent), and others.[62] This landed them in a contradictory stance. They recognized slavery, but their own demands questioned the color line on which Atlantic slavery was ultimately based. They distanced themselves from the abolitionists, but they refused to recognize slavery as a “natural” institution grounded on racial difference:

We answer that, liberty being a natural right, inherent in every being that breathes, the presumption is entirely to its advantage, that even in the Colonies where slavery is introduced, it does not suffice to say that a man is a slave, it is necessary to prove it.[63]

This was tantamount to denying that there existed a natural and necessary link between blackness and slavery. The consequences would soon become clear to all concerned. The white colonists found themselves in a double bind. They were not willing to give in to the demands of the gens de couleur, but they did not dare to attack the doctrine of the rights of man head on. In this, their dilemma resembled that of the adversaries of Jewish emancipation. The only way out was to fall back on the argument that abolition would cause severe damage to the entire French economy.[64] The colonists acknowledged the rights of man, but invariably added that this venerable truth was not applicable in the colonies.

In the spring of 1790, the select committee on the colonies, dominated by the planters’ lobby, worked on an ordinance for the colonial elections. The representatives of the gens de couleur persuaded Antoine Barnave, the committee’s secretary, to replace the term citizens by persons and to add a clause granting the franchise to all freemen “irrespective of the color of their skin.” But in the face of the vehement objections of the colonial lobby, Barnave deleted the last clause. The upshot was the decree of 28 March 1790 that conferred the vote on “all persons aged 25 years, possessing property or domiciled for two years in their district and paying taxes.” The lobby successfully sabotaged Grégoire’s attempt to force a plenary debate on the matter.[65] Consequently, the moot question lay unresolved. The decree referred to “all persons” but said nothing about color.

In Saint-Domingue, the whites naturally interpreted the decree as an endorsement of the status quo, while the gens de couleur maintained that “all persons” meant exactly what it said. The people of color, who had manned the colony’s police force and militia, now resorted to arms to defend their newly won rights. Their rebellion was led by Vincent Ogé. Though he did not try to enlist the slaves on his side, he “reminded his white opponents that he might easily have done so.”[66] The people of color were defeated and in February 1791 Ogé was publicly tortured to death, while twenty-one of his associates were hanged. But the civil war in the colony went on and spread to Martinique. The crisis assumed such proportions that the National Assembly had to reconvene the Colonial Committee. Barnave warned the colonists that the free colored enjoyed the support of an increasing number of deputies. Jacobin clubs all over France began to bombard the Assembly with petitions for immediate enfranchisement of the colored.[67] The consequences were not long in coming. In May 1791, the colonial problems were for the first time discussed in a plenary session of the National Assembly. The slaveholders proposed that no law “concerning the status of slaves in the American colonies” should be made without an explicit request from Saint-Domingue. Robespierre retorted that he would never accept a decree that consecrated slavery. If the colonies could only flourish thanks to slavery, he added, they should be left to perish, but the only result of his intervention was to replace the word esclaves by non-libres.

Thereupon, Reubell (apparently less afraid of faraway people of color than of close-by Jews) proposed an amendment that would confer political rights on free people of color whose parents had been free.[68] This looked like a useful compromise and was accordingly voted by the National Assembly on 15 May 1791. The decree, though intended to assuage the conflict, infuriated the whites in the colony because it granted full rights to second-generation freemen of color, disregarding the sacrosanct color line. French commissioners were sent across the Atlantic and on 24 September the National Assembly repealed the May decree, apparently leaving the people of color no other recourse than an appeal to the slaves. This time, however, the politicians in Paris as well as the white planters in Saint-Domingue were overtaken by an unforeseen and extremely dangerous turn of events on the island: not only did the free people of color revolt but at the same time a massive slave insurrection erupted in the great sugar plantations on the northern plain of Saint-Domingue.

To understand how that could happen we must recall the history of the slave population. The backbreaking work on the sugar plantations killed the slaves in such quantities that a continuous supply of replacements from Africa was needed. Of the half million slaves in the colony on the eve of the insurrection, some 330,000 had a living memory of African freedom. The slaves had developed a lingua franca, Kreyòl, which ensured easy communication between all the slaves in Saint-Domingue. Songs and voodoo ceremonials contributed to a community spirit, often linked to practices of covert resistance to the murderous labor regime. Moreover, in the late eighteenth century, the slave traders had moved their operations to the Congo region in central Africa, a Christianized kingdom torn by recurrent civil wars. Many of the newly arriving slaves were former soldiers, sold into slavery after being captured in battle. These were men with military experience, trained in the handling of firearms and in the tactics of mobile warfare.[69] Finally, a slave elite of headmen (commandeurs d’atelier) and voodoo priests, often with links to the outside world, had evolved on the plantations. They had set up an underground communication network that was well hidden from the slaveholders and their henchmen.

When the smoldering civil war between the whites and the people of color erupted into serious fighting, the slaves were increasingly drawn into it. After their defeat in February 1791 the people of color began to arm their slaves. Soon the whites responded in kind. Slowly it dawned on the better-informed slaves that the rise of a new regime in France had led to infighting among the free people in the colony. Moreover, two new words, liberty and equality, seemed to command a hitherto unheard of popularity among the people of color. The urban slaves were astonished and the slaveholders horrified by the spectacle of French soldiers fraternizing with the people, embracing everyone regardless of their skin color.[70] Finally, it transpired that a sort of civil war was raging in the metropolis itself. In these circumstances, the well-known fact that the slaves heavily outnumbered the whites acquired a novel significance. Rumors about a softening of the labor regime circulated on the plantations. In August 1791 a slave meeting was held on one of the large plantations. A man, probably belonging to the people of color, told the slaves that the new government in Paris had passed a decree abolishing the whip and granting the slaves three free days a week instead of two. But in the colony the masters refused to apply it. Could not action by the slaves themselves, perhaps in concert with the people of color who were already at war with the whites, force the slaveholders to implement these reforms?[71] A week later the uprising began. Like so many other insurrections, this one was ignited by a call for improvement of the existing regime. However, it rapidly transformed itself into a revolutionary movement that sought to do away with slavery itself.

The slave revolt began in the night of 22 August 1791 when a tropical storm raged over the island. The sign was given by Boukman Dutty, a slave headman and voodoo priest. The assembly pledged secrecy and revenge, drinking the blood of a ritually sacrificed black pig. In a speech later attributed to him Boukman opposed “our god” to the “god of the whites”:

This God who made the sun, who brings us light from above, who raises the sea, and who makes the storm rumble, that God is here, do you understand? Hiding in a cloud, He watches us. He sees all that the whites do! The god of the whites pushes them to crime, but ours wants good deeds. That God who is so good orders us to vengeance. He will direct our hands, give us help. Throw away the image of the god of the whites who thirsts for our tears, listen to the liberty that speaks in all our hearts.[72]

The image to be thrown down was, of course, the cross. The blood-sealed pact was probably derived from African traditions.[73] The god who orders revenge may well be an African god, or, for slaves originating from the Christianized kingdom of the Congo, an Africanized Christian God. At the same time, the conviction that God will assist the oppressed and that slavery contravenes his will shows a clear affinity with Christian abolitionism. In Boukman’s address to his fellow slaves, liberty may well denote the longing for a lost African freedom still remembered and cherished by the majority of the men and women toiling on the sugar fields, but it may also indicate the influence of the constant invocation of the revolutionary language of liberty and equality by the spokesmen of the gens de couleur.

That the Enlightenment language of equality had an impact on the slave leadership is apparent from the letter addressed by Biassou, Jean-François, and Belair to the French General Assembly of Saint-Domingue. In the opening lines of the letter, sent in July 1792, the authors identify themselves as former slaves. We, they tell the French, “are those whom you call your slaves and who claim the rights to which all men may aspire.” The so-called right of the slaveholders, the letter argues, rests on nothing else than the fact “that you are stronger and more barbaric than we.” The three signatories remind their French addressees that they have sworn to uphold the French Constitution:

And what does it say, this respectable Constitution?—what is the fundamental law?; have you forgotten that you have formally vowed the declaration of the rights of man which says that men are born free, equal in their rights; that the natural rights include liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression? So then, as you cannot deny what you have sworn, we are within our rights.[74]

Besides the language of natural rights, the letter observes that the slaves are the equals of the whites, because all are “children of the same father created in the same image.” To delegitimize slavery, the letter invokes the authority of the Enlightenment as well as the authority of Holy Scripture. The slave leaders address their French interlocutors both as Christians and as men bound in duty to uphold the rights of man. Finally, they make four demands: liberty for all slaves, general amnesty for all who have taken part in the fighting, a guarantee of these articles by the Spanish Government (the Spanish, who ruled the eastern half of the island, had offered the slaves protection), and ratification by the king and the National Assembly. If the French accept these demands, the slaves will return to their plantations and resume work as freemen at a yearly fixed wage.

Of the three signatories of the letter, Biassou and Jean-François were recognized by everyone as the foremost leaders of the insurrection. Belair, the third signatory, was a boy of fourteen in 1792 and a nephew of Toussaint Louverture who was not so well known at the time. Some historians have therefore surmised that Toussaint was a covert third author of the letter.[75] That is certainly possible, since the document, as Madison Smartt Bell notes in his biography of Toussaint, presents “almost all the points of policy which Toussaint would seek to achieve over the next decade.” Even so, his authorship of the letter is not attested by any source.[76]

Toussaint was born in slavery on the Bréda plantation. He received a good education, learning written French and probably some history and philosophy as well. As a manager of livestock he enjoyed more freedom than most slaves and in 1776 he was granted liberty by his master. He seems to have read the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, as well as some of Machiavelli’s writings. Most certainly he read parts of Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes, in particular his call for a black leader who would rise up to destroy slavery. Much later, when he had become a renowned general and charismatic leader of the slave insurrection, Toussaint declared that his calling to liberate his black brethren was first stirred by reading Raynal’s lines.[77]

His career certainly demonstrated that the liberation of the slaves was his overriding goal, to which he was willing to subordinate much else. When he believed that Spanish support was indispensable to attain that goal, he fought on the Spanish side, only to return to the French fold when the Convention confirmed the abolition of slavery that already was realized on the ground in Saint-Domingue. Toussaint’s political ideas defy any easy classification. Adroitly, he turned the new language of natural equality against the French tergiversations over the emancipation of the slaves. At the same time, he always considered himself a believing Catholic who condemned slavery because it ran counter to God’s law. His “real” religion probably was an Africanized Catholicism, combining the message of Christ with the credo of an African god of revenge and victory. Under his general’s bicorne, Toussaint wore a red voodoo head-cloth.[78]

Political and religious hybridity would remain a feature of the Haitian Revolution. We encounter a striking instance in the final crisis, and undoing, of the slaveholders’ power in June 1793. The struggle pitted the commissioners sent by the Convention, by then dominated by the Jacobins, against the white slaveholder elite who still refused to grant equal rights to the people of color. The republican commissioners, Léger Félicité Sonthonax and Étienne Poverel, had enlisted the help of the slave leaders to retake the town of Cap Français from French sailors and troops siding with the slave masters. The fighting ended in a partial victory for the commissioners, but Cap Français, the mainstay of white wealth and power on the island, was set on fire and virtually annihilated. Many of the white elite fled the island. The slave leaders, however, did not trust Sonthonax and Poverel, who still clung to the maintenance of a softened form of slavery. In the midst of the June crisis, the two commissioners offered freedom to “black warriors who will fight for the Republic … both against the Spanish and against other enemies, whether interior or exterior.”[79]

To the commissioners the Spanish alliance represented a serious threat to the French interest, but to the major slave leaders the Spanish bid still looked like the best way to get rid of the French slaveholders. The commissioners’ emancipation decree was thus double-edged: in principle any slave on the island could attain liberty, but only on the condition of a readiness to fight the Spanish troops that included numerous fellow slaves. When Poverel urged the slave warriors to return to the fold of the French Republic, one of the leaders of the slave armies, known as Macaya, explained his perspective on the turn of events:

I am the subject of three kings: of the King of Congo, master of all the blacks; of the King of France who represents my father; of the King of Spain who represents my mother. These three Kings are the descendants of those who, led by a star, came to adore God made Man.[80]

To the French commissioners this statement was utterly perplexing. In their view, France was now a republic and an appeal to the monarchy equaled treason. Against the background of the history of the Congolese kingdom, where Macaya probably spent his youth, his statement makes more sense. Congo was a Christianized monarchy torn apart by civil wars since the end of the seventeenth century. Congolese political thought considered monarchy the “normal” political regime, but it sharply distinguished between two types of monarchy: an autocratic kingship, marked by arbitrary and selfish rulers, and a healthy monarchy, where the king cared for the public weal and governed in concert with the natural leaders of the people.[81] In other words, the best course to follow for an oppressed people was to support a “good king” who would relieve their suffering by wise and benevolent reforms. Let us recall that in those days the French idea of a republic was looked upon as an outlandish political anomaly by most Europeans. To Macaya it represented a strange concept that lacked the familiar appeal of the good king.

His linkage of African and European kingship in a common Christianized myth of origin may well have been a sincere attempt to find common ground with his French interlocutors. On the other hand, it is more than likely that the pairing of the kings of France and Spain reflects the uneasy position of the slave leaders, who agreed to negotiate with the French but hesitated to jettison their Spanish alliance. Despite his distrust of the French and their newfangled “republic” Macaya in the end threw in his lot with them. Gaining freedom by entering republican service, he and another leader, Pierrot, agreed to fight on the side of the commissioners. Together with their soldiers they received their emancipation documents while the cry of vive la république resounded across the enclosure of the plantation camp where the ceremony took place.[82] The transformation of insurrectionary slaves into republican soldiers must have been an utterly demoralizing event to the few remaining white slaveholders on the island.

Sonthonax and Poverel were well aware of the craving for liberty among the slaves. Even so, they felt that decreeing general abolition was fraught with great risks: they still believed it feasible to salvage the sugar plantations, in their perspective the indispensable foundation of the colonial economy. It took them some time to understand that the economic foundations of the prerevolutionary colonial society were damaged beyond repair. On the ruins of slavery, a new social order, based on a small-holding peasantry, was slowly emerging. In these circumstances, the commissioners finally realized, abolition was the only policy that stood a chance to regain the self-liberated slaves’ allegiance to France. Their own June decree, however partial it was, contributed to the further unraveling of the slave system. Opening a door to freedom, it gave the blacks on the island the impression that the French authorities no longer believed in black slavery as a necessary and “natural” institution.[83]

Pressed on by the black soldiers who had helped him to “save the Republic,” Sonthonax finally crossed the Rubicon. His decree of 29 August 1793 ordered the emancipation of all the slaves in the colony.[84] The very same day, and probably to forestall Sonthonax’s monopoly of the public debate, Toussaint issued a brief proclamation calling up the population of the colony to join his side: “I am Toussaint Louverture; perhaps my name has made itself known to you. I have undertaken vengeance. I want Liberty and Equality to reign in Saint-Domingue. I am working to make that happen. Unite yourselves to us, brothers, and fight with us for the same cause.”[85] Toussaint signed the document “General of the Armies of the King, for the public good.” This could only mean the king of Spain, for the French king was executed in January as Toussaint must have known. On the other hand, the invocation of liberty and equality could be read as a declaration of allegiance to the French Republic.

The final decision, however, had to be taken in Paris. To guarantee that slavery would not be restored the Convention had to put the seal of law on Sonthonax’s August decree. To bring this about, Sonthonax dispatched a delegation to Europe, the three members of which arrived in Paris at the end of January 1794. One of them was a white man, the second a free man of color, but the third, Jean-Baptiste Belley, was a free black officer. They came just in time, for an energetic lobby of the planters had been urging the Convention to repeal Sonthonax’s emancipation decree. The acceptance of Belley as a colonial deputy in the Convention marked a momentous event. Belley was received with a fraternal accolade by the president of the Assembly, consecrating racial equality in a most visible manner.[86] The delegation subsequently managed to convince the Convention that the reports delivered by the planters’ lobby did not correspond to the actual state of affairs in Saint-Domingue and that legislating abolition was the only viable means to restore the colony to its former prosperity. On 4 February the Convention voted the abolition of slavery in all French territories. One deputy exclaimed that he wanted “all men to be free, without distinction of color.” The vote was carried by acclamation.[87] In May 1794, after killing virtually all the white Spanish military in his district and securing military control over a sizable territory, Toussaint Louverture finally rallied to the French Republic.[88] In 1796, the French government appointed Toussaint as deputy governor of Saint-Domingue. He became the de facto ruler of the colony until the arrival of the military expedition sent by Napoleon in 1802 to repossess the island and to restore slavery.

The resistance to Napoleon’s expeditionary army took more lives than all the fighting between 1791 and 1803. By means of deceit the French managed to capture Toussaint, but in the end the French forces were defeated. Realizing that the restoration of the slave economy was impossible, Napoleon cut his losses. In 1803 he sold Louisiana to the United States. On the first day of 1804 Jean-Jacques Dessalines signed the Declaration of Independence of the Republic of Hayti (thus reviving the original pre-Columbian name of the island). Meanwhile, the emperor had revenged himself on the man he thought responsible. Toussaint, tricked by the French into parleying, was transported to France and imprisoned in a fortress in the Jura Mountains. The memorandum he drafted to justify his conduct to the French Republic never reached Napoleon and went unanswered.[89] Undernourished and not adequately protected against the long winter, Toussaint fell ill and died in his cell on 7 April 1803. He never saw the new state he had helped to create. The new state of Haiti, despite enshrining antislavery in its constitution, remained authoritarian. In the end, the African political ideal of the “good king” had more staying power than the French notion of individual rights.

The Haitian revolution was fought under the banner of liberty and equality, twin ideals representing the abolition of slavery and the rejection of white supremacy. Its egalitarian politics rested on three languages of equality. The first was the concept of equality formulated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, couched in the Enlightenment language of universal natural rights. The second was the Christian notion of the equal dignity of all humans created in God’s image, entailing that the treatment of fellow human beings as movable property amounted to an insult of God’s majesty. The third, rooted in the living memory of African freedom, was inspired by a divine justification of resistance and revenge against oppression, intended to bring about the reign of a “good king.” Functioning within a political rhetoric of addition, the three languages of equality fed on one another. Over the years, the leaders of the slave insurrection used various combinations. The language of natural equality was well suited to shame the representatives of the French Republic, but the Christian idea of the equality of God’s creatures was equally cherished by the slave leaders, most of whom were heterodox Catholics. When addressing their followers in the heat of the fighting, the African language of godly revenge was often the most convincing one, and in the long run the “good king” proved to represent the most convincing political regime. It may well have contributed to the dictatorial turn of Haitian politics in the nineteenth century.

All three languages of equality were suitable to address the predicament of the slave movement, and all three evoked political and intellectual cultures and contexts recognizable to the participants. The historian should resist the temptation to regard the Enlightenment language of natural equality as more fundamental than the others.

Frederick Douglass and the Debate about Race and Slavery in North America

The proposal to give the slave-owners extra seats on account of the slaves they “represented,” ridiculed by Mirabeau in the French National Assembly, was accepted by the founding fathers of the American Republic. The 1787 Convention that hammered out the Constitution of the United States allotted the states of the Union seats in the House of Representatives in proportion to the size of their population. Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution stipulated that the population of a state would be determined “by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”

The clause, known as the three-fifths compromise, was adopted at the behest of the Southern states, who demanded more seats than their free population would give them. The Constitution avoided the words slave and slavery, but “all other persons” clearly meant slaves. Without naming it the institution of slavery was buttressed by the three-fifths compromise.[90] Likewise, the 1790 Naturalization Act opened the door to citizenship to any “free white person” of “good moral character” who had resided in the country for over two years, was over twenty-one, and had sworn an oath of loyalty. The Declaration of Independence stated that all men were created equal, but after 1790 only white immigrants could acquire citizenship.[91] In the first years of independence, some Northern states included free blacks born in America in the electorate, but by the late 1830s all states had passed statutes barring free blacks from voting.[92] Unlike Middle and South America, the United States did not recognize an in-between category of “people of color.” According to the one-drop-of-blood rule, one African ancestor sufficed to mark a person as “black.” Finally, as David Brion Davis has observed, Southern slaveholding presidents governed in fifty of the seventy-two years between Washington and Lincoln, and of the six Northern presidents four supported slavery.[93]

Even so, slavery never commanded the universal assent of the American people. The United States was constructed on an uneasy balance between free and slave states, provisionally, but not lastingly, outlined in the 1820 Missouri Compromise that decided that half of the states would be slave states. From the late eighteenth century, critics condemned slavery, mostly on Christian grounds, and a growing abolitionist movement, predominantly recruited among Northern evangelical Protestants, became part of the political landscape in the early nineteenth century. Invoking the Christian tenet of the common humanity of Africans, they could condemn slavery as unreasonable as well as ungodly.

The 1820s Second Great Awakening sought to purify morals and so to liberate American civilization from its sinful afflictions. The new activist Protestants claimed a divine calling to narrow the yawning gap between American ideals and American practice. Sexual misconduct, alcoholism, and slavery were the foremost targets of their moral crusade, with the debauched hard-drinking slaveholder who raped black women a favorite target of indignation. In 1833, Theodore Dwight Weld, a prominent abolitionist spokesman, declared “that no condition of birth, no shade of color … can annul the birthright charter which God has bequeathed to every being upon whom He has stamped his own image, by making him a free moral agent.”[94] Given the image of debauchery and rape associated with slavery it is no wonder that numerous women activists were drawn to abolitionism. According to Angelina Grimké, one of the first women to deliver public lectures, the struggle against slavery was “the high school of morals in our land,” where “human rights … are better understood and taught, than in any other.”[95] In her tract Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), the feminist Margaret Fuller highlighted the important contribution of women to abolitionism, concluding that the road from black emancipation to the emancipation of women was a “natural following out of principles.”[96] From 1830, free African Americans in the North organized their own national conventions to discuss the best means to combat slavery and to improve the social and political status of free blacks.[97]

Besides lofty Christian principles, abolitionists frequently alluded to the Haitian Revolution to demonstrate the courage, intelligence, and capacity for self-government of Africans. Shortly after George Washington’s birthday commemoration in 1832, William Lloyd Garrison, one of the most visible abolitionists, published a fictional dialogue between Washington and Toussaint Louverture. Right at the beginning, America’s first president laments his country’s failure to grant liberty to all its inhabitants: “Why when we released ourselves from oppression, did we continue oppression! Toussaint! That my example and acquiescence sanctioned this, is the bitterest recollection of my life on earth.” In Haiti, he told Toussaint, “your race are free, and enjoy with the blessings of freedom that increasing light and knowledge which give it its true value, and they may now show to the world that the despised African race have immortal souls, are rational beings.”[98] Toussaint’s example was also marshaled by William Wells Brown, the most prominent black novelist of antebellum America. In an essay on the Haitian Revolution he warned white slaveholders that “a Toussaint may some day appear in the Southern States of this Union,” and he darkly intimated that “the day is not far distant when the revolution of St. Domingo will be reenacted in South Carolina and Louisiana.”[99] To Southern whites the memory of Saint-Domingue was a political nightmare. They consistently strove to ban all publications about it and they outlawed the importation of slaves from the Caribbean. Despite their efforts, however, knowledge about the overthrow of slavery on Haiti was widespread among the slaves in the South.[100]

Notwithstanding his eulogy of Toussaint, Garrison adamantly opposed any form of armed struggle. He also kept aloof from lobbying and seeking the support of politicians. Slavery, Garrison believed, had to be abolished by persuading white Americans of its utter sinfulness. Garrison’s politics of pacifism and persuasion was inspired by his evangelical faith, but was also rooted in harsh realities. American slave revolts in 1800, 1811, 1822, and 1831 had been put down with the summary executions of hundreds of slaves while producing no tangible results. The success of British abolitionism offered a more attractive example. Bombarded with an unprecedented number of addresses and petitions, and affected by the mood of urgency and reform engulfing Europe in the wake of the 1830 wave of revolutions, the British Parliament abolished slavery in the British Empire in 1833. This outcome demonstrated that nonviolent action and moral persuasion could do the job. The American Antislavery Society, founded in 1833, soon attracted a large membership. At the end of the decade it boasted more than 1,300 local branches totaling some hundred thousand members of a Northern population of nine million. There were also 112 women’s associations. In the 1840s, the society distributed three million pamphlets and leaflets, three-quarters of which were distributed by women.[101]

The new society recruited agents among white as well as free black people. The two best-known African American agents were William Wells Brown and Frederic Douglass, former slaves who could draw on their own life stories to demonstrate the ugly and degrading nature of slavery. Douglass, who delivered his first public lecture in 1841, was the most gifted and prolific speaker and writer among the society’s African American agents.

Antislavery soon became Douglass’s full-time occupation. His eloquence, wide reading, and intellectual acumen earned him nationwide renown and respect. His first autobiography, published in 1845, was a huge success. In the next six years twenty-one editions were published.[102] Like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the next decade, the book had an international impact and was translated into several European languages. Douglass’s autobiography moves on two planes: it presents a scathing indictment of slavery but at the same time offers a story that interweaves recollection and self-fashioning. It encapsulated the need for liberation from bondage in a story of how one man liberated himself. It is written with the benefit of hindsight, portraying Douglass’s childhood as entirely centered on heroic resistance.[103] That is not to say, however, that the narrative is “untrue.” In a sense, the intermeshing of the narrative of events that really happened with the later reflections of the author and subject of the story produces the “real truth” of Douglass’s life.[104]

Douglass was born on a plantation in Maryland in February 1818 as Frederick Augustus Washington Baily (to escape the slave-hunters sent by his former owner, he later changed his surname to Douglass). He never knew his, possibly white, father and he was soon separated from his mother, Harriet Bailey. The young Frederick’s opportunity came when, at the age of eight, he was leased to a family in Baltimore. House slaves in cities were better treated and beaten less often than on the plantations. Douglass recounts that Sophia Auld, the mistress of the house, was the first white person to show kindness to him. Moreover, she taught him the alphabet and some simple words, but when her husband found out about these lessons, he at once terminated them. The change in Sophia Auld’s behavior must have been shocking to a boy of eight. In his autobiography, Douglass analyzes it as an exemplary case of how slavery degrades the masters as well as the slaves:

But, alas! This kind heart had but a short time to remain such. The fatal poison of irresponsible power was already in her hands, and gradually commenced its infernal work. That cheerful eye, under the influence of slavery, eventually became red with rage.… Thus is slavery the enemy of both the slave and the slaveholder.[105]

Even so, the subsequent course of Douglass’s life will show that the effects of slavery are connected, but not identical, in the two cases. It destroys the inner humanity of the masters but leaves them comfort and material freedom. By contrast, it puts the slaves’ humanity at risk, so that they face the choice between self-liberation and the “social death” of slavery.

The young Frederick refused to let the opportunity go. With the help of white schoolboys on the streets of Baltimore he managed to master the art of reading. A couple of years later he got hold of a book containing a critique of slavery, and he figured out the meaning of the word abolitionism. Without the hope of freedom conveyed by these ideas, he would not have endured life, he later stated.[106] The year 1833 marked the end of Douglass’s relatively pleasant life in Baltimore. He was sent to Thomas Auld, a relative of his Baltimore master living in a Maryland village. It was a bitter experience. Auld found his new slave altogether too defiant. To correct Douglass, he leased him to one Edward Covey, a notorious “nigger-breaker.” Covey gave him impossible assignments followed by severe lashings when he failed to get them done. An overload of heavy work and weekly beatings and whippings wore down Douglass, who was just sixteen at the beginning of the year he had to stay on Covey’s farm. One day, too dizzy and exhausted to go on. Douglass fled into the woods where Sandy, a fellow slave, offered him food and shelter. The next day he returned to the farm. Covey at once spotted him and began to tie him up, undoubtedly a prelude to further beatings. Douglass now felt that the only way out was to fight back. After two hours of fighting, Covey had to give up. After that day, Douglass writes, Covey never attempted to use the whip on him.

Before recounting the story of his fight with Covey, Douglass explicates its meaning to the reader: “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.” The battle with Covey, he finally concludes, marked “the turning point in my career as slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood.”[107] Covey might have appealed to the constables—Maryland law ordered hanging for a slave who resisted his master—but he probably was reluctant to call in outside help, lest the story damage his reputation as a slave-breaker. But for Douglas the crucial lesson was that the slaveholders were neither courageous nor invulnerable. Henceforth, he was now resolved “that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.”[108] From now on, his thoughts fastened upon a single goal: to escape to the North.

Margaret Kohn offers some valuable comments on the episode. After learning to read, the fight with Covey represents the second turning point in Douglass’s life story. The first was about the autonomy of reason, but the second turned on the freedom that comes with defending yourself, in mind and body, against the aggression of the powerful, making them aware that you no longer accept their authority. Douglass must have known that by fighting back he risked death, but by accepting that risk he recovered his manhood. In book knowledge Douglass by then surpassed the ignorant Covey, but learning had not kept the brutal slave-breaker off him. This awareness suggests, Kohn concludes, “that the liberation that comes through literacy and reason is insufficient if it is not recognized by others.”[109]

His first attempt to escape failed. He was sent to prison and was lucky to get out alive. In early September 1838, on his second attempt, he finally managed to reach the free state of New York. Homeless and adrift in a great city where he did not dare tell his story to anyone, lest he fall prey to slave-catchers, Douglass had the good fortune to receive help from David Ruggles, the head of the New York Vigilance Committee, an organization for the protection of the rights of African Americans.[110] Ruggles advised him to change his name. Officially he was then still Frederick Bailey, the name his mother gave him, but also the name slave-catchers dispatched from Maryland would use to find him. Equally important, Ruggles directed him to New Bedford, a seaport in Massachusetts where he might find work in the shipyards. In New York, Douglass married Anna Murray, a free black woman he had loved for a long time. Shortly thereafter, the couple moved to New Bedford, where they took the new surname Douglass. Ruggles, whom he fondly remembers in his second autobiography, was the first black abolitionist Douglass got to know, and who informed him about the activities of the abolitionist movement in the North.[111]

Once settled in New Bedford, Douglass marveled at the wealth and splendor of a Northern city. Of his new friend, Mr. Johnson, a colored man, Douglass said that he was better informed about the political and social conditions of the United States and the world than nine-tenths of all the slaveholders in Maryland.[112] However, he soon found out that racism was by no means absent from the North. A caulking job on a ship was closed to him because the white workingmen refused to admit “negroes” to the wharf. The Methodist chapel he visited practiced racial segregation. Douglass at once decided never to return there and instead joined a small company of colored believers known as the Zion Methodists. Becoming one of their preachers, he got his first experience of speaking in public. Douglass also became a subscriber to the Liberator, the weekly of the American Antislavery Society, edited by Garrison. “I not only liked—I loved this paper, and its editor,” he later recalled.[113] In 1841, he attended a major antislavery convention in Nantucket. A prominent abolitionist who had heard one of his sermons invited him to say a few words to the convention. Douglass at first hesitated, but then went to the pulpit. The audience was electrified by his speech, and Garrison took it as his theme in the concluding oration he delivered right after Douglass.[114] It would prove the beginning of fourteen years of lecturing and agitating against slavery, making Douglass into the most famous African American activist intellectual of antebellum America.

Douglass rested his case against slavery on universal equality, transcending the boundaries of race, and, as we shall shortly see, also of gender. What kind of arguments and theories did he rely upon? The first thing to note is that, apart from his religious and philosophical arguments, his visible agency as a brilliant orator and an accomplished theorist by itself constituted a powerful argument for equality. Some people in the North were so overwhelmed by his rhetorical brilliance that they disbelieved the story about his slave origins. That a self-taught slave could rise to such intellectual heights was beyond their imagination. For Douglass, refuting these objections was one of the reasons for publishing his 1845 autobiography. His speeches are replete with references to his slave roots, pressing his audience to imagine how American history looked when viewed “from the other side.” A most fascinating example of this inversion of perspective is found in an open letter to Thomas Auld, his former owner, published in the Liberator of September 1848. Douglass calls Auld to account for still holding his three sisters and his sole brother in bondage. What has happened to them? Are they still in Maryland, or has Auld meanwhile sold them to unknown “human flesh mongers”? He then invites Auld to imagine how he would feel if one of his children were treated in such a demeaning way. To press home how slavery emasculated male slaves and sexually dishonored female slaves, he took Auld’s daughter as his example:

How, let me ask, would you look upon me, were I some dark night in company with a band of hardened villains, to enter the precinct of your elegant dwelling and seize the person of your own lovely daughter Amanda, and carry her off … feed her coarsely—clothe her scantily, and whip her on the naked back occasionally; more and still more horrible, leave her unprotected—a degraded victim of the brutal lust of fiendish overseers, who would … destroy her virtue, and annihilate in her person all the graces that adorn the character of virtuous womanhood? I ask how would you regard me, if such were my conduct?[115]

The open letter is signed with the words: “I am your fellow man, but not your slave.” For Douglass, we might say, the anthropological turn was a psychological and bodily reality before it became a theoretical move. A key element, perhaps the key element of his life story, the fight with Covey precisely made the point that freedom is an existential category that cannot be obtained without agency. Freedom and equality had to be won by African Americans themselves, not meekly received as a generous gift from paternalist whites. The self-liberation of African Americans was to be the mainspring of progress, for “philanthropy never disenthralled any people.”[116]

That is not to say, however, that arguments were superfluous. Fighting slavery, American ideals had to be used against Americans, and Christianity had to be used against Christians. On the first issue, Douglass parted company from Garrison at the end of the 1840s. According to Garrison, the United States Constitution represented a pact with the devil, because it underwrote slavery in the three-fifths compromise and in its protection of the property rights of the slaveholders. Granting Garrison’s arguments on those counts, Douglass nonetheless came to the conclusion that the principles of the Declaration of Independence were the true heart of the Constitution. These principles proclaimed universal equality and should be used as a yardstick for the rest of the Constitution as well as for legislation by states and the federal government. Recognizing the enormous philosophical and emotional appeal of modern equality, Douglass definitely took the moral high ground. Douglass thus joined the political abolitionists, who argued that the true significance of the Constitution lay in its commitment to natural law and human rights.[117]

Likewise with religion. Douglass detested the hypocritical proslavery preaching of the Southern white churches, but he always remained a deeply believing Christian. In an appendix to his 1845 Autobiography he besought his readers not to misunderstand his critique of Southern white religion. The object of his sarcastic ire, he assured them, was the hypocritical pseudo-Christianity of the slaveholders, not the “impartial Christianity of Christ.”[118] In everything he said and wrote, Douglass combined the Christian notion of the equality of all humans created in the image of God with the Enlightenment tenet that all humans shared a number of essential traits that made them “naturally equal.” Perhaps we may conclude that Enlightenment modern equality strengthened and systematized Christian equality, while Christian evangelical equality heightened the emotional temper of modern equality and elevated common humanity to the status of a sacred ideal.

The 1845 Autobiography revealed where Douglass came from and under which new name he now lived. This exposed him to slave-catchers’ attempts to kidnap him. To forestall such a mishap the Antislavery Society sent him on a two-year lecturing tour to Britain and Ireland. As English law no longer recognized slaveholders as legitimate proprietors, he would be safe from pursuit. Douglass writes with gusto and delight about his stay in Europe. What struck him most was the absence of segregation in everyday life. About Liverpool he has this to say: “I went to Eaton Hall, the residence of the Marquis of Westminster, one of the most splendid buildings in England. On approaching the door, I found several of our American passengers, who came out with us on the ‘Cambria,’ waiting for admission.… We all had to wait till the company within came out. And of all the faces, expressive of chagrin, those of the Americans were preeminent. They looked as sour as vinegar, and as bitter as gall, when they found I was to be admitted on equal terms with themselves.… As I walked through the building… the servants did not say, ‘We don’t allow niggers in here!’”[119] To Douglass, who definitely was not blind to European race prejudices, the absence of daily racist rudeness was the most visible contrast between the United States and Europe.

On 12 May 1846 Douglass delivered a thundering oration to an audience of 2,000 in London. He sought to press home to the audience the vicious and degrading nature of American slavery. In Britain, however, he felt the need to explain why he thought it important to convey the truth about American slavery to the people of England. His message implied a warning to American slaveholders:

We want them to know that a knowledge of their whippings, their scourges, their brandings, their chainings is not confined to their plantations, but that some Negro of theirs has broken loose from his chains … and is now exposing their deeds of deep damnation to the gaze of the Christian people of England.[120]

Douglass was well aware of the equality effects of globalizing the critique of slavery. Slavery, he argued, is such a gigantic evil “that no one nation is equal to its removal. It requires the humanity of Christianity, the morality of the world to remove it.” In the American case, Douglass concluded, Britain is the best place to begin because it is linked to North America by language and religious culture: “I am here, because you have an influence on America that no other nation can have.”[121] In these words we can discern the first glimmerings of the project of a global crusade against injustice. Looking back from our time, we can see that the mid-nineteenth century marked the beginning of the transition from a world carved up into a number of local and regional communication networks to a world based on a global exchange of news and ideas.

His new English friends collected money to purchase Douglass’s freedom, a move frowned upon by some principled American abolitionists, but prescient in light of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Now legally a free man, he could return to New York State without looking over his shoulder in fear of slave-catchers. Back in America, he launched his own weekly: the first issue of the North Star was published in December 1847, with its motto on the masthead: “Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren.”[122] Douglass was convinced that feminists and abolitionists should cooperate. He participated in the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention on women’s rights. There, he seconded Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s proposal to include the vote for women in the convention’s platform, a demand that almost half of the delegates found “too advanced for the times.”[123] The North Star consistently supported women’s suffrage. There was, in fact, a similarity between the oppression of African Americans and women. In both cases, a category of people was excluded from citizenship on the grounds of pretended biological “facts.”

Douglass’s Critique of Physical Anthropology

A new development in the 1840s affected Douglass’s synthesis of Christian and Enlightenment equality in the argument against slavery The ancient Sons-of-Noah racism, while still highly influential in the popular mind, was intellectually overtaken by a secular, and often polygenist, scientific racism. Assuaging the Christian bad conscience about slavery plaguing many Americans, the new racism argued that emancipating the slaves was scientifically impossible and socially harmful. The scientific racists contended that “negroes” might at best attain the cognitive level of a white child. To set them free would only rob them of necessary paternalist guidance, with harmful consequences for white and black alike. To counter this new racism, the morality of the Gospel, while still powerful, was no longer sufficient.

Around 1840 a new “American school” of physical anthropologists began weighing in on the debate about slavery. With historical data, craniometrics, and measurements of brain size they sought to demonstrate that races were not formed by environmental factors, as Buffon, Blumenbach, and many others had argued in the eighteenth century, but that they had existed from the very beginnings of humanity. The racial hierarchy assumed as a matter of course by most white Americans, they further contended, could be traced back to remote antiquity. The new ethnology rejected all theories about a future “improvement” of the black race. The most prominent spokesmen of this new scientific racism were Samuel George Morton, George Gliddon, Josiah Clark Nott, and the Swiss American student of glaciology, Louis Agassiz. According to Nott, the level attained by the black population in the Southern states represented the highest stage of development of the black race. In 1847 he concluded that the Christian proposals for emancipation were scientifically pointless.[124] Louis Agassiz, appointed to the Harvard chair of zoology in 1847 and well known for his theory of the Ice Ages, asserted that the black “race” was congenitally inferior: “The brain of the Negro is that of the imperfect brain of a 7 months infant in the womb of the White.”[125]

The most successful protagonist of the new ethnology was Samuel Morton. He made his reputation with research on the fossils collected by the Lewis and Clark transcontinental expedition in 1805. In Crania Americana (1839), Morton presented a racial classification based on the measurement of the shape and brain volume of 256 human skulls (52 Caucasian, 10 Mongolian, 18 Malay, 147 Native American, and 29 Ethiopian). Combining his measurements with ethnological and historical data he drew far-reaching conclusions. In the first place, his craniometric findings confirmed the existence of Blumenbach’s five main races. Second, the available historical evidence, in particular the evidence of Egyptologists, indicated that these races had been in existence for more than 4,000 years.[126] According to Morton, the ancient Egyptians were Caucasians. In passing, he dismissed “the vulgar error … which classes the ancient Egyptians with the Negro race.”[127] Projecting Egyptian history on the then generally accepted biblical chronology, it followed that the races of humanity had existed from the beginning of the human species. Racial differences, Morton concluded, could not be attributed to environmental factors. Apparently, the Creator himself had produced these differences.

Morton sought to subvert Buffon’s definition of a species by collecting material on the existence of fertile hybrids stemming from different animal species. Seen in that light, he reasoned, cross-racial sexual relations with fertile offspring, an undeniable fact as every slaveholder knew from personal experience, would no longer suffice to establish the unity of humanity.[128] What his research demonstrated, Morton asserted, were the great and immutable differences between the races. Apart from the arctic peoples, he asserted, the Native Americans belonged to one single race that was inferior to the three Eurasian races but superior to the black Ethiopians. The Caucasians he considered the most beautiful race on earth. Finally, European progress represented the culmination of a world-historical trend in which white peoples always defeated colored ones. According to Morton, the biological evidence and the annals of history taught the same lesson. Even so, cultural and historical evidence was now considered secondary. The scientific credentials of nineteenth-century racism rested on “biological” data, generated by the practice of quantitatively measuring bodily features.[129]

In “The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered,” a lecture delivered in July 1854 at Western Reserve College in Ohio, Frederick Douglass confronted the challenge of the new physical anthropology. He started with the thesis that “the Negro is a man.” In a Christian context, the humanity of black people was virtually unquestionable, but the new anthropology put so much emphasis on the immutable and vast differences between whites and blacks that it could no longer be taken for granted. The human species, Douglass argued, is defined by a number of common traits, such as speech, reason, habitudes, hopes, fears, aspirations, and prophecies. All these attributes are present in blacks as well as whites. He concluded that “tried by all the usual, and all the unusual tests, whether mental, moral, physical, or psychological, the Negro is a MAN.”[130] Douglass’s reasoning is congruent with Enlightenment natural equality, but it has an antiracist polemical edge that is missing from most Enlightenment discussions. The polemical thrust is accentuated by the identity of the lecturer, a circumstance Douglass underscored by telling his audience that he felt himself “somewhat on trial.”

The apologists of slavery, Douglass observed, consistently compared “the highest type of the European and the lowest type of the Negro.”[131] He drew on what he had seen in Ireland to show that social circumstances were of greater significance than race. In Dublin he had addressed a meeting on temperance attended by more than 5,000 people, “and I say, with no wish to wound the feelings of any Irishman, that these people lacked only a black skin and woolly hair, to complete their likeness to the plantation Negro.” On the other hand, Douglass continued, “There are no more really handsome people in the world than the educated Irish people. The Irishman educated, is a model gentleman; the Irishman ignorant and degraded, compares in form and feature, with the Negro!”[132] The example was well chosen. In the 1840s, when the great famine devastated Ireland, almost half of the new immigrants to the United States were Irish. The white American Protestants looked down on the Catholic Irish who, they believed, were destitute, superstitious, illiterate, and prone to alcoholism and petty criminality. The anti-Irish agitation of those years was the first populist anti-immigration movement in U.S. history. The prejudices against the Irish exhibited familiar traits paralleling antiblack racism. Moreover, the Irish in the great East Coast cities often lived in the same neighborhoods as the free blacks.[133] Douglass’s attribution of Irish degradation to poverty and social exclusion will have rung a bell in his audience. The Irish Americans themselves, however, utterly repudiated the analogy. They recognized the importance of the color line and carefully cultivated their “white” image, aligning themselves with proslavery politics. In the end, the Irish were declared “white.”[134]

However, Douglass’s argument was not sufficient to refute polygenism. In that matter, Douglass drew on the eighteenth-century explanations of color changes in terms of climate, habitat, and ways of life. He invoked the example of the Jews, a people who seldom entered into mixed marriages and were scattered all over the world. Nonetheless there were differences in skin color: European Jews were white, Asiatic Jews were brown, and African Jews were black. Douglass further mentioned that in some parts of Africa the lowlands people were dark and the mountain dwellers white. Such gradual transitions from black to white, he posited, showed “that from the beginning the Almighty, within certain limits, endowed mankind with organizations capable of countless variations in form, feature and color, without having it necessary to begin a new creation for every new variety.”[135] The existence of so many transitional varieties ran counter to the hermetic classification of five major races. What the polygenists assumed to be clear-cut and immutable distinctions dissolved into a continuous spectrum of variation and differentiation. To cap his argumentation, Douglass reminded his audience that the authority of scripture was at stake, because polygenism contradicted the biblical story of creation.

A good part of Douglass’s critique of the new anthropological racism was devoted to his characterization of the ancient Egyptians as dark-skinned Africans. Once more, his lecture rang a bell with his audience. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the pyramids and Oriental atmosphere drew numerous American tourists to Egypt, occasioning the opening of an American consulate. George Gliddon, the first vice-consul, a student of Egyptology and collector of antiquities, returned to America for what turned out to be a ten-year lecture tour. A veritable Egyptomania traversed the land. More than a hundred thousand people attended Gliddon’s lectures and his book on ancient Egypt was an instant bestseller. Like Morton and Agassiz, Gliddon was a polygenist and an antiblack racist. His portrayal of the Egyptians made them as white as possible and rejected all suggestions that they might have been “dark,” “negroes,” or “Africans.”[136] Morton, who corresponded with Gliddon, readily agreed with the latter’s finding that the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom had possessed black slaves. Black slavery could thus be represented as an eternal historical constant.

As we may expect, Douglass presented a different perspective on Egyptian history. He regarded the whitewashing of the Egyptians as a vital component of the racist strategy to place black Africa outside history. He referred to Volney’s theory of the Negroid features of the sphinx and Morton’s evasive attempts to explain the sphinx as a sanctuary of black African slaves. Furthermore, he reminded his audience that the Greek historians, from Herodotus onward, described the Egyptians as dark, swarthy, or blackish. Next he invoked modern scholars who underlined the cultural similarities between Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa. Douglass’s concluded “that a strong affinity and a direct relationship may be claimed by the Negro race to that grandest of all the nations of antiquity, the builders of the pyramids.”[137] Therewith he situated the black Africans among the trailblazers of antiquity and gave them an honorable place in the genealogy of world civilization. However, he did not homogenize Africa into a black essence, as the scientific racists did, but repeatedly underlined the varieties of complexion found in the nations and tribes of the continent. The ancient Egyptians are situated within that variety: not, perhaps, as black as the sub-Saharan peoples, but sufficiently dark to be considered as definitely nonwhite by most white Americans.

To press home the importance of race mixture and cultural transformation, Douglass presents a fascinating variety of the anthropological turn. He invites the white Americans to direct their ethnological gaze at themselves. If the Egyptians were not Africans, Douglass posits, the English descent claimed by many Americans might be contested as well:

Especially could this be done if, like ethnologists, in given cases, only typical specimens were resorted to. The lean, slender American, pale and swarthy, if exposed to the sun, wears a different appearance to the full, round Englishman, of clear, blonde complexion. One may trace the progress of this difference in the common portraits of the American presidents. Just study those faces, beginning with Washington; and as you come thro’ the Jeffersons, the Adamses, and the Madisons, you will find an increasing bony and wiry appearance about those portraits, & a greater remove from that serene amplitude which characterizes the countenances of the earlier Presidents.… I think this is a correct index of the change going on in the nation at large—converting Englishmen, Germans, Irishmen, and Frenchmen, into Americans, and causing them to lose, in a common American character, all traces of their former distinctive national peculiarities.[138]

In this early version of the theory of the “melting pot,” Douglass identifies the weak spot in all racial classifications. The boundaries between races are always questionable. Where some claimed to discern clear-cut boundaries, others would see a gradual transition from lighter to darker skins in which no clear boundaries could be drawn. Like most well-informed North Americans, Douglass knew that the white versus black boundary imposed by the one-drop-of-blood rule in the United States was a far cry from the multiplication of in-between categories in the racial classifications used in the Caribbean and South America. Much later, when he himself visited Egypt, he noted in his journal that he did not know what color and features the ancient Egyptians possessed but that the great mass of the people he had seen on the streets of Cairo would in America be classified as “negroes.” Sarcastically he commented that “this would not be a scientific description but an American description.”[139] On his journey from Paris to Rome and thence to Egypt he had noticed the increase of “black hair, black eyes, full lips, and dark complexions,” as well as the changing lifestyle of people in the markets and streets.[140]

Douglass’s refutation of scientific racism rests on four arguments. First, he advances a thesis, akin to Enlightenment natural equality, about the attributes common to all humans which demarcate them from animals. Second, he denounces the polygenists’ reification of racial difference as contrary to the numerous affirmations of common humanity in scripture. In particular, he warns the slaveholders that by buying and selling human beings, created in the divine image, they insult the majesty of God. Third, by attributing the gradual differences in complexion and bodily form to environmental factors, climate being the most powerful, Douglass seeks to refute the polygenists’ claims that racial differences are primeval, permanent, and immutable. Fourth, his inversion of the ethnological gaze deconstructs the theory that elevates the white race to the status of a “self-evident” standard and judge of humanity.

Douglass’s explanation of the historical and geographical variation of the human species shows affinities with Buffon, but while Buffon’s environmentalism was part of an ethnography predicated on hierarchical differences, Douglass’s environmentalism is part of a radically egalitarian critique of white racism. The egalitarian thrust of his argument is strengthened by his personal aura as an accomplished black thinker and orator, as well as by his published life story of a slave who won freedom by his own efforts. Moreover, he was not the only African American writing and publicly speaking in antebellum America, and he never tired of encouraging his people to contribute to their own liberation. Liberty, Douglass relentlessly argued, must be acquired; it cannot be given you by another. It is also worth noting that Douglass saw the struggle against slavery as an international effort, as we have observed in his great speech in London. In the lecture against the scientific racists he likewise insists that “time and space, in the intercourse of nations, are almost annihilated” and that “oceans have become bridges.” The earth, Douglass declares, is becoming a magnificent hall where “a common humanity can meet in friendly conclave.” It is strange, he concludes, that is the middle of the globalizing nineteenth century “there should arise a phalanx of learned men—speaking in the name of science—to forbid the magnificent reunion of mankind in one brotherhood.”[141]

Seven years later the Civil War erupted. On 22 September 1862, President Abraham Lincoln decreed the emancipation of the slaves. “We shout for joy that we live to record this righteous decree,” Douglass commented in October.[142] On Lincoln’s proposal Congress recognized the republics of Haiti and Liberia, a step Southern intransigence had blocked for more than half a century. During the war Douglass contributed to the recruitment of black troops for the Northern army. After the war, in 1874, he was appointed president of the Freedman’s Savings Bank, followed by other offices in Washington. From 1889 to 1891 he served as American consul general to Haiti. After Reconstruction petered out and the federal government allowed the Southern states to introduce segregation and to nullify the voting rights of African Americans, Douglass’s critique of American racism became increasingly bitter. In 1893, he acted as commissioner for the Haitian pavilion at the great Columbian World Exposition in Chicago. On that occasion he underlined the lasting significance of the Haitian Revolution: “When the black sons of Haiti struck for freedom … they struck for the freedom of every black man in the world.”[143] In the same year he also vehemently criticized the invisibility of African Americans and their history in the American contribution to the exposition.[144] Douglass passed away on 20 February 1895 in Washington.

Dadabhai Naoroji’s Critique of Imperial Racism

While American scientific racism focused on the legitimation of slavery, its British counterpart, especially after the abolition of slavery, was a theory of empire. Robert Knox envisioned the future of the settler colonies in a language of racial war. He typified that portion of the British Empire as “a field of extermination.” “Already in a few years,” he declared, “we have cleared Van Diemen’s Land of every human aboriginal; Australia, of course, will follow, and New Zealand next.”[145] Knox’s genocidal vision is akin to the North American discourse on the Native Americans. These “savages” were simply unwanted, for the European settlers needed their land, not their labor. On the other side of the racial divide, Frederick Douglass likewise spoke about the Native Americans “melting away” as white settlement spread westward, while he regarded the African Americans as an integral part of American society.

Ruling India, however, could not be theorized in terms of an exterminatory race war nor in a simple black-white dichotomy. India was Britain’s richest and most populous colony, vital to the economic as well as the military viability of the empire. The empire needed the land as well as its industrious population. Its administration was not comparable to the settler colonies where the indigenous populations were marginalized or exterminated. In India, by contrast, some four thousand British civil servants governed a people of more than two hundred million.[146] Moreover, unlike the indigenous peoples of America, Australia, and Africa, the peoples of India could not be classified as savages. According to the standards of Enlightenment philosophical history, India belonged to the great civilizations that traced their origins to the Axial Age. It was in the third stage of the evolutionary scheme of philosophical history, featuring agriculture, cities, written canonical texts, and state institutions. The peoples of India were divided into a minority of Muslims, to which the governing class of the Mughal Empire belonged, and an overwhelming majority of Hindus. On average, the Muslims were of a lighter complexion than the Hindus. The most comprehensive classification setting the British apart from their Indian subjects was the distinction between “Asians” and “Europeans,” metonymically linked to a distinction between “darker” and “lighter” skin.

Support for empire was enhanced by polygenist race theory. For example, John Crawfurd, a retired colonial administrator from British India and a former governor of Singapore who in 1861 was elected president of the Ethnological Society of London, endeavored to demonstrate that the entire “Asiatic race” was, and always had been, inferior to the “European race.” Crawfurd’s views, while undoubtedly racist, were a far cry from the American polygenists discussed previously. Like them, he believed that the earth was populated by several races which had existed since the beginning of human history, but the craniometry of Morton and his colleagues he rejected as “utterly illusory.” Crawfurd’s races were, like Buffon’s, biocultural constructions, but unlike Buffon he highlighted their constancy through time. The main races on earth, he declared, “are now the same as they were in earliest antiquity.”[147]

In Crawfurd’s race theory, the Enlightenment insistence on the influence of climate and the historical evolution of races gave way to an emphasis on intrinsic qualities. Blumenbach’s Caucasian race and the Aryan or Indo-German hypothesis were rejected by Crawfurd, because those theories united Europeans and West Asians in one large race and blurred the dichotomy of Europeans and Asians.[148] According to Crawfurd there existed a clear and enduring difference between “intelligent Europe” and “puerile and inconstant Asia.”[149] Why Asians and Europeans were “races” remained rather unclear, and his lumping together of all the peoples of Asia into one “Asiatic Race” probably accounts for his rejection of craniometry. Crawfurd’s thinking shows affinities with the nationalism of his time that often used race and nation as closely related, or even interchangeable, markers of identity.

In 1867, a year before his death, Crawfurd published an essay on the physical and mental properties of the European and Asiatic races. His Asia included the Egyptians who were, or so he chose to believe, in Africa by geographical accident. While biological theories of heredity are mostly outside his purview, he advanced some generalizations about the bodily habits of his two races. The European, Crawfurd states, is larger and possesses more bodily strength. The Asiatics, by contrast, are more flexible in their muscular joints. “The most natural attitude of the European is to stand erect,” he further declares, “that of the Asiatic to sit, and when he sits his flexible legs are tucked under him.” The enhanced flexibility of the Asiatics, Crawfurd adds, is not caused by a hot climate, for it is also found in the inhabitants of northern China and Japan.[150] Passing on to skin color and esthetics, he first observes that the Asians vary from brown to black, and then goes on to say that the European physique is symmetrical and beautiful, while in Asia elegance decreases as one progresses further east. But the most important advantage of the Europeans is their greater intelligence. Moreover, they are more trustworthy and thus morally superior.

Crawfurd’s principal axiom is that the superiority of the Europeans cannot be attributed to a better environment or climate: “In instituting a comparison between different races of the human family, we must, since we know nothing to the contrary, consider them all as of equal antiquity … as having had, in so far as mere time is concerned, an equal opportunity of social advancement.”[151] But only the Europeans have fully exploited those opportunities. Crawfurd does not deny the high level attained in the early stages of Egyptian, Chinese, and Indian civilization, but these were followed by 3,000 years of stagnation. Asiatic religious literature and poetry, he adds, never attained the European level. He makes an exception for the Hebrew Bible, but its authors, he suggests, belonged to the Phoenician people, who in strength and character “were more European than Asiatic.”[152] In architecture and warfare, and above all in the art of navigation, the Europeans far surpassed the Asians. The pyramids and the Great Wall are dismissed by Crawfurd as instances of unproductive squandering of labor. The armies of slaves and serfs who built those impressive monuments, he concludes, only attest to the despotic nature of the Asiatic states. Finally, the weakness of the Asiatic states is demonstrated by the easy victories of the Europeans in any military contest with them.

Following Montesquieu, Crawfurd depicts the principal Asian states as despotisms that smother the spirit of individualism.[153] Also in line with eighteenth-century thinkers, Crawfurd contrasts the gender regimes of the two continents. The status of European women he typifies as a “near equality with men,” but that of Asiatic women, subject to polygamy and forms of legally sanctioned cohabitation, as akin to serfs.[154] In his peroration Crawfurd compares Britain with Japan. The two island states enjoy the same natural advantages: the protection of the sea against invasions, a moderate climate, good natural harbors, useful animals, and abundant natural resources. The British have fully exploited these opportunities, making them into the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. Japan, by contrast, has made no progress whatsoever in the last three centuries. The only explanation of this outcome, Crawfurd contends, is racial difference: “The Japanese are, in short, an example of the stationary character of the Eastern races carried to the last extremity. We can easily imagine such a people undergoing very little change in thousands instead of hundreds of years.”[155] By an irony of history Crawfurd delivered his lecture in 1866, two years before the Meiji Reforms that would transform Japan into one of the most dynamic nations in world history.

True to his professional career, Crawfurd saw his theory of an Asiatic “race” as a brief for severe but benign colonial governance. History demonstrated, he asserted, that from the times of Alexander the Great all improvements of Asiatic governments had been brought about by conquerors belonging to superior civilizations. Without denying the defects of colonial government, he flatly declared that “the best government which Asia has ever witnessed is that which resulted from our own conquests in Hindustan.”[156]

Crawfurd read his paper on 13 February 1866 in a meeting of the Ethnological Society of London. The next month the same company listened to a devastating critique of Crawfurd’s paper presented by Dadabhai Naoroji, a Parsee Indian from Gujarat, who had lived in London since 1855. He was known as a member of the Bombay Association, one of the first political organizations set up by young Indians. In 1852, the association addressed a petition to the British Parliament to ask for the opening of local government councils to educated Indians. The petition created quite a stir in Britain.[157] From 1856 to 1866 Naoroji taught Gujarati at University College in London. That the Ethnological Society invited an Indian intellectual to deliver a critique of Crawfurd’s paper testifies to the liberal sympathies of its members, many of whom did not share Crawfurd’s views on race. In 1863, the hardcore racists, who supported the South in the American Civil War, had walked out of the society to form a rival organization, the Anthropological Society of London.

To understand Naoroji’s views we must take a brief look at his career. Like Crawfurd, Naoroji’s career was connected to the fortunes of the British Empire, but in a quite different way. The story begins, as so many tales of upward social mobility, with a bright boy from a modest background. Dadabhai was born in 1825, in a village near Bombay (present-day Mumbai). Bombay was then the principal seat of the British administration in western India, and the hub of Indian trade with Africa and the Middle East. The local middle class displayed an interest in politics at an early stage, and from the 1820s a lively journalism made headway in the region.[158] Bombay harbored a religiously mixed population: besides Hindus and Muslims there were Christians, Jews, and Parsees. The Naorojis belonged to the Parsee minority, followers of the Zoroastrian creed who had fled Iran in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Having lost his father at the age of four, Dadabhai was raised by his mother, Manekbai, who was herself illiterate but had a keen awareness of the importance of a good schooling for her son. “She made me what I am,” Naoroji would later recall.[159]

The master of the village school soon spotted the intelligence of the boy and encouraged him to pursue his education at Elphinstone College, a new school founded in Bombay where the lessons were in English and Gujarati. Manekbai could afford to place her son there because education was free. Looking back on his life in old age, Naoroji stated that this new experimental school “was the foundation of my whole life’s career.”[160] At the same time his mother arranged his life according to traditional Parsee usages: in his eleventh year he was married to Gulbai, a seven-year-old girl. It was not a happy marriage, but Naoroji steadfastly refused to take a second wife, a Parsee custom he disapproved of.

At Elphinstone, Naoroji was educated in English. All the teachers were Englishmen. The college was the first institution of higher education in India modeled on Macaulay’s “Minute on Education,” which proposed an English-language education focusing on European science and literature. Naoroji excelled among his fellow students and later, at the age of twenty-six, he was appointed to teach mathematics and natural science at Elphinstone, the first Indian to attain such a position. In 1849, he supported the founding of an elementary school for girls, something many of his contemporaries considered a dangerous novelty. In 1851, he witnessed a violent outburst of Muslim rage against the tiny Parsee community, occasioned by an article in a Parsee magazine the Muslims believed to be insulting to the Prophet. Many Parsees were manhandled and wounded. What shocked Naoroji most was that the local police did nothing to protect the Parsees. In response, he launched a periodical to give a public voice to the Parsee community.[161] The next year, he was one of the founding members of the Bombay Association, which demanded the admission of Indian candidates into the colonial civil service.[162]

His subsequent career brought Naoroji to Britain, at first as partner in a trading company of the Cama family, a Parsee enterprise launched from Bombay. As mentioned, he taught Gujarati at London University from 1856 to 1866. He was thus absent from India when the great revolt of 1857 shook the colonial administration to its foundations. The centers of the insurrection were in the north and east of the subcontinent; the urban middle classes stayed aloof from the upheaval, and most Indian intellectuals and opinion leaders condemned the revolt. Naoroji went along with them, but he pointed out that the insurrection was caused by the “mistakes and mismanagement” of the colonial government which ignored the needs of the people of India. After the 1857 revolt, the charter of the East India Company was revoked. Henceforth, India was governed under the direct responsibility of the British government. The proclamation of Queen Victoria announcing the recasting of colonial rule included the directive “that, so far as may be, our subjects, of whatever race or creed, be freely and impartially admitted to offices in our service.”[163] Naoroji would often quote the words of the queen, but equally often he would have to register his bitter disappointment at the failure of successive British governments to live up to the promise.[164]

In England, Naoroji founded the London Indian Society, with the aim to promote contacts between Englishmen and Indians. In 1866, the society, renaming itself the East India Association, not only advocated colonial reform but also sought to disseminate impartial knowledge about India to the British public.[165] Consequently, it was only natural that Naoroji felt the need to take issue with Crawfurd’s opinions.

To begin with, Naoroji contradicts Crawfurd’s generalizing statements about the mental inferiority of Asians and in particular about the stagnation of the intellectual development of Indian boys after puberty and their leaving school prematurely. His experience at Elphinstone College, Naoroji declares, had taught him two things. In the first place, Indian youngsters are no less intelligent than European ones. And, second, most of them have good reasons not to complete the curriculum. They are sent to school to learn English, and thereupon they are expected to earn an income for the family. Moreover, the prevailing practice of early arranged marriages results in many boys having to assume the burdens of fatherhood before the age of eighteen.[166] Adopting a broader perspective, Naoroji posits that the intellectual abilities of the Asians are apparent from the high quality of the literature produced by Asiatic authors over the centuries. Against Crawfurd, who had summarily dismissed all Asiatic literature as of little worth, he adduces numerous examples of outstanding Arabian, Persian, Indian, and Chinese authors and he reminds his audience of the high esteem of Asiatic literature among the foremost European orientalists, such as William Jones, John Malcolm, and Max Müller. That most Europeans are ignorant of Asian literature is explained by the paucity of good translations and by the small number of Europeans proficient in Asiatic languages. The greater part of Persian poetry, for example, is not available in European translations.[167]

Crawfurd’s next argument depicted the Asiatics as people who are not truthful and who do not honor their commitments. Naoroji objects that the major Asian religions, just like Christianity, teach their followers a deep respect for the truth. Next, Naoroji cites several European observers who have concluded that immorality occurs more frequently in Europe than in India. The Hindus, he goes on to say, have always been known for their honesty in commercial transactions (let us recall that Anquetil Duperron was of the same opinion). He notes that British colonial officials had reported the traditional honesty of the villagers as being eroded by their dealings with the British. Naoroji adds that many complaints about the mendacity of the common people are related to the corruption of the local judiciary. Obviously, one should stamp out those abuses, “instead of merely raising up the cry of untruthfulness against the whole nation.”[168]

The accusation of polygamy is also rejected by Naoroji. The Parsees, he contends, abide by a strict monogamy. Zoroaster disapproved of polygamy, and generally accords man and woman an equal dignity. The polygamy and the low status of women among the Hindus are acknowledged by Naoroji, but he adds that Hindu women are highly respected. Finally he cites the example of the Mormons in North America to remind his audience that polygamy is also found among Europeans. Naoroji’s defensive observations on the Indian gender regimes are less convincing than his defense of the intellectual and moral equality of Asians and Europeans. He had himself participated in a campaign against polygamy among the Parsees. Moreover, his disagreement with his mother about taking a second wife demonstrates that he was well aware of the occurrence of the custom among the Parsees. His discussion of the gender regime of the Hindus avoids the issue of widow burning. Finally, the gender regime of the Muslims is not discussed at all.

Thus far Naoroji has defended the Asians against Crawfurd’s criticisms. Now he begins to talk back. Like Frederick Douglass, he performs an inversion of the gaze. The observations of a Parsee gentleman on the character of the English provide the appropriate source material. The blunt condemnations of Asiatic culture he daily encountered had impelled this gentleman to judge the English in a like manner. Wherever he came, he saw dishonesty, swindling, debauchery, alcoholism, social destitution, prostitution, and thievery. The English, this gentleman complained, are always talking of fair play, but what we have seen of their doings in India is mainly an ugly mélange of arrogance and avarice. Naoroji invites his audience to reflect on the Parsee gentleman’s categorical censure of English morality and mentality:

Studying the English character in this manner, the gentleman formed his opinion that the English were the most hypocritical, the most selfish and unprincipled people, and had no right to boast of higher morality and integrity. Now, if such evidence as Mr. Crawfurd relies upon be conclusive as to the character of the natives of India, I do not see how this Parsee gentleman’s conclusions cannot be also admitted as proved.[169]

Crawfurd’s reasoning, Naoroji concludes, makes for distrust and its ultimate result will be racial war. Unfortunately, the opinions of numerous Britons in India are just as prejudiced and superficial, albeit less systematically argued. Routinely, they resort to a double standard of morality: “Every wrong act of the native is at once condemned as innate in the native; similar acts of Europeans are of course only individual delinquencies, or capable of explanation.”[170] In such circumstances, Naoroji warns, the contacts between Europeans and Indians can never be sincere and cordial, and future attempts to ameliorate Indian society will founder on distrust and mutual incomprehension. Here we meet with the core of Naoroji’s variety of the anthropological turn. Time and again, he incites his British audience to consider how things look when viewed from the other side. He ask them to imagine how they would react to some stranger addressing them in the insulting language they use unthinkingly when talking to, or about, Indians.

Naoroji knew this from personal experience. On a visit to his home country, some years before, he had experienced the reaction of a British official in an incident about the right of way on a street. When he and a member of the Cama family politely requested to be spared the rude and insulting invective of the officer, the latter tried to hit them with his stick. When the two Parsees took the Englishman to court, the judge put the latter in the right. A higher court overturned the sentence and ruled that the demeanor of the Englishman amounted to assault, but fined him only one rupee.[171] Such incidents were quite common in British India. Crawfurd’s theory of the inferior Asiatic race was the theoretical counterpart of the daily racism of colonial society.

Coming to the issue of historical progress, Naoroji readily concedes that Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century has attained a higher level of development than India. In his opinion, however, that is not a timeless trait of a putative “Asiatic race” but a historical contingency. For centuries, the Hindus have had to endure foreign rulers—first the Mughals, then the French, and finally the British. Now in the 1860s, “[the Hindu] has not yet fully recovered from the staggering blow of the most extraordinary revolution by which a small nation in the far west has become the ruler of his vast country.”[172] Naoroji depicts the British conquest of India as a devastating culture shock. Not only the popular classes, he warns, but also the intellectuals and politicians are still mentally numbed by the enormity of the European maelstrom that seems to be carrying everything before it. The educated Indians, however, are beginning to realize “that the rights of intellect and justice are the same for all” and that justice shall be victorious in the end.[173]

Naoroji does not deny that there are many corrupt and despotic states in Asia, but once again he invites his English readers to invert the gaze and take a dispassionate look at their own civilization. What about Europe? Is it not true that Poland still groans under a despotic regime? And was Italy ten years ago not in the same predicament? Crawfurd’s comparisons, Naoroji argues, are biased. He compares the most developed regions of Europe with the Asiatic old regime and then draws conclusion about the “essence” of Asia and Europe. The great diversity of conditions within Europe and within Asia he passes over in silence. Naoroji’s principal objection to the racial theory of history is its determinism. A philosophy of history, he contends, should leave room for contingency: “Had it not been for taxed tea, we do not know whether there would have been a United States now. Had the confederates been victorious, what would have been the future history of the United States and of slavery? Had Britain been connected with the continent of Europe, it is probable that it might have had a different history, either a large European empire, or a province of some other.”[174]

According to Naoroji, the history of no part of the world was determined by racial factors. India’s progress was not impeded by an alleged racial destiny but by economic and political factors susceptible to human intervention. The most pernicious one, discussed by Naoroji in numerous publications, was the systematic draining away of money and produce from India to Britain.[175] Naoroji highly valued the high level of European civilization and he sincerely believed in the civilizing mission of the British Empire, but to him that mission was not a carte blanche for economic exploitation and racial arrogance but rather a sacred duty and a benchmark for the colonial state. To Naoroji, the civilizing mission did not represent a tangible reality but a solemn pledge that had to be honored in the future.

Thus far that had not happened. The 1857 revolt had instilled fear and diffidence in the British. Cordial exchanges between British and Indians became more exceptional than ever. In a discussion of the positive and negative results of British rule, drafted a few years after his critique of Crawfurd, Naoroji summed up the positive accomplishments: abolition of suttee and infanticide, allowing remarriage of Hindu widows, education for boys and girls (though yet partial), peace and order, liberty of the press, railways, good administration, and equal justice, though on the last point he added that it was sometimes vitiated by partiality to the Europeans. On the negative side of the balance, Naoroji mentions two main deficits, the first being political: “Repeated breach of pledges to give the natives a fair and reasonable share in the higher administration of their own country, which has much shaken confidence in the good faith of the British word.” The second concerns the political economy of colonial rule. The British tax India to the utmost, but the revenues are not invested in the development of India, and the final result comes down to an impoverishment of the country. British rule is not tyrannical and excessively violent, except when it feels itself threatened, as in 1857. Even so, it is a burden. Naoroji reminds his readers that the natives call the British system sakar ki churi, the “knife of sugar.”[176] It may look sweet, but its final results feel bitter and hard.

In December 1885, Naoroji took part in the founding convention of the Indian National Congress in Bombay. All of the founding members were influenced by his weltanschauung.[177] In 1886, the Liberal Party nominated him as their candidate for a seat in the House of Commons. By then, the platform of the Liberal Party included home rule for Ireland, England’s first colony. To Naoroji Ireland and India were comparable cases. The adversaries of home rule maintained that the Irish people were incapable of governing themselves. In his election campaign, Naoroji countered them with an argument he also used about India. Once more, his rhetorical strategy turns on an inversion of the gaze:

I put to them one simple question. Will Englishmen for a single day submit to laws made for them by those who are not Englishmen? … What is our own, however bad it is, is dearer to us than what is given to us by another, however high and good he may be. No one race or people can ever legislate satisfactorily for another race.[178]

No well-informed observer could miss the reference to India. National self-determination, Naoroji is saying here, is in the end more valuable than any civilizing mission. Unilateral exercise of power, however noble its intentions, always corrupts the powerful as well as their subjects.

Most British conservatives shared Crawfurd’s mindset. Their claims to represent a higher civilization were metonymically linked to deep instincts of racial superiority. Almost as a matter of course, Naoroji’s campaign called forth racist sentiments and language. Never before had a non-European stood for a seat in Westminster. The Tory Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, referred to Naoroji as a “black man,” perhaps not “exactly black,” but yet “a man of another race.”[179] What Salisbury really wanted to say was “nonwhite.” The racist utterances of the prime minister met with widespread critique and ridicule, but nonetheless they tell us something about the mood of a sizable part of the political class and the electorate. On the other side of the fence, the Liberal politician Herbert Gladstone remarked that he knew Naoroji and Salisbury quite well, but that in his opinion Salisbury was the blackest of the two. Antoinette Burton has argued that Naoroji’s entry into British home politics compelled all concerned to rethink the boundary between “us” and “them.”[180] Naoroji lost the election in 1886, but six years later he became the first Indian MP. He delivered the oath with his hand on the Avesta, the scripture of Zoroaster. His faith in the British civilizing mission slowly faded away, and ultimately he concluded that self-government was the only viable solution for India. And yet he always clung to the hope that India could remain associated with the British Empire.

The Contradictory Civilizing Mission of John Stuart Mill

Like his father James, the well-known British liberal philosopher and politician John Stuart Mill spent the greater part of his life in the service of the East India Company. Also like his father he never visited India. Unlike Dadabhai Naoroji or John Crawfurd, he had no firsthand experience of the encounter between the British and their Indian subjects. While for Naoroji and Crawfurd India represented a lived experience, for Mill it was a theoretical construct. For us, Mill is of interest because he justified the colonial civilizing mission as an integral component of his radical-liberal theory of representative government. In his famous no-harm principle, formulated in On Liberty (1859), he limits the authority of the state to restrict individual liberty to cases where the unrestrained exercise of liberty would harm others. As his script for enlightened despotic rule by the colonial state, presented in Considerations on Representative Government (1861), seems to contradict the no-harm principle, Mill is a good test case for the consistency of a liberal theory of colonial rule.

In 1823, at the age of seventeen, Mill began his career as a clerk in India House. When the East India Company was dissolved, after the insurrection of 1857, he took early retirement. Mill’s appraisal of Indian civilization was mainly derived from his father’s History of British India. Beyond that, he made no extensive study of the languages and the culture of India.

The ultimate foundation of Mill’s vision of colonial issues was Enlightenment philosophical history. He opened his influential Principles of Political Economy (1848) with an outline of the four stages of the history of humanity. However, he typified the fourth stage as “industrial” instead of “commercial” as Smith and Turgot had done in the eighteenth century.[181] In hot climates, Mill further asserted, the population is incapable of “sustained and persevering labour” and lacks the prudential foresight needed for the establishment of sound political institutions. It is no coincidence, he went on to say, that military strength, industrial energy, and intellectual power are mostly concentrated in the northern regions of the world.[182] Of all the northern nations, England was the most civilized; moreover, it cultivated the highest understanding of liberty. In some cases, Mill advocated British humanitarian intervention to safeguard liberty against tyranny.[183]

Mill cherished liberty, but he was less sanguine about equality. In the wake of Bentham, he relegated the idea of human rights to the dustbin of empty metaphysics. In the matter of the electoral franchise he advocated plural votes for the better educated and more intelligent upper strata of society. On the other hand, he stressed that a good political regime should include the greatest possible number of inhabitants in the citizenry, because people could only acquire the art of sound political judgment through actual participation. In Considerations on Representative Government, written after he left India House, Mill seeks to demonstrate that representative government is the best political regime. He resolutely breaks with the Aristotelian classification of regimes that had dominated European political thought since medieval times. According to Mill, aristocracy and monarchy can be left out of account. In modern nineteenth-century society only two political regimes are serious candidates for our allegiance: representative democracy and professional bureaucracy.[184]

The cardinal virtues of bureaucratic government, Mill states, are reliability and professional expertise, but the disease which invariably afflicts bureaucracies is routine. Left to its own devices a bureaucracy inevitably turns into a “pedantocracy.”[185] To counterbalance the ossification of the state machinery one needs freedom, civic virtue, public debate, and accountability, qualities that can only flourish under a representative government. This accords with a key argument in On Liberty where Mill had emphatically stated that the discovery of the truth and rational problem-solving are unattainable without free public debate.[186] Accordingly, freedom of expression was not only an intrinsic value but also a condition of just and efficient governance. To anticipate any and all critiques of his encomium of representative government, Mill presents a refutation of the theory of enlightened despotism.

Let us consider, Mill conjectures, the best thinkable example of enlightened despotism. Let us, then, take the hypothetical case of a wise and omniscient despot, who is, moreover, immune to the vices of selfishness and corruption. In short, a person who is immune to the seductions of unlimited power, which would, according to Herodotus, Aristotle, and Montesquieu, unfailingly transform the good monarch into a despicable tyrant. Mill expresses his chief objection against the rule of this superman as follows:

What should we then have? One man of superhuman mental activity managing the entire affairs of a mentally passive people. Their passivity is implied in the very idea of absolute power. The nation as a whole, and every individual composing it, are without any potential voice in their own destiny. They exercise no will in respect to their collective interests. All is decided for them by a will not of their own, which it is legally a crime for them to disobey. What sort of human beings can be formed under such a regimen? What development can either their thinking or their active faculties attain under it?[187]

According to Mill, the ideal despot smothers the mental energy of his subjects, and finally destroys their faculty of moral judgment. “The food of feeling is action,” he declares, and whoever is deprived of all liberty and autonomy cannot be said to have agency in a meaningful sense of the word. Consequently, such a person cannot cultivate his or her intellectual and moral capacities. Furthermore, the more perfect the despot becomes, the more harmful the consequences will be. A perfect despotism inevitably results in the withering away of the intelligence of the population.

The difficulty is that Mill’s recipe for the British civilizing mission in India is precisely a theory of good and wise despotic authority. He extensively discusses the social conditions in which a representative regime is impracticable: the people must be habituated to obey the directives of the state officials, and they must be capable and ready to support representative institutions and to fulfill their civic duties. As a likely obstacle to these political virtues, Mill mentions an “extreme spirit of locality” he attributes to the “Asiatic village.” The great passivity resulting from enduring despotic governance presents us with another limiting factor. Moreover there are in-between cases where a representative regime is feasible but not optimal. Mill thinks of peoples who, “in order to advance in civilization,” have to learn lessons from a more advanced people. In such cases representative government may obstruct progress.[188] It seems clear that this refers to the colonies. In a separate chapter on the British Empire, Mill returns to the subject. To begin with, he distinguishes between colonies “of European race” and colonies where the British rule non-European peoples. In the white settler colonies, he recommends representative government, but in the second case he advises against it.[189]

India is, of course, the chief example of the second category. In India, Mill explains, we encounter “conditions of society in which a vigorous despotism is in itself the best mode of government for training the people in what is specifically wanting to render them capable of a higher civilization.”[190] To function smoothly such a colonial despotism should not become a tool of party politics and electioneering in Britain. The best course is to install a professional body of experts who are well informed about Indian affairs. Mill avers that India House, his erstwhile employer, offered exactly what was needed. As matter of fact, the colonial government after 1858 came close to Mill’s formula: some four thousand British civil servants ruled more than two hundred million Indians. If we judge that government in its ideal form, without taking into account racism, incompetence, and corruption, it comes close to the perfect despot so brilliantly torn to pieces by Mill in an early chapter.

It is an irony of history that Thomas Munro, a colonial official from the generation of Mill’s father, had expressed his misgivings about the forcible imposition of European civilization in India. He invited his audience to imagine what would happen if the people of Britain were governed in a like manner:

Let Britain be subjugated by a foreign power tomorrow, let the people be excluded from all share in the government, from public honours, from every office of high trust or emolument, and let them in every situation be considered as unworthy of trust, and all their knowledge and all their literature … would not save them from becoming in another generation or two, a low minded, deceitful, and dishonest race.[191]

Munro belonged to the numerous colonial administrators of the old school who did not expect much from “Anglicizing” the peoples of India. In his famous “Minute on Education” (1835), that would shape the educational system in India for the rest of the colonial era, Macaulay expressed the Anglicist’s goal as the formation of a “class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”[192] Writing shortly after Queen Victoria’s 1858 proclamation, one would expect Mill to discuss the issue of admitting educated Indians to the colonial administration, but in a fairly long chapter on “the government of dependencies by a free state” he is completely silent about it. In this way, the historical moment of Indian maturity would forever remain a receding target.

The distinction Mill makes between white settler colonies, fit for self-government, and the rest of the colonies, unfit for self-rule, demonstrates that the global color line was an integral part of his political thought. His discussion of Indian affairs defines the condition of India as a lack of civilization, but he does not even begin to acknowledge that feelings of racial superiority among the white civil servants governing India might be part of the problem. In another case, however, Mill was well aware of the racist nature of colonial government. In 1865, Edward John Eyre, the governor of Jamaica, put down an insurrection with exceptional severity. When the revolt was over he had hundreds of people executed by summary justice. Mill acted as chairman of a committee that publicly condemned the unnecessary killing and sought Eyre’s prosecution. The governor was removed from his post but did not have to answer for the executions he had ordered. Mill commented that the British public appeared unwilling to endorse judicial action against British administrators “for abuses of power against negroes and mulattos.”[193] It is not credible that Mill was ignorant of the mass executions after the suppression of the 1857 Indian “Mutiny.” In his autobiography, however, he discusses—and regrets—the abolition of the East India Company but does not even mention the insurrection that brought about the demise of the company.[194]

The difference between Mill and Naoroji is that the latter had personally experienced the racist arrogance and contempt for the “natives” of the British in India. Mill lacked such experience, while the colonial civilizing mission was virtually self-evident for him. To Naoroji, however, it represented a high aspiration frequently invoked by the colonial administrators but seldom practiced on the ground.

Mill’s theory of colonial government is also at odds with his advocacy of women’s emancipation. In an early essay on marriage and divorce, drafted in 1832, Mill had declared that considering “the best law of marriage, we are to suppose that women already are, what they would be in the best state of society.”[195] In The Subjection of Women he flatly states that the present customs and defects of women are the result of thousands of years of dependency and miseducation, and therefore no reliable indication of the real “nature” of women.[196] In the case of women, Mill believed that centuries of subjection did not preclude immediate emancipation. There is a structural analogy between the condition of women and the predicament of a people that has had to cope with enduring subjection and arbitrary rule (as Frederick Douglass had underlined in the 1840s), but Mill is apparently unaware of it.

We have seen that the French revolutionaries of the 1790s extended citizenship beyond the color line but squarely refused to bring down the gender barrier. Mill, on the other hand, was an ardent champion of women’s emancipation but he stopped at the color line, which he identified with the boundary of civilization. In this, he was representative of a broad trend in the Western politics of citizenship in the 1870–1940 decades. In particular in the Protestant nations the civil and political emancipation of women made significant advances.

By 1930, women had acquired the vote and access to higher education in North America, Europe, and the European white settler colonies, with the exception of a number of Catholic countries, such as France, Italy, and Belgium.

Gender and the European Civilizing Mission

Even so, the struggle of women for citizenship was not entirely confined to the white West. In Turkey, women got the vote in 1934, as part of Ataturk’s secularist modernization package. They also gained access to higher education. In Egypt, however, the Wafd party, which in 1919 organized a massive revolt against British rule, refused to grant women the franchise in the constitutional “democracy” Egypt soon thereafter became under British tutelage. Consequently, the Egyptian women who had participated in the revolt felt betrayed by the male Wafd politicians.

The emancipation struggle of Egyptian women illustrates the contradictions of the European civilizing mission in matters of gender, as well as the ambiguities of the Islamic responses to it. As we have seen, Enlightenment philosophical history regarded the condition of women as an index of progress, but also warned that the liberty of women should be moderated by their male guardians. The European colonial powers generally regarded the gender regime in their dependencies as “backward.” According to Lord Cromer, the British consul-general in Cairo and the de facto ruler of Egypt at the turn of the century, the position of women in Egypt was “a fatal obstacle to the attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of European civilization.”[197] Cromer’s opinion echoed a long tradition of Orientalist theorizing blaming Islam for all the defects of North African and Middle Eastern societies. To most Europeans, the Islamic veil symbolized backwardness and a lack of rationality. Even so, Cromer’s stance was contradictory in at least two respects. In the first place, while seemingly “feminist” in Egypt, he was well known for his opposition to feminism in Britain. As Leila Ahmed has noted, Cromer was a founding member of the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage.[198] However, this personal inconsistency was less consequential than the policies he implemented or, rather, failed to implement in Egypt.

As in other parts of the non-Western world in the late nineteenth century, middle-class Egyptian women and men were beginning to question the traditional gender regime. Their ideas partly converged with the European critique of Oriental gender backwardness, but at the same time they took part in an indigenous upsurge of reformist thought and action that had started in late Ottoman times. Some reformers attempted to show that Islam did not condemn the emancipation of women. The Guide for Girls and Boys published by Al-Tahtawi in the 1870s, before the British occupied Egypt, posited that men and women only differed in the parts of their bodies “pertaining to femininity and masculinity” but that women’s minds were not inferior to those of men, so that all professions could be opened to them. In 1875, almost 900 girls were enrolled in government schools while more than 5,000 were attending missionary schools.[199] In the 1890s Egyptian women founded periodicals calling for more rights and education for women. They published figures on literacy—0.5 percent for women and 3.6 percent for men—and appealed to the Cromer administration to set up more modern schools for women and men. Upper-class Egyptian women traveled to Europe, where they often appeared unveiled or in European dress in public. Women also started to enter professional careers in medicine and teaching.[200]

Undoubtedly, these nascent feminist ideas were indebted to European examples taken up by the Egyptian intellectual elite in which literate women were active participants. That is not to say, however, that they owed anything to the professed civilizing mission of the British colonial administration. As a matter of fact, Lord Cromer reacted to the call for educational reform and more opportunities for women by raising tuition fees. The upshot was that in 1914 fewer girls attended state schools than in the 1890s. By contrast, more than 5,000 girls were enrolled in American mission schools. Ultimately, the wellspring of Cromer’s reluctance to make education more accessible was political. His stint of office in India had made him wary of introducing Western-style education because he feared it would give rise to nationalist ideas. Consequently, he considered it a political risk rather than an opportunity for implementing a civilizing mission.

In the public debates about these issues feminist ideas of emancipation and equality began to circulate in Egyptian society. A male defender of women’s rights, Qasim Amin, is often considered Egypt’s first feminist. Tahrir al-Mar’a (The Liberation of Women), the book he published in 1899, occasioned heated and passionate polemics. Amin advocated a cautious westernization combined with a liberal reading of the Sharia. The face-covering veil, he contended, was actually a pre-Islamic tradition. The usual argument that the veil represented a guarantee against seduction was turned around by Amin:

How strange! If men feared that women would be tempted, why were not men ordered to wear the veil and conceal their faces from women? … Are men to be regarded as weaker than women in controlling their desires?[201]

Amin regarded the veil as the visible symbol of female seclusion, the confinement of women to the female quarters of the home, a condition that excluded them from civil society and stunted their minds. Women, or at least elite women, should acquire knowledge about the history of various countries, the natural sciences, politics, culture, and religious beliefs, but they would only be able to cultivate their knowledge in a useful manner when they could freely move about in civil society.[202]

Amin had obviously accepted much of the British critique of Islamic and Arabic culture. He can thus be characterized as a “westernizer.” According to Leila Ahmed, Amin’s strategy conceived of emancipation as something to be imposed on women by male authorities. It is true that The Liberation of Women ends with a call to found an “organization of fathers” who will pledge to educate their daughters to become free and responsible members of Egyptian society and who will assist the government to change the laws that oppress women. But that is not the whole story. The laws, Amin submits, will “guarantee women’s rights within the limits of Islamic law,” but his rules of exegesis are so liberal that this limitation is not very significant.[203] Moreover, Amin again and again blames traditionalist men and despotic political regimes for the sad plight of Egyptian women. The thrust of his book definitely goes beyond an enlistment of women to further the progress of men.

Amin’s book interweaves two discourses. The first is a plea for the liberation and improved education of women as a necessary precondition for the modernization of Egypt under male guidance. But the second focuses on the intrinsic justice of granting women rights that go beyond their function as mothers of a new generation. In The New Woman (1900), written to refute his numerous critics, Amin reports enthusiastically about the increasing political agency of women in the American state of Wyoming where they had won the vote in 1869. He also cited John Stuart Mill’s eulogy of Harriet Taylor to underline the intellectual capacities of women.[204] Like the Enlightenment thinkers discussed earlier he uses the condition of women as a benchmark of progress, but his vision of the future of women’s rights is more open-ended. In the early twentieth century, however, all policies advocating the emancipation of women met with aggressive antimodernist responses such as the antifeminism of the Wafd party and the fundamentalism of the Muslim Brotherhood. The ensuing polarization about gender was inescapable and made it very difficult for women to develop an autonomous Islamic feminism, a predicament that has persisted into our time.[205]

The Global Color Line and the European Civilizing Mission

In the nineteenth century modern equality became an increasingly powerful idea, both in Europe and worldwide. But we have also witnessed the ascendancy of modern inequality, in particular scientific racism. Attempts to extend equality beyond the color line met with tenacious resistance by white people everywhere, but especially in the colonial empires and in North America.

The abolition of slavery was of great historical moment, but in no part of the world did it result in the acceptance of black Africans as equals. The history of the United States after the Civil War demonstrates that with particular acuity. After Reconstruction the efforts of the North to impose some measure of racial equality on the South petered out, and the Southern states were allowed to disenfranchise African Americans and to introduce a system of apartheid. Everything was done to reduce the black population to a servile status. Black Americans who openly resisted met with white terror. They could be lynched, whereupon their murderers were not prosecuted or were acquitted by all-white juries. The constitutional rights of African Americans were effectively nullified, because a person with a black skin could seldom take a white adversary to court. Apartheid laws were less complete in the rest of the United States, but segregation was also rampant in the North. Eventually, most states outlawed or nullified racially mixed marriages.

In the European colonial empires, the situation was basically similar. Persons of dark complexion were everywhere subject to humiliating laws and regulations. Nowhere could a colored person successfully contest the racial arrogance and violence of the whites. That is what Dadabhai Naoroji had in mind when he deplored the lack of open and cordial contacts between Europeans and Indians. In the radical phase of the French Revolution, people of color and black Africans in Saint-Domingue acquired political rights, but under Napoleon this precarious equality was reversed and slavery reasserted. Only Jewish emancipation was maintained, but in an increasingly anti-Semitic environment. In later histories and commemorations of the French Revolution Jewish emancipation was included, but the Haitian Revolution disappeared from European memory and historiography, only to return at the close of the twentieth century.

At the same time, the Europeans became increasingly sensitive to affronts against themselves. Lydia Liu tells the fascinating story of British reactions to a Chinese term for foreigners or “men from afar.” In the treaty of Tianjin, imposed on China in 1858, after the Second Opium War, the British inserted an article stipulating that “henceforth the character ‘Yi’ shall not be applied to the Government or subjects of Her Britannic Majesty in any Chinese official document issued by the Chinese authorities.” The English, who in the eighteenth century had taken no offense at the use of the character, now took it to mean “barbarians,” a term of abuse.[206] The nonwhite Chinese were thus debarred from questioning the civilized status of the white English, but the treaty said nothing about the terms the English used when speaking about the Chinese. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds have recently shown that the abolition of slavery and the rise of anticolonialism called forth a new global sense of whiteness, an imagined community of all whites, and particularly all white men. They see it as “a transnational form of racial identification” that sought to put the “natives” in their place in the colonies, especially the white settler colonies, and to curb nonwhite immigration to what were now dubbed “white man’s lands.” Driven by racial fear and white pride, the imposition of a global color line accelerated toward the end of the nineteenth century.[207]

Even so, white supremacy manifested itself in different postures and mentalities. Naoroji was invited by the London Ethnological Society, of which he was a member, to deliver a critical response to Crawfurd’s lecture on the inferiority of the Asiatic race. In a North American setting such an intellectual encounter was unthinkable. Frederick Douglass regularly addressed audiences of white abolitionists, but he never got the opportunity of an open intellectual exchange of any sort with representatives of American scientific racism. When Douglass visited England he was at once struck by the absence of the daily racist rudeness that pervaded American society. The argumentation and rhetoric of Douglass and Naoroji reflected the different social settings of their lives. Douglass felt the need to demonstrate extensively that the “negro” is a human being, while Naoroji assumed as a matter of course that his British audience would take for granted the humanity of the Asians. Douglass had to confront slavery, while Naoroji, perhaps overly optimistic, regarded slavery as a thing of the past. Even so, there are also important parallels. Both Douglass and Naoroji deployed the anthropological turn, inviting their audiences to look at themselves through the eyes of the “other.” In the middle decades of the nineteenth century such inversions of the gaze were probably less common than in the Enlightenment, but we shall see that a critical “anthropological” imagination reasserted itself toward the end of the century, both in antiracist and anticolonial literature and in the new scientific discourse of cultural anthropology.

Most languages of equality were mixed. Besides Enlightenment modern equality, most antiracists and advocates of equal rights invoked a religious language of equality before God. In the Haitian Revolution Enlightenment modern equality was deployed side by side with two religious languages of equality, Christian and African. According to strict philosophical logic, a contradiction between religious and secular languages of equality could be construed, but in a political rhetoric of addition speakers as well as audiences appreciated the vigor and appeal of their combination. Empathy with the downtrodden and oppressed was likewise often invoked, frequently in combination with the anthropological turn, inviting white audiences to imagine how things looked in a nonwhite perspective, and turning the cold gaze of reason on the defects and crimes of white people. Likewise, they encouraged their peoples to remember the glorious achievements of non-Europeans and nonwhites, as in Douglass’s insistence that the ancient Egyptians were Africans and Naoroji’s invocation of the sublimity of Hindu and Persian literature.

Opponents of discrimination frequently acknowledged the superior technology, military might, and social organization of the Europeans, but did not accept it as evidence of white racial superiority. Instead, they argued that all grandeur was historically contingent. World history, they recalled, was a story of the rise and fall of empires and civilizations. While it might be true that in the nineteenth century European civilization enjoyed global supremacy, white preeminence would not last forever, and sooner or later the time would come when other peoples and civilizations would surpass the Europeans. This argumentation harked back to the cyclical temporality of the historians of antiquity, but often the same authors presented arguments that assumed an Enlightenment developmental temporality. Let us recall Douglass’s vision of an intensification of worldwide communication that would promote mutual understanding among peoples from different complexions and climes, and ultimately lead people all over the world to realize that they belonged to the brotherhood of humanity. Such reasoning was not predicated on a temporality of rise and decline, but on a futurity of convergence and cooperation.

It is important to see that this seemingly utopian vision developed in tandem with a globalization of anticolonialism. From the end of the nineteenth century, Indian nationalists were not only, and perhaps not even primarily, found in India. Indian intellectuals and activists in London, South Africa, the Malay Peninsula, Japan, and in several European capitals were in regular contact with nationalist leaders in India itself. In all those localities, Indian nationalists exchanged experiences and ideas with anticolonial intellectuals and organizers from other Asian countries, such as Indonesia and Indochina. Such exchanges naturally stimulated visions of an international solidarity of all colonized peoples against their European overlords.[208]

Viewed in the context of the emergence of anticolonialism, the notion of a civilizing mission admitted of different interpretations, and could even be turned against doctrines of racial supremacy. Generally speaking, the doctrine of a European civilizing mission was more open and flexible than scientific racism. We have encountered it in three varieties, represented by John Crawfurd, Dadabhai Naoroji, and John Stuart Mill. Crawfurd’s version is grafted upon a racial vision of superior Europeans and inferior Asians. Though his racism is biocultural rather than biological, it remains a deterministic theory of history. Crawfurd’s world is a static universe in which only Europe has a history worth considering. The hierarchy of Europeans and Asians, he argues, has endured for more than two millennia and will persist in the future. His doctrine leaves little room for the equal dignity of Asians, let alone for decolonization. The only future Asians can hope for is limited progress under European tutelage.

Mill’s version goes beyond such racial determinism. All peoples, he believes, can take the road to progress. Mill earnestly attempts to integrate the civilizing mission in his radical-liberal political theory. For all that, his doctrine of the nonage of entire peoples has a racist connotation, as the immature peoples are invariably identified with the global community of the nonwhite. In Mill’s vision of history, however carefully formulated, a global color line carves up humanity into culturally superior and inferior peoples. Moreover, his own refutation of the scenario of the perfect despot cannot be reconciled with his pedagogical imperialism. On top of that, his theory of the nonage of nonwhite peoples is inconsistent with his unyielding critique of any and all justifications of the nonage of women in a civilized society. This inner contradiction in Mill’s theory reflects a structural tension in world politics at the turn of the new century. Women’s emancipation advanced throughout the Western world and commenced in several Asian countries, but the global color line resisted all attempts to extend civil and political equality to peoples of a “dark” complexion. Consequently, feminists in Asia and Africa were caught in an agonizing double bind. The white civilizing mission used the liberation of women to demonstrate the “backwardness” of African and Asian societies while simultaneously maintaining their subjection as “people of color.” Moreover, indigenous traditionalists could depict feminism as a Trojan horse of the Western powers.

Naoroji transforms the imperial civilizing mission from a racially arrogant conceit into a demanding ideal. His confrontation of the beautiful theory with the harsh reality brings to mind Multatuli’s critique of Dutch colonial rule in Indonesia, expressed in his famous novel, Max Havelaar (1860). Havelaar, Multatuli’s autobiographically crafted hero, is a colonial civil servant who seriously attempts to honor the official promise of just and impartial governance. Multatuli has him deliver a biting speech to the Indonesian village heads in his district, promising that he shall protect the common people against “extortion and oppression.”[209] But in the end, Havelaar proves unable to honor his promise and is disgraced and unseated by his superiors. Put in this perspective, the colonial doctrine of good governance—in 1860, a Dutch civilizing mission had not yet emerged—is turned into a critical argument Asian nationalists can use to confront their European masters with their own grandiloquent ideals. When it becomes clear that the Europeans are unwilling or unable to honor their promises, the road is cleared for anticolonialism.

Naoroji’s observations on Irish home rule go part of the way. His thesis that no nation or race possesses the ability to make adequate laws for another nation or race calls into question the legitimacy of the entire colonial project. Add to that the turning around of the civilizing mission and we see the dawning contours of an autonomous anticolonial project. That is not to say, however, that Naoroji turns his back on Britain. He would always cling to the conviction that India has much to learn from the British. In that respect, he does not profess a strict equality between Asians and Europeans. His ideas about the necessary “modernization” of India show some affinities with Karl Marx’s opinion that the people of India, now that the British had awakened them from their world-historical slumber and put them into contact with Europäisches Wissen, would in the future prove able to liberate themselves from the British yoke.[210] Later European socialists often have expressed similar judgments of colonialism.

Naoroji, however, is rather more in a hurry than Marx. He repeats again and again that the English must give up their pedagogical arrogance before it is too late. According to Naoroji, the learning process of the Indians must become a dialogue between equal partners instead of a forcible imposition of a made-in-England imperial “Truth.” Noaroji never took the step to a demand of unconditional Indian self-determination, but all the components of such a vision can be found in his speeches and writings. That makes him an exemplary transitional figure in the emergence of the radical anticolonial critique that was to become a global trend after the turn of the century.

8

THE GLOBALIZATION OF EQUALITY

IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY white global hegemony attained its all-time high. Between 1880 and 1914 the size of the colonial empires increased at breakneck speed. Except for Ethiopia and Liberia, Africa was carved up and divided among the European powers. In South Asia and Indonesia the remaining autonomous interior spaces and principalities were “pacified” and brought under colonial control. China, Japan, Iran, and the Ottoman Empire escaped colonization but had to suffer humiliating encroachments on their sovereignty. After the Spanish-American War the United States became a colonial power in the Philippines, the Pacific, and the Caribbean. On the eve of the First World War, white rule directly affected the lives of nearly 600 million dark-skinned people, amounting to more than 30 percent of the world’s population.[1]

In matters of common humanity and equality, the 1880–1940 decades present a Janus face. Its inequality side is marked by the ascendancy of the color line and scientific racism; its equality side by the growing power of anticolonialism, antiracism, and democratic ideas in Asia, Latin America, North America, and Africa. In Europe itself, democratic ideas gained much ground until the 1920s, but declined almost everywhere in the interwar years. On the other hand, the Russian Revolution opened up new expectations of global emancipation to the peoples of Asia and Africa.

The color line became the major global frontier, within as well as between nations. The prestige of scientific racism attained its zenith in the decades between the American Civil War and the Second World War. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, white race consciousness became a feature of global politics, a powerful creed that underpinned all European empires. It was especially virulent in the white settler colonies. One of its causes lay in the change of the gender composition of the settler societies. Before the nineteenth century most “overseas” Europeans were single men who “took” native women as concubines or, more rarely, as spouses. From the mid-nineteenth century onward European settlers increasingly married European women and founded white families in the colonies. The change resulted in a new language of inequality that tended to draw a boundary between the “true whites” and all others, whether natives, people of mixed blood, or immigrants from other nonwhite regions. The white family came to be the linchpin of the new colonial order while most varieties of racially transgressive sexuality, in particular when European women were involved, became disreputable and frequently illegal, a trend analyzed in a classic study by the American historical anthropologist Ann Stoler.[2]

The other face of the Janus shows the emergence of new and powerful criticisms of white supremacy and scientific racism, and an increasing participation of nonwhites, members of minority groups, and women in the global debates on equality and cultural difference. In his treatise on the equality of the human races (1885), the Haitian diplomat and anthropologist Anténor Firmin noted that European ethnologists had not managed to reach agreement on racial boundaries and concluded that “race” was an arbitrary carving up of humanity without any solid scientific grounding.[3] Even so, the sway of race thinking over the minds of countless people remained one of the most powerful global ideologies up to the Second World War. The champions of universal equality were well aware of the might and splendor of white Europe and America. Their voices rang out in hopeful and defiant expectation, but also bespoke the anxiety of people who were not quite sure that they could face down a ruthless and heavily armed adversary.

W. E. B. Du Bois, the most perspicuous of the African American thinkers in this period, gave expression to both attitudes. In The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, he anticipates “a new human unity, pulling the ends of the earth nearer, and all men, black, yellow, and white.” In the same pages, however, he also evokes another human unity, brought about by oppression and conquest. Seen through the eyes of nonwhites, Du Bois intimates, progress is profoundly ambiguous:

So here we stand among thoughts of human unity, even through conquest and slavery; the inferiority of black men, even if forced by fraud; a shriek in the night for the freedom of men who themselves are not yet sure of their right to demand it.[4]

In Asia and Africa, it took the critics of colonialism a long time to liberate themselves from the spellbinding paradigm of the European civilizing mission. Like Dadabhai Naoroji, Gandhi started out from a deep commitment to the promise of a British imperial citizenship that would be bestowed upon all who merited it, regardless of their complexion or religion, only to be continually disappointed until finally rejecting the imperial civilizing mission. Like the Japanese in the Meiji reform era, he pondered the question whether it would be feasible to adopt European technology without being overwhelmed by European culture. That was a question that hovered over all projects of national autonomy in Asia and Africa. It was nowhere fully resolved, and has persisted into our time. All anticolonial movements were built on a mixture of borrowing from and rejection of “Europe.” Even so, European civilization slowly lost its aura of invincible superiority. After the First World War, it still commanded much admiration, but the world had also witnessed its self-destructive potential. Gandhi expressed the new disillusioned vision of Europe in a brief but memorable saying. Asked in the interwar years what he thought about European civilization, he replied that “it would be a good idea.”[5]

In such circumstances the voices of equality sounded strident and combative, but seldom triumphalist. If we can nonetheless discern an increasing self-confidence, it sprang from the awareness of a growing worldwide web of connections and mutual support among the critics of colonialism and white supremacy. Affordable transport by railways and steamships, expanding postal services and telegraph networks, an explosion of both highbrow and popular journalism, as well as a growing number of Asian and African students studying at Western universities and after 1880 also in Japan, created something like a global public sphere, or at least a network of loosely connected regional publics. The recent historiography suggests that a global civil society emerged in the final decades of the nineteenth century and further expanded in the first half of the twentieth century. It is especially noteworthy that its growth continued in the interwar years, decades that witnessed a de-globalization of the world economy.[6] At moments of acute crisis, a sense of global simultaneity could emerge, giving critics of racism and colonialism the feeling that they were in step with worldwide trends.[7]

The thinkers discussed below participated in the new global civil society, though in significantly different ways. Anténor Firmin and Franz Boas criticized the nineteenth-century racist enthnology. Boas’s new cultural anthropology influenced American and European anthropology on a broad front, and forged a new anthropologic language of modern equality. Firmin, a Haitian scholar, was less successful but merits our attention because he confronted French racist anthropology on its own turf, and because he provides us with a window on the emergence of new languages of global equality in the “creole” world of the Caribbean. José Rizal and Mohandas Gandhi intellectually confronted colonialism, but in widely different settings. Gandhi formulated his political ideas in South Africa and India, two parts of what was then the most advanced colonial empire. Compared to the dynamic British Empire the Spanish colonialism José Rizal confronted in the Philippines was stagnating and backward. Accordingly, Gandhi sought to think “beyond” European civilization, while Rizal denounced Spanish culture as “insufficiently modern.” Finally, W. E. B. Dubois, perhaps the most “global” of the thinkers discussed in the present chapter, began his intellectual odyssey in the United States but studied also in Berlin and eventually came to frame the travails of the African Americans in the setting of the global “color line,” a term he himself coined at the first Pan-African Conference in 1900. Du Bois created a language of equality that was suffused with a new cultural sensitivity, informed by his experience of being black in the world of the color line. All the thinkers discussed below can be seen as partaking in a common endeavor, the critique of the global white power structure that stood at its zenith in the decades prior to the First World War.

The Beginning of the End of White Global Rule

At the close of the nineteenth century, a modern European army was defeated by an African nation. In the battle of Adwa (March 1896), the Ethiopian troops of Emperor Menelik II inflicted a crushing defeat on the invading Italians. Thanks to the victory at Adwa, Ethiopia remained an independent state. After the failure of Napoleon’s campaign in Haiti, it was the first decisive victory of a nonwhite army facing a European adversary. The defeat of the British general Gordon by the Sudanese army of the Mahdi, in 1885, was also spectacular, but it did not definitively halt the British advance: in 1898 the army of the Mahdi was mowed down by the machine guns of Kitchener, and the Sudan became a British colony. The Italian defeat at Adwa, where half of their soldiers perished, was far more consequential.

The news from Adwa traversed the world. For many, particularly in Africa and Asia, it demonstrated that European arms were not invincible. Four days after the battle, the London Times interviewed a French history professor who warned against gloating over the Italian debacle:

You may be sure that from one end of Africa to the other it is already known, or will be tomorrow, that Africa has conquered Europe.… This is a reason why this whole business is so serious and why nothing could be more heedless than to rejoice at the defeat of the Italians. That defeat is also ours.[8]

The Times agreed with the French professor. The paper’s editorial deeply regretted the defeat of a European army by African “natives.” To gild the bitter pill, the editors underlined that Ethiopia was an ancient and civilized nation, so that Italy was spared the ignominy of a defeat by “savage negroes.”[9]

The consequences of the 1905 Japanese victory over Russia and the subsequent abortive revolution in Russia were felt worldwide. Italy could perhaps be written off as a second-rate power, but the humiliating defeat the “yellow” Japanese inflicted on the huge Russian war machine demonstrated that the global balance of power was shifting. Reflecting on the outcome of the 1905 Russo-Japanese war, Gandhi declared in Indian Opinion, the weekly he edited in South Africa, that the nonwhite Japanese had won a victory over Russia by “unity, patriotism and the resolve to do or die.” The Indians, whether in South Africa or in India itself, should heed the example of Japan and cease their vain and selfish quarrels.[10] The Japanese victory impressed observers in the colonized nations as well as in Europe itself. Journals in Batavia and Singapore commented on the war, and a German naval officer stationed in Port Arthur even expressed the opinion that white lordship in Asia was ending and a new era in world history about to begin.[11]

After the turn of the century, the first international gatherings of non-European peoples met. The first Pan-African Conference, held in London in 1900, was small in terms of numbers but of great symbolic significance. The Universal Race Congress of 1911, however, attracted over a thousand participants. The congress advanced the idea that all races might contribute to a future universal culture, if only notions of racial hierarchy were abandoned.[12] At the Pan-African Conference Du Bois made his prophetic statement that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”[13]

The Russian revolution of 1905 failed, but its impact was felt all over Asia. The revolutions of 1906 in Iran, 1908 in the Ottoman Empire, and 1911 in China were all inspired by the double example of Japan and Russia. The Iranian autocracy was restored in 1911 with Russian and British military support, but the revolutions in Turkey and China had lasting results. The growth of nationalist movements accelerated in several parts of Asia. A new mentality had its day, thinking beyond and against the civilizing mission that the European colonial powers now adduced in response to the mounting Asian critiques of colonial rule.

A fascinating example is found in the Indonesian archipelago, then the “Dutch Indies.” In 1913, when the Kingdom of the Netherlands celebrated the centenary of its liberation from Napoleonic rule, Soewardi Soerjaningrat, a young Javanese intellectual from a prominent aristocratic family, published a sarcastic critique of colonialism in The Express, the journal of the Indische Partij (“Indian Party”), the first nationalist grouping in Indonesia. The journal was edited by Ernst Douwes Dekker, a grandnephew of Multatuli, the most vocal critic of colonialism in the Netherlands.[14] According to Savitri Scherer’s study of the episode, it was “the most controversial political essay written until then by an Indonesian.”[15]

Under the title “Als Ik Eens Nederlnder was” (“If I for Once Would Be a Dutchman”) Soerjaningrat starts with the statement that, as a Dutchman, he would of course proudly cherish the memory of 1813 when the Dutch had liberated themselves from “the yoke of foreign domination.” But, Soerjaningrat continues, I would not permit, let alone command, the Indonesians to take part in the festivities:

In my opinion, there is something out of place—something indecent—if we (I still being a Dutchman in my imagination) ask the natives to join the festivities.… we will hurt their sensitive feelings because we are here celebrating our own independence in their native country which we colonize.… Does it not occur to us that those poor slaves are also longing for such a moment as this, when they like us will be able to celebrate their independence? … If I were a Dutchman, I would not organize an independence celebration in a country where the independence of the people has been stolen.[16]

If I were a Dutchman, the author continues, “I would warn all my fellow colonists about the danger in holding an independence celebration at this moment” and to beware of hurting “the feelings of the people in the Indies who have begun to have the courage to disobey us and who may in fact do so.” He darkly hints that the Dutch are deluding themselves about the effectiveness of their “soul-destroying policy.” After this softly threatening language, Soerjaningrat drops his Dutch persona and reverts to his native self: “But … I am not a Dutchman, I am only a brown-colored person from the tropics, a native of the Dutch colony, and because of that I will not protest.”[17] Even so, the Dutch colonial government considered the publication an act of subversion, in particular because a Malay translation was soon published, making it accessible to a larger native audience. Moreover, Soerjaningrat and his political friends were infiltrating the Sarekat Islam (“Islamic Union,” founded in 1911), which was attracting a large popular following. The authorities were all the more worried because Soerjaningrat belonged to one of the most prestigious Javanese princely families. Both he and Douwes Dekker were exiled to the Netherlands.[18]

Soerjaningrat’s political intervention fits into a larger pattern. He had a Dutch-language college-level education and he was fluent in Dutch. The Dutch so-called “ethical policy,” like the British colonial policy after 1857, sought to enlist educated Indonesians in the lower rungs of the colonial administration under the banner of a civilizing mission. In this period, many future Asian leaders got a European education, where they took up democratic, liberal, and socialist ideas, which they of course interpreted and reworked according to the circumstances in their home countries. For instance, the opponents of the shah in Iran imported notions of constitutional monarchy from Europe, but they also sought to demonstrate that such ideas were rooted in Islamic political thought.[19]

The sea change in world politics opened up new vistas for the political imagination of Asian and African intellectuals and politicians. As we have seen above, Gandhi viewed “1905” as a lesson for Indians. The next year he commented on the political events in Iran, suggesting that the reformist zeal of the shah was caused by the Japanese victory and the attempted revolution in Russia.[20] In America, Du Bois and other black leaders likewise found inspiration in the changed atmosphere, anticipating “a joint awakening of the black, brown and yellow peoples.”[21] The Japanese nationalist thinker Ryutaro Nagai declared that Japan was uniquely equipped to lead a movement to “overthrow the world-wide autocracy of the white man” and to “emancipate the colored peoples of the world.”[22] Interestingly, Nagai began his career as an admirer of British liberalism, but the racist insults he had to suffer as a student in Oxford convinced him that the European civilizing mission was deeply hypocritical. Generally speaking, the critique of the civilizing mission, which arose in India in the wake of the Insurrection of 1857, now gained momentum throughout Asia and Africa.

The European civilizing mission did not, of course, disappear overnight, but henceforth it was burdened with a heavy mortgage. Moreover, the critics of colonialism encouraged a reappraisal of traditional African and Asian history and culture, in which, they argued, valuable insights and moral lessons could be found. Among the speakers addressing the first Pan-African Conference was Attoh Ahuma, a nationalist journalist and clergyman from West Africa who had published a book on Gold Coast Aboriginals to show that Africans too had a history they could be proud of. An overdose of European education, he lamented, had emasculated the minds of Africans.[23] While such diagnoses contained elements of romantic nostalgia, they also enabled people to imagine a future that went beyond a replication of European history.

In the 1880s scientific racism was criticized on theoretical and historical grounds by Anténor Firmin, a Haitian politician and scholar, and by José Rizal, a young Filipino intellectual and novelist. After a classical French-language education in Haiti, Firmin was appointed in 1883 to a diplomatic post in Paris. There he met a fellow Haitian scholar, Louis-Joseph Janvier, who was working on an essay on racial equality and was a member of the Société Anthropologique de Paris. Noticing Firmin’s interest in matters of race and anthropology, he called on the support of two other members to nominate Firmin for membership. Firmin was accepted after a majority vote by secret ballot.[24] At that time, the dominant school in France was Paul Broca’s polygenist physical anthropology. Attending the sessions of the society, most members of which regarded the inferiority of black people as a respectable scientific doctrine, must have been a weird experience for the two Haitian scholars. Conversely, their very presence must have been unsettling to the white members, because it contradicted one of their basic assumptions.

In the preface of his De l’égalité des races humaines, published in Paris in 1885, Firmin recalls that he was shocked by the dogmatic racism of most members of the Société Anthropologique.[25] He then announces that he will take many of his examples to prove the equality of the “Negro race” from Haitian society. In the opening chapter of his book, Firmin declares that to define anthropology as a branch of natural history unduly limits its domain. The crucial distinction between humans and animals, he posits, is sociability, underscoring the importance of the social environment for individual flourishing: “One essential philosophical idea takes precedence over all other considerations: there are conditions under which a particular living being cannot realize its full potential.”[26] With this theoretical move, Firmin invalidates biological determinism. Against Broca he argues that environmental influences operating over millions of years can bring about substantial modifications of bodily shape and physiognomy. To explain such modifications Firmin invokes “the elegant laws of natural selection formulated by Darwin.”[27]

Firmin criticizes Broca’s racist polygenism but, surprisingly, does not advocate monogenism. He uses Buffon’s species definition to refute the doctrine that races are distinct species. Like Frederick Douglass he highlights the bodily and mental traits shared by all humans. Even so, he does not believe that the unity of the human species is only consistent with monogenism. According to Firmin, the decisive principle is not genealogy but the “constitutional unity of the species.” He absolutely rejects the “the unity of origin, Adamic or not.” Firmin dismisses monogenism as “an article of faith drawn from theological traditions.”[28] He himself defends the theory that species-identical humans emerged hundreds of thousands of years ago in several regions of the planet. Originally, they were all alike, but in the course of time climate and other environmental factors produced the varieties in complexion and bodily shape that are recorded in historical times.

Firmin devotes many pages to a historical and empirical refutation of the prevailing doctrines of the “inferiority of the negroes.” Egypt and Ethiopia are discussed, but also Central Africa and, of course, Haiti. With numerous examples, he seeks to demonstrate that black Africans have made major contributions to human civilization. He pays much attention to people of mixed descent who, after centuries of creolization, made up a large proportion of the Caribbean population. Métissage, as the French named the phenomenon, was far more common in South and Middle America than in the racially segregated United States. Most white scholars believed that racially mixed unions led to degeneration or were infertile. Firmin could claim with some justification that he had assembled far more reliable knowledge in this field than his European colleagues. He named numerous Haitian authors, poets, politicians, scholars, and physicians of mixed descent, whose achievements were in no way inferior to those of comparable white individuals.[29]

Finally, Firmin argues that the science of anthropology should not be narrowed to physical anthropology. It should also include history and the study of human society. He singles out the authority of Blumenbach and his acolytes as laying the foundations for the naturalists’ claim to anthropology as their domain. Anthropology, Firmin posits, is “the study of Man in his physical, intellectual, and moral dimensions, as he is found among the different races which constitute the human species.”[30] Race is thus retained as a core anthropological concept, but it loses its status as the master concept.

According to Firmin it is possible “to recognize the superiority of the Caucasian race at this juncture in human history,” but “it is not scientifically possible to accept as a general law facts which are merely the result of a series of contingent events.” Fair scientific investigations will show, Firmin posits, that at different periods in world history, different races were in the vanguard. Europe itself has had its barbarian centuries, a “fact today’s European scientists and scholars have unfortunately overlooked.”[31] Firmin’s conclusions on the historical contingency of the achievements of the white race accord with the observations of Dadabhai Naoroji on the relative merits of Asia and Europe.

In the same period, colonial racist arrogance also found an ardent critic in East Asia. José Rizal, a young native of the Philippines, born to a modest middle-class family, at first studied medicine at the University of Manila, but in 1882, at the age of twenty-one, he left for Spain. In Madrid, he read medicine and philosophy, and from there he roamed through Europe, studying philosophy and literature but also locating sources on the history of the Philippines. In those years he read, among many other authors, Rousseau, Voltaire, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and the Dutch critic of colonialism Eduard Douwes Dekker, who had published his biting indictment of Dutch misrule in Indonesia under the pen name of Multatuli. The cosmopolitan education Rizal received in Europe made him aware of the utter backwardness of the Spanish colonial stratum that monopolized politics and intellectual life in the Philippines.

In Spain, Rizal published essays in La Solidaridad, a journal edited by Filipinos who advocated colonial reform and hoped to get the ear of the Madrid government. Their demands were democratic and meritocratic. Among other things, they advocated replacement of the military administration by a civil government, protection of individual liberties, and recruitment of civil servants by competitive examinations. As a student in Manila, Rizal had felt the sting of racial prejudice when he entered a literary contest and won the first prize. What then happened, he later recounted, opened his eyes: “I won. I heard applause resound, sincere and enthusiastic; but when it was discovered that the winner was a Filipino, the applause grew cold, it changed to ridicule—to insult, even, and the Spaniards whom I had vanquished were given the ovation.”[32] In Madrid, Rizal had read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its example convinced him that the novel could be a powerful medium of political enlightenment. The eventual result was Noli Me Tangere, Rizal’s first novel.

Written in Spanish, Noli Me Tangere was published in 1887 in Germany and smuggled to the Philippines, where it circulated clandestinely. The novel reads like a black comedy. It offers a dark satire of Philippine colonial society as a labyrinth of mutual incomprehension, deceit, torture, knavery, greed, silliness, and white self-importance. Across this desolate landscape wander a few unhappy figures, the chief protagonists of Rizal’s narrative. They pursue dreamlike objectives of social and political improvement, the impossibility of which they know almost instinctively, and yet feel unable to relinquish. The Spanish authorities immediately branded the book as subversive. Elsewhere, Rizal comments that “all those … who among normal civilized people are considered good citizens, friends of progress and enlightenment, in the Philippines are declared enemies of order.”[33] In Noli Me Tangere, Elias, an enigmatic boatman with a keen intelligence, warns Ibarra, the chief character of the novel, that he has far more enemies than he thinks. In our lands, Elias concludes, “It’s not criminals who provoke great hatred, it’s honest men.”[34]

In The Indolence of the Filipino, his major political tract (published in La Solidaridad in 1890), Rizal presents a critique of Spanish colonial rule, focusing on the psychological consequences of a mindless despotism. The treatise seeks to demonstrate that before the arrival of the Europeans the Philippines had a flourishing and productive economy. He notes that Antonio Pigafetta, the chronicler of Magellan’s voyage around the world, lauded the courtesy and the commerce of the Filipinos. Rizal also refers to similar observations found in a thirteenth-century Chinese manuscript.[35] In these years, he annotated and republished an early seventeenth-century treatise by Antonio de Morga, which praised the level of civilization, the productivity, and the far-flung commercial connections of the Philippines.[36] Morga, he adds, reports that in his time Spanish rule had already corroded the mental vigor of the Filipinos.[37]

Rizal condemns the Spanish colonial regime both for what it does and for what it neglects. In the Philippines, he declares, “the stupidities of some, and the crimes of others, are attributed to indolence.”[38] Rizal himself does not accept this “theory,” but he does not entirely dismiss the charge of indolence. Instead he seeks to uncover its real causes. His basic axiom is that human beings only work to attain a definite objective: remove that objective, and you reduce them to inaction. That is, he goes on to say, precisely what the Spaniards did in the Philippines. The evil lurks everywhere, starting with the education of children: “You belong to an inferior race! You haven’t any energy”; that is what native children are told. If denigration and intimidation are continued from childhood into adolescence, indolence finally becomes a deadening routine.[39]

The Spanish regime, however, is not only oppressive; it is also backward. All the walls of London, Rizal tells his readers, are covered with advertisements for the products of the British colonies, but the inhabitants of Madrid know next to nothing of the produce of the Philippines.[40] While the English at least do something to enhance productivity in their empire, the Spanish state is only interested in tax revenues. Likewise, the religious orders in the Philippines only promote obscurantism. Educational policy in the colonies is nonexistent. What the Spaniards diagnose as racial inferiority is in reality the result of centuries of their own misrule. Rizal expresses his conclusion in one terse sentence: “Indolence in the Philippines is a chronic malady, but not a hereditary one.”[41]

Back home, Rizal soon found himself on a collision course with the authorities. After he had founded the reformist Liga Filipina, the government banished him to Dapitan on the southern island of Mindanao. There he worked on a plan for a colony of free Filipino farmers in British North Borneo, but the Manila government blacklisted the project. From faraway Dapitan, he warned against premature plans for an armed uprising circulating in the Liga Filipina.[42] Four years later an abortive uprising caused a moral panic among the Spaniards. For Rizal, who had no part in it, it proved fatal. The Spanish authorities violated virtually every procedural rule to get hold of him. In Manila a court martial found him guilty of treason and condemned him to death.

On 30 December 1896, at the age of thirty-six, José Rizal was executed by a firing squad. A British colonial official who witnessed the execution reported that of the many people assembled to watch the proceedings, the Filipinos were cowed and sullen, looking on in silence; the Spaniards, however, dressed up for the occasion and were loud and boisterous, gloating over the death of their hated enemy.[43] Eighteen months later came the Spanish-American War, which made the Philippines an American colony. The United States, which before 1898 had encouraged the armed struggle against the Spanish, now became the new colonial power. It took the Americans years to subdue the native guerrillas, led by Filipinos who refused to exchange one colonial master for another.

Both Firmin and Rizal arrived at a deeply historicist critique of European racial thinking. This was a common trend at the close of the nineteenth century. In his study of the politics of anti-Westernism in Asia, Cemil Aydin notes that anticolonial critics generally appreciated the high level of European and North American development, but decoupled it “from any association with religion, race, and geography.”[44] Likewise, Rizal did not deny the reality of indolence among the Filipinos, but explained it as the contingent outcome of centuries of colonial misrule. In this, both Firmin and Rizal drew on a theoretical framework akin to the one deployed a generation before by Dadabhai Naoroji. The differences between the three critics of colonialism are also worth noticing. Naoroji and Firmin criticized but also respected European civilization, because they had established political and intellectual niches in the capital cities of the two most advanced empires of their time. Rizal was facing a far more backward empire, which accounts for the bitter and contemptuous tone of his critique.

Franz Boas and Cultural Anthropology

Around the turn of the century, scientific racism was not only attacked by antiracist and anticolonial intellectuals but also from within. The most conspicuous spokesman of the new critique was Franz Boas, a Jewish German scholar who came to the United States in the 1880s and who is generally acknowledged as one of the chief pioneers of twentieth-century cultural anthropology. Boas is important for several reasons. His investigations of Native American cultures led him to a deconstruction of the concept of the “savage.” Moreover, he formulated a methodological cultural relativism that encouraged students of social problems to recognize their “natural” ethnocentrism. And finally, by his contributions to the public debate about race issues in the United States, he demonstrated that anthropology could also help to dismantle racial prejudices. It is no exaggeration to say that Boas pioneered an anthropological language of equality that contested virtually all the inequality claims of scientific racism.

Boas was an assimilated Jew who never advertised his Judaism, but it is apparent from everything he wrote as well as from his intellectual network that his own experiences as a Jew in a deeply anti-Semitic environment made him sensitive to all forms of racial oppression.[45] Looking back on his youth, he noted that his education had been marked by the liberal and democratic mindset of “1848.”[46] The revolutions of 1848 had failed, and Boas grew up in Bismarck’s Germany, but a minority of burghers and intellectuals clung to their democratic ideals. Boas’s mother, Sophie Boas-Meyer, was a feminist and left-wing democrat. One of his uncles did a two-year prison term for his propaganda for the Bund der Kommunisten, the association for which Marx and Engels drafted The Communist Manifesto. Upon his release from prison, he went to America where Boas was in regular contact with him.

Boas’s academic career began in Heidelberg. A member of a traditional student’s corporation, he fought at least five duels, several of which were occasioned by anti-Semitic insults.[47] From his school days he had read the writings of Herder, Kant, Goethe, and Schiller, but he was most impressed by Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt.[48] His later anthropological theories bear the imprint of Herder and, more generally, German historicism, picturing cultures as totalities that have their own intrinsic worth. One reservation has to be made, however: for German historicism, from Herder to Ranke, the national community represented the “natural” heart of modern history. Boas, on the contrary, detested the authoritarian and anti-Semitic nationalism of Bismarck Germany and decoded nationalism as a modern variety of the ethnocentrism of the “primitive horde.”

In 1882 he left for Baffin Island, a largely unexplored territory west of Greenland. His initial research focused on cartography, but very soon he developed a keen interest in the Inuit. Boas wintered on the island, sharing in the hardships of Inuit life. During the long polar winter he learned the Inuit tongue, listening evening after evening to their songs and folktales. He soon found out that what European experts back home “knew” about the “Eskimo” was utterly unreliable.[49] Inuit culture was the subject of Boas’s first anthropological publication. Probably, it was also the first anthropological report based on a yearlong participatory observation, a fieldwork methodology Bronislaw Malinowski is usually credited with in textbook histories of anthropology. It proved a turning point in Boas’s career. As a geographer he landed on Baffin Island; as an anthropologist he left it.

Boas recounts that he came to appreciate the friendship and the skills of his Inuit companions during the long Arctic winter. The Inuit, he noted, were very fond of stories. One is about the travails of the little orphan Quadjaqdjuq, who is maltreated by many of the villagers until the Man in the Moon comes to his aid and gives him superhuman strength. Quadjaqdjuq thereupon slays three huge bears and then kills all the villagers who have molested him. Finally, he becomes a renowned hunter and traveler. His story is the Inuit variant of the universal theme that the last shall be the first. Boas’s report on Inuit culture ends with a strong affirmation of common humanity:

I had seen that they enjoyed life, and a hard life, as we do; that nature is also beautiful to them; that feelings of friendship also root in the Eskimo heart; that, although the character of their life is so rude as compared to civilized life, the Eskimo is a man as we are; that his feelings, his virtues, and his shortcomings are based in human nature, like ours.[50]

Referring to their deep awe for traditional lore he observes that “the fear of the old traditions is truly deeply implanted in humankind, and just as it controls life here, it obstructs all progress with us.… I believe that if this trip has a significant impact on me as a thinking person, then it is the strengthening of my notion of the relativity of all education.”[51] Writing to his fiancée Marie Krackowizer, Boas told her that he did not desire a German professorship but would rather stay in America where “I can also work for the ideas in which I believe.… What I want, what I will live and die for, is equal rights for all, equal opportunities … for poor and rich! Don’t you think that when one has done even a little towards this, this is more than the whole of science together? And that will certainly never be granted me in Germany.”[52]

Would this affirmation of equal rights for all include the Inuit? Yes, but with one qualification. Boas noted that the Eskimo population on Baffin Island was dwindling fast. He expressed his regret about their inevitable destruction, but all the same accepted it as a “natural” consequence of their contact with whites. Therefore he deemed it important “to save what can yet be saved” of their tales and songs.[53] His overall attitude toward the Inuit may be characterized as an egalitarian paternalism.

Boas now started a new research project among the Kwakiutl, a Native American people in northwestern Canada, where the white settlers had only recently arrived. The study of the Kwakiutl was his first major research project. Situating the tribe in world-historical space, he concluded that the native population of British Columbia occupied an in-between position with the Siberian peoples on one side and the Indians of central Canada on the other. Their hair was less black and their skin rather light and certainly not “red.” Boas underlines the great diversity of languages in a relatively small region.[54] Primitive cultures, Boas further propounded, are not static. Their apparent stability, he explained, “is due to our lack of historical perspective,” which makes us misinterpret slow change as stagnation.[55]

The Kwakiutl were a proud nation. The name means “world smoke,” a token of their hospitality that was so magnificent that their fires kept burning forever and the smoke pervaded the entire world. The Canadian government, eager to civilize and Christianize the natives, sought to put an end to certain dances and ceremonies. Consequently, the Kwakiutl came to distrust white men and they wanted to make sure that Boas was not a government agent. Boas recounts that the village headman addressed him as follows:

We do not want to have anybody here who will interfere with our customs.… Is this the white man’s land? We are told that it is the Queen’s land; but no! it is mine! Where was the Queen when our God came down from heaven? Where was the Queen when our God gave the land to my grandfather? … We will dance when our laws command us to dance, we will feast when our hearts desire to feast. Do we ask the white man, ‘Do as the Indian does’? No, we do not. Why then do you ask us, ‘Do as the white man does’? … Let the white man observe his law; we shall observe ours.[56]

The words of the headman call to mind the arguments of Orou in Diderot’s Supplément au voyage de Bougainville. Perhaps that fictive Tahitian was more “real” than Diderot himself believed. The oration of the Kwakiutl chief produces a powerful equality effect. He only began to show some goodwill when Boas had explained that he was neither a missionary nor a government agent. In due course the Kwakiutl came to appreciate his sincere interest in their customs and language. During one of his later visits they even gave him a native name: Heiltsakuls (“The one who says the right thing”).[57]

Boas has nothing but scorn for European observers who had dismissed native music as “meaningless and senseless howling”: Whoever takes the trouble to listen carefully shall discover a beauty that remains hidden to the superficial observer. Only when one learns the native language does the “deep poetical feeling” of the song become accessible. By way of illustration Boas offers a translation of a love song.

In 1899, Boas finally obtained a tenured position as a professor of anthropology at Columbia University in New York. In 1901, he expounded his vision of the discipline in a brief but theoretically consequential essay that would be expanded into an influential book published ten years later. The article, entitled “The Mind of Primitive Man,” questions the widely held view that the thinking of “primitive peoples” was literally “primitive” compared with the mental makeup of “civilized peoples.” Boas starts from a definition of the object of anthropology as “the study of the mind of man under the varying conditions of race and of environment.”[58] In the definition race and environment appear as factors of equal consequence, but we will soon see that Boas seeks to minimize the importance of race while he upgrades the weight of the natural and social environment. To understand how he proceeds we must realize that he worked in an academic setting where the primacy of race was taken for granted by virtually everyone.

The problem is the extent of the influence of race on mental capacity. A number of anatomical facts, Boas declares, “point to the conclusion that the races of Africa, Australia, and Melanesia are to a certain extent inferior to the races of Asia, America, and Europe.” The most significant of those anatomical facts is brain size. That being said, Boas hastens to observe that the racial differences in brain size are very small and that there is a large overlap between the races. “The bulk of the two groups of races,” he posits, “have brains of the same capacities, but individuals with heavy brains are proportionally more frequent among the mongoloid and white races than among the negroid races.”[59] Even so, the chief mental traits that distinguish humans from animals, such as abstract thought, the control of bodily impulses, and moral and esthetical judgment, are found in all races. It seems very likely that Boas, lacking hard data demonstrating full racial equality, did not dare to disqualify race entirely, a hesitancy also visible in his 1894 address “Human Faculty as Determined by Race.”[60] After all, he was arguing against a massive academic consensus. Nonetheless, in the 1901 essay the concept of race is progressively emptied of its content while an emergent concept of culture is called upon to do most of the work that used to be assigned to race (in the book published in 1911 the significance of race is played down even more).

Next, Boas questions the opposition of civilized versus primitive, as well as the related opposition of the modern to the traditional. It is often said, he tells his readers, that civilized peoples are better able than primitive ones to control their emotions. However, the advocates of this view often fail to take into account the occasions when the emotions have to be controlled. Take, for instance, the calm equanimity of captive Indians when tortured by their enemies. Few civilized men could equal such composure in the face of extreme physical pain. Another of Boas’s examples concerns the ability to subdue the appetite for food when the moment is socially inappropriate. Europeans can do that when they have to wait until dinner when hungry, but the Inuit perform the same feat when religious taboos forbid them to kill seals basking in the sun on the ice. Even an Inuit community on the point of starvation, Boas relates, respects the taboo.[61]

The opposition of the modern to the traditional was one of the great building blocks of nineteenth-century European social theory. Boas does not for a moment deny that modern thought maintains a critical attitude to tradition that is absent from the mental habits of primitive peoples, but he is at pains to point out that the results of modern science are transmitted to most individuals as traditional matter, much the same as folklore.[62] It follows that, while modern societies are superior to primitive ones in science and technology, this is not necessarily true of the individuals who are brought up in modern societies. Much of modernity is transmitted as folklore. What is true of knowledge applies to the entire cultural field. Boas defines culture as the sum total of the achievements of the mind. In all societies, therefore, culture “shows the cumulative effects of the activities of many minds.”[63] It follows that culture is a transgenerational phenomenon, and not a direct expression of the mental makeup of individuals at a given point in time. The customs of civilized and primitive peoples show tremendous differences, but the ways they relate to their own customs are basically similar.

Notwithstanding his partial deconstruction of the modern and the civilized, Boas’s concept of culture is predicated on difference. Cultures can be theorized as widely varying contingent outcomes of different historical trajectories. The task of anthropology then becomes the scientific investigation and explanation of cultural difference. To study a culture different from his own, Boas explains, the anthropologist “must divest himself entirely of opinions and emotions based upon the peculiar social environment into which he is born.”[64] It is important to see that this is a methodological cultural relativism and not an ethical one. Boas discusses the example of the Inuit tenet that oldsters who can no longer survive in the arctic conditions should be killed by their children or grandchildren. In Inuit society this is a binding obligation. As a matter of course, Boas remarks that, while such a custom may seem “revolting” to “us,” the anthropologist should understand that to the Eskimo “it is founded on an ethical law.”[65]

To the members of a primitive horde, Boas posits, every outsider is identified as an enemy who ought to be enslaved or killed. Before we unthinkingly condemn such behavior, he warns, we should imagine a world in which the protection of the state and the law are unheard of and where the concepts of “foreigner” and “enemy” are factually and ethically identical. Arrived at this point, Boas, rather unexpectedly and skipping several levels of abstraction, offers a world-historical vision of common humanity and cultural difference:

We can trace the gradual broadening of the feeling of fellowship during the advance of civilization. The feeling of fellowship in the horde expands to the feeling of unity of the tribe, to a recognition of bonds established by a neighborhood or habitat, and further on to the feeling of fellowship among members of nations. This seems to be the limit of the ethical concept of fellowship of man we have reached at the present time.… The ethical point of view which makes it justifiable at the present time to increase the well-being of one nation at the cost of another, the tendency to value one’s own civilization as higher than that of the whole race of mankind, are the same as those which prompt the actions of primitive man.[66]

Cultural relativism is here transformed into a universalistic notion of common humanity and a critique of all forms of cultural solidarity restricted to only a part of humanity. Anthropology, Boas concludes, “teaches us a higher tolerance than the one which we now profess.”

For Boas, the equal value of all civilizations receives the benefit of the doubt. The analogy between modern nationalism and the “primitive” solidarity of the horde is understandable against the background of his deep aversion to German nationalism. His vision also ties in with the cosmopolitanism of the assimilated Jewish immigrant who intuitively feels that, however much he adapts to the dominant culture, he will always remain an outsider. The conviction that an increasingly inclusive vision of common humanity, making for an expanding circle of human fellowship, represents the grand highway of world history indicates the limits of Boas’s cultural relativism. It cannot be doubted that the trend toward greater inclusivity and equality represents a positive value for Boas. His utterances on the historical progression of common humanity show a marked resemblance to Condorcet’s vision of an egalitarian future in the late Enlightenment, albeit without the latter’s apodictic philosophical grounding.

In The Mind of Primitive Man, the book he published in 1911, Boas rejects the entire argument about the greater and lesser brain sizes of different races, replacing it with a discussion of the morphological traits of the brain. Another factor he now takes into account is gender. Generally, he notes, the brains of women are much lighter than those of men, but the cognitive ability of women, “while perhaps different from that of men, cannot be deemed to be of an inferior character.”[67] Boas finally concludes that anatomical and physiological considerations do not support the common assumption that the white race represents physically the highest type of man.[68]

Next, he confronts historical arguments for the superiority of the white race. Cultural diffusion, he notes, is limited neither by race nor by language, because the commonalities among human civilizations outweigh the differences. The ancient civilizations of Peru and Central America “may well be compared with the ancient civilizations of the Old World.” The significant difference concerns time lag, as the Old World civilizations reached a certain stage thousands of years before the Native American ones.[69] Boas further observes that the European conquest of America was accompanied by the introduction of new diseases, against which the Native Americans possessed no immunity. Hence the utterly destructive impact of the arrival of the Europeans. Surveying the world, Boas concludes, all attempts to correlate racial types and cultural stages have failed. The upshot is “that cultural stage is essentially a phenomenon dependent upon historical causes, regardless of race.”[70]

The time lag between the Old World and the New, and between Europe and Africa, Boas concludes, has played a fateful role in world history: “The rapid dissemination of Europeans over the whole world destroyed all promising beginnings which had arisen elsewhere. Thus no race except that of eastern Asia was given a chance to develop an independent civilization. The spread of the European race cut short the growth of the existing independent germs without regard to the mental aptitude of the people among whom it was developing.”[71] This conclusion calls to mind what Anquetil Duperron remarked around 1800 about the historical misfortune of the Americas. Theoretically, Boas’s critique displays affinities with Dadabhai Naoroji’s and Anténor Firmin’s thesis that European superiority existed as a historically contingent fact but not as an intrinsic property of the white race.

We can now see the basic tension in Boas’s concept of culture. On the one hand, his vision of the interaction of cultures is predicated on conquest, migration, and cultural diffusion. On the other hand, his cultural relativism tends to portray cultures as more or less closed wholes whose parts are functionally interlocking. The first concept of culture emerged from Boas’s attempts to identify the long-run trends in world history, but the second arose out of his fieldwork in America. We should bear in mind that Boas was a contemporary of Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian who regarded the frontier as the main explanation of the history of the United States. Referring to the report of the superintendent of the census Turner posited in 1893 that the frontier was on the point of vanishing. The remaining Indian territories were reduced to islands in an ocean of European settlers.[72]

The predicament of the native peoples could be captured by the metaphor of cultures as closed functionalist wholes. Boas’s critique of the denigration of the Native Americans as “savages” impelled him to emphasize the functional logic of their way of life. For all that, his insistence on their precarious otherness as well as his view of them as helpless victims, who had to be saved by well-meaning white men, showed that he did not approach them as fully-fledged equals. His affirmation of the equal value of all cultures is contradicted by a paternalist research strategy, based on the vain hope that the collection of more scientific knowledge about native cultures would result in a more reasonable policy toward them. In certain cases, the natives were treated as specimens that could be studied in laboratories and put on display in museums. That happened to a group of Greenland Inuit who were lodged in the basement of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Boas himself participated in this questionable experiment, which included the illegal abduction of the skeleton of a deceased Inuit, which was later retrieved by his son Minik Wallace.[73]

Boas on Black and White in North America

To apply the concept of culture to modern history it had to be theorized in a more dynamic and less functionalist manner. To understand how Boas revised and refined his concept of culture, it is helpful to consider his anthropological approach to modern societies and in particular his interventions in the public debates about the relations between white and black in America.

From the onset of the colonization of the continent, Africans and white settlers interacted as members of one society. While the whites coveted the land of the Native Americans, they needed the labor power of the Africans, at first as slaves and later as wage laborers and sharecroppers. Native Americans were excluded and largely exterminated; the Africans were subjected and exploited.

Boas’s 1911 book began with a critical discussion of race prejudices. His clear and accessible writing style shows that he aimed at the general reading public. He highlights the racial heterogeneity of the United States but warns his readers not to assume unthinkingly that racial purity obtains in the old nations of Europe. Around the turn of the century anti-immigration became a major platform in American politics, and social Darwinist theories made much headway. According to Francis Walker, the superintendent of the 1870 and 1880 censuses, the new immigrants from Italy, Hungary, Austria, and Russia were “beaten men from beaten races, representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence.”[74] Nell Painter has shown that immigration policies involved an ongoing controversy over the inclusion or exclusion of newcomers in an expanding concept of “whiteness.” However, all groups aspiring to whiteness sought to sharply demarcate themselves from African Americans.[75]

What the white purists abhorred above all was the prospect of intermarriage of whites and African Americans. Discussing the mixing of black and white, Boas underlined the salience of gender: the overwhelming majority of known cases concerned unions of white men and black women, while unions of black men and white women represented the unthinkable. Historical and social research, he declared, had disproved the alleged degenerative effects of racial mixing. The persistence of such unfounded fears he attributed to the “race instinct” of the whites. In other words, the United States not only had a “negro problem,” as it was then called, but also a “white problem.”[76] Racism itself, Boas concluded, was one of the main causes of the “negro problem,” not only in America but worldwide.

In the United States, racism was institutionalized to an unprecedented extent. According to George Frederickson, the American South was one of the three most uncompromisingly racist regimes in twentieth-century history (the other two were South Africa and Nazi Germany).[77] Boas attributed the low status of the African American minority to two causes. The first was the race instinct of the whites that maintained a social closure of white society and did not admit black Americans as fellow citizens. The second lay in the consequences of centuries of oppression. The way Africans were enslaved and transported to America was a deeply traumatizing experience. The organization of slavery caused the disruption of families and obstructed the maintenance of a healthy social life. After Reconstruction the South reverted to a policy of exclusion and terrorist intimidation. In these unfavorable historical circumstances Boas finds it amazing “how much has been accomplished in a short period against heavy odds.” He adds that “it is hardly possible to say what would become of the negro if he were able to live with the whites on absolutely equal terms.”[78]

Against the prevailing opinion that black Africans had no history to speak of Boas advocated an unbiased study of African history before the advent of Atlantic slavery. Most white Americans, he complained, unthinkingly assume that all of Africa is populated by ignorant and lazy “savages.” To those unfamiliar with native African art and industry, Boas declares, “a walk through one of the large museums in Europe would be a revelation. None of our American museums has made collections that exhibit this subject in any way worthily.”[79] The Africans, he concludes, were, and still are, a “healthy primitive people,” endowed with creative imagination and technical proficiency.

Perhaps the first time Boas highlighted the achievements of African civilization was in a commencement address delivered in 1906 at the University of Atlanta, then the foremost “black” institution of higher education in the United States. On that occasion, he told the students that there was no need to be ashamed of their African origins. “It seems likely,” he declared, “that at a time when the European was still satisfied with rude stone tools, the African had invented or adopted the art of smelting iron.”[80] Boas further referred the students to the descriptions of sub-Saharan Africa in the reports of the fourteenth-century Arab traveler Ibn Battutah. Many centuries before the arrival of the Europeans, the lands south of the Sahara exhibited large cities, flourishing markets, and an imposing architecture. “So well organized were these states,” Boas noted, “that about 1850, when they were for the first time visited by a white man, the remains of [their] archives were still found in existence.”[81] Du Bois, who had invited Boas to deliver the commencement address, later recounted that the rehabilitation of African history deeply moved him: “I was too astonished to speak. All of this I had never heard and I came there and afterwards to realize how the silence and neglect of science can let truth utterly disappear.”[82]

But Boas’s visit to Atlanta also revealed the difficulties he had to divest himself from the commonplaces of physical anthropology and the habitual tone of anthropological discussions of “Negroes.” Before giving the commencement he participated in the yearly conference on racial issues organized by Du Bois. In the lecture he delivered there he repeated what he had said in his 1901 article about the smaller average brain size of black people probably precluding them from producing as many “men of highest genius” as the white people. At the end of the lecture, Boas wrote to his wife, he was dissatisfied with the response from the audience. According to Rosemary Zumwalt, who has investigated the proceedings, it is more than likely that “Du Bois and the black audience resented the limitations that Boas had placed on the intellect of black people.” Thereupon, Boas attempted to “strike the proper tone” in the commencement address, which probably accounts for its more outspoken antiracist message.[83] I do not mention this to “condemn” Boas—that would be anachronistic—but to underline the impact of the all-white culture of the major American universities on the limits of reputable scholarly language, even for such an iconoclastic figure as Franz Boas. The critique of scientific racism presented by Boas helped Du Bois and his colleagues to discredit it; at the same time, the stridency of Du Bois’s attack on white racism enabled Boas to deepen his critique of the work of his white colleagues.

During his long career, Herbert Lewis reports, Boas corresponded with leading African American intellectuals, such as Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others. He was also involved in the work of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in its early years.[84] In 1915, he “declared that white racism was far more insidious than anti-Semitism in the United States.”[85] That statement is remarkable, for Boas’s early career had been slowed down by anti-Semitic hostility, fueled by a moral panic about the new immigrants from Eastern Europe and Russia, many of whom were Jews.[86] Even so, we have seen that Boas’s opinions about race were marked by an abiding tension between his egalitarian convictions and his attachment to the research agenda of physical anthropology, from which racist stereotypes were hard to eradicate. By the 1920s, however, when racism and anti-Semitism skyrocketed in America, Boas sought to use the data of the physical anthropologists against the racist conclusions they drew from them. But even then he could not quite free himself from racial determinism.[87]

A large part of Boas’s 1932 book Anthropology and Modern Life was devoted to the critique of racism. Once again, he underlined the arbitrariness of all racial classifications:

If the belief should prevail, as it once did, that all red-haired individuals have an undesirable character, they would at once be socially segregated and no red-haired person could escape from his class. The Negro who may at once be recognized by his bodily build is automatically placed in his class and not one of them can escape from the effect of being excluded from the closed group of Whites.[88]

No minority could avoid the deadening stigma of race. “Perhaps one of the most striking illustrations of this tendency in the present life of the United States,” Boas observes, “is the assignment of everyone with a Jewish name to an undesirable group whose members are, according to the fancy of the owner, not allowed to dwell in certain buildings, not admitted in hotels or clubs and are in other ways discriminated against by the unthinking, who can see in the individual solely the representative of a class.” Generally, Boas concludes, the formation of racial groups in modern society “must be understood on a social basis.”[89]

Anthropology and Modern Life also offers a critical discussion of nationalism. Many people, Boas declares, believe that nations are based on racial foundations, but the historical evidence does not bear this out; he notes that “people of pure descent or of a pure racial type are not found in any part of Europe.”[90] To discover the contemporary relevance of Boas’s critical discussion of nationalist claims to racial purity we have not far to seek. Most American “WASPs” (White Anglo Saxon Protestants) had come to believe that the vitality of the American nation was rooted in a “Teutonic” or Anglo-Saxon heritage.[91] The fear of a racial contamination of white America was the main impetus of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act that restricted immigration in order to preserve the racial status quo.[92] In everyday language, Boas notes, “no clear distinction is made between cultural groups and racial strains.”[93] Consequently, most people routinely conflate nation and race. That is hardly surprising, for nationalism and racism are based on the same psychological logic.

In his theorization of racism and nationalism, Boas shifts to a more open and flexible concept of culture. Instead of cultures as bounded units we get cultures as open ensembles with blurred boundaries. About the border between France and Italy he has this to say:

The transition of Italian into French is so gradual that only the political boundaries and the language imposed by Government, school and cultural relations determines whether we count a district as Italian or French.[94]

In this perspective, cultural belonging is not primordially given, but rather a product of the racial and national imagination, and, perhaps more significant, a result of state formation. In extreme conditions—Boas is thinking of the First World War—national culture may virtually annihilate individual autonomy, but that is not the normal case. The final pages of Anthropology and Modern Life underline that cultures should not be regarded as “superorganic” entities. Cultures exist through the actions of individuals and not at some mystic level beyond their agency: “The life of a society is carried on by individuals who act singly and jointly under the stress of the tradition in which they have grown up and surrounded by the products of their own activities and those of their forbears.” It follows that history is open to the future, but, Boas observes, retrospectively the results may appear “like a predetermined growth.”[95]

Boas’s main contribution to modern equality was the step-by-step dismantling of scientific racism from within. The move from physical to cultural anthropology not only dismantled racism but also laid the groundwork for a new way of thinking about cultural difference. Today, we can hardly theorize cultural difference and equality without the legacy of twentieth-century cultural anthropology. If we had to construct a genealogy of Boas’s thought in the European canon, Montaigne and the two Humboldts would figure among the most likely candidates for inclusion. And that in a double sense: first for their versions of the anthropological turn and, second, for their questioning attitude to all received ideas. Beyond that, we may situate Boas’s tentative philosophy of history in the wake of Enlightenment philosophical history in its skeptical and anti-imperialist versions, notably in Herder. Boas himself always stuck to his belief in the liberating power of scientific truth. According to George Stocking, he always retained a nineteenth-century belief in the virtues of liberal civilization, notwithstanding his anthropological deconstruction of that very ideal.[96]

In the final years of his life, the twin menaces of Nazism and racism were Boas’s chief worries. In November 1942, when war was raging in Europe and the Pacific, he revised one of his last essays, in which he warned that racism was the most dangerous of all prejudices because it was the most modern. Scientifically speaking, it was retrograde, but it deeply resonated with nationalism. Racism, Boas concluded, “has no scientific standing.” Differences there may be, he admitted, but “the claim is not tenable that mental qualities of races are biologically determined. Much less have we a right to speak of biologically determined superiority of one race over another.”[97]

Being Black in the World of the Color Line

Like Boas, W. E. B. Du Bois faced the problem of an American nation pervaded by a deep and ugly racism, but he came to it from the other side of the color line. In the book that catapulted him into national fame, The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903 when Du Bois was thirty-five, he recounts the boyhood experience that brought home to him the indelible racial seal his country had stamped on him. At his school, the pupils had purchased cheap visiting cards and played a game of exchange. All went well, Du Bois recounts, until a tall white girl, a newcomer to the school, refused his card, and refused it peremptorily, looking at him in a certain way: “Then it dawned on me that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.”[98] As a youngster harboring the same feelings and expectations as all young people, he was like the others, but he was also deeply different on account of the color of his skin.

Du Bois used the metaphor of the veil to depict a racial boundary that was sometimes institutionalized and clearly visible and at other times hazy and enigmatic. Even if they entered white society black Americans could never truly participate in it. And if they chose to remain in black company, they could not hope to escape the omnipresent hegemonic white gaze. Du Bois diagnosed this as the “double consciousness” of African Americans, “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.… One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideas in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” Intellectually and emotionally, Du Bois sought to enlighten himself as well as his fellow African Americans about what it meant to be black in America. His ideas of equality were scarred and battered by his bitter disappointment with white America. Unlike Frederick Douglass, Du Bois did not feel the need to demonstrate the humanity of black Africans. The agonizing question he kept asking himself was whether African Americans would be able to achieve their humanity in America. What he offered to his fellow African Americans, and to the world, was an ever-ongoing series of philosophical and historical reflections on the political psychology of a society divided by an institutional, but also deeply personal, racism. The Souls of Black Folk proved to be one those rare books that enabled people to imagine their world anew.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, a modest town in western Massachusetts, a region that on the whole welcomed the new American order ushered in by the North’s victory in the Civil War. The African American families in Great Barrington numbered less than thirty.[99] Du Bois’s maternal family, the Burghardts, were of mixed West African and Dutch descent. His father, Alfred Du Bois, hailed from a Franco-Haitian family, but when Du Bois was only two years old, his father left home never to return, and the young William was educated by his mother, Mary Silvina Burghardt. Du Bois attended a “white” college, where he was the sole black pupil. We have already seen that, however cordial the atmosphere may have seemed, the stigma of race soon marked the young Du Bois.

When Du Bois was nine, Reconstruction, the North’s attempt to give the black population of the South a fair deal, definitely petered out. Washington let the South go its own way, and the former slaveholders and their cronies regained power, intent on nipping in the bud the timid beginnings of racial equality. The Southern states adopted the infamous Jim Crow laws, introducing an American apartheid that reduced the African Americans to second-rate citizens and robbed them of all political rights. This was the darkening world Du Bois encountered as a college student. The hopeful expectation of better days the Northern victory had raised among the African Americans gradually gave way to a bitter and disillusioned “realism.”

The life of black Americans was marked by an everyday experience of humiliation. No African American could avoid white racism, either in its aggressive Southern variety or in the paternalist condescension and social avoidance that were common in the North. That was the reality Du Bois sought to capture in his writings. Du Bois, a gifted young man, who got scholarships and prizes, went to university—first to the all-black Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, later at Harvard, and finally in Berlin. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois looks back at his summer stints as a schoolteacher in a backwoods Tennessee village. Trekking from village to village he had to hunt for a job, finally finding one in Wilson County. He arrived the same day as a white man who was hired for the white school. The school commissioner offered dinner to both of them, but, as Du Bois recounts, “even then fell the awful shadow of the Veil, for they ate first, then I—alone.”[100] In the vivid story of that summer he describes the reality behind the equal-but-separate doctrine. Separate it was, but the equal quality of schooling remained an empty promise. The black village school had no door, the pupils sat on makeshift seats, and every night Du Bois had to return his borrowed teacher’s chair to his landlady. The boys and girls in his class were eager to learn, but they also had to contribute to the family income. Their chances to move ahead in society were slim at best. When, years later, he returned to the village, the girl Josie, his most vivacious pupil, was dead, and the surviving pupils had casual jobs, if any, and many of them were in debt. “How hard a thing is life to the lowly,” Du Bois concludes, “and yet how human and real! … Thus sadly musing I rode to Nashville in the Jim Crow car.”[101] The title of the chapter containing this story is ironical and highly symbolic: “On the Meaning of Progress.”

As Paul Gilroy underlines, the Fisk years were important to Du Bois because he became a member of a proud black community in the midst of the segregated South. Outside the university, he encountered a racist violence he had never experienced in New England, but he also acquired a deeper awareness of what it meant to be black in America. The Fisk community demonstrated that black intellectual and artistic life was possible and actually superior to the debauchery and rudeness of Southern white culture. Participating in the life of a black community, an experience he had not had in Massachusetts, also made him aware of the positive meaning of blackness, in particular by listening to the music and the songs of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. At Fisk, Du Bois reinvented himself. There he developed a positive feeling of belonging to “his” people. There he found his own calling as a self-conscious black intellectual.[102]

At Harvard, Du Bois was selected as one of the speakers at the 1890 Commencement, an important graduation ceremony. In the same academic year, Clement Morgan, another African American student, was elected class orator. The election of two black students to these highly coveted honors drew national attention, as Harvard was the first university to publicly break through the color line. Behind the scenes, however, some members of the selection committee had tried to remove De Bois from the list. The attempt failed, but it was a near thing. Du Bois himself later recalled that he never felt really at home in Harvard.

After Harvard came Berlin. On his way to the German capital Du Bois traveled from Rotterdam up the Rhine to Cologne and then further inland to Eisenach. The easygoing sociability of Dutch and German people surprised and delighted him. Nobody in Eisenach objected to him dancing with a young maiden from the town’s burgher stratum. Du Bois fell in love with Dora and she wanted to marry him, but the ostracism a white woman married to a black man would suffer in America deterred him and their relationship ended with his departure from Eisenach. The experience of a society where socializing with whites, and even with white women, was possible without scandal and injury was a new one for Du Bois.[103]

At the Friedrich Wilhelm University Du Bois studied economics and sociology with Gustav Schmoller and Adolf Wagner and history under Heinrich von Treitschke, typified by Du Bois as a “fire-eating Pan-German.” He also attended the lectures of the sociologist Max Weber, who would later speak highly of Du Bois’s sociological work.[104] Looking back at his Berlin time in Dusk of Dawn, his 1940 autobiographical book, Du Bois recounted that he discussed social conditions in Europe with students and professors and also gave much thought to foreign policy and colonial affairs. “I began to see the race problem in America, the problems of the peoples of Africa and Asia, and the political developments of Europe as one.”[105]

At Fisk, Philadelphia, Harvard, and Berlin Du Bois acquired a thorough academic grounding in philosophy, economics, sociology, and history. Harvard and Philadelphia also convinced him that useful contacts with white Americans were possible, though seldom without tensions and feelings of social distance. Next he embarked on a long teaching career at Atlanta University, an institution of higher learning with black as well as white faculty and a mostly black student population. He taught at Atlanta from 1897 to 1910, initiating a strong curriculum in sociology, economics, and history; publishing an impressive number of sociological studies of African American urban communities; and organizing a series of yearly conferences devoted to the study of topics that concerned African Americans.

Unlike other African American centers of higher learning, Atlanta offered a full liberal arts curriculum, not one specially attuned to the “practical” needs of future black professionals and entrepreneurs. It was Du Bois’s heartfelt conviction that African Americans needed an intellectual elite that could stand up to the white elite educated at Harvard, Yale, Chicago, and Princeton. Black students, he felt, should not confine themselves to industrial and economic matters but should also study history, philosophy, literature, and the classics of antiquity and modern Europe. Du Bois’s educational philosophy flowed from his awareness of the rapid urbanization of American society, spawning a growing group of urban African Americans who would one day outnumber their rural brethren. While he was a staunch egalitarian when it came to the racist foundations of America, his approach to the internal dynamics of America’s black population was based on a hardheaded appreciation of the emerging class structure of African American communities. The education of an elite of black academics, he concluded, was necessary for the resilience of the entire community.

When Du Bois erupted on the American scene, Booker Washington was the foremost spokesman of the African American cause, extolled by many as a worthy successor of Frederick Douglass. Born a slave shortly before the Civil War, Washington had witnessed the rise and fall of Reconstruction. His strategy can be summarized in a formula: putting economic effort and social uplift first, with political rights later. He believed that Southern blacks, by their own educational and industrial effort, could prosper and carve out a place for themselves without attacking the Jim Crow system head on. He hoped that on those terms Southern whites would be willing to give the emancipated slaves a fair chance.

In the meantime, Washington professed to abide by segregation and disenfranchisement. In his famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech in September 1895, he had addressed Southern whites in the following words: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”[106] White as well as black leaders and intellectuals (including Du Bois) responded enthusiastically to Washington’s speech, which was reported by all the major newspapers across the country. By the turn of the century, however, it dawned on more and more African Americans that the overwhelming majority of white Southerners were unwilling to honor their part of the bargain, while the North looked the other way. Washington had greatly underrated the passionate depth of white racism, and his political project was going nowhere. The stage was set for a questioning of his strategy.

Attempting to be as respectful as he could, Du Bois pounds the weak spot in Washington’s program: “Is it possible and probable,” he exclaims, “that nine million men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meagre chance for developing their exceptional men?”[107] There is a triple paradox in this, Du Bois asserts: in the first place, it is utterly impossible for working men and entrepreneurs in a modern economy to defend their rights without the ability to take an opponent to court, to vote, and wield political power. Second, Washington insists on self-respect, but counsels “a silent submission to civic inferiority such as is bound to sap the manhood of any race in the long run.” Third, he advocates black elementary schools and industrial training, but opposes black institutions of higher learning, a policy that will perpetuate the intellectual dependence of black teachers and educators on white professors and scholars. Du Bois proposes an alternative list of three demands: “Negroes must insist continually,” he argues, “that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys.” What African Americans need, he concludes, are political power, self-respect, and intellectual autonomy.[108] In Du Bois’s vision there are no stages in the fight for equality. The struggle for political power must be foremost, because white supremacy is ultimately buttressed by white state power and white control of the judiciary.

Du Bois’s language, recalling Douglass’s reflections about his fight with Covey, is strikingly masculine: the “manhood” of the black race is at risk, and “black boys” are entitled to education on a par with “white boys.” By expressing his political concerns in such language, Du Bois underlines that male psychology and power are crucial in the ascent from slavery to full personhood. However, he followed Frederick Douglass’s belief that gender and race equality were two halves of the same walnut. He was aware of the racism of some prominent feminists and of many prospective female voters, but that did not deter him from endorsing votes for women. “Every argument for Negro suffrage,” he declared in 1912, “is an argument for women’s suffrage; every argument for women’s suffrage is an argument for Negro suffrage; both are great moments in democracy.”[109]

For all his criticisms of Booker Washington, Du Bois clearly understood that African Americans, being a minority in the nation, could not hope to bring down the racist system singlehandedly. White and black shall have to overcome racism together, or suffer its poisonous consequences together.[110] In Du Bois’s view, whites are not primarily seen as the enemy but rather as the heart of the problem: “It is not enough for the Negroes to declare that color-prejudice is the sole cause of their social condition, nor for the white South to reply that their social condition is the main cause of prejudice.… Both must change, or neither can improve to any great extent.… Only by a union of intelligence and sympathy across the color-line in this critical period of the Republic shall justice and right triumph.”[111]

Black Americans should fight for equality on all fronts, but by no means should they seek to become clones of white Americans. To Du Bois, true equality did not denote sameness but black autonomy. The racial “soul” of black folks, he contended, has something to say to America. Imagining a future biracial civilization forged by the two “world-races” on American soil, Du Bois declares:

We the darker ones come even now not altogether empty-handed: there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.[112]

In 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded. Its main aim was to struggle for the realization of the promise of equality enshrined in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. From the outset the organization was racially mixed, reflecting the conviction that cooperation across the color line was vital to success. The NAACP started as a small pressure group, but by 1919 it counted almost 90,000 members and more than 300 local branches. Du Bois became the first editor of The Crisis, a monthly associated with the NAACP. Writing the copy almost singlehandedly, over his long tenure he made the journal the mouthpiece of all black and white activists who refused the accommodation preached by Booker Washington.

The Crisis was an unexpected success: by 1912, more than 150,000 copies were sold annually.[113] Its strident tone and calls for justice and civil rights apparently met a need. In the eventful times of the First World War monthly circulation numbers skyrocketed to 50,000 in 1916 and almost 54,000 in 1918, providing Du Bois with the platform he needed.[114] He used it to offer historical interpretation, political commentary, and philosophical reflection, but also to highlight facts omitted by the white press. In October 1925, he gleefully reported that in Louisville, Kentucky, Harvard and Princeton psychologists had conducted intelligence tests with white and black school children, but no results had been published. The stumbling block was that the outcomes were “wrong”: the white pupils did not score better than the black ones.[115]

Du Bois’s Global Vision of Equality in an Age of World Crisis

To understand the ultimate development of Du Bois’s ideas of equality and common humanity we have to situate them in his increasingly global vision of history. In Darkwater, published in 1920 after the United States had intervened in the Great War and Europe lay in ruins, Du Bois offers a series of reflections on the place of the “darker peoples” in the new era of world history that was only just beginning. “We of the Darker Peoples,” he declares, looked on in amazement at the cataclysmic self-destruction of Europe. Throughout the text, the words “the darker peoples” carry a double meaning: they denote the nonwhite majority of humanity, but they also signify a collective “we” of which the author himself is a part and in whose name he speaks to the world. Darkwater is written in the same powerful poetic language as The Souls of Black Folk. Between historical and political essays Du Bois inserted poems and parables, such as “The Riddle of the Sphinx” and “Jesus Christ in Texas.” Compared to the 1903 book that centered on America, Blackwater is far more global in scope and analysis. Moreover, it contains more economics, global as well as national, and of a definitely socialist bent. Let us recall that Du Bois had voted for Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party candidate in the presidential election of 1904. But let us likewise recall that he had severely castigated the Socialists for their failure to combat the racism of the white working classes.[116]

On a personal plane, Du Bois’s command of the arcane languages of European philosophy and literature helped him to survive in a hostile environment. In his famous essay on the souls of white folk, first published in 1910 and revised for Darkwater, Du Bois throws out his challenge to the whites who liked to see themselves as the natural lords of the world:

High in the tower, where I sit above the loud complaining of the human sea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk.… Of them I am singularly clairvoyant.… I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know. This knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furious! … And yet as they preach and strut and shout and threaten, crouching as they clutch at rags of facts and fancies to hide their nakedness, they go twisting, flying by my tired eyes and I see them ever stripped,—ugly, human.[117]

This is akin to Frederick Douglass reflecting on his fight with Covey, but at a higher, meta-textual level of abstraction. Du Bois expresses his thought in a philosophical language of equality that derives its power from a double reflexivity: not only does the “nigger” Du Bois know the innermost secrets of the thoughts of his white “masters,” but they know that he knows and that knowledge deeply unsettles them, all the more so because they know that he knows that they know.

Having placed himself high above the whites in intellectual space, Du Bois goes on to diagnose the racial foundations of the twentieth century. “The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples,” he states, “is a very modern thing—a nineteenth and twentieth century matter indeed.” But now the world “has discovered that it is white and by that token, wonderful.”[118] Antiquity and the Middle Ages, he observes, did not attach much importance to race, and in the eighteenth century the unity of humanity was the paramount idea, but in the course of the nineteenth century race gained an unprecedented centrality. Du Bois’s emphasis on the modernity of racism is striking and distinguishes him from Franz Boas.[119] For Boas racism, like nationalism, was a modern phenomenon, but he theorized it as a late offshoot of the traditional ethnocentrism of the primitive horde. Hence modern science provided the antidote. In his early years as a scholar, Du Bois had likewise subscribed to such a rationalist approach, but now he understood that racism had to be analyzed in terms of the changing balance of global power.

That explained why the global color line was lodged at the core of the modern “souls of white folk.” That also accounted for the ugly side of the novel encomium of whiteness. When black men began to dispute the white man’s claim to inherit the world, they met with a murderous rage. Du Bois recalls the white mob violence against African Americans in 1917 and 1919, urging his readers to judge it in a global context: “Can you imagine the United States protesting against Turkish atrocities in Armenia, while the Turks are silent about mobs in Chicago and Saint Louis?”[120]

Writing in the aftermath of the First World War, in which the United States had intervened to make the world “safe for democracy,” Du Bois sarcastically observed that in such a crusade there was plenty of work to do at home. About the Great War itself Du Bois has this to say: “In the awful cataclysm of World War, where from beating, slandering, and murdering us the white world turned temporarily aside to kill each other, we of the Darker Peoples looked on in mild amaze.”[121] The suffering of the Belgian people has been highlighted in the propaganda of the Entente, Du Bois notes, but has the world forgotten Congo? “What Belgium now suffers is not half, not even a tenth, of what she has done to black Congo.” And what do we see today: “Machine-guns against assegais; conquests sugared with religion; mutilation and rape masquerading as culture.”[122] After having painted a vast canvass of worldwide colonial murder and robbery, Du Bois pronounces his verdict on the world war:

As we saw the dead dimly through rifts of battlesmoke and heard faintly the cursings and accusations of blood brothers, we darker men said: This is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming Terrible is the real soul of white culture.[123]

Morally, Du Bois avers, Europe is not better than other races and civilizations. She has built a mighty edifice on foundations erected by her predecessors over two millennia. The greatness of Europe, he concludes, “has lain in the width of the stage on which she has played her part,” not in any intrinsic superiority. Like Dadabhai Naoroji, Anténor Firmin, and José Rizal, Du Bois explains Europe’s rise to global power as a contingent outcome of world history.

What, Du Bois inquires, is the meaning of the catastrophe of August 1914 and what are its deep wellsprings? Why did Germany go to war against Britain, France, and Russia? Dynastic jealousies and nationalist feelings there assuredly were, but they do not suffice to explain the Great War: “Manifestly it is overseas expansion and colonial aggrandizement which explains, and alone adequately explains, the World War.” The struggle was about the global balance of power and the division of the world among the white powers. With the franchise of white males and the coming of trade unions, the ruthless exploitation of the white working class had reached its limits, but, Du Bois continues, the Europeans hit upon a chance of exploitation on a world scale, promising huge profits, so enormous that not only the very rich but also the middle class and the white working class could have their share in the revenues. “This chance,” Du Bois asserts, “lies in the exploitation of darker peoples.” Overseas there are no trade unions, no voters, no questioning onlookers or inconvenient consciences. The dark peoples “may be used down to the very bone, and shot and maimed in ‘punitive’ expeditions when they revolt.”[124] Du Bois’s theory of imperialism closely resembles Lenin’s well-known 1917 treatise on the same topic, but he was not plagiarizing Lenin, for the gist of his theory was already outlined in an Atlantic Monthly article of May 1915.[125]

According to Du Bois, the Industrial Revolution heralds the end of a condition of want and scarcity that has existed since the dawn of humanity. The world can now supply enough for all, on the condition that all may claim their rightful share. The great ethical question of the twentieth century, he posits, is “how we may justly distribute the world’s goods to satisfy the necessary wants of the mass of men.”[126] In the future, he goes on to say, the private property of raw materials, machines, and tools will rapidly be superseded and replaced by a “socialization of industry” that shall enable humanity to organize the distribution of its products according to the needs of the majority. This may look like the familiar agenda of European socialism, but Du Bois turns it into a flaming wake-up call to the colored peoples of the world. The disinherited darker people, he ominously announces, “must either share in the future industrial democracy or overturn the world.”[127] If the white race does not heed the summons of history and continues its course of robbing and murdering colored people, the world war will be but the opening salvo of a far more terrible and devastating global Armageddon. Du Bois’s dissection of the souls of white folk ends in a somber but not pessimistic peroration:

Eastward and westward storms are breaking,—great ugly whirlwinds of hatred and blood and cruelty. I will not believe them inevitable. I will not believe … that all the shameful drama of the past must be done again today before the sunlight sweeps the silver seas.… Back beyond the world and swept by these wild, white faces of the awful dead, why will this Soul of White Folk,—this modern Prometheus—, hang bound by his own binding, tethered by a fable of the past? I hear his mighty cry reverberating through the world, “I am white!” Well and good, O Prometheus, divine thief! Is not the world wide enough for two colors.… Why, then, devour your own vitals if I answer even as proudly, “I am black!”[128]

In the interwar years, Du Bois would question the faltering intelligence and resolve of white souls over and over again, as the world around him inexorably propelled itself toward a second and greater catastrophe. Between 1918 and 1928, he made four trips to the Old World, visiting France, England, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Africa, Germany, Russia, and Turkey. He stayed in Paris at the time of the Versailles Peace Conference and in Geneva in the early days of the League of Nations. In Paris, he organized the second Pan-African Congress, with participants from the French West Indies, the United States, Haiti, Liberia, France, Algeria, Egypt, Congo, and Ethiopia.[129] These voyages, Du Bois recalled in Dusk of Dawn, his 1940 autobiographical retrospect on the interwar years, gave him a fund of experience and knowledge of “incalculable value for … judging modern conditions and, above all, the problem of race in America and in the world.”[130] The anticolonial movements that emerged almost everywhere in the interwar years of course keenly interested him, bringing him to the conclusion that African Americans, being a 10 percent minority in the United States, could only hope to win true equality as partners in a worldwide movement of colored people (perhaps not such a bad prophecy, considering that the 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act roughly coincided in time with the decolonization of sub-Saharan Africa).

Even so, the future of African Americans was to be hammered out in America, and nowhere else. In the aftermath of the First World War a wave of antiblack violence swept through the land. This, many African Americans concluded, was the “reward” for the young black men who had put their lives on the line in the fight for European freedom. Bitter and disappointed, Du Bois had appreciated the attraction of Marcus Garvey’s movement for black autonomy and emigration to Africa. In those years, Garvey enjoyed a staggering popularity. At its peak, his Universal Negro Improvement Association, championing black racial purity and black nationalism, boasted almost a million members—far more than the NAACP.[131] Garvey was a charismatic leader who professed a doctrine of race pride, asserting that the angels were black and the devil white.[132] In these years, Du Bois also veered toward black autonomy and empowerment, though along different lines. The NAACP supported black authors and artists, contributing to the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance, a movement promoting a renewal and reinvigoration of black culture.

Du Bois thought Garvey’s strategy misguided and his emigration projects impractical and ultimately dangerous.[133] He feared that American whites, terrified by the coming of black autonomy along the lines promoted by Garvey, would envisage a policy of expulsion. Most African Americans, Du Bois stated, have suffered segregation rather than opted for emigration. They were right, for the elementary reason that “Negroes have no Zion.”[134] Du Bois hated segregation and passionately believed in full racial equality, but in Dusk of Dawn he recounts how he came to accept the necessity of fortifying black culture and black institutions into an indefinite future, because the African Americans needed to stand together as long as full emancipation was not attained. Taking the pulse of history, Du Bois felt that full equality began to look like a receding target. Under the influence of Freudian thought, he came to fathom the deep and irrational complexes from which white racism sprung.[135] As Du Bois had already declared in Souls of Black Folk, he “would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.”[136] This can be read as racial essentialism, but I think we may decode “Negro blood” as a metaphor for black culture.[137] Let us recall that Du Bois drafted Dusk of Dawn in the wake of the great revival of African American art, music, and literature in the interwar years.

At the end of the First World War, the eyes of the world turned to Russia. In June 1919, Nguyen Tat Thanh (later known as Ho Chi Minh), a Vietnamese kitchen hand in a Paris restaurant, sent a petition asking President Wilson to support the self-determination of his people. Getting no response, he approached the Russian leadership the next year.[138] Moscow soon became a new epicenter of anticolonial politics. For Du Bois, as for countless others in Asia and Africa, the Russian Revolution was a signal of hope, despite his dim opinion of communists. His discussion of the Soviet example in Dusk of Dawn bespeaks his awareness of “all its failures” but underlines the epochal significance of the turn to socialist ideas in one of the largest nations in the world. Russia, Du Bois observes, was attempting to put into “the hands of those people who do the world’s work the power to guide and rule the state for the best welfare of the masses.” The Russians’ self-confidence deeply impressed Du Bois: “It was, in fact, the foundation stone of my fight for black folk; it explained me.”[139]

For all that, Du Bois did not believe that a violent overthrow of the American state would usher in a better society, let alone that the African Americans were capable of such a feat. That is not to say, however, that he rejected the Russian Revolution. He deemed it “the most momentous change in modern human history … since the French Revolution.”[140] In 1928 he made a two-month trip to the Soviet Union. What he saw deeply impressed him, but he also noted the misery in the great urban centers. The communists, he believed, were building a new society centered on rational production and social justice.

Even so, he was well aware of the human cost of communist methods, but, writing when the Second World War had already begun, he saw it as one of the many symptoms of an age of war, revolution, and economic upheaval. We may, Du Bois declared, cling to our conviction “that deliberate murder, organized destruction and brute force cannot in the end … preserve human culture; but we must also admit that nothing that Russia had done in war and mass murder exceeds what has been done and is being done by the rest of the civilized world.”[141] For Du Bois himself, however, such methods were unacceptable. Communist interference with African American politics, he noted, was usually ill-advised and counterproductive. The road of violence and revolution, he concluded, would be suicidal for American blacks.

What then? The persistent destitution and poverty of the great mass of black Americans would not be cured by civil rights alone. Emboldened by the New Deal, Du Bois outlined a new strategy. Roosevelt, he thought, had embarked on a course of economic reconstruction. In that context, a new socioeconomic course for the African Americans was badly needed. Its core would be a “co-operative Negro industrial system in America.” The long-term goal remained the “abolition of all racial distinctions,” but meanwhile African Americans should begin to build their own economic system and collectively help themselves.[142]

And then there was Germany, of which Du Bois harbored such fond memories. In 1936, when Hitler had been in power for three years, Du Bois visited Germany anew. African American reactions to Nazi anti-Semitism had been muted at first because the public outrage of white America, which condemned Hitler while condoning lynching, seemed hypocritical to them. Even so, in the summer of 1934 the NAACP issued a public statement, drafted by Du Bois, denouncing “the vicious campaign of race prejudice directed against Jews and Negroes by the Hitler Government.” The mention of “Negroes” among Hitler’s victims referred to reports received by the NAACP that the Nazis already persecuted the tiny minority of people of color in Germany. William Pickens, a branch director of the NAACP who compared Nazi Germany and the Jim Crow South, gave his verdict in 1934 in just three words: “I prefer Alabama.”[143] Back from his visits to Germany and Japan, Du Bois publicly condemned Nazi anti-Semitism in no uncertain terms: “There is a campaign of race prejudice carried on, openly, continuously and determinedly against all non-Nordic races, but specifically against the Jew, which surpasses in vindictive cruelty and public insult anything I have ever seen; and I have seen much.… There has been no tragedy in modern times equal in its awful effects to the fight on the Jew in Germany. It is an attack on civilization, comparable only to such horrors as the Spanish Inquisition and the African slave trade.”[144]

From Germany Du Bois traveled home by way of Russia and Japan. While he was not duped by German propagandistic condemnations of American racism, he was taken in by the Japanese ideology of “developing” and “civilizing” East Asia. In Manchuria he professed to praise the work of the Japanese occupation. He was apparently unable to relinquish his long-standing admiration for the only Asian nation that had managed to defy Europe. Commenting on the role of the Japanese in China, he declared that “Japan fought China to save her from Europe.”[145] At the same time, African American opinion was inflamed over the Italian occupation of Ethiopia, noting that Britain, France, and the United States had calmly watched while Ethiopia was bombed and invaded by the Italians. For black Americans, Ethiopian independence represented one of the most precious symbols of black empowerment in the age of the global color line.

Du Bois steadfastly supported Zionism, but encouraged the Jews to rethink their place in the world. Instead of considering themselves as a hopeless minority in white Europe, they might “conceive themselves as part of the disinherited majority of men whom they would help to lead to power and self-realization, and at the same time imbue them with cultural tolerance and faith in humanity.”[146] Early in 1943, when the first reports of the full horror of the Holocaust became available, Du Bois, writing in an African American newspaper, urged his audience to rethink the global scene that would result from the world war:

The present massacre and persecution of the Jews is to be looked at, not simply from the point of view of what they are suffering, but, even more, from what this persecution means as an exemplification of modern civilization. There is scarcely a modern civilized land that did not have its part in laying the foundation upon which Hitler has builded. In addition to this, let us for a moment remember that this group of persecuted people has given to the world such leaders and masters as Moses, Jesus Christ, Mendelsohn, Marx and Heine and even the modern concept of Almighty God. If a group like this can be openly and publicly crucified in the midst of modern European civilization, what hope remains for human culture in Europe? Must we not turn to Africa and Asia to re-center the world.[147]

What can we conclude about the evolution of Du Bois’s understanding of common humanity and equality? In Souls of Black Folk, he draws on the radical antiracist version of modern equality he found in the late nineteenth-century struggles against segregation, but his language of equality was suffused with a new cultural sensitivity, fueled by his struggle to comprehend the ambiguous psychology of being black in the world of the color line. The double consciousness of African Americans was, we might say, transformed into a double perspective on world history.

Du Bois adopted the language of modern equality to argue for full political rights for African Americans, the abolition of segregation, and the uncompromising rejection of scientific racism. In the latter task the anthropology of Franz Boas was a crucial inspiration. What Du Bois understood better than Boas, however, was that besides legal and political dimensions, equality also has to deal with the psychological wellsprings of racism. African Americans cannot become equals by imitating the lifestyle and mentality of white Americans. True equality and mutual respect are inconceivable without the acceptance of cultural difference. Black Americans, Du Bois asserted, should be enabled to become full members of the American nation without giving up their own histories, memories, and gut feelings. Of course, they ought to live up to common standards of decency and civilization—Du Bois’s own standards were particularly demanding—but there should not be a double standard for white and black working-class people or for white and black intellectuals. The unease Du Bois felt when socializing with whites served him as a seismograph of white duplicity. His theorization of equality sought to balance the two faces of modern equality we have repeatedly encountered.

From his early experiences as a schoolteacher in backwoods Tennessee, Du Bois understood that the emancipation of the overwhelming majority of African Americans, especially in the former slave states, was impossible without regular employment and decent schooling. The persistent destitution of the majority of African Americans and its aggravation during the Great Depression set him thinking about the economic foundations of modern equality. The Russian Revolution convinced him, not so much of the wholesale rightness of communist doctrines, but of the feasibility of a noncapitalist economic order, in which profit would be subordinated to the prosperity of the people (After the Second World War, he came closer to communism). Reasoning along these lines, Du Bois sought to combine two concepts of equality: an individualist equality, predicated on full civil and political rights, and a collective equality, predicated on a cooperative and planned economic effort to secure jobs and sufficient incomes for the great mass of black Americans. A future and better America, Du Bois believed, should offer equal opportunities to all Americans without distinctions of race, gender, and creed. To attain that goal, a reorganization of the economy along socialist lines was needed. About the institutional and political forms of this future American socialism, Du Bois remained rather vague, although he clearly rejected a “communist dictatorship.”

Next we must include Du Bois’s deployment of the anthropological turn in our assessment of his notions of common humanity and equality. The essay on the souls of white folk is an outstanding example of the inversion of the gaze. The whites, who routinely discuss black people in terms of a putative “negro problem,” are themselves categorized as a “problem.” Moreover, Du Bois spots their profound nervousness about a “negro” analyzing their pride and prejudice. The analysis of white misgivings and anxieties is all the more disconcerting because it happens in the context of the First World War, which has led to an agonizing reappraisal of European civilization in Europe itself. When Du Bois declares that the senseless sacrifice of an entire generation on the altar of national pride is not an aberration but represents the inner demons of European civilization, he strikes a chord that resonates with the critique of numerous European poets, novelists, and philosophers of the interwar years. That is the most signal difference between Du Bois on the one hand and Douglass and Naoroji on the other. His predecessors had to confront the heyday of white supremacy, while Du Bois was facing a still powerful but internally divided, insecure, and vulnerable Europe.

We may conclude that the white intellectuals of Europe and their “colored” critics shared a deep sense of world-historical time changing gears. All perceptive observers of the international scene somehow understood that “1914” signified an irreversible historical turning point, but their assessments of its meaning differed and their imagined futures diverged even more. Du Bois’s rethinking of the racial foundations of world history and his suggestion to recenter the world on Asia and Africa represented one possible way forward; the United.States’ anticipation of an “American Century” another. Europe lay in ruins but was still determined to defend its colonial empires. Asia and Africa would soon find themselves in the throes of decolonization. No more than anyone else could Du Bois predict the future course of world politics, but his intuitive grasp of a global temporality changing gears was right on the mark. So was his deeply felt conviction that the world had to be—and would be—decentered from white supremacy to a multiracial human community.

Gandhi in South Africa and India

Like North America, India was one of the frontiers on the global color line. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the white race consciousness discussed by Du Bois became a powerful political factor in the colonial empires, particularly in the white settler colonies. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa defined themselves as white bulwarks and sought to limit further immigration of “colored” people.[148] As we shall shortly see, Gandhi entered South African politics to fight this new white racism. The racial demography of India itself, however, differed radically from most other British colonies. In the early twentieth century, a tiny British stratum of administrators, military men, entrepreneurs, professionals, and their families presided over some 270 million native Indians, precluding any attempt to introduce the white settler model.

Gandhi greatly admired Dadabhai Naoroji and, like Naoroji and many other Indian leaders, he embarked on his career with a sincere belief in the promise of imperial citizenship.[149] However, while Naoroji never entirely lost his high regard for Western civilization, Gandhi ultimately came to reject the Western model of civilization altogether, seeking to replace it with a model of frugality, self-sufficiency, and compassion. His mature political thought highly valued the autonomy and equal dignity of all human beings, but for him cross-cultural equality did not imply that Indians should strive to become “like Europeans.”

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in 1869 in Porbandar, a port city and the capital of the princely state of Porbandar (part of present-day Gujarat). The Gandhi family came from a merchant lineage, and accordingly belonged to the third caste of the Indian system. Despite their modest origins, Gandhi’s grandfather and father served as first ministers of the prince of Porbandar.[150] The religious culture of the family was rather eclectic: Gandhi’s father adhered to Vishnu Hinduism, but his mother belonged to a sect that combined Hindu with Muslim tenets and advocated interreligious harmony. Among his father’s friends were Jainists, a creed preaching nonviolence. In his boyhood Gandhi was married out to Kasturbai Makanji, a twelve-year-old girl with whom he tried to become intimate without ever really succeeding. Here lay the roots of his later opposition to child marriage.[151] His parents sent him to an English-language high school. Mohandas was in the top echelon of his class, and the first in his family to learn English. The young Gandhi highly valued the classics of English literature and philosophy taught in his school, but he intensely disliked the Christian missionaries who spoke disparagingly about Hinduism.[152] His attitude to Britain appears to have been an uneasy mixture of resentment against the haughty foreign rulers and attraction to their sophisticated intellectual culture.[153]

In 1888, when he was nineteen, his father sent him to England to study law, a profession they expected to profit himself as well as his people. On his departure, he promised his mother to abstain from meat, wine, and women. The first thing the young Gandhi did in London was to pay a visit to Dadabhai Naoroji. He had great expectations of Britain, “the land of philosophers and poets, the very centre of civilization,” but three years after his arrival, he noted that in the meantime he had reconsidered his opinion of English civilization. In London, he socialized with other Indian students, but he also became a member of the London Vegetarian Society, an association championing an ideal of universal humanity and a frugal lifestyle. In January 1890, he attended the funeral of Charles Bradlaugh, a militant atheist and proponent of progressive reforms in India. It was in the meetings of the theosophists that he first became acquainted with critical theories about the horrors of the urban wastelands of Europe and the bankruptcy of modern civilization. Some vegetarians, such as Edwin Arnold and Edward Carpenter, took their inspiration from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita and advocated the ontological primacy of the spiritual, a communal lifestyle, and a democratic ethos. In these years, Gandhi studied the Bhagavad Gita in an English translation. Finally, Gandhi was admitted to the bar in June 1891 and sailed for India two days later.

Back home, he started a law practice, but when an Indian firm in South Africa solicited him as their legal counsel, he accepted the offer on the spot.[154] In May 1893, he left for Durban, the capital of Natal, where the bulk of the South African Indians resided. Gandhi expected to spend a year in South Africa, but his stay was to last for more than twenty years. The South African years would be decisive for Gandhi’s political and intellectual career. In Natal, he faced a rude and insolent racism, for which neither India nor England had prepared him. The first racist incident happened within a week of his arrival. Traveling by train from Durban to Pretoria, he was unceremoniously removed from his compartment because a white passenger had objected to the presence of a “dirty coolie” in “his” carriage. Gandhi’s indignation about the incident initiated a twenty-year struggle for the civil and political rights of the Indian minority in South Africa. In a letter to the editor of the Natal Advertiser, he first highlighted the peaceful and frugal way of life of the Indian shopkeepers and tradespeople in Natal, and then expressed his indignation at the daily arrogance of the whites: “Is this Christian-like, is this fair play, is this justice, is this civilization?”[155]

Shortly after his arrival in Durban, Gandhi acted as spokesman for the Indian community on a contentious political issue. The Natal government proposed a reform of the electoral franchise that would remove virtually all Indian residents from the voting rolls. The demography of the colony explains why they took this step. In 1893, the population of Natal counted 500,000 Africans, 43,000 whites and 41,000 Indians.[156] The whites reckoned that only a political color line could guarantee their power. Representing the Indian community, Gandhi sent a petition with 500 signatures to the governor, followed by a request with more than 10,000 signatures to the imperial government in London. In the public controversy that ensued, Gandhi drew attention to the lack of respect for Indian citizens among white journalist and politicians who routinely referred to people of Indian descent as “coolies” or “Rammysammies.”[157] He declared that the Indians were not asking for special privileges; they merely demanded “what any person in a civilized country would consider as his birthright.” Though Gandhi admitted that it would be unwise to give the vote unconditionally to all indentured laborers, he refused their exclusion on a permanent basis. If they or their children got schooling and attained the status of independent working men, full citizenship should be conferred on them. Numerous Indian boys who were now attending school, he added, “are entirety brought up after the European style.” Gandhi also objected to the government putting the Indians at the same level as “the natives of South Africa.”[158] The last demand demonstrated that he regarded the Natal Indians as superior to the black South Africans.

The protests failed, and the restricted franchise became law in 1896. The next year, an Immigration Restriction Act was passed, with the obvious purpose of curbing Asiatic immigration into Natal. In both cases, London took care to avoid explicit references to race or color, but the wording of both acts effectively excluded Indians. Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain had urged the leaders of the white settler colonies to avoid openly racist language lest the acts fan discontent in India itself, which counted hundreds of thousands of men “every bit as civilized” and of more ancient lineage than the white settlers in Africa and Australia.[159]

Coming back to Gandhi’s thought on these matters, two observations suggest themselves. In the first place, complaints about everyday racism filled many pages in the letters and memoranda drafted by Gandhi on behalf of the Indian community.[160] The second observation concerns Gandhi’s invocation of the birthright of civilized people and the attendant distinction between the Indian community and the black Africans. Both points demonstrate that Gandhi remained within the logic of the British civilizing mission and imperial citizenship. But, and this is of great significance, he extended the domain of the “civilized” across the color line, while the Natal government was doing precisely the opposite. The issue had global implications. Gandhi was well aware that the immigration and civil rights restrictions proposed in South Africa had been preceded by similar measures in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and other parts of the empire. Everywhere, the admittance of free (that is, nonindentured) Asian immigrants was the main bone of contention.[161]

Gandhi criticized the racial demarcation between Asians and Europeans within the empire, but he did not question the color line between Europeans and Africans with anything like the same fervor. His stance accorded with his position as official spokesman of the Indian community in Natal. The Natal Indian Congress, of which Gandhi was the acting secretary, obtained that the two entrances to public buildings—one for whites and one for colored people—were replaced with three entrances: one for Europeans, a second for Asians, and a third for Africans.[162]

Gandhi also appealed to Christian ideas of equality in the New Testament. Many Indians in South Africa, he protested, “are taught by their religious teachers the doctrine of equality. They are told, Sunday after Sunday, that the Great Master knew no distinction between a Jew and a Gentile, a European or an Asiatic.” Even so, their children were refused entry to the better schools on the sole ground of their being “colored.”[163] The mainstay of his opposition to the plans for immigration restriction remained the idea of imperial citizenship. If all Indians are British subjects, and if all British subjects are free to settle in all parts of the empire, Gandhi argued, then the same right must be granted to the 300 million inhabitants of India. In a speech in Durban, he proposed to replace the racist notion of a “white man’s country” with the ideal of an “imperial brotherhood.”[164] During the Boer War, he reminded the government, the Indians had sided with the English against the Dutch-speaking Afrikaners, but no reward for their loyalty was ever offered.[165]

To organize the public defense of the Indian community on a regular footing, Gandhi founded Indian Opinion, a weekly devoted to the Indian cause. The first issue came from the press in June 1903. Queen Victoria’s 1858 pledge was discussed in July. Gandhi referred to it as “the Magna Charta of the British Indians.” It is striking that Gandhi showed no sympathy whatsoever for the 1857 insurrection that had occasioned the royal proclamation. In his opinion, it could only have led to the replacement of a modern despotism by a multiplicity of backward ones.

Over the years, Gandhi got more interested in the fortunes of the black people in South Africa and worldwide. Under the title “From Slave to College President,” he eulogized Booker Washington, telling his readers that “a life such as this teaches a lesson to all of us.”[166] In a brief report on the “kaffirs” of Natal he referred in passing to the “savage Negroes,” but most of his attention went to the eloquent speech of the black leader Dubey, according to Gandhi “a Negro of whom we should know.” Dubey’s speech singled out antiblack racism as South Africa’s main problem. He contended that the white South Africans could not sustain themselves for a single day without the labor of the blacks.[167] Later, Indian Opinion reported on the Universal Races Congress that took place in London in 1911. Gandhi underlined the significance of Du Bois’s contribution.[168] But an altogether different experience was perhaps even more important. In 1906, a Zulu insurrection was put down by the British army with “exemplary” ferocity. Gandhi volunteered for medical service with the English, and soon he found himself in the midst of the fighting. What he saw appalled him. What the British called the suppression of an uprising mostly consisted of the indiscriminate slaughter of unarmed civilians. For all that, Gandhi never advocated a united front of Indian and African opponents of racism. A few years later, he would refer to the black Africans as people “who are less advanced than we.”[169] In any future black insurrection, Gandhi believed, the Indians should comport themselves as loyal subjects of the crown. His attitude to the Africans was paternalist rather than egalitarian.

The struggle against the new registration laws proposed by the Transvaal government in 1906 proved a turning point. The government planned to impose on all Asians the obligation to have their fingerprints taken and to carry their identification cards wherever they went, while the police would be authorized to enter their homes for identity verification at all hours of the day and night. Before an audience of 3,000 in Johannesburg, Gandhi declared that the only fitting response was to refuse to exchange their old IDs for new ones on the conditions set by the government. Responding to Haji Habib’s proposal that all present take a solemn oath to oppose the ordinance, Gandhi underlined the gravity of the occasion. In a crisis that threatened the survival and the dignity of the entire Indian community a solemn pledge was appropriate. The oath would be sworn before God. Gandhi envisioned belief in God as a unifying force instead of leading to religious strife: “We all believe in one and the same God, the differences of nomenclature in Hinduism and Islam notwithstanding.” An oath, he insisted, was no trifle: “If having taken such an oath we violate our pledge we are guilty before God and men.”

Having invoked the divine foundation from which human agency ultimately gets its meaning and linking it with notions of male dignity and autonomy, Gandhi went on to stress the importance of individual responsibility. Every one of us, he warned, “must think out for himself if he has the will and the ability to pledge himself. Resolutions of this nature cannot be passed by a majority vote.”[170] We all hope, he concluded, that in the face of resolute opposition the government will refrain from passing the hateful ordinance, but in the alternative case we must steadfastly suffer the consequences of our disobedience. All those present took the oath. In the face of great personal risks, the majority of the Transvaal Indians joined the campaign. Only 511 out of 13,000 Transvaal adult male Indians registered in accordance with the new law.[171] A staggering 96 percent disobeyed the ordinance. As the government did not dare to imprison that many people, they arrested the “ringleaders,” including Gandhi himself.

The way Gandhi addressed the meeting had a triple equality effect. In the first place, he explained that colored men had the right, nay the moral duty, to defy their white rulers and to demonstrate their human dignity. In his long fight for the rights of South African Indians, Gandhi sometimes despaired of the moral resilience of his compatriots, warning them that “if we behave like worms we should not blame others for trampling upon us.”[172] Like José Rizal, he was aware of the deleterious psychological effects of colonialism. Second, by stressing the personal responsibility of every man, he was effectively telling them that moral rectitude and courage in the face of imminent danger were more important than wealth and status. In his speech women were not mentioned, and only later on would Gandhi underline that women were fully capable of satyagraha.[173] Finally, by defining the religious dimension of the pledge in a resolutely ecumenical way, he enjoined them to find common ground beyond the differences between Hinduism and Islam. That issue was, of course, of particular import for the future of India. We have only to recall that when Gandhi was speaking, the partition of Bengal along religious lines, a British ploy to divide and rule, was fresh in everyone’s mind.

In the aftermath of these dramatic events, Gandhi outlined a political theory of active nonviolent resistance. He invented a new name for a new strategy: satyagraha, variously translated as “truth-force” or “soul-force” (in Sanskrit, Satya means “truth,” but can also be rendered as “soul”; Agraha can be rendered as “insistence” or “firmly holding to” or, as Gandhi preferred, “force,” but not force in the sense of physical coercion). In the concept of satyagraha Gandhi brought together the various intellectual insights and political perspectives he had reflected on since his arrival in South Africa. To begin with, he adamantly refused the Enlightenment notion of a self-sufficient autonomy of the human person. According to Gandhi, the ultimate foundation of the truth is not humanity but God. The road to true humanity begins with the recognition of the “Godly heritage” which gives human life meaning and purpose. Knowledge of God, however, is not a logical intellection. As Gandhi put it, “The heart takes precedence over the intellect.… Inspiration precedes the arguments with which we justify it.”[174]

Without recognition of the divine grounding of all life, Gandhi believed, there is no truth whatsoever. Humans can divest themselves from deceit and delusions by their access to the infinite mind of God and by the insight that their souls are partaking in it (a striking parallel with Sufism as well as the Stoic logos). Here Gandhi draws on the Bhagavad Gita, the supreme text in the Hindu canon. God, teaches the Gita, “is beyond all, and yet he supports all.” Only by fully ingesting this truth can people understand the profound meaning of the Gita’s teaching that “when a man sees that the God in himself is the same God in all that is, he hurts not himself by hurting others.”[175]

This conception of humanity entails nonviolence (Ahimsa). If every human is a part of the connected whole, whoever uses violence against another will wound his own soul. Consequently, violence literally equals self-destruction. One who truly apprehends the divine, the Gita teaches, “has the same love for enemies and friends.”[176] Enemies, too, partake in the divine and can be moved to atonement and compassion. The affinity with the Christian gospel is striking. When Gandhi first read the Sermon on the Mount in his London years he reported that the words of Christ “went straight to my heart.”[177] Gandhi did not follow the Gita merely because it was a Hindu canonical text but because his heart resonated with its “deep truth.” Besides the gospel and the Gita, Gandhi’s political vision bore the imprint of Henry David Thoreau’s treatise on civil disobedience (1849), wherein the author explained that his obligation to obey American laws did not extend to upholding slavery. Another impulse came from Tolstoy’s view that war is always unjust and that victory in war ultimately destroys the soul of the victors.[178] However, the imperative of nonviolence did not amount to a doctrine of passively sitting back under all circumstances. Active nonviolent resistance and legitimate self-defense are always permitted.

Active nonviolence was not a mere philosophical tenet. The majority of the Indian National Congress leaned toward reform within the parameters of the empire and had persuaded the British Raj to accept reforms and limited forms of self-government on the local level. To them, Gandhi’s agitation in South Africa represented a challenge. In Gandhi’s opinion the Congress leadership’s infatuation with European civilization impeded the struggle for an autonomous India that would carve out its own model of civilized life. According to Gandhi, Congress did not reject violence on principled grounds but because it was afraid of it. On the other hand, Gandhi had to reckon with a small but influential faction that advocated terrorist tactics modeled on the Russian Narodniki. As Bhikhu Parekh observes, “By the end of the nineteenth century, the terrorist movement had become too important to be ignored.” Nearly forty government officials had been assassinated or attacked, and there had been raids on ammunition factories.[179]

In July 1909, shortly before Gandhi arrived in England to lobby for the civil rights of the Indians in South Africa, Curzon Willie, a political aide to the secretary of state for India, was assassinated by Madanlal Dhingra, a young Indian associated with the terrorist faction. Gandhi sharply condemned Dhingra’s act and in particular those who had incited him to it. Killing in wartime was permissible in certain circumstances but the killing of an innocent man in a peaceable gathering—Willie was shot at close range at a reception in South Kensington—was an unpardonable crime. The terrorists could not defeat the British, Gandhi warned, and even if they could the outcome would be disastrous for India:

Even should the British leave in consequence of such murderous acts, who will rule in their place? Is the Englishman bad because he is an Englishman? Is it that everyone with an Indian skin is good? … India can gain nothing from the rule of murderers—no matter whether they are black or white. Under such a rule, India will be utterly ruined and laid waste.[180]

Gandhi believed and hoped that satyagraha, when practiced on a mass scale, would obviate the need for violence. He was enough of a realist to understand that the power of a colonial state could not be broken overnight, but he expected that satyagraha would enable the oppressed people to tilt the balance of moral authority in their favor and weaken the oppressor by attrition.

Gandhi’s Struggle to Liberate and Reinvent India

In 1909, still living in South Africa but thinking of India, Gandhi drafted Hind Swaraj, a title that has been variously rendered as “Indian Self-Rule,” “Indian Freedom,” or “Indian Autonomy.” Swaraj can mean freedom from domination by others as well as the inner freedom of a mind that rules itself.

Starting from satyagraha, Gandhi arrived at a new explanation of the power of the colonial state. Both the Congress majority and the advocates of armed resistance believed that British power rested on modern technology and military might. Gandhi disagreed. The numerically small British elite and its army, in the majority manned by native Indians, were not the real foundations of colonial rule. Hind Swaraj consists of dialogues between a Reader, who represents an impatient youngster longing for Indian independence, and an Editor, who stands for Gandhi. The core of the civilization of the Europeans, Gandhi explains, is “irreligion.” It has corrupted the Europeans to such an extent that “they lack real physical strength or courage, they keep up their energy by intoxication.… Women, who should be the queens of households, wander in the streets, or they slave away in factories.”[181] The faith of the English, Gandhi explains, is greed. Even so, Gandhi’s dim opinion of the English national character should not be overstated. “That the English people are somewhat more selfish than others is true,” he says in the opening chapter of Hind Swaraj, “but that does not prove that every Englishman is bad.”[182]

Naturally enough, the impatient Reader wants to know how the English, if they are so corrupted and degenerated, have managed to conquer and dominate India. Gandhi’s answer is a classic example of turning the question around:

The English have not taken India; we have given it to them. They are not in India because of their strength, but because we keep them.… Some Englishmen state that they took, and they hold, India by the sword. Both these statements are wrong. The sword is entirely useless for holding India. We alone keep them.[183]

According to Gandhi, the essence of colonial power consists in the subaltern mentality of the colonized. As long as Indians continue to imitate England and lack the self-respect to stand on their own feet, the country will remain in servitude. His conversation partner, however, advocates the path of realpolitik. India, he argues, must follow the Japanese example. Thanks to its modernized army and fleet the voice of Japan is respected and heard throughout the world. Gandhi is not impressed. What you propose, he retorts, is “English rule without the Englishman.… This is not the Swaraj that I want.”

The British, Gandhi explains, consider the Indian past meaningless and maintain that it will take British guidance to make India into a nation, but they are mistaken: since antiquity India has been a nation with a common culture. The reader now objects that what Gandhi says may apply to pre-Islamic times but that when the British arrived there were Hindus, Muslims, Parsees, and Christians. “How can they be one nation,” he asks. “Hindus and Mahomedans are old enemies.”[184] Gandhi replies that adherents of different religions can be members of the same nation, just as immigrants from abroad do not destroy a nation but merge into it. To endure, a nation must have “a faculty for assimilation.” India has ever been a country full of variety, “but those who are conscious of the spirit of nationality do not interfere with one another’s religion.”[185] According to Gandhi, there was little enmity between Hindus and Muslims before the arrival of the English.[186] Here he definitely overstated religious harmony in precolonial times.

His historical point is that the English policy of divide and rule fanned the fires of religious discord. The most dramatic recent instance, which was obviously on Gandhi’s mind, was the partition of Bengal effected by Lord Curzon in 1905. The partition followed roughly religious boundaries, creating a West Bengal with a Hindu majority and an East Bengal with a Muslim majority. It coincided with the institution of a separate electorate for Muslims, making them a political counterweight to the Hindus.[187] The nationalists organized a bitter campaign against the British project, actually the first instance of a mass mobilization led by the Indian National Congress. The partition marked the end of the cooperation between the colonial state and the nationalists. As Gandhi notes in Hind Swaraj: “After the Partition, people saw that petitions must be backed up by force.”[188]

With Hind Swaraj Gandhi laid the theoretical groundwork for the course he would follow through the protracted struggle for Indian nationhood in the global crisis marked by two world wars. Within a year after the outbreak of the First World War, he returned to India. When Gandhi arrived, in January 1915, he found the nationalist movement in disarray. Their loyalty to the empire was shaken, but they lacked a clear alternative. As in South Africa, Gandhi settled with a group of devoted coworkers in an ashram, where all members participated in daily physical labor, all luxury was banned, and untouchables participated on equal terms with caste Indians. In 1917 and 1918 he applied the principles of satyagraha to settle workers’ strikes and peasant grievances. The Indian National Congress meanwhile loyally supported the British Empire in the world war. Three million men from India and the dominions contributed to the British war effort.[189]

But the “reward” Congress had hoped for was not forthcoming. Instead, the British imposed higher taxes, and in February 1919 they introduced the notorious Rowlatt Acts, under which any Indian suspected of sedition could be arrested and given a two-year sentence without judicial appeal. Gandhi was incensed by this brutal disrespect for civil rights and decided than an immediate reaction was needed. Accordingly, he launched an all-India satyagraha. No section of the Congress endorsed Gandhi’s call for action, but the common people of India responded in astonishing numbers. In Calcutta 200,000 people took to the street; in other great cities, the numbers were smaller but nonetheless impressive. In the Punjab, which had supplied the greatest number of Indian soldiers in the war, the movement got out of hand and in several cities violence erupted. Immediately, Gandhi was on his way to calm down the crowds but was stopped by British police before reaching the province. The result was the Amritsar massacre. On 13 April, a crowd of some 10,000 people, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, all of them unarmed, gathered in an enclosed square. General Reginald Dyer, the local British commander, closed off the exits from the square and without warning ordered his soldiers to open fire and to aim at breast level. Five minutes later 400 were dead and more than 1,000 wounded.[190] The brutality of the British shocked all of India, but in England Dyer received a hero’s welcome. Gandhi publicly admitted that launching a satyagraha without trained cadres to keep it nonviolent was a “Himalayan miscalculation.” Even so, his resolve to confront the British was unbroken. To all concerned, on the British and on the Indian side, it was clear that Amritsar was a point of no return.

Many members of the Congress began to drift toward Gandhi. One of them was Jawaharlal Nehru, who two years before had dismissed Gandhi’s politics as unpractical, but who now joined the satyagraha in Allahabad.[191] In 1930, Gandhi launched another nationwide satyagraha directed against the salt monopoly the British had implemented to defray the costs of the colonial state apparatus. No Indian household could subsist without salt, and so everyone had to pay up. Gandhi started the campaign with a salt march of a selected group of some eighty people, representing fifteen Indian provinces. The membership was mostly Hindu, but there were two Muslims, one Christian, and four untouchables among the participants. After twenty-four days, the company reached the coast where its members, in open defiance of the law, began to collect salt. The campaign underlined the economic irrationality of the British Raj which sought to monopolize what everyone could collect on a beach. As in 1919, the response among the Indian people was massive. Within days, hundreds of thousands were disobeying the salt law. Gandhi and his allies, well aware of the importance of international public opinion, had invited journalists from across the world, and their actions were reported by Indian, British, and American newspapers. Gandhi and many other salt marchers were arrested. Altogether, the British had to arrest 90,000 Indians to stop the movement. In England, Winston Churchill declared that the Indian people had inflicted an unprecedented humiliation on their British rulers. Nehru, himself also imprisoned, wrote to Gandhi that “our prosaic existence has developed something of epic greatness.”[192]

Concepts of Equality and Equality Effects in Gandhi’s Politics

Over the years, Gandhi’s critique of all types of inequality, not excluding caste itself, became more pronounced. In his political thought, we can distinguish five basic dimensions of equality. The first is a universalistic concept of humanity, grounded in the divine foundation and mutual interconnection of all human souls. Second, there is satyagraha, an inclusive communalist practice that implies a questioning of established social and cultural hierarchies. Third, satyagraha overflows into a social philosophy that conceives of society as a functionally differentiated ensemble, in which all contributions are of equal worth. Fourth, Gandhi outlined a theory of toleration, based on the equal dignity and truth of all religions. Finally, he presented an inversion of the hierarchical relation between the colonized and the colonizers, based on a profound critique of the European way of life.

Gandhi’s concept of common humanity is the bedrock of his entire political and social philosophy. Common humanity is ultimately based on understanding that the God in ourselves is the same God in all that is. In that sense, we can speak of the sanctity of the human person, and in that sense no one can claim to be inherently superior to another:

I believe implicitly that all men are born equal. All—whether born in India or in England or America or in any circumstances whatsoever—have the same soul as any other. And it is because I believe in this inherent equality of all men that I fight the doctrine of superiority which many of our rulers arrogate to themselves.[193]

All men are parts of a divinely sanctioned human community that extends all over the world, and, through metempsychosis, also through time. Every human existence is a link in an eternal chain and has to acknowledge its “place” in the ongoing flux of humanity. In Gandhi, we find a great emphasis on duty linked to an acceptance of one’s station in the community. Society is not theorized as a set of individuals but as a functionally differentiated whole.

The individualist notion of modern equality invented in the European Enlightenment is a far cry from Gandhi’s approach. The Enlightenment tended to regard the individual as the primary reality and society as an artificial construction contrived by humans to solve their conflicts by a rational calculus. For Gandhi, by contrast, the social bond is the primary and precious reality. To him, modern individualism represents a negative force, a turning away from the social ties that make us human. A strong personality is not a footloose individualist but a person who knows where he or she stands in society and who can use this situated awareness to swim against the current. Gandhi’s social conception of common humanity represents a mean between the twin stereotypes of Oriental collectivism and Enlightenment individualism.

The second dimension of Gandhi’s thinking about equality springs from his highly original notion of truth-force or soul-force. As we have seen, the experience of cooperating in a satyagraha had strong equality effects, for all members of the group were co-responsible for their individual acts and for the well-being of the group. Over the years, Gandhi put more and more emphasis on the egalitarian implications of satyagraha as a practice that transcended the boundaries of caste, gender, and religion. Frequently, he personally led the way, for example by cleaning latrines, a dirty and “polluting” labor traditionally assigned to untouchables. The moral force of satyagraha was predicated on ordinary people making themselves into historical agents. As a social and emotional experience, it produced a double equality effect. In the first place, it opposed an active people to an irresolute and violent government which had lost the moral high ground. Second, the practice of satyagraha disrupted the deeply ingrained routines of inequality that underpinned Indian caste society in “normal” times.

The third component of Gandhi’s thinking about equality concerns social issues, of which caste and gender were the most pressing. His social philosophy Gandhi took from John Ruskin’s Unto This Last, a book he first read in South Africa and which remained with him to the end. The true basis of society, Ruskin argued, is not egoism, as the political economists taught, but human relationships. Ruskin set forth three propositions: first, that the good of the individual is comprised in the good of the community; second, that the work of humble laborers is of equal worth to that of the trained professional; and third, that a life of labor, as a tiller of the soil or an artisan, is the life worth living. Ultimately, Ruskin’s third thesis became the foundation of Gandhi’s social philosophy. In an ideal society, all men and all women ought to partake in manual labor.

In this connection, Gandhi’s ambiguous views on caste merit a discussion. The one aspect of the caste system he condemned categorically was untouchability. The humiliating exclusion of an entire category of people because of their alleged pollution he found unacceptable. Indians who endorsed untouchability could not consistently criticize the racism of the white settlers. According to Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi’s arguments had been made before, but the global context he placed them in was new. In 1920, Gandhi declared that “Swaraj is unattainable without the removal of the sins of untouchability as it is without Hindu-Moslem unity.”[194] Untouchability contravened his belief in the basic humanity of all people, but it was also an obstacle to the cooperation of Hindus and Muslims, as the latter firmly rejected the kind of moral inequality it represented. On top of that, the untouchables themselves were demanding its abolition and threatened to approach not the Congress but the British to further their aims.

The caste system itself, however, was not criticized by Gandhi at this stage. His cautious attitude was probably linked to his acceptance of the Hindu tenet of reincarnation as well as to his views on the economic future of India. Gandhi, who advocated a fairly traditionalist economic model centered on manual labor and the village community, was deeply convinced that children continuing in their parents’ trade was the best way to maintain the social fabric of India. Consequently, it took Gandhi a long time to realize that the degrading treatment of the untouchables “was but a concentrated expression of the spirit of inequality inherent in the entire caste system.”[195]

The other form of social inequality Gandhi had to deal with was the subjection of women. Gender proved less intractable than caste. Already in Hind Swaraj, he had unambiguously declared that men and women were equally capable of participating in satyagraha.[196] In his 1922 commentary on the Constructive Program he argued that the degraded status of Indian women demanded radical reform. The men of the Congress, he stated, have not sufficiently realized that. Characteristically, Gandhi suggested that they begin the necessary reform in their own homes. Wives, he says, “should not be dolls and objects of indulgence, but should be treated as honoured comrades in common service.” The oppression of women, Gandhi declared, has been the work of men: “Woman has been suppressed under custom and law for which man was responsible and in the shaping of which she had no hand.… In a plan of life based on non-violence, woman has as much right to shape her own destiny as man has to shape his.”[197] On the public calling of women Gandhi embraced an undiluted egalitarianism. He reminded his audience that two women had served as presidents of the Indian National Congress.

The fourth component of Gandhi’s thought on equality concerned religion. Like the other leaders of the Congress, he knew that the unity of a future Indian nation depended on Hindu-Muslim cooperation. In these circumstances, Gandhi argued, the postcolonial Indian state should be religiously neutral. The state had secular tasks, while religion belonged to the people practicing it.[198] Gandhi himself freely acknowledged his Hindu roots, but he always spoke with empathy and respect about other faiths. He regarded Buddhism as a reform movement in the Hindu fold, comparable to the role of Protestantism in the Christian orbit but without the religious wars that accompanied the Protestant Reformation.[199] In 1939, responding to the Muslim leader Jinnah’s call for the recognition of Muslims as a separate nation, Gandhi declared that “mutual forbearance and toleration is the law of life. That is the lesson I have learnt from the Koran, the Bible, the Zend-Avesta and the Gita.”[200] Ascribing the doctrine of tolerance to the scriptures of Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Hinduism, this statement made it into an all-Indian virtue.

Just as the apostle Paul declared that in Christ the distinction between Greek and Scythian became meaningless, Gandhi believed that the Gita’s injunction to “cultivate an equal eye towards all beings” meant “to serve all people in the world with equal regard.”[201] To him, common humanity was at the core of all the great religions. His conviction that Hinduism was not a body of dogma but an unending quest could be applied to all religions.[202] Feeling most at home in Hinduism, Gandhi never claimed superiority for it. According to him, Jesus of Nazareth was one of the greatest teachers of humanity, and he counsels Hindus to open their minds to the Sermon on the Mount. To a Christian acquaintance Gandhi wrote: “I do not want you to become a Hindu. But I do want you to become a better Christian by assimilating all that may be good in Hinduism.” In the same letter he explains that his own inclination is to do likewise: “I can’t explain why I delight in calling myself and remaining a Hindu, but [it] does not prevent me from assimilating all that is good and noble in Christianity, Islam and other creeds of the world.”[203]

Gandhi believed in toleration, but he did not like the term because it suggested a condescending attitude toward “other” religions. The “others” are errant sheep, but for the sake of social peace we shall leave them alone. Of course, toleration is preferable to civil war, but Gandhi deemed it insufficient. He preferred to speak of the “equality of religions.” We must accept, he argued, that God is one, but that this truth is expressed by humans in a multiplicity of creeds. Religions are human approximations to the divine, not the divine itself. The recognition of the equality of all religions, Gandhi posited, does not lead to ethical relativism, for the distinction between good and evil is universal and affirmed by all religions.[204]

Atheism, however, presented a difficulty to Gandhi, for atheists deny the divine foundation of humanity. Here Gandhi drew a line: “We do not propose to cultivate tolerance for irreligion.… If, however, we follow the law of love, we shall not bear any hatred towards the irreligious brother. On the contrary, though we see that he follows irreligion, we shall love him and, therefore, either we shall bring him to see the error of his ways or he will convince us of our error, or each will tolerate the other’s difference of opinion.”[205] By referring to atheism as irreligion, Gandhi defined it by what it lacked, not as a positive secular-humanist weltanschauung. His toleration of unbelievers seemed to be merely pragmatic. In this matter, Gandhi adopted the very paternalism he condemned in interreligious relations. That he had great difficulty in coming to terms with atheism is also apparent from his remarks about the English freethinker Charles Bradlaugh. In his London years Gandhi had attended the funeral of “that good friend of India.” According to Gandhi, Bradlaugh’s denial of God was occasioned by his aversion to the dogmatic Christians who had sought to exclude him from Parliament. The veritable God, Gandhi argued, was present in the heart of all humans: “God is conscience. He is even the Atheism of the Atheist.”[206] This sounds beautifully tolerant, but it comes down to explaining away atheism. Gandhi’s attitude to atheism indicates the limits of his concept of equality.

The fifth and last component of Gandhi’s thinking about common humanity and equality pertains to civilization and temporality. Its core is an inversion of the theory of a European civilizing mission. According to Gandhi, the basic drive of European civilization is an unending forward flight of frenzied individuals who want ever more and will, for that very reason, never have enough. An insatiable greed resides in the heart of the capitalist economy. Gandhi feared its consequences for India: “Railways, machinery and the corresponding increase of indulgent habits are the true badges of slavery of the Indian people as they are of the Europeans.”[207] It follows that the Europeans cannot civilize other peoples, for the elementary reason that Europe itself is destroying the very foundations of civilization.

It is important to see that, even though he rejected machinery and economic modernization, subscribing to an untenable policy of autarky in a globalizing world economy, Gandhi’s critique was not traditionalist across the board. As Bhikhu Parekh observes, he was not “hostile to such liberal values as liberty, equality, constitutionalism and the rule of law; rather he felt that they suffered from the limitations of the materialist civilization of which they were a product and needed to be differently defined and grounded.”[208] In the debate about the future of India, Gandhi did not side with the traditionalists. Indian culture, he believed, should be reformed and regenerated by drawing on its own cultural resources, but also by drawing on external sources such as the ideas of Ruskin and Tolstoy.

Global Equality in an Age of War and Revolution

Two world wars, a devastating economic depression in the heart of the capitalist world system, the collapse of five major empires, and waves of revolution and counterrevolution marked a global transition of staggering proportions. Of course, no clear beginning date can be given, but if we have to identify a beginning of the unraveling of the nineteenth-century world system the Japanese victory over Russia in 1905 would probably be our best choice. After 1905, one crisis would be followed by another, inaugurating a period of global upheaval that would only be provisionally concluded in 1945. Before 1900, people were living in the world of colonialism triumphant. After 1945, they were entering the era of decolonization.

In The Ruins of Empire, Pankaj Mishra’s 2012 study of the intellectuals who remade twentieth-century Asia, the author shows the deep impact of the Japanese victory, worldwide but in particular in Asia. In South Africa, Gandhi foresaw worldwide ramifications of nonwhite Japan vanquishing a European great power; in the Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal, later known as Atatürk, rejoiced in the Japanese success When the news reached the young Nehru, who was then studying in Britain, it put him “in high good humour.” The Chinese nationalist Sun Yat-sen, also in England, was equally enthusiastic. Later in that year, on his way to China by the Suez route, “Sun was congratulated by Arab port workers who thought that he was Japanese.” In America, Du Bois referred to a worldwide eruption of “colored pride.” Admiral Togo’s victory was saluted as the opening of new era by nationalists and journalists in Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Vietnam, India, Burma, China, South Africa, and Indonesia.[209] On Java, young students started a first nationalist association in these years. In the Philippines, now an American colony, the war rekindled hopes for independence. Later in the year, an Egyptian intellectual on his way to Japan even expressed the hope that Japan would convert to Islam, its emperor becoming a new Saladin who would unite eastern and western Asians in their struggle against white imperialism.[210] As Cemil Aydin has shown, Pan-Islamism and Pan-Asianism emerged as serious competitors to white supremacy and global universalism.[211] In retrospect, we can see that the Russo-Japanese War introduced a novel sense of “global simultaneity.” It was perhaps the first truly global moment in world history.[212]

The thinkers discussed in this chapter sought to offer intellectual and political guidance to people who experienced the great expectations, but also the traumatic defeats, of a world that continually seemed on the brink of derailing. The downfall of the empire in China inaugurated a democratic upsurge but also a bloody era of infighting among warlords. Likewise, the Russian and the Turkish revolutions spawned modernizing dictatorships while the Indian nationalists could not impose their agenda on the British and failed to bridge India’s religious division; African American leaders achieved much but they were unable to dismantle the racist American state, and Europe itself seemed on a downward slope toward fascist supremacy. What is truly amazing, seen against this dismal background, is the intellectual and moral self-confidence of people such as Boas, Du Bois, Gandhi, and many other men and women of their generation. They managed to remain levelheaded in an age of extremes and to retain a moderate optimism in an age of catastrophes.

Franz Boas was conscious of his minority status as a Jew in America, and he knew that his egalitarian views were not shared by most white American scholars and public intellectuals. Even so, he spoke for the Native Americans, dismantled scientific racism from within, criticized racial prejudice in American society, and pioneered an interpretation of world history that rearticulated Enlightenment cosmopolitanism in the novel language of cultural anthropology. Boas’s cultural relativism contested the arrogant universalism of the Euro-American West but clung to the Western confidence in the liberating potential of scientific reason. Positing a long-term trend toward widening circles of identification that would eventually culminate in a planetary conception of common humanity, Boas defended a modernized Enlightenment theory of history, but one that had begun to emancipate itself from its Euro-American moorings.

The intellectual achievement of Du Bois was to understand that the twentieth century would be the century of the color line and to recognize the modernity of the global white race consciousness that had emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. From that vantage point, he was able to set forth an incisive analysis of the impact of organized racism on black psychology joined to an equally penetrating diagnosis of the white racists’ psychological pathology. In his later comments on the Holocaust, acknowledging that the Nazi persecution of the Jews was unprecedented in its horror, Du Bois demonstrated his receptivity to the unforeseen contingencies of history. His conclusion that the descent of European civilization into a maelstrom of nihilism and mass murder showed the necessity for a recentering of world history may well be one of the first global visions indicating the need for a coherent alternative to Eurocentrism.

Gandhi’s reaction to the world crisis was to insist that any viable popular strategy against racism and colonialism had to be based on nonviolence. In the light of the murderous record of many postcolonial states, his prediction of the fateful consequences of violent decolonization has proved prophetic. Drawing on disparate religious and philosophical sources, Gandhi outlined an alternative, the road of satyagraha, predicated on active resistance by means of nonviolent noncooperation.

Like Boas and DuBois, Gandhi condemned racism because it negated common humanity and human dignity. His main difference from them lay in his rejection of the European model of civilization. In their different ways, Boas and Du Bois reasoned along modernist lines, hoping to enlist European science and technology in the global struggle for common humanity and equality. Gandhi, by contrast—not unlike Rousseau—believed that alienation and moral corruption were indissolubly tied to the economic and technical matrix of European modernity. While few twentieth-century thinkers would entirely reject Gandhi’s critique, most felt unable to accept his wholesale rejection of modern economics and technology. The leaders of postcolonial India revered Gandhi but pursued a course of modernization all the same. On the other hand, Gandhi’s satyagraha has inspired many egalitarian theorists and leaders after 1945, the most conspicuous among them being Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. His economic recipe soon fell into desuetude, but the legacy of satyagraha lived on. Even so, Gandhi’s political theory was unable to deal with the radical evil of a Hitler or a Stalin. As critics have observed, a satyagraha against totalitarian state terror would have lasted at most a day.

Of the three thinkers, only Du Bois lived to see better days. Boas passed away in the middle of the Second World War, when victory still hung in the balance. Gandhi was murdered by a Hindu fanatic in January 1948, less than six months after Indian independence. The ideals of common humanity they championed gained a beginning of global recognition in 1948, when the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Seen in the long run of twentieth-century history, the struggles and ideas discussed in this chapter have contributed to the global acceptance of equality and common humanity.

A minor episode in the making of Versailles Peace Treaty that is not so well known as it ought to be,may help to clarify the links between 1919 and 1948. In January 1919, the Japanese delegation at the Versailles conference proposed to include an article on racial equality in the charter of the League of Nations:

The equality of nations being a basic principle of the League of Nations, the High Contracting Parties agree to accord as soon as possible to all alien nationals of states, members of the League, equal and just treatment in every respect making no distinction, either in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality.[213]

Japan being the only nonwhite great power at the time, it pressed for global recognition and made its proposal to further that aim. Its discussion by the great powers assembled in Versailles was the first exchange of opinions on racial equality by representatives of the states who, according to themselves, represented the “international community.” Although supported by France and Italy, the Japanese proposal foundered on the opposition of the United States and the British Empire. As Naoko Shimazu notes in her book on the episode, the Japanese had noncommittal allies but very committed adversaries.[214] Because the proposal affected immigration, an aspect the Japanese delegation had indeed highlighted, Britain referred it to the self-governing dominions in the empire—that is, to the white settler colonies. Led by Australia, the white settlers orchestrated a determined campaign against the proposal, in which they got the support of President Wilson. The proposal was first watered down and finally rejected. In Japan, the refusal to include the equality of nations and races in the charter of the League was attributed by the major newspapers to the arrogance and the duplicity of the Euro-American white powers.[215]

Looking back at the episode from the present day and comparing Versailles with the post-1945 global settlement, we can regard the Japanese proposal as a first step in the direction of a worldwide condemnation of racism. In 1915, France, Britain, and Russia had issued a common statement on the Armenian genocide, condemning “the crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization.” At first, the Russians had proposed the formula “crimes against Christianity and civilization,” but the French, concerned about public opinion in their colonies, wanted to avoid the impression that only Christian minorities deserved protection.[216] However, the 1925, 1930, and 1933 proposals to the League of Nations to adopt a universal charter of minority rights all foundered on the adamant opposition of the great powers.[217]

In the interwar years, the acknowledgment that racism violated the law of nations for the first time appeared on the international agenda, but the great powers were not ready for an international recognition of racial equality, let alone for the imposition of sanctions on violators. The hour of serious action on these issues only arrived after the tremendous horrors and genocidal violence of a second global war.

9

THE AGE OF HUMAN RIGHTS

THE SECOND WORLD WAR discredited racism but did not end it. Likewise, the war eroded the political and moral foundations of colonialism, but the colonial empires managed to survive the global conflagration. Even so, decolonization got underway in the aftermath of the war, more slowly than Asians and Africans wanted but much faster than the colonial powers expected in 1945. As Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper put it in Empires in World History, “The colonialism that collapsed in Africa and Asia in the 1950s and 1960s was not the conservative variant of the interwar decades but a colonialism that was interventionist, reformist, and accordingly open to challenge.”[1] The termination of European colonialism fully confirms Tocqueville’s dictum that the most dangerous moment for a deficient regime arrives when it commences to reform itself.[2]

The postwar historical moment provided a window of opportunity that would be closed by the onset of the Cold War at the end of the 1940s. The declarations and guidelines hammered out in those few years set the stage for the intellectual geopolitics of the second half of the twentieth century. The war accelerated the career of two powerful universalisms, human rights and national self-determination.[3] Neither were new ideas. Human rights can be traced back to the eighteenth century and national self-determination to the upsurge of the nation-state in the nineteenth century. As so often, taking a longer historical view enables us to identify ruptures and major turning points. The adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 epitomizes the historical moment when an inclusive concept of modern equality acquired the status of a global value, formally—if not wholeheartedly—underwritten by almost all the sovereign states then in existence, including the great powers.

Such an outcome was considered virtually unthinkable only thirty years before when racial equality, even in the modest format championed by the Japanese, was flatly rejected at Versailles. I say this advisedly, to counter a downgrading of the 1948 Universal Declaration on the grounds of its lack of legal enforcement apparatus and its meager results in the 1950s and 1960s. Those meager results are undeniable, especially when viewed against the high expectations of the late 1940s, but in a long-term historical perspective the 1948 Universal Declaration remains a major turning point in world history. It should not be judged by the grand claims made by some in the 1940s nor by the disappointment of others at the failure of the UN to protect human rights in the Cold War era, but against the background of the evolution of world politics from the nineteenth century to 1940.[4] Moreover, the Universal Declaration marks an important moment in public intellectual history. It brought into circulation a template and an authoritative language on which all subsequent advocates of human rights have drawn.

Human rights and national self-determination were both predicated on equality, but in significantly different ways. Human rights bestowed an identical bundle of rights on every human being on the planet. It thus focused on individual rights, while national self-determination rested on collective rights, proclaiming the equal right to self-government of all collectives which could make a credible claim to nationhood. Furthermore, human rights were formulated as rights of individuals against the state and, in social and economic matters, as claims of individuals on the state. By contrast, national self-determination aimed at the creation of new states and often placed collective interests above individual ones. Put differently, human rights underwrote democratic citizenship, while national self-determination offered a language of state formation and mass mobilization.[5] Consequently, there was a latent tension between the two.

However, given the problem of decolonization, they were also positively linked by the antiracist concept of universal equality that was a key tenet of both. Without exception, the movements for national independence asserted that “colored” people, individually and collectively, were the equals of white Europeans. Viewed in this perspective, the global equality of individuals and the global equality of races and peoples were indissolubly linked. The radical broadening of the equality claims in the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, couched in a language of nondiscrimination, was the work of Asian and African delegates and committee members, seconded by the Soviet Union and the Latin Americans. Support for national self-determination came from the same quarters.

Europeans and North Americans accepted the broadening of modern equality only reluctantly. Their vision of world order harked back to the early twentieth-century idea of “civilization” that drew on scientific racism and imperial power. The persistence of feelings of European, or Western, superiority was by no means confined to conservatives. In the first two postwar decades, most European social democrats strongly doubted that Asians and Africans were fit to govern themselves. Instead, they offered “development,” an idea strongly reminiscent of the civilizing mission of the prewar colonial empires.[6] The representation of the West as the principal vector of human history affirmed white supremacy in an indirect way. Even so, the two world wars had destroyed the serene confidence in European civilization that had been a hallmark of the pre-1914 decades.[7] Celebrations of Western civilization remained quite common, but they were now shadowed by reflections on why it had so abysmally derailed.

Auschwitz had impaired the prestige of Europe as the global center of civilization, both in Europe itself and worldwide. The Germans, formerly respected as one of the most highly civilized peoples on earth, had proved more barbaric than the most inveterate “barbarians” in the long history of humanity. The psychological impact of the Holocaust was probably greater in Europe than among Asians and Africans, who knew from long experience that the Europeans, despite their civilizational claims, had practiced violence, torture, and mass murder on all continents. Black intellectuals and activists underlined the parallels between colonialism and Nazism. “Hitler,” Aimé Césaire would famously assert, “applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the Negroes of Africa.”[8]

Western Cold War ideology presented the West as a bastion of democracy and individual rights facing the threat of communism. On the other hand, the communist states defended national self-determination, an issue on which the West tergiversated. Consequently, the Cold War was also an East-West competition for the allegiance of the new nations which called for more inclusive notions of humanity and civilization to capture the minds and hearts of people worldwide. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Britain and France instructed their colonial administrators to avoid insulting racist language.[9] Consequently, new possibilities became available to the peoples of Asia and Africa to use the tensions between the new superpowers to their advantage.

The first years of the United Nations marked the historical moment when the idea of equality went global. This intellectual transformation was accompanied by an institutional one. One of the most salient features of the aftermath of the Second World War was that the automatic “Western” and “white” majorities in international institutions and conferences could no longer be taken for granted. Henceforth, the West had to share the international platform with the two countervailing power centers of the communist world and the new nations struggling for independence (later called the “Third World”). The globalization of equality-thinking now reached the top-level venues of world politics.

Below I discuss three landmarks in the dissemination of visions of common humanity and modern equality in the postwar decades: in the first place, the inclusion of a radical and non-racist discourse of equality in the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; second, the dismantling of scientific racism by UNESCO, the United Nations agency for education, science and culture; third, the exposition on “The Family of Man” that can be seen as a pictorial pendant of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Next, I turn to the theorization of post-colonial equality by Aimé Césaire, one of the founders of the Négritude movement in literature and polics, and by Leila Ahmed, who at the end of the twentieth century explored the nexus of gender and Islam in the colonial and postcolonial setting. Finally, I will briefly discuss the upsurge of a new human rights politics from the 1970s, when human rights were taken up by non-governmental organizations, eventually spawning a global network of activists and concerned citizens.

The Inclusion of Global Equality in the United Nations Charter

Looking back at the failure of all human rights initiatives in the interwar years, American historian Mark Mazower has raised the question how “in the space of just a few years, between the Atlantic Charter in 1941 and the 1948 Universal Declaration, did the language of human rights come to occupy such a prominent part in international diplomacy that the new world order would be built on a commitment to their advancement?”[10]

To understand the rise of human rights we have to consider the Second World War and how it differed from the First World War. At the end of the Great War, Lenin and Wilson had introduced a new language of international politics that directly addressed the people at large, but in the negotiations at Versailles old-style diplomacy carried the day. By contrast, the Second World War was an ideological war from the very beginning. The Euro-American alliance, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan stood for competing political ideals. As the British and French colonies played a decisive role in mobilizing troops and assets, and as the fighting engulfed North Africa as well as East and Southeast Asia, the question “What are we fighting for?” had to be addressed in global terms. United by a deep hostility to Hitler, the Allies felt the need to outline their vision of the postwar world order to their peoples and to the world.

In August 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter, specifying what were to become the war aims of the Allies. At the core of the charter stood the “four freedoms” already included in Roosevelt’s State of the Union address of January 1941: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom from fear and want. Social security and improved labor standards were also mentioned. Condemning the ruthless Nazi subjugation of occupied nations, the charter declared the intent of the signatories to “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of Government under which they will live.” The Atlantic Charter, Brian Urquhart has observed, “marked the point at which the leadership of the Western world passed decisively from Britain to the United States.”[11] Its universalistic language suggested a worldwide validity for the principle of national self-determination, which Britain soon felt compelled to tone down. When asked a year later whether the principle would apply to the British colonies contributing to the war effort, Churchill backtracked: “We mean to hold our own. I have not become the King’s First minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.”

In January 1942, twenty-six nations signed the Declaration of the United Nations, which was later regarded as the first step toward a new world organization. They would cooperate “to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands.” Mazower notes that thenceforth the subject of human rights came up again and again in official and unofficial deliberations on the postwar order.[12] The constant harping on the tyrannical nature of the Nazi dictatorship almost automatically called forth democracy and respect for individual rights as its virtuous antonyms.

On 17 December 1942, a United Nations Declaration on Jewish Massacres was issued simultaneously in Washington, London, and Moscow and broadcast throughout the world. Acting on the information of Jan Karski, who had visited the Warsaw ghetto in October 1942 and had given a firsthand impression of the extermination of the Jewish people, the Polish government in exile had demanded Allied intervention to stop the massacres.[13] The declaration was signed by the governments (many of them in exile) of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and the French National Committee. Its core passage detailed that the Nazis had embarked on a policy of extermination:

The German authorities, not content with denying to persons of Jewish race … the most elementary human rights, are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe. From all the occupied countries Jews are being transported, in conditions of appalling horror and brutality, to Eastern Europe. In Poland, which has been made the principal Nazi slaughter-house, the ghettos established by the German invaders are being systematically emptied of all Jews except a few highly skilled workers.… None of those taken away are ever heard of again. The able-bodied are slowly worked to death in labour camps. The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or are deliberately massacred in mass executions. The number of victims of these bloody cruelties is reckoned in many hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent men, women and children.[14]

The Allied governments announced that the perpetrators of these crimes would be prosecuted after the war.

In 1944, the delegates to a convention of the International Labor Organization, meeting in Philadelphia, adopted a declaration proclaiming “the right of all human beings, irrespective of race, creed, or sex” to pursue their material and spiritual needs in “conditions of freedom and dignity, of economic security, and equal opportunity.”[15] The Atlantic Charter, and in particular its endorsement of national self-determination, was read and commented upon across the world. Indian and Burmese nationalists immediately wanted to know whether the promises of the charter were applicable to the colonies.[16] Intellectuals and journalists in Britain’s African colonies also frequently invoked the charter in their pleas for future independence.[17] In South Africa, a young lawyer named Nelson Mandela expressed the hope that the charter would contribute to full citizenship rights for black Africans.[18] In 1943, the African National Congress invoked the charter in its memorandum African Claims for Africa, but South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts, relying on Churchill’s public statements, rejected the ANC’s interpretation of the charter.[19] When the British equivocated and opted for a revamped empire instead of decolonization, hopes were directed at America and Russia. The Soviet Union squarely supported national self-determination but everywhere pressed for a leading role for communists in the anticolonial struggle. Internally, Moscow tolerated no criticism whatsoever of its semicolonial rule in Central Asia. The United States supported decolonization in principle, provided the nationalist movements were not communist, but shied away from antagonizing its European allies as long as the Axis powers were not defeated. Moreover, the United States envisaged the annexation of a number of “strategic islands” in the Pacific.

Hitler’s racist ideology was ill suited to appeal to the peoples of Africa and Asia, but Imperial Japan posed a far more dangerous threat. In December 1941, when they went to war against America and Britain, the Japanese adopted the slogan “Asia to the Asians,” even though the Japanese invasion of China led many to suspect that what they really meant was Japanese supremacy. In a broadside distributed to all Japanese soldiers, the war was justified as a struggle against white domination: “These white people,” the pamphlet indignantly exclaimed, “may expect, from the moment they issue from their mothers’ wombs, to be allotted a score or so of natives as their personal slaves. Is this really God’s will?”[20] The Japanese government sought to gain the allegiance of the colonized peoples with promises of future independence. In 1943 they conferred semiautonomous status on Burma and the Philippines.[21] In September 1944, the Japanese prime minster declared that Indonesia would be granted independence “in the future.”[22] It is not clear that the people of these countries fully trusted their new Japanese rulers, but it stands to reason that the Japanese occupation inflicted lasting damage on the prestige of the defeated Europeans. Sutan Sjahrir, an Indonesian nationalist who had squarely refused to collaborate with the Japanese, later recounted that one of the most decisive factors for the Indonesians in winning their independence was “how the Dutch behaved when the Japanese came in. They caved in. The Dutch were scared; they bowed; they wept; they begged; they all but crawled … and we Indonesians said to ourselves: ‘if the Dutch are that scared of the Japanese, then why ought we to be scared of the Dutch?’ Dutch fear of the Japanese was a powerful psychological element in our resolve to fight the Dutch for our freedom.”[23]

After the defeat of Germany and Japan, the United States granted independence to the Philippines, but not to their “strategic islands” in the Pacific. In India, where the nationalist movement was stronger and better organized than anywhere else, Britain opted for rapid decolonization, but not without giving the Muslim parts of the colony the leeway to form a separate state. In 1947, India and Pakistan acquired statehood, albeit at the price of an extremely bloody partition struggle. The next year, Burma and Sri Lanka became independent. Indonesia declared itself independent in 1945. After two brief but ferocious colonial wars, the Dutch, under heavy American pressure, recognized Indonesian independence in 1949. Before the end of the war, France had promised independence to its two mandated territories in the Levant, but in June 1945 French forces bombed Syrian cities to forestall full military control by the Syrians. Shukri al-Quwatli, the Syrian president, appealed to the Americans, who had recognized Syrian independence in 1944. American pressure and British troops quickly ended the affair.[24] France had to give in, and Syria and Lebanon became independent states in 1946.[25] In North Africa and Vietnam, however, the French would fight bloody colonial wars until they were forced to admit defeat. In the late 1940s European colonial rule in Africa still held its own. African decolonization was to be a protracted affair that would be played out over the 1950s and 1960s.

In the final year of the war, when the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and China started preparations for the United Nations, both Britain and Russia opposed the inclusion of human rights in the charter of the new world league, while the United States was at best lukewarm. The 1944 Dumbarton Oaks Agreement of the Big Three outlined the future organization of the UN but said nothing about human rights and tacitly dropped the promise of national self-determination in the Atlantic Charter. The agreement was greeted with disappointment and anger in many places. The pressure and advocacy surrounding the founding conference of the UN were intended to remind the great powers of their earlier promises.

In the run-up to the conference, the Chinese delegation submitted a declaration including the principle of “the equality of all states and all races,” reminiscent of the Japanese formula at Versailles. The British reaction to the Chinese proposal showed what had changed since the days of Versailles. London was unhappy with the idea but also felt embarrassed because British and international public opinion would associate a categorical rejection of racial equality with Nazism. Even so, the Chinese proposal was not adopted. Instead, the four powers declared that the charter would be “based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states.” In this way, the sensitive term of “race” was avoided and the sacrosanct tenet of state sovereignty affirmed.[26]

But the matter did not end there. The Inter-American Conference, meeting in February 1945 in Mexico City, in which twenty-one Latin American nations and the United States participated, recommended the inclusion of a declaration of human rights in the charter of the new world organization. It also passed a resolution against racial discrimination.[27] The forty-five civic and religious associations invited to the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco likewise spoke out in favor of human rights.[28] The groundswell of American public opinion and political actors worldwide convinced the American government that some place for human rights would have to be found in the UN Charter.[29]

The San Francisco conference started on 25 April 1945, two weeks before the capitulation of Nazi Germany. The fifty-one founding members of the United Nations represented all continents, but not in equal measure. First, there was the host country of the conference, the United States. Next, we count twenty Latin American, fourteen European, and nine Asian states, but only three African ones. Finally, the four white settler states in the British Empire were represented. The position of Europe remained quite strong, but San Francisco marked the end of the automatic majority the European powers had always found self-evident in international gatherings. In their opening statements, several delegations supported human rights, but mostly in quite generic terms. However, some delegates considered that insufficient. Ramaswami Mudaliar, the Indian representative in San Francisco, declared that the dignity of ordinary people and the fundamental human rights of every inhabitant of the world represented an “eternal truth” to which all religions subscribed. But, he went on to say, those human rights must be truly universal:

Those rights are incapable of segregation or isolation. There is neither border nor breed nor color nor creed on which those rights can be separated as between beings and beings. And, speaking as an Asiatic, may I say that this is an aspect of the question which can never be forgotten.… Those fundamental human rights of all beings all over the world should be recognized, and men and women treated as equals in every sphere.[30]

To Mudaliar, human rights and racial equality were indissolubly linked. Furthermore, it is worth noticing that he included gender equality in the hard core of indispensable human rights, a cause for which feminist activists, such as Bertha Lutz of Brazil and Jessie Street of Australia, had lobbied in the run-up to San Francisco.[31] As in Versailles, the main adversaries of racial equality were the white settler states, in particular Australia and New Zealand, who feared that their “white” immigration policies would come under fire. The New Zealand Department of External Affairs suspected “that the Chinese will press for formal recognition of the principle of racial equality … in the same way as did the Japanese at Versailles.”[32] He was right; the Chinese delegation at Dumbarton Oaks, led by Wellington Koo, not only lobbied for racial equality but also contested the Western monopoly on human rights thinking.[33]

At this crucial moment, the Indian delegation tabled a formal amendment demanding that all fundamental rights should be accorded to “all men and women, irrespective of race, color, or creed.”[34] The group demanding an affirmation of racial equality in the charter included India, the Philippines, Egypt, Brazil, Panama, Uruguay, Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic.[35] Of the European states, only France seconded the Indian amendment. Finally, it also got the support of the Soviet Union. The Russian endorsement surprised many delegates, for the Soviet Union had thus far opposed the inclusion of human rights in the charter. Apparently, Soviet politics veered toward human rights because Moscow had belatedly discovered that it offered an opportunity to win the allegiance of the peoples of Asia and Africa.

The issue of racial equality was of course closely tied to anticipations of decolonization. The Chinese representative rejected the creation of new mandated territories, declaring that the charter ought to contain not a single article that violated “the principle of the equality of all races and their right to self-determination.” The representative of Iraq argued that racial discrimination was a Nazi doctrine that should be banned from international politics. Carlos Romulo, representing the Philippines, reminded the assembly that men of different races had fought side by side in the terrible war that was now in its final stage. The victory over the Axis, he declared, was a victory for the entire world, and not for one race, one nation, or one leader.[36] Romulo underlined that the “self-government” now offered by the colonial powers was an empty phrase. The peoples of the world, he warned, “are on the move,” and what they want is real independence.[37]

In the end, the opponents of racial equality had to give in. The preamble of the United Nations Charter, adopted on 26 June 1945, declared that the new world organization would be established “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental Human Rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” In the preamble race is not mentioned, but Article 1 of the charter states that the United Nations will promote and encourage “respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.”[38]

Even so, the adoption of the charter was by no means a victory for the colonized peoples. Racial equality was included, but national self-determination was not. Attempts by African associations and politicians to get a hearing in San Francisco consistently fell on deaf ears. Of the forty-two organizations asked to serve as consultants to the U.S. delegation, the NAACP was the only African American one. Even their modest presence greatly irritated the British. In an internal memo, one British diplomat expressed the hope that “we shall deny these bands of lunatics any part in the conference.” One of the NAACP observers was Du Bois, whose first recommendation was terse and elementary: “Colonialism must go.”[39]

Critics pointed out that the charter did not specify sanctions for violators. The limited reach of the charter would soon be demonstrated. In 1946, the Indian delegate Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the first woman to lead a delegation, tabled a formal condemnation of the discrimination against Asians in South Africa (like Gandhi, she failed to mention the discrimination against black Africans). South Africa invoked the principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states. The resolution drafted by Lakshmi was approved with a two-thirds majority in the General Assembly, but the United States and Britain voted against it. Only a decision of the Security Council could impose sanctions, and no decision was forthcoming.

Even so, the inclusion of the equality of races, sexes, and religions in a treaty signed by fifty states, including the major world powers, demonstrated that a significant threshold had been crossed. It is striking that the pressure to adopt a globally inclusive concept of equality mainly came from Asian, African, and Latin American states. The language of human rights originated in Europe, but the radicalization of equality at the founding assembly of the United Nations cannot be reduced to a simple “adoption” of the political language of the European Enlightenment. As the German historian Sebastian Conrad has shown for the nineteenth century, the non-Europeans reworked and universalized Enlightenment concepts in their struggle for autonomy.[40] Without their contributions the San Francisco meeting would probably have yielded yet another universalistic language of tacit noninclusion, in particular on the matter of race.

Radicalizing Modern Equality: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Anyone comparing the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights with the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen will notice some striking similarities as well as some equally striking differences. The most obvious similarity is, of course, the language of rights itself. The main difference concerns the framing and scope of the concept of equality. The 1948 declaration refers to “all human beings” as bearers of rights, while the 1789 declaration had referred to “men” (les hommes). The 1789 declaration introduced rights within a national framework, but the principles set forth in 1948 only make sense in a global setting. In 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man represented an intellectual building block of the new French political culture. In 1948, by contrast, the Universal Declaration was designed to put limits to how states could treat their citizens but also consecrated the principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs of all sovereign states. The declaration thus combined the principle of national sovereignty with a set of universal precepts that stood morally “higher” than positive law.

Most significant for our problematic, the 1948 declaration contains a strong affirmation of the principle of nondiscrimination. It posits that “everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”[41] According to one member of the drafting committee, the Frenchman René Cassin, the declaration had to be based on the “great fundamental principle of the unity of all the races of mankind.”[42]

In January 1947, the committee appointed to draft a bill of rights began its work. The committee was a politically and philosophically mixed group, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, who enjoyed great international sympathy, not only as the widow of President Roosevelt but also because she was a known opponent of racial discrimination and women’s oppression.[43] She was assisted by John Humphrey, a Canadian jurist who wrote the first draft of what would eventually become the Universal Declaration.[44]

The Frenchman René Cassin belonged to a Jewish family, but his wife was of Protestant descent, so that the couple represented the two ancient French religious minorities. Cassin himself felt support for human rights could be found in the secularism of the French Republic as well as in secular Judaism.[45] He also was a known opponent of political and legal discrimination against women.[46] Cassin, who had lost twenty-nine relatives in the Holocaust, was deeply committed to the cause of human rights as a barrier to future persecutions.[47] Another high-profile committee member was the Chilean Hernán Santa Cruz, a schoolmate of Salvador Allende. Santa Cruz was a socialist and one of most consistent advocates of the inclusion of social and economic rights in the Universal Declaration.[48]

Four of the most energetic and active members of the committee were Asians. Carlos Romulo, the representative of the Philippines in America, had served as an aide to General Douglas MacArthur. In 1941, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for a series of newspaper articles announcing the coming end of colonialism in Asia. Belonging to a small country he distrusted the great powers who “acted as if they owned the world.”[49] Philosophically, Romulo defended a Christian view of humanity, based in a neo-Thomist doctrine of natural law. The second Asian committee member was Charles Malik, a scion of a middle-class Lebanese family belonging to the Greek Orthodox Church. The Maliks were of Arabic descent and Charles was brought up in the cosmopolitan culture of the Lebanese elite. He studied mathematics and philosophy at the American University in Beirut, at Harvard, and in Freiburg under Heidegger. He left Germany within a year after being beaten up by Nazi thugs on account of his “Semitic” looks.

The third Asian member was the Confucian philosopher Peng Chun Chang, the representative of Nationalist China. Chang hailed from a family of merchants and scholars. In his boyhood he witnessed the Boxer Rebellion, an ineffective attempt to roll back foreign influence in China. At the age of eighteen he left for America to study philosophy under John Dewey. He earned his PhD in 1921 with a dissertation about education for modernization in China.[50] Chang sympathized with the 1919 democratic May Fourth Movement. In 1937, when the Japanese invaded China, Chang was a highly respected pedagogue, literary critic, and playwright. From 1940 to the end of the war, he served as Chinese ambassador to Turkey and Chile.

The fourth Asian member was Hansa Mehta, besides Eleanor Roosevelt the only woman on the committee. Born in 1897 in Surat, India, to a family of scholars and politicians, she studied philosophy and literature at Bombay University, followed by enrollment at a school of journalism in England. In London she met Sarojini Naidu, who introduced her to feminism. Her marriage to a lower-caste man caused a family scandal, but her father respected her choice. Back in India she became an activist in the struggle for independence. In 1930, Mehta participated in Gandhi’s salt marches, for which she served three years in jail.[51] During her stint at the UN she served as one of the two female advisors on the new Indian Constitution, agitating against child marriages, purdah (female seclusion), polygamy, unequal inheritance laws, and the ban on cross-caste marriages.[52]

The Asian members of the drafting committee hailed from countries—the Philippines, Lebanon, China, and India—that had recently gained independence or gone through violent political upheaval. All of them had acquired a part of their intellectual training in the West, and finally, they shared a cosmopolitan outlook. Compared to them, Roosevelt, Humphrey, and Cassin can be characterized as open-minded and forward-looking westerners, while Santa Cruz represented the Latin American outlook on human rights, which was more socially egalitarian than the Western mainstream. Finally there was Vladislav Ribnikar, the Yugoslav member who represented the communist perspective.

The first problem was what to opt for: a declaration or a full-blown treaty. India forcefully argued for a treaty with legally enforceable rights.[53] Eleanor Roosevelt, who had strict instructions from the White House on this crucial issue, favored a declaration. That was anyway the most realistic option because getting a treaty accepted would take much longer and time was running out. With the communist coup in Prague, the civil war in Greece, and the Berlin blockade, the international atmosphere was rapidly souring.

What would be the title of the projected declaration? The original working title was “International Declaration of Human Rights.” Cassin’s proposal to replace this intergovernmental phrase with “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” was adopted by the majority.[54] Later on, Hansa Mehta proposed to replace rights of man with human rights in the entire declaration, to make its language gender neutral. Ironically, the term brotherhood survived, so that Article 1 now ran: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”[55]

Should the declaration be based on a philosophical or religious foundation? The religious diversity in the world—and in the committee itself—made agreement on a religious foundation highly unlikely. This marks an important difference with 1789 when the National Assembly declared the rights of man “in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being.” In 1948 there was no room for any reference to a divine inspiration. In a late stage of the drafting process the Netherlands attempted to insert a reference to God in the preamble but could not muster a majority.[56]

Philosophy was a different matter. The preamble of the final version of the declaration begins with the statement that all members of the human family possess “equal and inalienable rights” that should be recognized and protected by the rule of law. Such a formula seems to exclude the positivist tenet that rights are created by state power. Human rights are clearly assumed to have an “absolute” validity which subsequently has to be recognized and protected by legislation. Charles Malik, starting from Christian natural law, would have preferred to ground human rights in “nature,” which he regarded as God’s creation. His approach was criticized by Peng Chang, who reminded his colleagues that the declaration was meant to be acceptable to the entire world and should therefore contain no references to a Christian philosophy that was not shared by the greater part of humanity. The reference to brotherhood in Article 1, Chang argued, struck the right tone. Brotherhood was a tenet of the monotheist religions but also of the European Enlightenment and the Chinese classics. Generally, Chang believed, it would be best to frame the declaration as a well-designed list of rights without providing a specific philosophical foundation. All people who accepted the rights should be free to ground them in their own religious or philosophical worldview. Eleanor Roosevelt concurred, saying she herself believed in a “divine Creator,” but that the declaration should allow all people to “think in their particular way” about the issue. It was accordingly decided to delete all references to nature in the final version.[57]

In 1947, the problem of the diversity of worldviews was also discussed by the American Anthropological Association and by a special UNESCO advisory committee convened to collect statements on the cultural universality of human rights. The American Anthropological Association sent a “Statement on Human Rights” to the Roosevelt committee, warning against a one-sided declaration that would reflect only the values of Western Europe and America. The anthropologists deplored the fact that the important commonalities between different cultures were so often overlooked in Western discussions of values. They recommended the adoption of an article on “the right of men to live in terms of their own traditions.”[58] That recommendation elicited a critical response from Julian Steward, a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, who argued that not all extant traditions were consistent with a respect for individual rights: “As human beings, we unanimously opposed the brutal treatment of Jews in Hitler Germany, but what stand shall be taken on the thousands of other kinds of racial and cultural discrimination, unfair practices, and inconsiderate attitudes found throughout the world?”[59]

The UNESCO committee of scholars started its work in January 1947. Its composition was Western but otherwise quite pluralist: Among its most active members were the British historian E. H. Carr, the American philosopher Richard McKeon, and the French Catholic personalist thinker Jacques Maritain.[60] They dispatched a questionnaire to several hundred philosophers and leading intellectuals from all parts of the world. One hundred and fifty responses were submitted.[61] The Chinese philosopher Chung-Shu Lo, for instance, explained that the concept of human rights was not mentioned in the Chinese classics but that the right of the people to revolt against unjust rulers was recognized since ancient times. The Chinese thinkers, he went on to say, did not demand rights but put great store by “the sympathetic attitude of regarding all one’s fellow men as having the same desires, and therefore the same rights, as one would like to enjoy oneself.” Individual entitlements, he explained, were distilled from the social principle of reciprocity, whereas modern European natural right arrives at reciprocity from the interests and inclinations of individuals. Coming to the issue of cultural diversity, Lo advocated tolerance, not only of all religions but also of atheists.[62]

Another interesting reaction came from Humayun Kabir, a Muslim attached to the Ministry of Education in India. Kabir observed that in the past human rights had too often been reserved for Europeans, or even for a part of the Europeans. What was now needed, he submitted, were truly universal rights. He referred to the traditions of early Islam where differences of race and color had been overcome to an extent “not seen before or since.” A new charter of human rights, he contended, should include all humans “irrespective of race, creed, colour or sex.”[63] Professor S. V. Puntambekar, from the Hindu University of Benares, underlined the spiritual needs of all humans and the endless complexity of human nature. Accordingly, Puntambekar advocated toleration of differences, the vital importance of which was underscored by the menace of civil war in India. Finally, he highlighted the paramount significance of freedom from foreign domination.[64]

Summarizing the above and numerous other responses, the members of the UNESCO committee arrived at several conclusions. The history of declarations of individual rights, they concluded, was chiefly confined to the history of Europe since the mid-seventeenth century. But when the foundations of human rights were found in a broader vision of personal dignity and common humanity the picture changed:

The history of the philosophic discussion of human rights, of the dignity and brotherhood of man, and of his common citizenship in the great society is long: it extends beyond the narrow limits of the western tradition and its beginnings in the West as well as in the East coincide with the beginnings of philosophy.[65]

Here the reasoning of the UNESCO committee anticipates Karl Jaspers’s concept of the Axial Age, which the German philosopher would expound in his 1949 book Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (On The Origin and Telos of History). What the committee is saying is that there are cross-cultural foundations for views of common humanity and personal dignity, but not for the individualist conception of the human person that had emerged in the European Enlightenment. The committee further observed that even within the Western world fundamental differences existed between liberal and Marxist philosophers. In the liberal tradition the individual was the primary reality, while the Marxists emphasized the social nature of the individual. Since the Industrial Revolution, they further argued, the insight had prevailed that social and economic rights, and more generally “rights to,” also had to be included.[66]

Perhaps the most important outcome of the UNESCO survey was that the lists of fundamental rights and values submitted by the respondents overlapped to a large extent. The list of globally accepted rights included civil and political as well as social and economic rights.[67] A broad consensus existed on the need for truly universal rights, irrespective of race, skin color, sex, religion, and language. Apparently, there was cross-cultural agreement about the desirability of a list of universal rights but not about their philosophical or religious grounding.

Another contentious topic concerned the proper relationship between the individual, the society, and the state. Charles Malik argued that the individual was the primordial reality and the subject of rights. Peng Chun Chang, however, thought this an overly individualist conception of humanity. He rendered the Confucian idea of humanity (ren) as “two-people mindedness.” The true essence of humanity, Chang posited, was not found in the isolated individual but only manifested itself in interpersonal relationships. Even so, he did not advocate a Confucian grounding of the Universal Declaration but advocated a balanced approach that would do justice to the individualistic as well as the social ontology of the “individual.” At the same time he distanced himself from the communist standpoint that individuals should be defined by their duties to society as organized in the state. The communist view, Chang argued, should be rejected as too state centered and potentially authoritarian. In the final text of the Universal Declaration it says that “everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.”

Coming to universal equality, Article 2 forbids discrimination on the grounds of race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, or other status. Most of the grounds of exclusion used in the course of history are thus excluded in their turn. The second part of Article 2 declares that no distinction shall be made “on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.” This wordy formula referred to colonies and trusteeship territories. The colonized peoples would thus be individually free but collectively subjected.

The Universal Declaration includes the right to have rights. Article 6 proclaims “the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law,” and Article 15 states that “everyone has the right to a nationality” and that “no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.” The rights to leave one’s country, to return there, and to seek asylum in the case of persecution are also included. It follows that states may not create or sustain conditions under which people are divested of all their rights, a clear allusion to the policies of Nazi Germany. Even so, stateless individuals cannot invoke the legal protection of the UN when no nation is willing to receive them. Dictatorial states refusing to abide by human rights can only be compelled to do so by the Security Council—that is, by the great powers acting in concert.

The French declaration of 1789 had stipulated that nobody was to be molested on account of his opinions, “not even religious ones.” The Universal Declaration expounds a broader approach to the freedom of religion. Article 18 declares that “everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” The social nature of religion thus gets far more traction than in 1789. The right to change one’s religion reflects a secularist orientation, for most religions accept conversion but reject apostasy. The right to change one’s religion was the reason for the abstention of Saudi Arabia in the final General Assembly vote. According to the Saudi delegate Jamil Baroody the emphasis on changing one’s religion recalled the spirit of the Crusades.[68] In the preparatory stage the Saudi amendment to delete the clause got a fair amount of support, but in the final vote Baroody stood alone. The Pakistani minister of foreign affairs, Zafrullah Kahn, justified his yes vote with a Quranic verse on the voluntary nature of religious belief.[69] Syria and Egypt also voted for the clause, despite their reservations about the formulation.[70] In the debate, René Cassin admitted that to change one’s religion was a “delicate matter” for the followers of certain religions, but submitted that freedom of thought was incomplete without the right to alter one’s opinions.[71] Religion is thus placed on the same level as all other “opinions,” which again assumes a secular worldview.

Gender was another bone of contention. According to Article 16 of the Universal Declaration, “the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.” This is the only passage in the declaration in which an institution is defined as “natural.” In 1948, no one objected to the naturalization of the heterosexual family (that would only come with the new feminism and gay activism of the 1970s). What caused commotion was the first part of the article which declared that “men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry.… They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage, and at its dissolution.” Again it was Baroody who dissented. He proposed to replace “full age” with “legal matrimonial age.” He further proposed to delete the words “without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion,” because it justified a Muslim woman marrying a non-Muslim man.[72] Baroody reproached the framers of the article for seeking “to proclaim the superiority of one civilization over all others.”

The Saudi amendments were seconded by Syria and Lebanon, but the Pakistani delegate Shaista Ikramullah, a young woman born in purdah, rejected them. While agreeing with Baroody that equal rights in marriage should not be interpreted as “identical rights,” she underscored that the article “was designed to prevent child marriage and marriages contracted without the consent of both parties, and also to ensure the protection of women after divorce and the safeguarding of their property.” Ikramullah did not support the Saudi amendment because “it would enable countries with laws discriminating against women to continue to apply them.”[73] Baroody’s proposal got the support of a few Muslim states but was defeated by a large majority. In the final vote on the entire declaration he was the only Muslim delegate to abstain. Surprisingly, the U.S. delegates did not object to the freedom to marry across racial boundaries. In 1945, thirty states in the United States had laws forbidding or nullifying cross-racial marriages.[74]

South Africa, where the laws enforced racial segregation, also abstained in the final vote. By an irony of history, the South African prime minister, Jan Smuts, had played an important role convincing the British and the Americans to put human rights in the UN Charter, but his draft preamble did not include racial equality.[75] In the meantime the General Assembly had invoked the human rights clauses of the charter to censure South Africa. Given these circumstances the South African abstention did not surprise anyone.

In the final adoption of the Universal Declaration, no member state voted against it, but there were eight abstentions: Saudi Arabia and South Africa, discussed above, and the representatives of the Soviet Union, Ukraine, Belorussia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. The main objections of the six communist states concerned the role of the state. Rights in the Universal Declaration, they declared, were too often defined as rights against the state, as in the article on the right to leave one’s country and to return there.[76] In capitalist class societies, the communist delegates argued, the state did not respect the basic interests of the masses, but in socialist countries individuals and the state were in harmony. On the other hand, the communists agreed with the inclusion of social and economic rights in the declaration. These rights were already included in Humphrey’s first draft of the declaration, based on the Panamanian and Chilean proposals.[77] Several Latin American states had adopted socioeconomic rights in their legislation. The first constitution in the world to contain social and economic rights was the Mexican Constitution of 1917. The United States supported social and economic rights but minimized the role of state intervention in guaranteeing them.

What can we conclude about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? In the first place, while the notion of individual human rights was of European provenance, the radical deepening of the concept of equality reflected the growing weight of the extra-European world. Second, the debate in the General Assembly demonstrated that people from widely different cultural backgrounds could reach an agreement on human rights. Cultural divergences there assuredly were, but it would be anachronistic to characterize the 1948 debates as a culture war. In part this outcome reflected the “westernized” careers of the Asians and (few) Africans present in Paris and the large voting bloc of Latin American states. But the radicalization of equality language had not been a standard item in prewar Western political culture.

Third, the condemnation of racism was based on two very different historical experiences. On the Western side, the world war had been fought against the Nazi bid for empire, of which the racist Herrenvolk ideology and anti-Semitism made up the core. On the side of Asians and Africans, racism stood at the center of their long history of slavery and colonial subjection. To them, the twentieth century was indeed the century of the color line. Racists and antiracists thus confronted each other in the West as well as worldwide.

The fourth conclusion is that a worldwide consensus on the importance of social and economic rights had emerged, albeit not on the means of their implementation. This consensus rested on a synergy of Western and non-Western experiences. In the West it emerged from the experience of the Great Depression, but outside the West it reflected a new awareness of global social inequality and extreme poverty. The communist contention that the socialist states represented a superior solution of the problem of economic inequality and poverty gave the debate an extra edge, but the story that the communist bloc could claim the inclusion of social and economic rights in the declaration is a myth.

The fifth conclusion is that the objections to the status of the individual as the ultimate bearer of rights did not stem from a putative “Asian collectivism,” but from the communist states. Communism was an offshoot of socialism that, like liberalism, could trace its origins to the European Enlightenment. The controversy over the priority of the individual was thus both an intra-Western and a global disagreement. At its core were two oppositions: the opposition between democracy and totalitarianism and the economic controversy over state intervention and laissez-faire policies. An opposition between “Western” and “Asian” values occasionally surfaced, in particular on gender matters, but it was not central to the debates in 1948.

My sixth and last conclusion concerns the historical significance of the Universal Declaration. Situated in the longer history of thinking about common humanity and equality since the seventeenth century, the Universal Declaration stands for the historical moment when modern equality was accepted as a global standard, a moral beacon buttressed by the collective authority of the world’s sovereign states. Placed in a broader context, the Universal Declaration’s import goes beyond the issue of human rights and their observance. What the drafters produced and the General Assembly adopted was an inclusive vision of humanity. Seen in that perspective, the deliberate omission of a religious or philosophical grounding should not solely be seen as an overcautious pragmatic move. It demonstrated that it was feasible to speak about the needs, expectations, and legitimate strivings of all the human beings on the planet without adopting a particular philosophical or religious stance. The Universal Declaration did not need a philosophical discussion of the concept of humanity because the declaration itself was couched in a new inclusive language of modern equality.

Ashley Montagu’s Proposal to Abolish the Concept of Race

In Franz Boas’s anthropology, race remained a valid explanatory concept, albeit restricted to the physical variation in the human species. The investigation of cultural variety was assigned to anthropology, history, and the other human sciences. Consequently, the concepts of culture and race were defined as antonyms: culture was everything that was not race, and race was everything that was not culture.[78] Boas denied the existence of “superior” and “inferior” races, but he accepted the validity of a racial classification of humanity. The same line of reasoning is found in the influential book Race and Racism, published in 1942 by Boas’s collaborator Ruth Benedict. She defines race as a “classification based on hereditary traits” and warns that “to recognize Race does not mean to recognize Racism.”[79]

A more radical approach was advocated by the British anthropologist Ashley Montagu, who argued that the concept of race was indissolubly linked to racism. In Montagu’s view, “race” was a phantom concept that did not correspond to any biological reality. His critique would be crucial to the dismantling of the concept by a UNESCO expert panel in 1950. Montagu was a self-adopted name. He was born in 1905 as Israel Ehrenberg. His father was a Jewish tailor in East End London. Children from another neighborhood regularly threw stones at the young Montagu on his way to school. When he asked his mother why they were so hostile, she told him that it was “because we are Jews.” To his next question why people hated Jews his mother shrugged her shoulders: “That’s what people are like.” In an interview in the 1990s Montagu recounted that his interest in racism dated from those times. He wanted to find out why people were given to such outlandish prejudices. Anti-Semitism, he then recalled, was endemic in England, from the popular classes to the cultivated gentlemen in their London clubs.[80]

In 1925, at the age of twenty, Montagu published his first critical essay on racism in a student magazine. After his student days he adopted the aristocratic-sounding name of Francis Ashley Montagu—why is unclear, but probably to protect himself from anti-Semitic prejudices (Montague is the name of the Veronese family of Romeo in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet). After his studies in London he left for New York, where he graduated in 1937 under Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict with a thesis on the procreative beliefs of the Australian Aboriginals. Montagu later recounted that Boas’s class on the languages of the Native Americans was the most important course he ever took: “Why? Because it provided … an understanding of how people in a particular culture think, how differently the mind works in different cultures, as well as how the construction of reality is socially determined, not to mention understanding that falsification begins with language.”[81]

The strength of Montagu’s critique of race was that he was not only well versed in cultural anthropology but also in physical anthropology and genetics. Besides, he had thoroughly studied the history of anthropology and theories of race. That enabled him to extend his critique of race to the putative biological grounding of the concept. At the 1941 celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the University of Chicago Montagu delivered a public lecture on “the meaninglessness of the anthropological conception of race.” The head of the anthropology department dismissed his critique out of hand, but many students expressed their “hearty agreement.”[82] Montagu reworked his lecture into a book that was published the next year as Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, followed by a second, greatly expanded edition in 1945.

According to Montagu, most anthropologists believe that the concept of “race” refers to a physical, biological reality. In the light of modern genetics, however, “race” is a meaningless notion. The theory that “race” refers to hereditary physical types, Montagu argues, is untenable because genetics, ever since the recovery of Gregor Mendel’s work in the late nineteenth century, is based on the heritability of distinct traits and not of “complexes of characters.”[83] It follows that every human population is genetically somewhat heterogeneous. Genetic changes can be caused by random variations in gene frequencies or by mutations of particular genes. In the course of human history, Montagu reasons, migration results in the creation of mutually isolated groups. Random variations and mutations may cause physical differences between such groups. Environmental factors such as climate thereupon set in motion Darwinian mechanisms of natural selection. The combination of geographical isolation and environmental factors can cause differences in the frequencies of particular genes in the various populations that make up humanity.

Montagu emphasizes that such populations are not static but dynamic entities: “The so-called ‘races’ merely represent different kinds of temporary mixtures of genetic materials common to all mankind.”[84] According to Montagu, the idea of “races” as large, fixed, and stable entities persisting unchanged through the ages is a fabrication of physical anthropologists. They produce race by two questionable operations. In the first place, they conceive of the average traits of a large population as an independent physical reality. Individual differences in gene frequencies are dissolved in the averages, and the individuals are then redescribed as “exemplars” of the “race” that is construed on the basis of the averages. In the second operation the bundling of such a complex of traits in a “race” is theorized as inheritable en bloc, contrary to modern genetics, which only recognizes the hereditary character of disparate traits. It is this operation that transforms the dynamic concept of population into the static concept of race. “The process of averaging the characters of a given group, of knocking the individuals together, giving them a good stirring, and then serving the resulting omelette as a ‘race,’” Montagu concludes, “is essentially the anthropological process of race-making.”[85]

To understand how “races” can become relatively stable historical entities, Montagu further argues, one must take into account historical factors, in particular sexual and social selection. People frequently seek out sexual partners from the population they are familiar with and which they like better than outsiders. Mechanism of social closure and segregation in housing and schooling are present in many societies, making the process of sexual selection even more rigid. The circumstance that the black inhabitants of the United States persist as a distinctly demarcated “race,” Montagu asserts, has nothing to do with biology—it is the result of a social closure imposed by the white Americans. If American society were not segregated, a process of hybridization would slowly dissolve the black minority into the white majority.[86] The American laws against racially mixed marriages and the strict segregation in virtually all public amenities are cultural mechanisms, Montagu goes on to say, comparable to the Indian institution of “caste.” Accordingly, he proposes to use the term caste instead of race when referring to the cultural factors causing the formation of physically differentiated populations.[87]

To identify the biologically, ecologically, and socially caused physical differentiation Montagu proposes the term ethnic group. He defines this new concept as follows: “An ethnic group represents one of a number of populations which together comprise the species Homo sapiens, but individually maintain their differences, physical and cultural, by means of isolating mechanisms such as geographic and social barriers.”[88] The concept of ethnic group would make the pseudobiological term “race” redundant, which would be all to the good, Montagu believes, because “race” always tended to overflow into racism. Ethnic group was free of the biological determinism of race and left open how genetic and social factors interacted in specific cases.

The replacement of race with ethnic group, Montagu hopes, would clear the decks for a cultural approach to intelligence. He alludes to the measurements of brain volume to explain the alleged difference in intelligence between the “races,” which Boas had minimized but never totally discarded. According to American physical anthropologists, the “negroes” had an average brain volume of 1,400 cubic centimeters, while the “white” average was 1,450. From those data countless students of racial difference had concluded that the average white was more intelligent than the average black. Montagu wonders why the Neanderthal “race” was never included in such comparisons. Measurements of skulls of this Paleolithic subspecies yielded an average brain volume of 1,626 cubic centimeters, but nobody had ever concluded that the Neanderthal were more intelligent than modern Homo sapiens.[89] Montagu concludes that such rough measurements of size and weight cannot decide the issue one way or another. Moreover, intelligence is only partially innate. Social environment and education greatly influence to what extent humans can develop their brain potential. In the final analysis, Montagu concludes, “it is culture that makes ‘brains’, not brains culture.”[90]

Montagu published Man’s Most Dangerous Myth when America was fighting Nazi Germany, but he had no illusions that the United States had turned overnight into an antiracist nation. During the war, the U.S. Army had segregated blood banks, to preclude any chance that white soldiers would be “contaminated” with “black blood,” a policy that was ridiculed by the African American news media.[91]

UNESCO and the Abolition and Resurrection of the Concept of Race

While the Universal Declaration consecrated racial equality, UNESCO was assigned the task to enlist the authority of science in the campaign for a better postwar world. The UNESCO charter singled out racist ideology as one of the causes of the war: “The great and terrible war which has now ended was a war made possible by the propagation … through ignorance and prejudice, of the doctrine of the inequality of men and races.”[92] In this diagnosis, racism is furthered by ignorance. To disarm it the authority of science must be marshaled.

To prepare the ground for a large-scale pedagogical campaign UNESCO convened an expert committee to draft a scientific report on the race question. The committee completed its work in the first half of 1950 and the UNESCO Statement on Race was presented to the world on 18 July 1950.[93] In its message to the press UNESCO declared that the statement offered a scientific validation of several principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in particular the conception of humanity as one “human family.”[94] On the day of the press release the front page of the New York Times read: “No Scientific Basis of Race Bias Found by World Panel of Experts.”[95] The last hour of scientific racism seemed imminent, but it would soon become clear that the antiracist consensus was less unanimous than the Times headlines suggested.

Of the eight experts who drafted the Statement on Race, two were U.S. citizens. The six others came from England, France, New Zealand, Mexico, Brazil, and India. The American members were Franklin Frazier and Ashley Montagu, the latter functioning as rapporteur. The other members were Ernest Beaglehole (New Zealand), Claude Levi-Strauss (France), Juan Comas (Mexico), Humayun Kabir (India), Morris Ginzberg (Britain), and L. A. Costa Pinto (Brazil).[96] The committee thus counted four “North-Atlantic” members, one from the dominions in the British Empire, two Latin Americans, and one Asian. No woman was invited, although there were outstanding female anthropologists, such as Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead.

Given his role as final editor, it is hardly surprising that Montagu’s critique of the race concept provides the hard core of the statement. It opens with an affirmation of the unity of humanity. All humans belong to the species of Homo sapiens and they probably have a common ancestry. Humanity, the report continues, has diversified over time “by the operation of evolutionary factors such as isolation, the drift and random fixation of the material particles which control heredity (the genes), changes in the structure of these particles, hybridization, and natural selection.”[97] Consequently, the decisive factors are on the one hand biological (mutations in the genetic material) and on the other hand social (hybridization can be slowed down by social closure) and geographical (isolation brought about by migration). Biologically speaking, the report concludes, the human species consists of a number of populations differing in the frequency of one or several genes. This is the biological meaning of race. This explanation is immediately followed by a warning against overstating the differences between the populations:

[The] genes, responsible for the hereditary differences between men, are always few when compared to the whole genetic constitution of man and to the vast number of genes common to all human beings regardless of the population to which they belong. This means that the likenesses among men are far greater than the differences.[98]

The critique of an exaggeration of race differences we have already encountered in the work of Franz Boas, but compared to Montagu’s argument in Man’s Most Dangerous Myth, it marks a retreat. In the UNESCO statement “race” corresponds to a biological substrate, a thesis that Montagu’s book had plainly rejected.

Next the report discusses the common sense assumptions and perceptions of people when they speak about races. Most men, the report observes, are prone to inflate small genetic differences to “fundamental differences” between their own group and all others. Moreover, they apply the term race to all differences people habitually call racial. Historically evolved differences between nationalities and religions are routinely confused with racial differences. The report mentions the examples of Englishmen, Americans, Frenchmen, Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Jews, Turks, and Chinese. These kinds of misconceptions are so deeply inscribed in the term race that it is preferable to drop the term altogether and to replace it with ethnic group. In accordance with Montagu’s book the UNESCO team thus proposes to abolish the race concept.

At the present time, the report continues, most anthropologists are used to divide humanity into three great subdivisions—the Mongoloid, the Negroid, and the Caucasian division. But these subdivisions are not static: in the past they were different from what they are at present and they will change again in the future. “Races” are fluid entities that appear, fluctuate, and disappear in the long biological history of humanity. The report underlines that “whatever classification the anthropologist makes of man, he never includes mental characteristics as part of those classifications.”[99] Hereditary genetic differences, the committee concludes, are not significant for the emergence of cultural difference and the divergent achievements of disparate groups and peoples. On the contrary, the historical development and the cultural experiences of such groups explain the differences we encounter at the present time. In this matter, the report takes a stand that we may characterize as strong environmentalism: “The one trait which above all others has been at a premium in the evolution of man’s mental characters has been educability, plasticity.”[100] Personality and mindset have nothing to do with biological differences: they can effectively be considered “race-less.” On these grounds the report strongly underlines that there is no scientific justification whatsoever for a ban on racially mixed marriages.

The rapporteurs further recommend a clear-cut distinction between the biological fact of population or race, and the race myth. “For all practical social purposes,” they declare, “‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth.” In the recent past, they recall, the mythology of race has caused untold suffering and the deaths of millions of innocent people. Even at the present time, they warn, the race myth impedes the healthy development of millions of men and women, and consequently robs civilization of the efficient cooperation of productive minds. The report invokes the authority of Darwin’s Descent of Man to argue that “the whole of human history shows that a co-operative spirit is not only natural to men, but more deeply rooted than any self-seeking tendencies.”[101] The final conclusions of the report make the considerably stronger claim that “biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood.”[102]

The greater part of the final section of the statement is devoted to the concept of equality. To begin with, the rapporteurs declare that the validity of the ethical norm of equality in no way depends on the factual equality of human faculties and abilities. On the other hand, they are well aware that exaggerated accounts of the differences between people are often used to discredit equality. Therefore they carefully spell out the consequences of their critique of the race concept for the issue of equality. Their first conclusion is that in making racial classifications anthropologists can only use physical and physiological measures and should on no account insert mental and cultural differences. Second, there are no innate mental differences. The available scientific data demonstrate that the cognitive potential of the mind is the same in all ethnic groups. The third conclusion states that the major social and cultural differences between groups belonging to Homo sapiens cannot be explained by genetic differences and consequently have nothing to do with “race.” Fourth, there is absolutely no evidence for the belief that racial mixture is physically or mentally harmful. The fifth and final conclusion is that the biological differences between ethnic groups are irrelevant to social, political, and moral issues.

The Statement on Race buttressed the concept of equality by replacing the negatively charged concept of race with ethnic group and by minimizing the historical and social significance of the differences between the main ethnic groups. The concept of race did not vanish altogether, but its poison was drained. UNESCO distributed the statement worldwide and it was printed in newspapers in more than eighteen countries. Generally, it was well received. Apparently, many people felt the need for an authoritative refutation of the race myth.

The scientific community in the West, however, was not unanimous in its praise. Some biologists and geneticists complained that the UNESCO committee lacked the scientific authority to pronounce on genetic and biological matters because its members were cultural anthropologists and sociologists. In part, this was a classical conflict over academic turf. Geneticists and biologists claimed ownership of the race concept. But they also criticized the content of the statement. British scientists were in the forefront of the battle. On 15 August 1950, less than four weeks after the presentation of the statement, several geneticists, biologists, and physical anthropologists, speaking on behalf of the Royal Anthropological Society, sent a letter to the editor of The Times, which briefly stated their criticisms. In October, Man, the journal of the Royal Anthropological Society, published a more extensive critique and also printed the text of the UNESCO statement. The gist was that the UNESCO statement was not endorsed by all experts in the relevant disciplines and thus lacked scientific authority. The critics singled out three conclusions that were, in their opinion, not sufficiently grounded in scientific data. The first was “the too simplified statement that ‘race is less a biological fact than a social myth’”; next came the proposal that the phrase ethnic group should be substituted for race in ordinary speech; and third the concluding statement that man is “born with biological drives towards universal brotherhood and co-operation.”[103]

The UNESCO directorate was most unhappy with this negative publicity. They had wanted an uncontroversial statement. Accordingly, they opted for an exercise in damage control.[104] To that end they convened a second committee composed exclusively of geneticists, biologists, and physical anthropologists, but they could not exclude Montagu, whose expertise in physical anthropology was unexceptionable. Consequently, Montagu kept his pivotal position as rapporteur. The new committee counted thirteen members: four Americans, four Englishmen, two Frenchmen, one Swede, one German, and one Dutchman. While three of the eight members of the first committee were Latin Americans and Asians, the second committee was 100 percent North Atlantic and 100 percent white. The new committee produced the Statement on the Nature of Race and Race Differences. It went to the press in June 1951, four month after Ashley Montagu had published Statement on Race, a short book that contained the 1950 Statement on Race with explanations and enlargements by Montagu.

Like the 1950 report, the second UNESCO report stated that there was no scientific foundation for racism. The scientific findings of the last 150 years, the revamped committee concluded, has yielded no biological grounds “for limiting the principle of equality as applied to races.”[105] The second report also maintained the conclusion that there are no valid scientific reasons for laws against interracial marriages. But a careful comparison of the two statements also brings to light a number of remarkable differences.

The most controversial conclusion in the first statement was that there existed a biological foundation for an ethics of universal brotherhood. Accordingly, the second committee deleted it. In the second place, the recommendation to drop the race concept and to replace it with the concept of ethnic group was also deleted. The race concept makes a cautious comeback and the critical observations of the first statement are softened or omitted. While the first statement had consistently put the term “race” between quotation marks, and thus called its scientific authority into question, the second statement does not do so. Whereas the first statement dismissed the race concept as scientifically doubtful and superfluous, the second statement considers race a serious scientific concept that is central to anthropology and human biology. The process wherein populations with differing gene frequencies emerge is explained in roughly the same way in both statements, and the second statement also affirms that the existing races “are merely the result, considered at a particular moment in time, of the total effect of such processes on the human species.”[106] The first report had added that in the course of human development, the “races” appear, fluctuate, and will also disappear. This addition is omitted in the second statement, consequently leaving more room for race as a biologically anchored and long-run reality. What is also omitted in the second statement is the thesis that the genetic commonalities between the races are far greater than the differences.

Another issue on which the two statements differ concerns the causal links between race and mentality. The first statement said that no anthropologist would ascribe specific mental properties to a “race.” The second statement says that “most anthropologists” would refrain from doing so. About intellectual and temperamental differences the second statement says: “It is possible, though not proved, that some types of innate capacity for intellectual and emotional responses are commoner in one human group than in another, but it is certain that, within a single group, innate capacities vary as much, if not more than they do between different groups.”[107] The precise meaning of the last clause is not clear. The full sentence has all the marks of a compromise formula. It looks as if one or more members of the panel did not want to categorically exclude intellectual inequalities between races and the other members then added a compensatory clause.

The two statements agree on the argument that genetic differences cannot account for the cultural differences between peoples, an opinion that sits ill with the above affirmation of the possibility of racial differences in mentality. But the emphatic statement of the first report that personality and character are “race-less” is omitted. It is puzzling that the second statement denies the influence of racial factors on cultural history but leaves open the possibility of a race psychology. The importance of history is formally acknowledged in the second statement, but it gets far less attention than in the first. The second committee also deleted the thesis that educability and plasticity are among the most important properties of the human species. Overall we can typify the standpoint of the first statement as strong environmentalism and that of the second as weak environmentalism.

The social and political thrust of the two statements is perhaps the point where they differ most. The first report had concluded that all humans are capable of acquiring the skills and virtues to thrive in communities and that the biological differences between ethnic groups are irrelevant to sociability, politics, and morality. The redactors of the second report deleted this and many similar passages. They were not content to delete the contentious statement on the biological foundation of universal brotherhood but also crossed out all other passages about the vital need for social interaction inscribed in human nature. Another crucial difference concerns the attitude to the widespread misuse of race in ordinary language and in particular in racist language. The first panel signaled the careless use of race in common parlance as one of the principal grounds of their recommendation to replace race with ethnic group. The second committee mentions the matter one time: the identification of nationalities or religions with races it calls “a serious error but … one which is habitually committed.”[108]

We may conclude that the first UNESCO statement not only deconstructed the race concept but also offered a historical and social critique of racism. The second statement sought to expunge everything that could be construed as “political.” Its main concern was to keep the peace within the academic community. The all-white composition of the second committee probably reinforced the conservative tendency to play it safe. In his study of the retreat of scientific racism Elazar Barkan has pointed out that the changing composition of the scholarly community played a major role in the transformation and critique of the race concept.[109] Groups who had traditionally been relegated to the margins or excluded because they were deemed “inferior,” such as immigrants, people of color, Jews, and women, began to enter the academic community. While there seldom is a direct causal link between the cultural identity and intellectual stance of individuals, the presence of newcomers undercut the self-evident nostrums that had been taken for granted in the old setting. People are seldom enamored by doctrines which proclaim their own inferiority. Before the First World War anthropologists and biologists were white men, who themselves belonged to the race and the gender their theories extolled as superior. The twentieth-century academic community was slowly—very slowly—becoming more heterogeneous. The two UNESCO Statements on Race can be seen as symptomatic of the hesitations and uncertainties in a changing academic community when the Second World War had turned the concept of race into dangerous ground.

As a solution of the race conundrum, the second UNESCO statement failed. Unintentionally, it made visible the intractable problem of race boundaries (which the first statement had evaded). The members of the second panel had worked hard to provide race with a purely biological basis. But how many races existed and how could the racial provenance of an individual be determined? The obstacle to any solution comes into plain view at a close reading of the one conclusion the second panel added: “Some biological differences between human beings within a single race may be as great as, or greater than, the same biological differences between races.”[110] Now what? If this is true we may confront a situation in which biological differences between individuals A1 and A2, both belonging to race A, are greater than the corresponding differences between A2 and B1, who belongs to race B. The question arises whether it would not be better to draw the racial boundary between A1 and A2 instead of between A2 and B1, or perhaps draw the more radical conclusion that genetic pools do not equal continental human groups and that races are splintered and fluid entities instead of discrete actors on the grand stage of world history.

The second statement, like the first, subscribes to a classification of humanity into three major subdivisions. It usefully recalls that these had long been known as grand-races in French and Hauptrassen in German. In other words, they could be dated back to the nineteenth century, way before the advent of modern genetics. When we bring modern genetics to bear on the old racial classifications, it becomes clear at once that the “principal races” were not biological entities but historical and political constructs. The final conclusion would then be that modern racial classifications do not rest on biological facts but present us with politico-historical objects formulated in a pseudobiological language. That, after all, was the gist of Montagu’s critique of the race concept.

Visualizing Common Humanity in Edward Steichen’s Family of Man

In all ages, oral and pictorial communication reaches a far larger public than the written word. Accordingly, the American photographer Edward Steichen conceived of photography as a “universal language.” While writing was bogged down in national or regional communities, he stated, pictures could speak “equally to everybody in the world.”[111] In the famous exhibition The Family of Man, which toured the world in the 1950s, Steichen and his collaborators presented over 500 pictures of people—individuals, families, groups, crowds—from sixty-eight countries, highlighting the commonalities across the most diverse cultures. The exhibition opened its doors in January 1955 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the ten years after its launching it traveled all over the world. In a 1958 lecture, Steichen recalled that the largest attendance was in Calcutta, with 29,000 visitors on a single day. In Belgrade, in communist Yugoslavia, more than half of the population had seen it. In the first three years of the exhibition, it attracted three and a half million visitors, while the catalogue sold a million copies.[112] By 1962, more than nine million people in sixty-one countries had seen the exhibition.

The exhibition, Steichen explained in his 1955 introduction, “was conceived as a mirror of the universal elements and emotions in the everydayness of life—as a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world.”[113] Three years later, he said that he wanted the exhibition to express “my own very firm belief that we are all alike on this earth, regardless of race or creed or color.”[114] Going by these utterances, I think it is not far-fetched to say that Steichen and his team sought to create a pictorial counterpart to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Like the drafters of the Universal Declaration, they looked back on two world wars and the Great Depression. Steichen himself was born in 1879 and had served as a photographer in the American Army and Navy in two wars. The Family of Man reflected the historical memories of the generations that had emerged from thirty years of death and destruction and desperately hoped for a better future.

The exhibition was designed as a one-way track, guiding the visitors along a prearranged route from entrance to exit. It opens with an image of the sun above water seen in a dark, perhaps Arctic sky, capped by a quote from Genesis: “And God said, let there be light.” Its concluding sequence of images show, first, a hydrogen bomb test symbolizing the threat of universal destruction, followed by a huge canvass of the General Assembly of the United Nations captioned by the opening sentences of the UN Charter. In front of the UN picture stood smaller photographs of married couples from different continents. Next, some forty pictures of children—working, walking, crying, playing—redirected the gaze to the tender beginnings of each new generation. At the very end the visitor could reflect on the meaning of it all, looking at an enchanting picture of two little children walking on an overgrown path from the darkness, where the perspectival framing situates the spectator, to the light ahead of them. The symbolism seems clear: the visitors to the exhibition are still bogged down in the dark world of the twentieth century but the next generations may yet accede to the light. The caption reads: “A world to be born under your footsteps.”[115] Suffering will be followed by redemption, but it is up to the next generation to make it so: a lightly secularized version of the religious myths of deliverance. To the makers of the exhibition it represented a universal truth, illustrated by quotations from the Bible but also from pagan antiquity, from the Asian classics, and from Native American proverbs. Their deliberate ecumenical eclecticism parallels the philosophical agnosticism we have seen at work in the drafting of the Universal Declaration.

In the main body of the exhibition people are depicted in a dazzling variety of settings, occupations, and moods. Amidst the kaleidoscopic plurality, however, one social institution stands out: the family is the centerpiece of human life as it is presented in the exhibition. The “family of man” is the overarching metaphor chosen for humanity, and the “atoms” of humanity are not individuals but families. The visitors get to see couples in love (always heterosexual, of course), marriages, pregnant women, childbirth, babies being breastfed by mothers, children playing and at school, grieving families, and group pictures of small and large families, always with the men standing up and the women seated in front of them.

Later feminist critics have observed that Steichen’s world was a patriarchal one. It was, in theory and practice. The prominence of the family and of children in the exhibition (200 out of 500 photographs) accords with the naturalness conferred on the institution of the family by the Universal Declaration. But the equality of the sexes also proclaimed in the Universal Declaration is only marginally present in The Family of Man. The exhibition has a fair number of images of working women, mostly in agricultural or “primitive” settings, but the majority of the labor images, and virtually all the “modern” ones, show male workers. There is no trace of the countless women who were doing industrial “masculine” work in wartime in all the belligerent countries. The only images that suggest the equality of the sexes are mixed college and high school classrooms and four pictures of women putting their ballots in the box on election day in France, Japan, China, and Turkey.[116] There are no images of voting men, so that women voters are depicted both as an exception and as a sign of democracy triumphant.

Some critics have taken exception to a “Western” or even an “American” bias or, stronger yet, a “Cold War” perspective in the way the exhibition represented the world. The great majority of the photographs were indeed taken in the United States. Moreover, the racial composition of the exhibition is predominantly white. Of the 410 pictures in which the color of the portrayed people can be identified, 285 show whites, 42 show blacks, 49 depict in-between colors (mostly from North Africa, India, and Latin America), 22 show East Asians, and 5 show people from the Arctic regions. The whites thus outnumber the colored at a ratio of four to one. In a generic sense the critics thus have a point, but even so we should not underestimate the equality effects of the exhibition. In the first place, common people and everyday life get pride of place. Compared with newspapers, radio, and television, politics and politicians are barely visible. The politics of the exhibition is a left-leaning democratic populism. Coming to matters of race, the most striking feature of the exhibition is the near absence of race mixing: only seven photographs show racially mixed groups. As in the United States in the mid-twentieth century, racial segregation is presented as the default setting of human sociability. On the other hand, the exhibition displays a soft version of racial equality. The different races are placed side by side: there is no overt racial hierarchy. Even so, the images of sub-Saharan Africans display an atmosphere of “primitive” technology coupled to agricultural or hunting pursuits, an element also present in the rare images of Arctic and Native American peoples. The exhibition shows traces of the division of the world into civilized and uncivilized peoples that was a hallmark of the pre-1940 ideologies of race and history.

We might diagnose this as a tension between the master language of the exhibition, which emphatically glorified the common humanity of all peoples on earth, and the anthropological imagination subtending the arrangement and framing of the photographs. The master language of The Family of Man is universal equality, but the anthropological imagination of its creators is predicated on difference. I think it reasonable to accord an equal weight to both sides of the equation. Critics working from a hermeneutics of suspicion have been prone to identify the anthropological imagination as the “real” code of the exhibition while decoding its explicit message of equality as a “sentimental humanism” in service to the global imposition of a Western model of humanity. Against that, I insist that both interpretations are sustainable. Most visitors, I would think, have seen equality and otherness, or otherness and equality. For many young people it was their first acquaintance with pictures of people from distant parts of the world. They were fascinated, but fascination is a Janus-faced emotion, a balancing act of empathy and exoticism.

Once more, we can usefully juxtapose The Family of Man to the Universal Declaration. Undoubtedly, the drafters of the declaration were imbued with their own anthropological imaginations, but the abstract language of the text of the declaration hides those from view, as it was meant to do. Moreover, they were an ethnically and philosophically mixed company, in stark contrast to the white North American homogeneity of the team that created The Family of Man. And third, they were philosophically minded people who were, as we have seen, aware of the global problematic of sameness and difference. The upshot is that the Universal Declaration is an egalitarian text than can accommodate difference to a certain extent, while in The Family of Man equality and difference form an unmediated polarity.

Finally, there was Auschwitz. The Universal Declaration and The Family of Man refer to it, but in different ways. The UN Charter and the Universal Declaration both invoke it as one of the reasons, perhaps the chief reason, for declaring universal rights. The preamble of the Universal Declaration refers to “barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” Adopted by the UN Assembly the day after the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, everyone present will have known which “barbarous acts” were meant. The Family of Man showed two photographs of the emptying of the Warsaw Ghetto after the crushing of the Jewish uprising, accompanied by a smaller picture, taken in Israel, of a woman decrying the injustice and raising her arm in an accusatory gesture. These images stand at the beginning of a brief series of photographs of repression and popular resistance. The images thus represent the Holocaust, but they are metonymically linked to images of oppression in other places and times. The section on resistance and oppression was followed by a brief series of images of politics, presented as an encomium of democracy. Next the visitors came face to face with nuclear destruction and thence they entered the final sequence, discussed above.

Steichen and his team have been taken to task for not making the Holocaust more central and for not displaying photographs of the concentration camps.[117] Beyond that, the critics have accused them of inserting the Holocaust in a rosy vision of history and, by implication, obscuring its roots in modernity. Compared to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklärung, published shortly after the war, Steichen’s view of history is indeed bound to appear as optimistic, but we should pause to consider what kind of “optimism” Steichen deployed and to what ends. To understand Steichen’s strategy in The Family of Man we have to step back a moment to the exhibition on the Korean War he produced in the early fifties. In that case he used many photos by David Duncan, whose book This Is War Steichen considered the most forceful indictment of war ever put forth by photography. The Korea exhibit attracted a large public, but to Steichen himself it was a disastrous failure. As he put it to Wayne Miller, his later assistant in The Family of Man: “Although I had presented war in all its grimness … I had failed to accomplish my mission. I had not incited people into taking open and united action against war itself.”[118] This aversion to war also clarifies Steichen’s ambiguous position in the Cold War. He detested communist dictatorship as an unmitigated disaster because it was built on an inveterate mistrust of ordinary people. But his warnings against a nuclear Armageddon and his conviction that peaceful relations between peoples are the foundation of civilization was not without its risks in the decade of Senator McCarthy’s witch hunt against everyone who used a language that might be labeled as “pacifist.”[119]

The design of The Family of Man emerged from the bitter disappointment about the Korean War exhibition. If negative images made no lasting impact, Steichen reasoned, perhaps positive images could do a better job. Accordingly, he set out to create “a positive statement on what a wonderful thing life was, how marvelous people were, and, above all, how alike people were in all parts of the world.”[120] This was indeed an optimistic view—but of people, much less of history. It also was a very American view. Steichen had long contemplated an epic exhibition about America and Americans, a subject that was intimately connected to his own biography. Born to a rural family in Luxemburg, his parents had taken him as a newborn baby to America, in search of a better future. For Edward Steichen the American dream came true; he managed to seize the opportunities offered by the immigrant society and to become an internationally famed photographer.

The structure of feeling called forth by his own success undoubtedly shaped his views of people, especially his deep appreciation of the patient tenacity and good sense of common folks. His social philosophy was a populist humanism. That explains why in The Family of Man the micropolitics of the common people get pride of place, while the macropolitics of statesmen intrude only intermittently. Ordinary people, Steichen believed, are basically of good will and they carry on, even in the face of impossible odds. Steichen’s view of history, by contrast, can hardly be called optimistic, let alone “rosy.” He belonged to the generation that had lived through the entire “Thirty Years War of the Twentieth Century,” a generation not known for its blithe optimism. Steichen knew quite well to what extremities people may resort in the inferno of war and social dislocation. In that sense, his view of history was hard-nosed rather than rosy. Antonio Gramsci’s dictum that pessimism of the intellect should be balanced by optimism of the will comes closer to Steichen’s mindset than facile denunciatory labels such as “rosy optimism” or “sentimental humanism.”

What the nine million visitors took home from the exhibition we cannot know with any certainty. A reasonable conjecture might be that they ingested impressions of human diversity as well as common humanity, and probably some generic notions of historical improvement and the dangers of war. In all likelihood, the result of a kaleidoscopic sequence of such impressions would be to create an opening of the imagination rather than a definite worldview. As John Roberts has noted, “The spectator had to think himself or herself outside of his or her self, his or her imagined community, in rapid succession.”[121] What they would “do” with that opening of their imagination would, of course, depend on the worldviews, politics, and personal experiences with which they came to the exhibition. In that respect, The Family of Man can once more be juxtaposed to the abstract language of the Universal Declaration that proclaimed definite ideals of common humanity and universal equality, but also left ample room for interpretation and imagination. Steichen’s exhibition reached out to a vaster global public than the Universal Declaration could hope to address, but they pointed in the same general direction.

Aimé Césaire and Postcolonial Equality

Given the extreme genocidal racism of the Nazis the comparison with colonialist mass murders suggested itself. Both systems rested on a racist foundation combined with a social Darwinist theory of history permitting, and at times demanding, the extermination of peoples deemed “inferior,” “sub-human,” “dangerous,” or “useless.” Though far from identical, the analogies were significant enough to warrant a comparison. Du Bois considered the Nazi persecution of the Jews worse than the Jim Crow system in the United States and only comparable to the evils of slavery itself. For black critics familiar with the record of colonialism in Africa the similarities loomed larger. Both systems, they argued, practiced terror and mass murder as routine components of government, or “governmentality,” as Foucault called it (discussed in the final section of this chapter). The issue driving their analogy was not a competition over suffering—that would come later, when the Shoah was erected into a global moral icon—but a critical question to the West: if you now solemnly declare that the Nazi genocide of the Jews is an absolute evil, how can you remain silent about mass murder and state terror in your own colonies?

One of the black intellectuals to ask that question with particular intensity was Aimé Césaire. Born in 1913 in Martinique, a French colonial possession in the Caribbean, Césaire belonged to the same generation as Richard Wright, Kwame Nkrumah, and Frantz Fanon. Césaire adhered to the Martinique branch of the French Communist Party in 1945. His writings extend across a broad spectrum of genres, from political speeches and treatises to poetry and theatre plays. His first major publication was actually a poem in blank verse, the style taken from the surrealist school of André Breton but the subject from his experience as a black man growing up in the colonial society of Martinique, attending the famous Lycée Louis le Grand and the equally famous École Normale Supérieure in Paris and then returning to Martinique. The poem is fittingly entitled Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land).

Work on the Cahier began in 1935, when Césaire had, in his own words, “become conscious of my belonging to the foundational condition of the Negro. My poetry is born from that realization.”[122] The Cahier has been identified as the founding text of Négritude, a term that is easily misunderstood as a celebration of blackness. But that is not at all what the poem seeks to express. For Césaire, poetry was a vehicle for reworking memory as well as a medium of philosophical reflection. The Cahier represents Césaire’s anguished quest for his identity as a “negro” in the age of colonial racism. Far from reducing the experiences of black people to their roots, he passionately affirms the universality of the black experience, positioning it on a par with the white race in the making of world history. Like all other human beings, every black man or woman is a microcosm of the world. But within the global space of the human Césaire consistently refers to the specific trajectories of black peoples and, above all, to their fateful encounters with Europeans. Time and again he invokes a sense of departure as a recurrent experience of what it means to be a “negro”:

Departure.

As there are humans-hyenas and humans-panthers, I would be a human-Jew

A human-Kafir

A human-Hindu-from-Calcutta

A human-from-Harlem-who-does-not-vote

The human-famine, the human-insult, the human-torture

At any moment anyone [n’importe qui] could seize him give him a beating, kill him—perfectly well kill him—without being accountable to anyone without having to offer an apology to anyone

A human-Jew

A human-pogrom[123]

Césaire next presents a factual-ironic evocation of the history and memory of the transatlantic slave trade:

And I say to myself Bordeaux and Nantes and Liverpool and New York and San Francisco

No part of this world that doesn’t have my fingerprint

…

Who can boast to have more than I have?

Virginia. Tennessee. Georgia. Alabama[124]

But then the poem takes another turn:

What is also mine is a small cell in the Jura Mountains

… the snow is a white guard in front of a prison

…

What is mine

Is a man alone imprisoned by whiteness

A man alone who defies the white howls of the white death

(TOUSSAINT, TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE).[125]

These lines conjure up a long history of violence, suffering, and oppression, but also, through the identity of their black author and by the evocation of the leader of the Haitian Revolution, the agency of Africans in the making of the Atlantic world.

When Césaire laments the fate of the downtrodden “negroes” he says, “I accept all that,” but the text invites the reader to sense the implied nonacceptance of a condition that was not a decree of fate but the doing of white Europeans. At one moment, Césaire imagines that he hears the voice of his country that speaks an inner truth—“and the voice declares that through the centuries Europe has stuffed us with lies and has made us bulge with miseries.” The next movements of the poem transfer the reader from the memories of a closed past to the imagination of an open future:

Because it is not true at all that the work of humanity is done

That we have nothing to achieve in the world

That we parasitize the world

That it suffices that we adapt to the pace of the world

But the work of humanity is only just beginning

And it remains for humanity to overcome every interdiction that blocks the avenues of its ardor

And no race possesses the monopoly of beauty, intelligence and power

And there is room for all at the rendezvous of victory.[126]

This is neither a glorification of the black race nor a modest demand for a place under the sun. The poem vindicates the agency of all the human peoples and races in the fullness of history. Speaking the language of an antiracist universalism, Césaire seeks to imagine a planetary “we” that passes beyond the racial “we” of the Europeans. What also has to go, he explains, to give that future a fair chance, is the degrading stereotype of the “good negro,” the évolué of French colonial parlance, who bends over backward to obtain the dishonest approval of the whites. To make way for the future, the decks must be cleared of that sort of “negritude.” Toward the end of the poem Césaire triumphantly exclaims: “Je dis hurrah! La vieille négritude progressivement se cadavérise” (“I say hurray! The old negritude is progressively dying out”).[127] Even so, the last lines of the Cahier express the yearning for a liberated world in a melancholy language. It is as if Césaire cautions his readers not to expect a bright future around the next corner but to prepare themselves for a lengthy uphill struggle.

In his political treatises, Césaire theorizes history as an open, contingent process the direction of which is, at least in part, determined by what human beings do or fail to do. In one of his first political speeches, delivered at the centenary of the 1848 abolition of slavery by the Second Republic, he highlighted the agency of the Parisian artisans who in February 1848 demanded the immediate abolition of slavery.[128] But the principal hero of his speech was Victor Schoelcher, the minister of the Provisional Government who pushed through the abolition decree in time—that is, before the Second Republic expired. Two years later a similar occasion presented itself to Césaire, who was then the burgomaster of Fort de France in Martinique. Inaugurating a square named after the Abbé Grégroire, emancipator of the Jews and a spokesman for abolitionism, Césaire told the inhabitants of Fort de France that Grégoire was “a man of the avant-garde,” a man who championed equality across the board, irrespective of race and skin color.[129] Césaire thus positioned his own antiracist idea of modern equality in the genealogy of French radical republicanism.

Building on these foundations, Césaire drafted his Discourse on Colonialism, a vitriolic diatribe against the colonial system and its ideologues among prominent French politicians, academics, and men of letters. In the 1950s the French Empire in Asia and Africa began to unravel. In 1954, the French suffered their most humiliating defeat at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam and in the same year the Algerian nationalist movement embarked on a campaign of armed resistance, to which the French responded with state terror against armed insurgents and unarmed civilians alike. In those years of high-pitched political passion, Césaire wrote his discourse on colonialism, of which the final draft was published in Paris in 1955.[130]

The Discourse opens with the thesis that European civilization is moribund because it is unable to solve the two major problems to which its existence has given rise: the colonial problem on a world scale and the problem of the proletariat in Europe itself. Césaire at once attacks the colonial problem. The Europeans, he avers, are wont to justify colonialism by its pretended civilizing mission, but the historical record shows that colonialism is not about evangelization nor about philanthropy and civilization: “The decisive actors here are the adventurer and the pirate, the wholesale grocer and the ship-owner, the gold digger and the merchant, appetite and force, and behind them, the baleful shadow of a form of civilization which, at a certain point in its history, finds itself obliged … to extend on a world scale the competition of its antagonistic economies.”[131] The final sentence testifies to the Marxist foundations of Césaire’s theory of imperialism, and yet he is miles away from Marx’s analysis of colonialism as a necessary stage in the evolution of the extra-European world.

Césaire’s vision of world history includes an affirmation of the value of transcivilizational contacts in the making of a worldwide common humanity. Even so, he continues, we should ask the elementary question whether colonization has really furthered contact between civilizations. That question he answers with a resounding no. According to Césaire, the civilizing mission is ideological humbug, because colonialism not only fails to civilize but represents the antithesis of civilization. To arrive at a realistic diagnosis of colonialism, Césaire contends, “we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism.”[132] This is a viewpoint we have encountered before: in Raynal’s depiction of the overseas Europeans as a new kind of savage, in Edmund Burke’s indictment of the plunder of Bengal by the East India Company, and in Frederick Douglass’s assertion that slavery dehumanized the slaveholders. Like Raynal and Douglass, Césaire’s analysis proceeds from the individual to the systemic level. It is not only individual colonizers who are transformed by the violence and the immorality they gradually internalize; the same fateful logic affects European civilization as a whole. Colonialism de-civilizes Western civilization. Césaire describes the process in graphic terms:

We must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated … all these prisoners who have been tied up and “interrogated,” all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged … a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.[133]

Nazism, Césaire concludes, is the final result of the European descent into savagery. The beast was fed and nurtured in the womb of the colonial empires, and when it finally emerged in Europe itself the Europeans could not believe their eyes. The inhumanity of the Nazis came as a nightmarish surprise to people who had for centuries condoned the routines of terror in the colonies. It was only when such methods were used in Europe and against Europeans that they woke up. What the average European bourgeois reproached Hitler for was “that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the Negroes of Africa.”[134]

At this juncture Césaire invokes human rights. The pseudohumanism of the French apologists of colonialism, he declares, has for too long “diminished the rights of man.” The routine French understanding of human rights “has been—and still is—narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist.”[135] Bourgeois Europe, Césaire concludes, cannot bring itself to make the step from such pseudohumanism to a truly universal equality. Historically, Europe has become a blind alley. This drastic conclusion may also reflect his personal bitterness over the missed opportunities of France in the 1945–1948 years when Césaire had advocated conferring full French citizenship rights, regardless of race, on all inhabitants of Martinique.[136]

Colonialism, then, has damaged the colonizers as well as the colonized. For the mouthpieces of the pretended civilizing mission Césaire has nothing but disdain. They hold forth on progress and education, but against the statistics of “progress,” such as the mileage of railroads and canals, Césaire points to the disruption of the “natural economies” of the colonized lands and to the millions of people “who have been taught to have an inferiority complex, to tremble, kneel, despair, and behave like flunkies.”[137] At the present time, Césaire exclaims, it is the natives of Africa and Asia who demand schools and it is Europe which refuses to provide them.

The Discourse on Colonialism ends with an appeal to the proletariat, the only class that, in the words of Césaire, still has a “universal mission.” The meta-political language, as distinct from the cultural politics of the Discourse, is Marxist. But its Marxist certainties would soon be put to a cruel test by the events of 1956. At the end of that fateful year when the insurrection of the Hungarian people was crushed by Russian tanks Césaire felt that no other choice was left to him than to leave the French Communist Party. In an open letter to the general secretary he warns that if the party should come to power in France, its rule would bring about the same “catastrophic effects” the world has seen in Russia. Césaire further mentions “the disgraceful anti-Semitic practices” that are still going on in the countries that call themselves socialist, the communist regimes’ handling of the common people as mere instruments of state interests, and finally the French Communists’ collaboration with the colonialist politics of the French state in North Africa.[138]

Interviewed by Françoise Vergès in 2004, Césaire looked back on his communist years. He explained that he had wholeheartedly joined the Communist Party of Martinique but that he had always felt uncomfortable among the white French Communists. In France, he noted, there was a communist “we” to which colored people like him could not fully belong.[139] For Césaire, it would seem, communism no longer offered a credible solution to the ills of the world—it had become part of the problem.

Césaire’s writings are important for understanding the significance of common humanity and equality in the era of decolonization. While the Universal Declaration formulates the equality of races and peoples in general terms, Césaire focuses on the obstacles encountered by “people of color” when they seek to affirm their equality in a world still largely dominated by the white empire-builders. Postcolonial equality was never self-evident and even the universality of common humanity was frequently called into question by the murderous actions the colonial powers routinely commited when dealing with Africans and Asians who dared to claim equality for themselves.

Islam and the Equality of the Sexes

When Leila Ahmed published Women and Gender in Islam in 1992 it was immediately recognized as a seminal intervention in the emergent global debate about the place of Islam in the modern world. Since the Enlightenment, the position of women had time and again been used as a benchmark of modernity. Accordingly, numerous Western politicians, journalists, and academics have pointed to the low status of women in Muslim countries as evidence of a generic backwardness of Islamic culture. In the 1980s, the growth and visibility of Muslim communities in Western Europe, epitomized by a series of headscarf affairs in France and elsewhere, closely following the Islamic revolution in Iran, led to a veritable moral panic about gender and Islam. Many commentators resuscitated memories of an ancient struggle between the West and the Orient, with Islam as the most dangerous avatar of the Oriental Other.

Interestingly, the return of Islam as the spectral epicenter of global peril coincided with the return of a “long” view of history framed by the rise and fall of religions, civilizations, and empires, rather than by the vicissitudes of national states and the Cold War. In the 1990s, the new historical frame would find its political vulgate in Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. Consistently highlighting the plurality of beliefs and discourses within religions and civilizations Leila Ahmed consciously writes against the new vulgate of the clash of civilizations. She criticizes essentialist and monolithic discourses on Islam, arguing that the history of Islam is pervaded by an unceasing struggle over its meaning and significance, in which dominant and dissenting currents have fought over the control of Quranic hermeneutics and Islamic doctrines. The oppression of women, she contends, was mainly rooted in an “establishment Islam” which she defines as “the Islam of the politically powerful.” The establishment view, she further argues, was not the only possible interpretation of Islam. In the Quran another message can be found, an “ethical Islam” affirming the common humanity and equality of all men and women on earth.[140]

Leila Ahmed (1940, Cairo) grew up, as she herself puts it in her autobiography, in “the last days of the British Empire.”[141] Nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt had been a colony in all but name since the British occupied the country in 1882. In 1923, after the revolutionary protests of 1919 against the British exploitation of Egypt in the First World War, the country became a parliamentary monarchy under British tutelage, with a liberal constitution that was often honored in the breach. The great majority of Egyptians were Muslims, but the country harbored sizable Christian and Jewish minorities. With the benefit of hindsight, Egypt in the aftermath of the Second World War, when Ahmed went to school, might be characterized as an early postcolonial society. However, she cannot be included in the generation of Aimé Césaire, who lived and wrote in the Cold War era. Ahmed’s main writings, by contrast, postdate the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Ahmeds were westernized elite Egyptians who had no confidence in King Farouk but detested the retrograde Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood even more. At school, Leila Ahmed was educated in English and at home Arabic and French were also spoken. In the milieu of her parents, she notes, there seemed to be no contradiction “between pursuing independence from the European powers and deeply admiring European institutions, particularly democracy, and Europe’s tremendous scientific breakthroughs.”[142] Even so, the unescapable fate of being born a Muslim girl was brought home to her in a most painful manner. When she was eight or nine an Italian boy who played in the neighborhood games sexually assaulted her. She fought him off, but her mother got word of what had happened and immediately blamed the victim, telling her daughter that she felt like killing her and then killing herself. In this manner, a vulnerable girl was exposed to the cruel code of honor no Muslim family could escape. The young Leila found salvation in the beauty of nature and the enchanting world of the literary imagination. At school, she recalls, the lessons in English literature opened her eyes to previously unthinkable vistas. But even there she encountered the ugly racist face of British imperialism, in the person of a British teacher who admitted that she wrote finer essays than her friend Jean Said—Edward’s younger sister—only to find it deplorable because Jean was a Palestinian Christian while Leila was “only” a Muslim.[143] At home, she heard terrifying stories about the rude racist behavior of British officers and civil servants.

Nasser came to power in 1952 when Leila Ahmed was twelve. To her it was another traumatic experience. In her autobiography she recounts what happened to her at school. One of Nasser’s chief planks was that Egypt was henceforth an “Arab” nation. Accordingly, all young Egyptians had to learn to read classical Arabic, more difficult and very different from the colloquial Arabic spoken by the Egyptian people. Once, noticing that she had not done her Arabic homework, her Palestinian teacher, Miss Nabih, erupted in anger and finally shouted at her: “You’re an Arab! An Arab! And you don’t know your own language!” Suddenly furious herself, Leila retorted: “I am not an Arab! I am Egyptian!” Defiantly, she closed her book and refused to read any further, whereupon Miss Nabih slapped her across the face.[144] In those days, government propaganda loudly and unceasingly told the Egyptians that they were Arabs, doing to the people at large what Miss Nabih was doing in the classroom to the twelve-year-old Leila.

That was not all. The new Arab identity imposed by Nasser’s regime had a nasty exclusionary side. Before the advent of Nasser, Jews and Christian Copts were accepted as Egyptians, but now they were increasingly redefined as non-Arab and possibly unreliable outsiders. The Jews in particular were singled out as enemies of the Arab nations. In the wake of the lost 1948 war against the new state of Israel Nasser mounted an aggressive anti-Zionist campaign. In the political language of Arab nationalism “Zionist” increasingly functioned as a metonym for “Jew.” Without its antonym “Zionist/Jew” Ahmed explains in her autobiography, the Nasserist notion of “Arab” was actually meaningless.[145] After the 1956 Suez War, when Egypt was attacked by Britain, France, and Israel, many Egyptian Jews fled the country, the family of Ahmed’s best friend Joyce among them. She would never see her friend again.

At home the status of Egypt’s religious minorities was discussed in quite different terms. Her parents explained to Ahmed that Christians, Jews, and Muslims believed in the same God but had different religions because people had to remain in the faith they were born to. Looking back many years later Ahmed reconstructs the gist of the conversation that ensued. Her mother explained that there were differences between the three religions but that they were “in essence” the same. When Leila asked whether the religions were “exactly equal” her mother answered: “No, ours is best.” When she pressed her question, asking why everybody else did not convert to the “best” religion, her mother backtracked a bit: “Well, it’s best for Muslims, dear. Why don’t you run off and play now?”[146] Gandhi was a hero to Ahmed’s parents, so their outlook may well have been inspired by his approach to religious difference.[147]

The 1956 war, a brutal attack on a small nation by the mighty British whose literature and science she had come to admire so much, shocked Ahmed profoundly. Thus far, she had enjoyed the cultural and educational benefits offered by the British Empire, but now she witnessed the ugly face of imperialism at close range. The swift end of the war, achieved under American pressure and Russian threats, made Nasser the victor, acclaimed by all the newly independent nations of the world, but at home he used his newly won prestige to crush any and all opponents, among them Ahmed’s father, who had the temerity to criticize Nasser’s Aswan Dam project on ecological grounds. Soon Nasser’s rule became a veritable dictatorship with an omnipresent secret police. Ahmed felt torn apart by her anti-imperialist patriotism and her deep aversion for the Nasserist regime.

In the late sixties, studying at a women’s college in Cambridge, she sought to find out how Egyptian and Arab identities intersected and clashed in the political upheavals of the twentieth century. Among other things, she discovered that in the 1920s Egyptians could openly support Zionism without being labeled as traitors. She was excited by the unexpected results of her investigations, which uncovered a far more complex and less linear story than the black-and-white history of Nasserist propaganda, but she also felt anxious about appearing unpatriotic to her Egyptian and Lebanese student friends. On top of that she had to cope with European racist representations of “the Arabs.” Most English people, she now discovered, regarded all Arabs as backward and uncivilized and routinely categorized them as “blacks.” In Cambridge, however, the word race was hardly ever used while racism was invariably associated with poor white working-class neighborhoods, far away from the august abodes of academic politeness. And yet, Ahmed later realized, “I am perfectly sure that, though I never spoke of it, I knew full well that even civilized Cambridge did not regard us as equals.”[148] It was in those years, we should recall, that Enoch Powell’s anti-immigrant agitation and racist language made deep inroads into British public opinion, giving rise to an anguished feeling of estrangement among “non-white” immigrants from the empire.

In European parlance, Ahmed now discovered, “Arab” was a term loaded in the negative: “‘Arabs’ meant people with whom you made treaties that you did not have to honor, Arabs being people of lesser humanity … it meant people whose lands you could carve up and apportion if you wished … it meant people whose democracies you could obstruct at will, because you did not have to behave justly toward people of a lesser humanity.”[149] Gradually it dawned on her that she was caught between two false notions of Arab identity—the Nasserist one, which demanded hatred of the Jews and the acceptance of a nationalist dictatorship, and the Western one, which denied the full humanity of “Arabs” and used them as pawns in an imperialist game. The Nasserist notion of Arab identity, Ahmed finally concluded, rested on a simple inversion of the European language of race and empire. Its power was derived from the European Orientalist script written over the lands of the Middle East. The only way out of the maze, it seemed, was to deconstruct all essentialist notions of identity.

When she later read Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), which she immediately recognized as “a major text of our times,” it strengthened her quest for a nonessentialist approach to the issue of identity. But she also felt some unease with Said’s analysis. Orientalism, she notes, echoed “the perspectives and rhetoric of Arab nationalism” and it did not come to grips with the complexities Ahmed herself had lived through. Its “uniformly and comprehensively negative” view of imperialism resonated with her own experiences of the real injustices of imperialism but it left little room for her equally real experience of the opportunities for intellectual advancement the empire had opened up for women of her generation, opportunities her mother’s generation had not enjoyed. Likewise, Said’s utterly dismissive portrayal of Orientalism was contradicted by the close reading of the writings of the British Orientalist Edward Lane Ahmed had done for her dissertation. Western scholars, Ahmed objects, certainly started out from an Orientalist framing of the Orient, but they could also write against it (my discussion of the French Orientalist Anquetil Duperron agrees with Ahmed’s observations).[150]

For Ahmed’s study of women and gender in Islam these hard-won insights into the pitfalls of a simple inversion of Western Orientalist discourse were of vital importance. Her chief objection to the typical Arabic narrative of resistance, of which Nasserist nationalism was only one example among many, was that it “appropriated, in order to negate them, the terms set in the first place by the colonial discourse.”[151] To show this, she discusses Qassim Amin’s book Tahrir Al-Mar’a (The Liberation of Women, already discussed in Chapter 8) which has traditionally been regarded as marking the beginning of feminism in Arab culture.[152] Published in Cairo in 1899, the book immediately triggered a heated controversy. What caused alarm was Amin’s demand to abolish the veil, coupled with a wholesale westernization of manners and mores. The veil became the main focus of the polemics: it lost its innocence and its abolition became the marker of modernity and “civilization.”

According to Ahmed Amin’s feminism. at times reads as an encomium of European civilization. Ahmed calls this complex of ideas “colonial feminism.” It enlisted feminist demands and proposals for real and badly needed marriage reforms as supports of the colonial civilizing mission. Ahmed cites evidence of Egyptians who advocated far more radical reforms, such as Al Tahwati who recommended in the 1870s that girls be given the same education as boys and contended that women only differed from men in the procreative parts of their bodies but that they absolutely equaled men in their cognitive potential.[153]

Colonial feminism, Ahmed objects, first manufactured a flattened and homogenized version of Islam and then condemned it as a backward antiwoman doctrine. Only against that backdrop could the British civilizing mission and the abolition of the veil become the solution to all the ills of society. While admitting that the principal currents of mainstream Islam, from the Abbasid Caliphate continuing to the nineteenth century, had indeed downgraded women, she forcefully argued that the Quran also presented another, more egalitarian voice, an “ethical Islam” that had been systematically marginalized and pushed into oblivion by the great majority of Muslim jurists and commentators. Among the Islamic currents to uphold an ethical and spiritual vision of common humanity, the Sufis were perhaps the most influential. In this connection Ahmed cites the verses from Sura 33.[154] These verses address men and women on an equal footing, just as the important and much-quoted verses in Sura 49 affirm that God created all the nations of the world as offspring from a single man and a single woman. The many Quranic patriarchal commands and legal prescriptions, she underlines, must be read in the context of their places and times and should not be accorded an absolute transhistorical validity (an argument also frequently deployed in Christian feminist biblical hermeneutics). The Quran, Ahmed concludes, contains enough of such gender-neutral pronouncements to provide the grounding of a Muslim argument for the equality of the sexes. Here her argument converges with the Moroccan feminist scholar Fatema Mernissi who declares: “What we are seeing today is a claim by women to their right to God and the historical tradition.… Our liberation will come through a rereading of our past and a reappropriation of all that has structured our civilization.”[155]

The vital importance of the acknowledgment of critical and feminist readings of the Islamic traditions is likewise apparent from Ahmed’s discussion of the veil and the headscarf in contemporary politics. In her 1992 book she explains that the veil is not a Quranic prescription. The Quran only instructs women to cover their private parts and throw a scarf over their bosom.[156] In early Islamic times veiling was common in many parts of the eastern Mediterranean and West Asia, but it was not peculiar to Islam. In due course veiling became an ingrained habit that was often regarded as “Islamic,” but most educated middle- and upper-class Muslim women who unveiled in the second half of the nineteenth century did so to affirm their up-to-date modernity and certainly not as a sign of abandoning the faith. In their own opinion, unveiling did not make them less faithful Muslims. Conversely, the late twentieth-century return of the veil—or rather the hijab—cannot be explained as a return to tradition. In Egypt, the resurgence of the hijab started after the humiliating defeat in the Six-Day War against Israel, which many Egyptians now blamed on the “Godless” secular regime imposed upon them by Nasser.

Ahmed underlines that the hijab became especially popular among female students preparing for a professional career in medicine, engineering, military sciences, or pharmaceuticals. These women were no less “modern” that the Egyptian women who unveiled in the late nineteenth century. Their religiosity was not traditionalist but represented a conscious preference for a particular kind of Islam. A sociological survey conducted in 1982 in Egypt showed that veiled students were slightly more conservative and less feminist than their unveiled colleagues, but the differences were small and—more significant—an overwhelming majority of both groups affirmed the right of women to pursue higher education and to engage in professional careers outside the home.[157] These outcomes do not show a polarization between modernist and traditionalist women but rather suggest a pattern of two roads to modernity, with the unveiled women a little ahead of their veiled sisters.[158]

Beyond such arguments for a feminist rereading of Islam and against the frequently heard equation of the hijab with misogyny, Ahmed’s study of gender in Islam targets the propensity among Muslims to counter the Western totalizing critique of Islam with an equally totalizing doctrinal response. Taking that course Muslims are entrapping themselves in the argument and the language of their opponents. The most tragic example of this type of self-entrapment is of course Islamic fundamentalism, a term that entered the political vocabulary in the 1990s. According to Ahmed, holding on to an “original Islam” and an “authentic” indigenous culture cannot provide the solution for the ills of a postcolonial society, for the elementary reason that an original, pure, and uncontaminated Islam has never existed. What is needed, she concludes, is to pass beyond the frozen opposition between the colonial and the indigenous and to adopt a more dynamic framework. Inventions, ideas, and institutions, she posits, should be judged “on the basis of their merit, not their tribe of origin”:

After all, and in sober truth, what thriving civilization or cultural heritage today, Western or non-Western, is not critically indebted to the inventions or traditions of thought of other peoples in other lands? And why should any human being be asked to do without some useful invention, political, technological, or of any kind, because it originated among some other tribe, or, conversely, be compelled to practice a custom that has nothing to recommend it or even much against it for no better reason than that it is indigenous?[159]

At a first glance, this looks much like the reasoning of Diderot’s Tahitian in his debate with the chaplain of Bougainville’s expedition. But there is a capital difference, for Ahmed, unlike Diderot, shows an emphatic respect for sincere and honest religious beliefs from whatever quarter they come. It would subvert the dialectic of her argument to embrace a militant secularism as the only alternative to the oppressive tenets of mainstream Islam. Instead, she proposes to fight Islam with Islam, grounding the common humanity and dignity of men and women in the “ethical Islam” she values and cherishes. She considers herself as secular but she rejects the kind of militant secularism that writes off all religious people as dumb and deluded.[160] Anyway, the old certainties of a steady secularization of the world have been called in question by the worldwide resurgence of religion in the last three or four decades, a resurgence that is by no means confined to the non-Western world. The trend has also strongly affected the social ethos and politics in the United States. Western Europe is perhaps the only region that has thus far stuck to the secularist trend.

For the subject of this book Ahmed’s observations on Islam are of great value. In the contemporary age a large part of humanity will continue to embrace religious worldviews. A militant modernist secularism can easily give rise to a bracketing of the common humanity of all those who “still” believe. Ultimately, it may produce another futurity of the “not yet,” unwittingly following in the footsteps of Enlightenment philosophical history. A more balanced view, recognizing the plurality of religious as well as secular worldviews, seems more attuned to the understanding of our past and our future.

Human Rights Politics in the Late Twentieth Century

The 1960s saw little human rights activism. The United Nations, however, slowly put in place a legal and institutional framework based on the Universal Declaration. In 1966, the UN General Assembly adopted two human rights covenants: one on civil and political rights and another on economic, social, and cultural rights. Both covenants started with a clause affirming the right of self-determination of all peoples. A specific convention against racial discrimination came into force in 1969. A convention against “all forms of discrimination against women” entered into effect in 1981, following a convention against torture in 1978.[161] However, the covenant on civil and political rights was ratified by the United States only in 1991, and even then Washington registered so many reservations that the covenant is virtually unenforceable in the United States. The UN covenant on economic, social, and cultural rights was ratified by the great majority of member states in the 1980s and 1990s. The United States, however, has signed but thus far not ratified it. The group of states that have neither signed nor ratified is roughly identical with the nonparticipants in the covenant on civil and political rights. Brief mention should be made here of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, a treaty opened for signature by the member states of the Council of Europe in 1950. It was ratified in the 1950s by Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, Austria, Italy, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Turkey. Most other West European states ratified the treaty in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by the former communist states in the 1990s. The European Court of Human Rights began its work in 1959, but it only admitted individual applicants from 1963 onward, and then only from states that had accepted the relevant protocol.

In the 1950s and 1960s, however, there was little enthusiasm among governments, within the West or worldwide, to put to use the new legal instruments the United Nations and the Council of Europe were planning. Discussing the British attitude to projects for a court of human rights circulating in the corridors of the Council of Europe, a legal adviser of the Foreign Office expressed the apprehension of many colleagues in rather crass language: “It would surely be undesirable to set up now a court to which governments might be arraigned by individuals.… To do so would be to invite Communists, crooks and cranks of every kind to bring actions which would be at best frivolous and at worst designed merely to embarrass governments.”[162] Of the two major colonial powers, France only ratified the European human rights treaty in 1974. Britain did so in 1953, without registering reservations about its overseas possessions, despite misgivings in the Colonial Office. Even so, consecutive British cabinets continued to administer the colonies as if the concept of human rights did not exist.

As more and more colonized peoples achieved nationhood, the responsibility for decent government devolved on the new postcolonial states, many of which failed to live up to the expectations of their peoples and developed into authoritarian democracies or outright dictatorships. Under these circumstances, the majority of new states in the UN sought to frame human rights in a way that safeguarded them against international censure of their repressive politics. Accordingly, they privileged social and economic rights over civil and political rights. The privileging of civil rights, they now asserted, was a “Western” ploy tinged with racism and meant to put the newly independent nations under a neocolonial tutelage. Self-determination and economic development, they argued, trumped the classical rights of individual liberty. The “Western” advocates of human rights, they further contended, did not respect the cultures of Africans and Asians and sought to impose Western values on their erstwhile colonial subjects. This new “third world” doctrine came down to a hijacking of cultural diversity to serve the interests of state power.

The 1968 Teheran Conference, organized to celebrate the Universal Declaration’s twentieth anniversary, exposed the hypocrisy of states paying lip service to human rights while ruthlessly stamping out individual rights and liberties at home. The third world bloc at the conference advanced the claim that socioeconomic rights were the “true” human rights because they provided the foundation of development and prosperity. The Universal Declaration, they argued, had to be reinterpreted in light of the new postcolonial world order. Fittingly, the 1968 conference was hosted by the shah of Iran who happily subscribed to this politically toothless version of human rights. The Western countries, caught in a Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, muted their criticism. The United States in particular took a defensive stance because it had to reckon with the civil rights movement at home (Martin Luther King was murdered three weeks before the opening of the conference) and with the opposition to its intervention in Vietnam. In the entire conference only two delegates uncompromisingly defended civil and political rights. One was the French delegate René Cassin, a veteran from the Roosevelt Committee, and the other was the Czech delegate Rudolph Bystricky, representing the Prague Spring government of Alexander Dubçek (toppled by the Soviet invasion in August). But their warnings fell on deaf ears.

Teheran represented the nadir of UN human rights politics. The Jamaican UN ambassador, Egerton Richardson, who had worked hard to organize the conference, called Teheran “our moment of truth … [in which] we saw what it means to be promoting the cause of human rights by working mainly through governments.”[163] The UN further discredited itself as the majority of dictatorships in the General Assembly sought to colonize the UN human rights commission in order to safeguard their own states against condemnation. With some of the most atrocious human rights violators on the commission, the UN destroyed its own moral authority and paved the way for new approaches to human rights that nobody had even imagined in 1968.

Two new and different kinds of human rights politics appeared in the second half of the 1970s. Jimmy Carter, who won the U.S. presidential election in 1976, made human rights a foreign policy objective. As president, Carter openly criticized the human rights record of South Korea, Iran, Argentina, South Africa, and Rhodesia, although his stance toward the Soviet Union and China was more cautious. Even so, the human rights clause in the 1975 Helsinki Accords on European Security gave the dissidents in Eastern Europe an opportunity to demand respect for human rights in their countries. Soon, dissidents in the communist bloc went on to make human rights the centerpiece of a moral “anti-politics” that replaced reform communism, which petered out after Moscow had put an end to the Prague Spring. In due course, human rights activists became the major voices of opposition to communism, a situation that would continue until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of Soviet Communism in its wake.

In the West, Amnesty International made human rights into a grassroots movement that proved surprisingly successful in using the tactics of naming and shaming and in mounting campaigns for the release of individual prisoners. In all of this, the role of UN officials was of little importance, but we should note that the Eastern European dissidents as well as Amnesty International regularly invoked UN human rights treaties. The existence of these treaties gave their campaigns a legal and ideological authority they could not have marshaled if human rights had been a brand new slogan without any history or authority. In Europe, the European Court of Human Rights likewise made human rights an available political language. It gave individual plaintiffs rights against their states, and from the 1980s onward, the number of appeals to the Strasbourg court mushroomed.

Amnesty International, created by a small group of activists in Britain in 1961, in the 1970s attained a membership of 90,000 in the US and 300,000 in continental Europe. Its deliberately employed “a-political” grassroots tactics, with local chapters “adopting” political prisoners worldwide, attracted countless people who were disillusioned with the leftist politics of the late sixties. Recently, the American historian Samuel Moyn has shown that the sudden explosion of human rights politics at the close of the 1970s has to be explained by a contingent fusion of disparate political and cultural trends: Carter’s human rights agenda, the reorientation of dissidents in the communist bloc after the Prague Spring, a similar but less complete reorientation in Latin America after the 1973 military coup in Chile, the turn away from leftist radicalism in North America and Western Europe, and finally the emergence of a human rights agenda among Protestant and Catholics worldwide.[164]

The upshot was that human rights migrated from the United Nations and the corridors of diplomacy to an increasingly powerful and versatile collection of NGOs and grassroots activists. At the end of the twentieth century, Amnesty International alone reported a million members, subscribers and donors in 160 countries and territories, with thousands of local, youth and student, and professional groups in more than ninety countries.[165] The new genre of human rights activists kept their distance from party politics and government agencies. NGOs also took up the cause of persecuted minorities, a topic that was mostly skirted by the state-centered approach of the UN agencies. The human rights lexicon was progressively broadened to accommodate new groups and categories: ethnic, religious, regional, and linguistic minorities; women; and sexual orientation groups, often subsumed under the LGBT label (lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgenders). Accordingly, the list of forbidden grounds for discrimination was extended beyond those mentioned in Article 2 of the Universal Declaration. The Universal Declaration became a canonical text for most human rights NGOs, but it was not treated as a doctrinal statement of principles but rather as an open-ended template that could be extended and updated in accordance with the needs of the times.

Modern Equality at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century

What can we conclude about the trajectory of common humanity and modern equality in the second half of the twentieth century? All things considered, the lasting results of the postwar historical moment were two: in the first place, the transformation of modern equality into a truly inclusive concept of global equality and, second, the dismantling of scientific racism. As I have shown above, the antiracist framing of the concept of universal equality was the result of the pressure of the Asian and Latin American delegates shaping the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, combined with the demands of NGOs and religious associations. It would never have happened if the Western UN members had completely controlled the field. Another example showing the importance of the UN can be found in the pariah status of South African apartheid that dates from the first years of the UN and became an emblematic fixture of the international scene in the 1960s. The only argument left to the apologists of the colonial empires was the tattered ideology of the civilizing mission. The critics of the color line had won the moral high ground. The postwar historical moment created a powerful global master language of universal equality, which can rightfully be counted among the major turning points of the global intellectual history of common humanity and equality.

The dismantling of scientific racism, begun by UNESCO in 1950 and continuing ever since, vitally contributed to the universalization of modern equality. The scientific authority of racism was damaged beyond repair, despite recurrent attempts to provide scientific credentials for racist views, in particular by means of questionable interpretations of intelligence test scores of African Americans. Even so, we should not assume that biology has now become a discourse of common humanity, except in a very restricted sense. Modern biologists accept the Buffonian definition of a biological species, from which it follows that all humans are members of the same species. Today’s mainstream view is that the first humans made their appearance in East Africa and from there spread over the other continents, but some paleoanthropologists defend a “regionalist” hypothesis about possible multiple areas of origin, particularly in East Asia.

Coming to common humanity, the biological foundations of an ethic of “universal brotherhood,” advanced by Ashley Montagu, have been dismissed by the great majority of biologists and geneticists. In evolutionary biology the neo-Darwinist synthesis upholds the unity of the human species, but its theory of human nature remains firmly grounded in natural selection and the survival of the fittest. Accordingly the biological mainstream conceives of human evolution in terms of an ever ongoing competition between groups and individuals for the scarce resources of the planet. Its “ethics”—if we may call it that—is akin to that of economic neoliberalism, resulting in a minimalist vision of common humanity. Like nineteenth-century political economy—let us recall that Darwin took the idea of the struggle for existence from Malthus’s Principle of Population—it has a strong propensity to regard egoism and competition as “natural” and altruism and cooperation as “artificial.”

In 1948, the Western powers were successful in blocking the principle of self-determination, but their holding action proved a Pyrrhic victory. The sceptics who pointed out the weakness of human rights in a world of sovereign nation-states were of course right, but that was clear from the very beginning. Even if the Universal Declaration had been a binding international treaty, the veto rights of the great powers in the Security Council would have protected violators who were clients of one of the five permanent members—as many violators were. States who inscribed human rights into law could violate them in practice, and even violators who had no patrons in the Security Council could make the costs of intervention against them prohibitively high if they commanded sufficient military or economic clout.

In the 1940s, no one seriously considered weakening the nation-state; the critical question was which collectivities could claim nationhood—only the longtime established sovereign states or also the colonized peoples of Asia and Africa? That question was not decided by legal argument but by the colonial wars of the 1950s and 1960s. At the end of the 1960s national self-determination had acquired the status of an unquestionable principle underpinning the postcolonial international system. But its victory did not further the cause of human rights. Once they had gained independence, the new Asian and African states embarked on a course of “development” that was often detrimental to large sections of their populations. Most of the new states resorted to authoritarian methods of mass mobilization to further their objective of development, and not a few of them evolved into “predator states” with governing elites and their cronies living lavishly at the expense of the people. They paid lip service to human rights but defined them in a way to shield themselves from international censure.

The 1970s were a decade of disenchantment and agonizing reappraisals. Human rights became the central value of mass movements and of a powerful current of world opinion, but in the process the meaning of the concept underwent a profound transformation. The new movements made good use of the political language created in the postwar historical moment and enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but in their hands it became less state centered and more oppositional, sometimes flowing over into calls for radical political and economic reform. In the aftermath of the Second World War human rights were conceived as guarantees governments were assumed to deliver to their citizens, but now state power was subjected to a new and cold scrutiny.

The neologism “governmentality,” coined by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, is well suited to elucidate the new disillusioned theory of state agency. Governmentality denotes a theory of governing people by means of homogenizing and differentiating disciplinary matrices in which individuals are “placed” and given an “identity” by the technologies of physical and psychological biopolitics. The human rights activists of the 1970s, whether in the first, second, or third world, conceived of themselves as “resisters” to the matrices of statist disciplinary power. Accordingly, human rights were no longer solely understood as formal liberties created by state legality but also as autonomous “values” anchored in human minds and bodies rather than in statist institutions. In such frameworks, human rights served not only to protect individuals against illegal state repression but also to criticize state power and its disciplinary effects.

Consequently, the new human rights politics, regardless of its explicit ideological moorings, had to deal with an altogether different understanding of individuality. The Universal Declaration could still theorize the family as a natural institution, but the new feminism that emerged in the same decade as the human rights upsurge contested the naturalness of the patriarchal family. At the same time, gay manifestoes started to contest the naturalness of heterosexuality. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed the rise of “identity politics” and “ethnic pride.” The framers of the Universal Declaration conceived of humanity in a relatively homogeneous mode. Their critique of racist and other exclusions naturally induced them to highlight the commonalities shared by all human beings. These foundations were retained as background assumptions guaranteeing universal equality, but they were now supplemented by a positive appreciation of cultural difference—increasingly denoted by the more upbeat term diversity. Interviewed in 2004, Aimé Césaire said about human rights that “to liberty, equality, fraternity I always add identity.”[166]

A further important consequence of the human rights upsurge of the late twentieth century was that the language of human rights was no longer “owned” by international organizations, diplomats, and courts of law but circulated in a far broader public of NGOs, activist groups, and concerned citizens. The trend started in the 1970s in the West and the communist orbit, soon joined by Latin America, but at the beginning of the new millennium it was expanding across the world, creating a global human rights community that increasingly profited from the communication revolution of the internet that got underway in the 1990s. The “open access” functioning mode of the vast network of human rights agencies and activists has itself brought about a powerful equality effect.

By its very abstractness, the terminological matrix of human rights could effortlessly accommodate the new emphasis on difference. In the process, the plasticity of human nature, underlined in the first UNESCO Statement on Race, acquired a novel political edge. The final result was that human rights and modern equality became a flexible and dynamic language. They were progressively cut loose from the generic Enlightenment intellectual matrix that is recognizable in the architecture of the Universal Declaration. Slowly and not always consciously they mutated into an “agnostic”—but definitely not militantly atheistic—language with distant and frequently forgotten roots in the European Enlightenment. At the present time, human rights activists are found across the entire spectrum of philosophical, religious, and scientific thought in the global intellectual space of the planet. Their politics range across a broad spectrum, from claims on states to guarantee equal rights for all the people they effectively govern to identity politics demanding the legal protection of minority cultures.

EPILOGUE

The Future of Global Equality

LOOKING BACK on more than two thousand years of thinking about common humanity, equality, and cultural difference, let us see if we can distill some useful conclusions that may assist us in judging our present-day predicament of globalization, human rights, and the “clash of civilizations.”

Thinking across cultural borders and frontiers is an intricate problematic because cultural difference is an extremely flexible phenomenon that eludes the simple realism of empirical enumeration and quantitative measuring. Admittedly, there is much to enumerate and to measure but the existential reality of culture, its way of being in the world, the attachment to the familiar ways of “home” and the reluctance to engage with the strange ways of “others” is not a measurable object but a relational dialectic in the flux of time. Cultural identity is not a primordial given or an inner essence of the self but a series of historical results that are created and lived in congenial as well as hostile encounters. Philosophers call this an anti-essentialist theory of identity.

To illustrate it with a banal example, the material, empirically verifiable differences between frogs and porridge are not cultural differences. Cultural difference is what happens when the English refer to the French as frog-eaters in a tone and vocabulary that deprecates frog-eating as definitely not the done thing. Its dialectical nature shows itself the moment somebody questions such seemingly solid prejudices. Cultural difference “exists” but when exposed to critique it tends either to unravel or to harden into dogma—in either case its self-evident naturalness is gone. Its components are factual and banal, but the ensemble, the X-culture or the Y-culture, is much harder to pin down. It is not a registration of facts and opinions but a raison sentimentale that processes experiences in an emotional semantics of “we” and “them.” In that way it brings into being the new reality of a cultural identity. We cannot define that reality as an individual psychic or mental state for it only subsists in social interaction. Culture cannot exist without doing things together, or refusing to do things together, or pondering the appropriateness of doing things together. Belonging to a culture means to participate in it and to “know” what other participants expect and how to make the next move. Ideas are a vital component of any cultural identity, but the real question is what people do with ideas and how we can understand those doings in their multiple historical contexts.

How does common humanity enter into the picture? Here I propose to take another look at the parable of the Good Samaritan. Where the priest and the Levite merely saw a stranger with whom they did not want to be bothered, the Samaritan saw a fellow human being in distress. What decides the outcome is not what there “is” but what the Samaritan “sees.” The statements “there lies a stranger” and “there lies a fellow human being” both register a correct observation. Empirically speaking, the fellow human being does not have a deeper reality than the stranger. Empathy and indifference represent two perspectives on the “same” state of affairs. Hostility and fear are also possible responses to a wounded man lying prostrate at a roadside. Cultural difference is thus an elusive “reality”: now you see it, and now you don’t. One lesson the parable teaches us, though perhaps not the one intended by the evangelist, is that the emotional semantics of cultural difference is not an iron cage from which there is no escape. People may find it hard to bracket the routines of the familiar and the homely, but they can imagine doing it and frequently they actually do it. In this book we have encountered numerous examples of people who were able to think across cultural frontiers and to question the semantics of indifference and exclusion.

Another reason to question the prison model of cultural identity pertains to the nature of individuality. Human minds are seldom culturally homogeneous. In societies with urban centers and written records everybody is exposed to merchants, pilgrims, and other travelers from afar. When the Persian Sufi poet Attar was speaking about Zoroastrians, he did not only think of them as infidel others but also as townspeople you might meet in the marketplace. Such banal experiences make people aware of cultural differences as a feature of daily life. People who reflect on the sources of their thinking usually end up with a fairly heterogeneous list. Even in people who seldom reflect on the cultural content of their minds a measure of hybridity will be found upon closer scrutiny. The amount of such hybridity is bound to vary with time and place, but even in backwoods hamlets a stranger will be seen now and then or, at the very least, tales about foreigners will be told. The world historian Jerry Bentley has cogently argued that in the long run of human history the intensity of cross-cultural interaction has increased, albeit unevenly and intermittently.[1] It follows that notions of 100 percent culturally homogeneous personalities—the pure Han Chinese or the authentic American—are phantasms of cultural purists.

Ever since antiquity migration and conquest, as well as traveling and intercrossing ideas, have been a feature of history. Admittedly, not everybody was equally affected by them, but on the other hand virtually nobody could live entirely isolated from them. That is especially true of townspeople: from their inception in antiquity, urban cultures have been heterogeneous and in perpetual flux, in particular in economic, religious, and political matters. As a rule people are able to adapt their demeanor and speech to meet the requirements of the various social roles they have to perform. The unceasing struggle of hierocratic and philosophical elites to contain and order such hybridity in stable and coherent bodies of doctrine testifies to the enduring salience of plurality and dissent. To express it in a short formula: most people are more “multicultural” than they think. Cultural identities are powerful, but they are not monolithic and they cannot do away with commercial transactions, pilgrimages, curiosity, and exchanges of information and ideas.[2]

In this book I have sought to show that there are basically two ways to question cultural difference: common humanity and the anthropological turn. The first transforms the stranger into the fellow human being, while the second deconstructs the semantics of the familiar and the alien. In many ways, the two perspectives can be regarded as complementary. In the Hebrew Bible we have encountered both. All humans are created in God’s image, but the Israelites are also reminded that they must not oppress the stranger in their midst, for they were themselves bondsmen in the land of Egypt, so that they can understand what it means to be treated as despised outsiders. Sages and historians in the other great civilizations have likewise put to use both perspectives. The abstract affirmation that strangers “are also humans” does not always suffice to pierce the carapace of ethnocentrism. The plurality of cultures and the inversion of the gaze give historical and anthropological depth to the abstraction of a culturally empty notion of common humanity.

That being said, we should not exaggerate the vulnerability of abstract concepts. The abstraction “human being” is fragile but neither meaningless nor ineffectual. Its very abstractness opens up a space for the imagination. That too is a lesson we may draw from the history told in this book. The golden rule of reciprocity, entailing the recognition of strangers as fellow human beings, is found in all religious and philosophical discourses of common humanity, from the Axial Age to the present time. Likewise, the idea that there are attributes or faculties shared by all human beings is a feature of all discourses of common humanity. The list of the essential properties of the human being varies over time, but the analogies are sufficient to treat them as variations on a basic theme. Among other things, the lists include elementary bodily needs and faculties, language, the use of tools, free will, reason and deliberation, and finally morality and the sense of the divine. Varying elaborations of a number of such features are found in all discourses of common humanity throughout history. The religious and philosophical foundations as well as the literary genres may differ—the basic themes endure. The worldwide UNESCO survey of opinions on human rights demonstrated a certain amount of global consensus in this field.

The abstraction human being denotes a universal concept of the human. It has the potential to be applied everywhere, but, as we have noticed time and again in this book, this potential is only realized to the extent that philosophers, priests, intellectuals, politicians, and ordinary people generalize it beyond its place of origin—but not necessarily to the ends of the earth. Herodotus, for instance, took the ability to identify one’s own customs and laws and to compare them with other peoples’ ways as core aspects of being human, but that capacity, he believed, was not available to all the inhabitants of the known world: the Scythians possessed it, but the outermost peoples in the arctic regions did not. In Diderot’s Encyclopedia, the Eskimo are still depicted as “the savages among the savages,” but half a century later Anquetil Duperron insisted on the full humanity of the arctic peoples.

We have seen that a universal concept like “natural equality” can be universalized in different ways. At the very least we should distinguish between imperial and anti-imperial universalization. Examples of the former are Roman Stoicism and the incorporation of natural equality in the law of nations, outlined by Boucher d’Argis in Diderot’s Encyclopedia. Anti-imperial universalization is found in Diderot’s Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville and in the writings of Anquetil Duperron. Drawing on a distinction recently proposed by Christopher Hill we may characterize the imperial use as a generalizing universal and the anti-imperial deployment as a relativizing universal, because it makes room for the autonomy of different cultures within the overall unity of humanity.[3] There also are, of course, hybrid forms of universals such as the metonymic couple of natural equality and divinely sanctioned common humanity in Protestant antislavery discourse. Such metonymical hybrids are probably more common in political usage than in philosophical treatises. Looking at the long run of history it seems safe to conclude that universalization of concepts has in most cases gone together with the material dissemination of religious and philosophical discourses in the wake of imperial expansion.

Humanity is plastic and malleable, but its cultural spectrum is not boundless. Notwithstanding the kaleidoscopic plurality of cultures there is a common human nature.[4] The discourses on human nature propounded by priests, philosophers, and political leaders range from weak and vague notions of common humanity to robust egalitarian doctrines. In this book we have encountered the proto-philosophical idea, advanced by some of the protagonists of Homer’s Odyssey, that everyone needs the gods, as well as strong universalistic equality claims, for example in Christian abolitionism or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Again, the spectrum is wide but it cannot be stretched indefinitely. No notion of common humanity, however weak, is consistent with ethical relativism.[5] In our treatment of the varieties of the anthropological turn we have encountered many authors who embraced one or another type of cultural relativism, but not one of them countenanced a wholesale ethical relativism. Herodotus was probably the first to formulate the beginnings of a theory of cultural relativism, but in the Histories ethical relativism is represented by Cambyses, the Herodotean archetype of the wicked king who believes that, as long as he can get away with it, everything is permitted.

At the inequality side of the historical equation cultural differences are discussed in stark and frequently essentialist terms. We have seen that discourses of common humanity and equality usually emerged as critiques of established discourses of inequality, setting in motion series of arguments and counterarguments in which common humanity, equality, and inequality were periodically refashioned. Certainties about equality were countered with certainties about inequality. God-fearing priests instructed their flock that they had the sacred duty to combat unbelief and, God willing, to kill the unbelievers. Others were equally certain that ethnography, or natural history, or empirical psychology, had demonstrated that black Africans could not develop beyond a “childish” intelligence and consequently stood in need of white leadership. Yet others had proved to their own satisfaction that the civilizing mission of the Europeans rested on the developmental logic of the history of humanity. According to Mencius, it was in accordance with the cosmic order that “barbarians” were to adopt Chinese ways. Still others delivered philosophical proofs that all religions were backward superstitions and that religious believers were intellectually deficient. At the end of the nineteenth century, not a few university professors scientifically demonstrated that academic study would deform the minds and bodies of women.

All those certainties arrived, flourished, and most of them have meanwhile departed the scene. Viewed in the long run of history, discourses of inequality display less consistency than discourses of common humanity and equality. They have assigned inferiority to ever-different ideas, customs, and categories of people. The boundaries they drew were changeable and subject to the contingencies of history. Discourses of inequality may appear realistic because they refer to factual, empirically verifiable human traits and differences, but for that very reason they are vulnerable to a critical examination of the purported “facts.”

The history of the other component of equality discourses, the anthropological turn, further impairs the “realism” of the inequality discourses. We have seen that even under conditions of extreme inequality, as in the sixteenth-century European conquest of America, the doctrines of inequality were fiercely contested. Besides references to common humanity, the inversion of the gaze had a powerful equality effect. Bartolomé de Las Casas invited his audience to realize that the Native Americans’ belief in their gods was as deep and sincere as the Christian belief in the Trinity. Michel de Montaigne advised the Europeans to take a good hard look at their own religious wars before triumphantly celebrating their superiority over the benighted cannibals. Two thousand years before, Herodotus made the lapidary remark that the Egyptians called all speakers of foreign tongues “barbarians.” A couple of centuries later Sima Qian demonstrated that the Chinese condemnation of the customs of the northern nomads was paralleled by an equally critical view of China on the part of the nomads. As every frontier is two-sided, all cultural hierarchies are susceptible to inversion. Given the changeability of cultural boundaries and the ever-varying classifications of humanity in the history of inequality thinking, the conclusion follows that hierarchical judgments of one culture about another are always historically contingent. Ultimately, then, common humanity represents the Archimedean point of the moral history of humanity.

The Significance of the Enlightenment

Intellectual history is not only about continuities. It also has to deal with ruptures and inventions of new ways of thinking. In the history of common humanity and equality two major turning points can be identified. The first is marked by the invention of the great religious and philosophical discourses of common humanity in the long Axial Age. The second is the rise of modern equality and modern inequality in the Enlightenment.

Given the problematic of the present book, we can perhaps better characterize the Axial breakthrough as the Age of the Multiple Invention of Humanity. Many of the religious and philosophical discourses of that distant age still circulate in our modern globalized world, but all of them are affected by the global dissemination and reworking of Enlightenment thought in the last three centuries. The Axial religions and philosophies adapted themselves to modernity in a double movement: on the one hand, they redefined themselves in opposition to certain aspects of Enlightenment thought, but by engaging in modern politics and confronting modern ideas they also ingested Enlightenment notions of history and time. For instance, eighteenth-century Protestant opponents of slavery condemned it as an insult to God’s majesty but also as contrary to natural equality. As believing Christians they could tack natural equality on the tenet that all humans were made in God’s image, but their short-circuiting of the spiritual notion of the human soul as a divine vessel with the sociopolitical concept of natural rights would not have been thinkable without the Enlightenment language of modern natural law. Likewise, nineteenth-century confessional politicians rejected the idea of progress, but by creating their own political movements they adopted Enlightenment notions of politics as a future-oriented programmatic activity aiming at a rational “improvement” of society. Likewise, they went along with the democratization of politics without abandoning their condemnation of the theoretical notion of popular sovereignty.

In this book I have underlined that the Enlightenment was marked by the double invention of modern equality and modern inequality. Modern equality posits the individual as the primary reality and society as an artificial contrivance created by men and women to further their security and comfort. The individuals are represented as free and equal, a viewpoint that could be grounded in materialist or idealist philosophies, or also in enlightened religious doctrines. Liberty and equality were theorized as “natural” in an anthropological as well as a normative sense. They were seen to exist as primordial “facts” but at the same time as the normative foundations of the political and social order. Modern equality marks a world-historical turning point: henceforth equality enjoyed the benefit of the doubt, while inequality stood in need of rational justification. That is, inequality had to be justified in the language of Enlightenment human science. At the end of the eighteenth century equality and liberty became foundational principles inscribed in written state constitutions. That was an unprecedented political departure.

We should add, however, that equality, while universal in theory, was in practice instituted in a national and male framework. The restriction of equality to the culturally defined nation could not be consistently theorized in terms of modern equality, and neither could the exclusion of women from citizenship. Historically, the concept of the cultural nation displays an analogy with the concept of race. It is striking that from the late eighteenth century to the Second World War the notions of nation and race were frequently treated as metonyms. Both were defined as communities of descent (national blood, racial blood), both posited a deep historically anchored “fate” that preceded all rational political choices, and both used a populist political language. Nationalism was a modern doctrine drawing on imagined traditions, a civil religion in which the people, as the historian George Mosse has memorably expressed it, collectively worshipped themselves.[6] Within the national community nationalism was a discourse of equality but globally it functioned as a discourse of exclusion, usually in tandem with discourses of race.

The Enlightenment spawned four discourses of modern inequality. Political economy offered rational arguments for socioeconomic inequality. New biopsychological theories of sexual difference defined women as equal in dignity to men and yet naturally “other” and subjected to male authority. Racial classification framed humanity in a biologically grounded hierarchy. Finally, philosophical history introduced a new regime of temporality. Henceforth, the plurality of cultures was not only theorized in a geographical framework but also as a sequence in time. The new temporal regime theorized time as development and progression, though not necessarily as moral progress. Europe thus represented a unique nodal point in space and time, the terminus ad quem of world history.

In my discussion of the Enlightenment I have shown that the combination of modern equality and philosophical history resulted in a discourse of cross-cultural equality that defines equality as “becoming like those who already are equal”—that is, to become like the Europeans. Europe, and later the “West,” represents the enlightened vanguard of humanity, endowed with the pedagogical authority to instruct the rest of the world in Enlightenment reason. Condorcet’s theory of historical progress envisions European pedagogy as the catalyst of the global forward march of equality. In present-day philosophical terms, Condorcet conflates equality with a fairly thick and quite definite doctrine of the good life. It includes all those who open themselves to Enlightenment culture, but it excludes those who embrace other orthodoxies. We have seen the mechanism at work in Jewish emancipation in the French Revolution. The Jews were welcomed as free and equal citizens, but they had to confine their Jewishness to the private sphere. The present-day French doctrine of secularist laïcité that seeks to exclude all religious practices and symbols from the public sphere.is a distant offshoot of Condorcet’s philosophy of history.

The interpretation of the Enlightenment notions of equality and cultural difference matters so much because, unlike other episodes in intellectual history, the Enlightenment has refused to be safely consigned to history. Many of the ideas and ideals of the Enlightenment are still marshaled, defended, and criticized today. In his brilliant and influential study of the Radical Enlightenment, Jonathan Israel has contended that only the materialist current, rejecting religion and espousing a philosophical monism, is consistently egalitarian. Spinoza, Bayle, and Diderot are the heroes of his history. According to Israel, the universalist discourse of modern equality cannot be grounded in a religious worldview because religious thinkers are bound to see the followers of other faiths, and a fortiori the atheists, as inferior to themselves, living in the darkness of untruth and unable to fully accept the supremacy of the religious Truth. In this book I have shown that Israel’s thesis is validated by the holy war discourses in the great monotheist religions but that powerful discourses of common humanity in the same religions laid the foundations for universalist concepts of equality. The overwhelming majority of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century spokespeople of antislavery were evangelical Protestants. It follows that the dualism between universalism (the unity of humanity) and particularism (only the believers are in possession of the truth) is a defining feature of all religions.

What Israel fails to acknowledge, however, is that the Enlightenment embodies a similar dualism. The literal meaning of enlightenment depicts it as a move from the darkness to the light. The invention of modern equality is one of the most momentous intellectual innovations of the Enlightenment, but Enlightenment reason also divides humanity into two camps: those who already are enlightened and those who are not yet enlightened. It is the calling of the first group to educate—to enlighten—the second one. No more than religion can the Enlightenment escape the dualism of universalism (the unity of humanity) and particularism (only the Enlightenment, or only the Radical Enlightenment, is in possession of the truth). Whether the truth is represented by a universal god or by universal reason, the basic polarity remains the same. The only consideration that justifies a privileged place for the Enlightenment is that religious egalitarians took a part (but by no means the whole) of their social and political insights from Enlightenment political thought. For their basic convictions about the unity of humanity and the wickedness of oppression, however, they could find ample support in their scriptures.

Israel’s dichotomy between an egalitarian Radical Enlightenment and a less egalitarian Moderate Enlightenment cannot account for the philosophical variety within the group of radical critics of colonialism and empire. Diderot was indeed a secular monist, but Raynal’s worldview was deistic and Anquetil Duperron came from a Jansenist fold and in his old age adopted a syncretistic religious creed. Above, I have already mentioned the Protestantism of the great majority of abolitionists. On the side of modern inequality, it is striking that racial classification theorizes humanity as an integral part of the animal kingdom, a stance that accords well with a materialist monism. Buffon and Blumenbach’s arguments for the naturalness and the primacy of the white race are entirely grounded in an environmentalist and proto-evolutionary theory of the long-term transformation of human bodies. To escape the crass consequences of this materialist logic, several students of natural history had recourse to theological arguments for the unity of humanity. Likewise, the Enlightenment made gender into an essentially contested concept, but the equality of the sexes could be consistently defended in Christian, Cartesian-dualist, as well as in monist terms.[7] Furthermore, in matters of gender as well as race, materialist monists also could defend female or racial inferiority with arguments taken from natural history. Diderot himself concluded that female physiology drives women to excessive passions and impairs their capacity for logical thought.[8] The upshot is that the Radical Enlightenment, not unlike the moderates, combines modern equality with several discourses of modern inequality.

Moreover, the four stages theory of philosophical history, with its hard core of developmental temporality, was shared by radicals and moderates across the spectrum of the Enlightenment. Radicals like Diderot and Raynal shared it with moderates such as Turgot, Smith, and Robertson. We have seen that Rousseau scornfully rejected all ideas of moral progress but nonetheless subscribed to the stadial theory of historical development and its corollary that modern history has no backstage exit. Even so, Rousseau was one of the few Enlightenment thinkers who at least attempted to criticize developmental temporality (and publicly admitted that it could not be dome). But Rousseau was not a monist radical but a deist moderate (in Israel’s classification, at least). In my opinion, the combination of modern equality and philosophical history represents the ultimate bedrock of Enlightenment thinking about politics and history. Accordingly, the tension between modern equality and the Eurocentric thrust of philosophical history pervades all Enlightenment thought about history and society.

Consequently, we can expect that the actual historical trajectories of modern equality do not fit Condorcet’s model of a steady across-the-board increase. We have seen that the French Revolution could accommodate racial equality to a certain extent but peremptorily rejected women’s citizenship. In the late nineteenth century, however, the pattern reversed itself. Women gained citizenship rights in Europe and the white settler colonies and later on in many Latin American and some Asian countries as well. But the opening of the citizenry to people of color and blacks in the French Revolution had very little impact in the era between Napoleon and the Second World War. Atlantic slavery was abolished, but in the postslavery states the emancipated slaves and other nonwhite people became second-rate citizens at best. In the matter of race the 1800–1945 era was not dominated by democratic thought but by scientific racism. It needed the global cataclysm of the Second World War to dismantle scientific racism, and even then Africans, Asians, African Americans, and black South Africans had to wage a long, uphill struggle to obtain self-determination and full citizenship rights. We may conclude that the path to the present-day partial hegemony of democracy was neither straight nor steady. Insofar as a long-term logic exists—and that is by no means certain—it is only effected by people acting through the contingencies of history.

What can we conclude about the Enlightenment? One feature of Enlightenment thought that gives it a strong and unprecedented critical potential is that it contains a meta-text about critique as an ever-ongoing struggle of the mind with itself. There, and there alone, it moves beyond religion. Self-criticism is, of course, as old as philosophy itself, but in the Enlightenment it becomes a programmatic tenet. As Kant puts in the preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, “Our age is the veritable age of critique, to which everything has to submit.”[9] Or, as d’Alembert expresses it in the preliminary discourse of the Encyclopedia, “Let us always respect Descartes, but let us readily abandon opinions which he himself would have combatted a century later.”[10]

In principle, then, the Enlightenment can critically reflect on itself. However, the historical, early-modern Enlightenment tends to conflate the ongoing process of intellectual critique and revision with the temporality of modern history itself, thus relegating all non-European intellectual cultures to the limbo of the “premodern.” A way out, one may conjecture, would be to backtrack to a culturally empty procedural liberalism that is not tied to any philosophy of history. But it is extremely difficult, and probably impossible, to conceive of a notion of individuality that is atemporal and culturally empty, and yet remains historically credible.

The Hyper-Reality of the West and the Persistence of Cultural Heterogeneity

Nowadays, the linear four stages theory of human history is no longer accepted by historians and anthropologists, but the developmental temporality that underpinned it has survived into our time. In discussions of economic growth and political modernization time is virtually always theorized as “development.” To keep afloat in the worldwide competition with the West, other parts of the world have to “develop” themselves. We have seen that Gandhi dismissed such strategies as “English rule without the Englishman.” However, the postcolonial history of India has shown that Gandhi’s critique was “powerful and lucid, but too radical,” as Sudipta Kaviraj has put it. According to Kaviraj, Gandhi offered “not an alternative solution to modernity’s problems, but to modernity itself.”[11] After India gained independence, European cultural and philosophical ideas retained a potent hold on the Indian mind. The Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has called this the hyper-reality of Europe. It is present wherever people make politics and write history in terms of progression, development, and modernization, adopting what Chakrabarty has called “the temporality of the not yet.” Even if Europe is never mentioned it still functions as a silent referent.[12]

The historians and philosophers of antiquity conceived of cultural difference as a geographical side by side, not a temporal sequence. In the conquest of America, the Spaniards sought to remake the Native Americans in the Christian image. Their conversion efforts were framed in the temporality of sacred history while their model of settler colonialism left little room for a secular civilizing mission. Insofar as the Europeans sought to introduce a new secular order in America they reasoned in terms of the colonial predator state and the enhancement of agricultural productivity by means of slave labor as well as freehold farming by white settlers. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the temporal horizon of Europe did not include the remaking of the world in the European image. Against that backdrop we can see the disruptive novelty of Enlightenment philosophical history.

Even so, we must be careful not to overstate the speed and extent of the rupture. Montesquieu, Diderot, and Adam Smith still regarded productive agriculture, artisanal manufacture, and worldwide commerce as the engines of European and global “development.” In Raynal and Diderot’s critical discussion of Europe’s oceanic empires, the beginnings of a theory of European cultural imperialism are visible, but their pessimistic view of empire was predicated on the limits of communication and state power in a world where the fastest means of transport were the running horse and the sailing ship. In 1798 Malthus could authoritatively declare that Britain was already approaching the absolute limits of agricultural productivity. These were the ultimate standards that framed the Enlightenment’s theorization of the future of the world. Only a few dissenting voices evoked the contours of a different future, as in the Abbé Sieyès’s observation, some years before the French Revolution, that the net product of the arts was “unlimited,” but we may doubt that even Sieyès realized the full implications of his words.[13] Likewise, Condorcet expected a virtually boundless material progress, including a steady increase of the life span of future generations. He further foresaw that equality and political liberty would extend over the entire world in a few generations.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century some observers began to speak of “industry” as a new and powerful form of economic organization. In due course “industry” came to represent a fifth stage in the history of humanity. It was only then that the full force of the developmental temporality invented by the thinkers of the Enlightenment was unleashed on the world. In the 1840s, the young English conservative Benjamin Disraeli imagined the novelty of the coming industrial civilization against the backdrop of classical antiquity. “Rightly understood,” he declared, “Manchester is as great a human exploit as Athens.… It is the philosopher alone who can conceive the grandeur of Manchester, and the immensity of its future.”[14]

The eventual historical results were indeed “immense,” but they contradicted Condorcet’s beatific vision of the future. Instead of the steady global dissemination of progress he foresaw came unequal and combined development. An interminable competition between empires, nations, and peoples encompassed an increasing portion of the globe. In lieu of world peace, also predicted by Condorcet, came wars of unprecedented destructivity. And instead of a growth of equality came an explosive increase of global economic inequality. In 1750, average per capita production was roughly equal in the greater part of the world, with only the European Atlantic rim scoring higher. In 1900, productivity in the West surpassed the rest of the world by a factor of three; in 1970, by a factor of seven.[15] Until 1945, the spread of liberty and equality was confined to islands in an ocean of autocratic regimes, and even today dictatorships and parliamentary oligarchies outnumber democracies. Condorcet’s prediction of greater equality between peoples and nations was belied by the rise of scientific racism and the imposition of a global color line.

A similar story can be told about the waning of religion, another of Condorcet’s predictions. Western Europe is the only world region that partly confirms his scenario, but even there massive secularization only arrived in the second half of the twentieth century. Nowhere did it result in an atheist majority. The European Values Survey of 1999, which confined itself to Western Europe, reported 9 percent identifying as atheists against 60 percent calling themselves believers in a god or other transcendental idea, with a surprising 18 percent believing in reincarnation.[16] In the United States, by contrast, technical and economic modernization coexisted with high rates of church attendance and biblical fundamentalism. In 2004, the Pew Research Center found that 48 percent of Americans believed the United States enjoyed the special protection of the Christian God. Similarly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, although secularism attracts a growing part of the intelligentsia and the urban middle classes, among the popular classes religious movements, including various fundamentalisms, attract a still greater following. In the postcommunist European nations a religious revival likewise competes with secular culture.

Economically, the hyper-reality of the West remains a solid fact. In The Age of Extremes, his history of the “short twentieth century,” the British historian Eric Hobsbawm dramatically contends that “for 80 percent of humanity the Middle Ages ended suddenly in the 1950s; or perhaps better still, they were felt to end in the 1960s.”[17] Hobsbawm’s rhetorical exaggeration signals an important dimension of the global transformation in the postcolonial era. C. A. Bayly has observed that an important feature of becoming modern consists in believing that you must become modern. The ensuing sense of futurity enables us to peer into the mind of the postcolonial state elites. The socialist legacy they had inherited from the interwar generation perfectly fitted the new historical era. They transformed the determinist “not yet” of the hyper-real Europe into the programmatic “and now we” of the third world against a backdrop of Marxist historical determinism. But despite all the dreams of overtaking the West, global economic disparities failed to decrease. Instead, they further widened. Economically, technologically, and militarily, the West still leads and the rest follow. Of the non-Western powers, only Japan is in the same league. In the last ten years, economists have highlighted the rise of new economic giants, such as Brazil, India, Russia, Indonesia, and, above all, China. At the present time, many observers of international trends speculate that China may emulate and outstrip Japan, or even the West itself. In terms of gross economic and military power that may well happen, but in per capita output China still lags far behind.

Culturally, however, the picture is far less clear. Many aspects of the Western way of life, notably electronic consumerism and a modicum of personal security, are regarded in other world regions with an unstable mixture of desire, envy, and hope. They have penetrated the lifestyle of the elites, and more recently of the middle classes, in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Consequently, electronic consumerism disseminates Western products and lifestyles worldwide. That is not to say, however, that the world is moving toward a universal homogeneous culture. Recently, the economist Pankaj Ghemawat has shown that much of what is presented as globalization is actually regionalization and that large swaths of the world are circumvented or only marginally touched by the global channels of trade and communication. Even the internet, the showcase of the apostles of wholesale globalization, is less global than it seems: As recently as 2008 only 18 percent of internet traffic crossed national borders.[18] Ghemawat’s skepticism provides a salutary antidote to the flat earth credo of the influential American journalist Thomas Friedman, his favorite bête noire.[19] In an interesting aside, Ghemawat notes that even global consumerism comes in culturally calibrated formats: MacDonald’s hamburgers are served with avocado in Chile, with horseradish in Poland, and with a topping of bulgogi marinade in South Korea.[20]

When we move from consumerism to basic values and models of selfhood the theory of the westernization of the world becomes still more questionable. Worldwide, religion remains the major vector of cultural identity. The competition between communitarian and individualist senses of selfhood is another one, closely tied to the town and country divide. The capitalist world economy has two faces. On the one hand it disseminates “Western” products, means of communication, and images. That is its homogenizing aspect. But it is also acts as a disruptive force, an ever-ongoing production of extremes of wealth and poverty combined with an uprooting of traditional cultures and communities. By their destructive impact, markets and hypercommercialization generate the profound anxieties and quests for deeper world-meanings to which religions old and new owe their impressive staying power. To discover that mass religiosity is more than a residue of traditionalism, it suffices to take a look at the growth of religion, including Protestant fundamentalism, in the United States, often celebrated as the heartland of modernity. Likewise, parts of Latin America are going through a silent transition from Catholicism to Protestantism.

Moreover, the crises and uncertainties generated by global market forces compel people to fall back on family networks and other local modes of resistance and cooperation. The latter aspect also accounts for the bitter conflicts about gender issues that invariably accompany globalization and its discontents. In many cases women take the lead to defend themselves and their children in the throes of disruption of traditionally patriarchal societies. They are in the forefront of the defense of human rights in many parts of the world. Locally, regionally, and nationally women have achieved leadership roles. The globalization of equality-thinking that began in the nineteenth century has offered them new ideas to consider and act upon. Together with modern equality, feminist ideas have traveled around the world since the late nineteenth century. In reaction, the backlash against women’s independence is one of the wellsprings of religious fundamentalisms, in particular in the Islamic world.

The upshot seems to be neither wholesale modernization nor across-the-board traditionalism but rather a multiplicity of mixed responses in which communities and individuals frequently invent surprising combinations. The responses to “Americanization,” as westernization began to be called in the twentieth century, though varying from country to country, have split communities and made for generation conflicts.[21] As so often in history, the new does not replace the old in one fell swoop.

Finally, public debates about the state of the world have become more global than ever before. In this aspect, as in many others, the wild nineties of the twentieth century marked a watershed. More and more, the language of global public debate became English, or rather Globish, a neologism coined by the French IBM manager Jean-Paul Nerrière in 1995, the year Netscape launched the first commercial internet search engine. At about the same time, another neologism, globalization, entered the international vocabulary. According to Nerrière, Globish consists of a basic English vocabulary of some 1,500 words that can be expanded to meet the needs of the user. At the present time, various kinds of English and Globish are spoken by one-third of the world population. Only Chinese counts more speakers, but it seems improbable that Chinese will evolve into a global lingua franca. The alphabet has rightly been called a democratic invention. And so an increasing number of Chinese are learning Globish.[22] Globish is also the dominant language of the World Wide Web. It plays a role comparable to earlier lingua francas, but on a global instead of a regional scale. In everyday usage it functions as the default setting of an emergent global public sphere.

What can we conclude about globalization and cultural difference? In his contribution to the Oxford Handbook of World History (2011), German historian Jürgen Osterhammel discusses such questions. “Is world society growing more equal or more unequal? Is world culture being homogenized, or are cultural differences mounting?” He concludes that there is at present no consensus among historians and social scientists about such “seemingly empirical questions.”[23] I agree with Osterhammel that more and better data are desirable, but I very much doubt that consensus about the global balance of homogeneity and difference will be achieved in the foreseeable future. The dialectical and reflexive nature of cultural difference makes it an essentially contested concept. Where some will “see” homogeneity and equality, others will “see” heterogeneity and inequality. Measurable differences, such as percentages of Muslims and Buddhists in a given country, only become cultural differences in the strong sense when people define them as such. Otherwise they are no more than the statistics of folklore. That is why I turn once more to discourses and ideas about modern equality and global cultural difference.

Competing Global Discourses

Toward the turn of the last century, human rights had become the lingua franca of international courts of law and an emergent global civil society. Considered as a global worldview, its strong normative foundations were its main strength as well as its chief weakness. Strength, because modern liberty and equality, the normative core of human rights, coincided with the normative core of liberal democracy, the world-historical victory of which was proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama in his famous article on the “end of history” published in the summer of 1989, on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But strength was also weakness, because the abstract legalism and militant moralism of human rights were unable to come to grips with the contingencies of history, such as empires, civilizations, religions, and nations.

Advocates of human rights tend to conceive of these historical realities as regrettable “deviations” from justice and fairness. Like Fukuyama, they theorize history as the quasi-Hegelian realization of an absolute idea. But unlike Fukuyama, and to their credit, they do not equate the new state of affairs with the global victory of the United States and its Western allies. The antistatist turn of human rights since the 1970s has made its advocates more critical of all states, regardless of political regime. After all, the democratic states of the West had selectively used the weapon of human rights against the communist states and some dictatorships elsewhere but had shielded their own dictatorial clients and their brutal use of arbitrary violence against all condemnations and sanctions.

Let us recall that Fukuyama not only announced the victory of an ideal but also of an empire. He criticized Paul Kennedy’s book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, highly acclaimed in those days, because Kennedy ascribed the decline of empires to “simple economic overextension.” Premodern empires, Fukuyama admitted, could not bankrupt their treasuries indefinitely, but “whether a highly productive modern industrial society chooses to spend 3 or 7 percent of its GNP on defense … is entirely a matter of … political priorities, which are in turn determined in the realm of consciousness.”[24] Fukuyama’s voluntarist theory of empire was a keystone of his Hegelian philosophy of history. World history, he argued, was driven by ideas that represented the deep truth of an age. Freedom, which for Fukuyama included economic neoliberalism, was the decisive truth, the Hegelian Geist, of modern history, and the fall of communism as a credible ideal announced the advent of a “posthistoric” era of untrammeled liberty. That future would realize itself through the agency of the planetary empire-state that embodied its key idea and—a crucial precondition of historic success—commanded the effective economic and military power to liberate the world. Liberation would be imposed by the posthistoric empire-state on the benighted states and peoples still dwelling in “history.” Looking back from the 2010s we can see the hollowness of Fukuyama’s voluntarist theory of empire. Bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, deeply indebted, its international moral leadership in shambles, and facing a resurgent China and a revanchist Russia, even the American hyperpower proved unable to impose its will in all corners of the globe. As for the putative “end of history,” many people in the world have seen rather more of it than they would have liked since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Four years after Fukuyama’s announcement of a posthistoric future, the influential American journal Foreign Affairs published an essay by political scientist Samuel Huntington, entitled “The Clash of Civilizations,” expanded into a book in 1996. Huntington made an altogether different prediction about global trends after the demise of the Soviet Empire. Fukuyama’s Hegelian one-world scenario, he contended, could not be farther from the truth. Instead, he argued that “culture and cultural identities, which at the broadest level are civilization identities, are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-Cold War world.” Huntington’s analysis immediately became the focus of heated debates, not only in the United States but worldwide. No article in Foreign Affairs, the editors noted two years after its publication, had ever attracted as much attention.[25] Huntington’s starting point looked like the opposite of Fukuyama. “The balance of power among civilizations,” he declared, “is shifting; the West is declining in influence.” Asian civilizations were expanding their economic, political, and military strength, Huntington posited, while Islam was exploding demographically with destabilizing consequences.[26]

According to Huntington, several factors account for the rise of cultural identities as global poles of attraction. The first is the accelerating pace of social and economic modernization bringing dislocation and alienation in its wake. People who feel threatened and disoriented need certainties and meanings at a deeper ontological level, and civilizational identities supply such comforting beacons. Second, the increasing economic and political capabilities of non-Western states and societies stimulate a “revitalization of indigenous identities.” Third, improvements in transportation and communication have led to an increasing worldwide interaction among peoples from different continents, making their civilizational identities more salient in confrontations with strangers from other civilizations. Finally, the world remains a Darwinist arena where states, economic actors, and individuals compete for wealth and power, invigorating thinking in terms of “us” versus “them.” In the contemporary world, Huntington concludes, “the ‘them’ is more and more likely to be people from a different civilization.”[27] Drawing on world historians from Toynbee to McNeill, he distinguishes nine major civilizations: the West, Latin America, China, Islam, sub-Saharan Africa, Russian Orthodox Christendom, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Japan.

In the popular press, Huntington’s theory of the clash of civilizations has often been misrepresented as a clarion call to the West to impose its values on the “Rest,” even to the brink of global war. At times Huntington may sound like that, but we will shortly see that what he really advocates is an altogether more prudent course. A descent into a hostile confrontation of closed civilizational blocs he considers possible but extremely dangerous and undesirable. Given his position in the American international policy establishment he analyzes world trends from a Western perspective. His strategic recommendations aim at the defense of Western civilization in an era of decreasing Western power. Huntington’s outlook is close to the realist school of international relations, which theorizes global politics as an ever-ongoing contest between states. A close reading of his book shows that the clash of civilizations is a powerful metaphor for another and “harder” reality, the clash of empires. As Lydia Liu puts it in her book about the nineteenth-century conflicts between China and the British Empire: “Civilizations do not clash; Empires do.”[28]

The global actors in Huntington’s scenario are not civilizations but states equipped with military and economic clout. Some civilizations, such as the West, China, and Orthodox Christendom, function as metonyms for empires. The cultural language of a clash of civilizations frequently shades into the political language of a clash of empires. Huntington’s main recommendations seek to outline the best course for the American Empire in an emerging multipolar world. In his opinion, Fukuyama’s overestimation of American power is a dangerous delusion. Huntington’s core recommendation concerns multiculturalism, which he accepts on a global scale but not internally in the West and least of all in the United States itself:

The global monoculturalists want to make the world like America. The domestic multiculturalists want to make America like the world. A multicultural America is impossible because a non-Western America is not American. A multicultural world is unavoidable because global empire is impossible. The preservation of the United States and the West requires the renewal of Western identity. The security of the world requires acceptance of global multiculturality.[29]

Western intervention in the internal affairs of other civilizations, Huntington warns, is “probably the single most dangerous source of instability and potential global conflict.”[30] These recommendations assume two things: the internal homogeneity of civilizations and the persistence of meaningful cultural differences between them. Are these assumptions realistic and, if so, to what extent? To clear the decks I will first examine what Huntington has to say about the similarities between civilizations. In a multicivilizational world, he concludes “the constructive course is to renounce universalism, accept diversity, and seek commonalities.” Ideally, people in all civilizations should work toward expanding their commonalities with people in other civilizations.

What are those commonalities? Minimalist moral concepts of truth and justice, Huntington asserts, are found in all civilizations, as are rules against murder, deceit, torture, oppression, and tyranny. Consequently, moral relativism is a red herring, a conclusion I also draw in this book. But what shall we say about rules against torture, oppression, and tyranny? Such rules are, of course, found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but Huntington’s observations about human rights are for the most part pessimistic and dismissive. He mentions the humiliating defeat of the West at the 1993 Vienna conference on human rights, where proposals to bolster civil and political rights were voted down by a majority bloc of Islamic and Asian states, just as at the 1968 Teheran conference.[31] However, the critique of human rights in Vienna did not reflect a clash of cultures or civilizations but a conflict between dictatorial regimes and their critics within and outside the UN.

The only UN gatherings where conflicts partly followed civilizational frontlines were the conferences on women’s rights. At the 1980 Copenhagen Conference, for example, Western feminists collided with women from African countries, many of which were Muslim societies, over the issue of female genital mutilation. Generally, issues of gender and sexuality are more polarized along civilizational boundaries than most other cultural issues. Even in that case, however, it should not be forgotten that the very same African women were often involved in campaigns against their own male-dominated political regimes. Over the past twenty years, feminist voices in Islam have become louder and have begun to attract a broader public.[32] The civilizational clash is thus balanced by the global dissemination of feminist ideas.

In his discussion of human rights, Huntington consistently equates civilizations with the major state elites speaking for them, and he repeatedly declares that human rights are a Western concept with Christian roots. The Chinese government’s conceit to “speak for China” is accepted at face value and the nationwide movement for democratization (e.g., Tien An Men, 1989) dismissed as the action of an insignificant urban minority. The real China, Huntington assumes, are the Communist rulers and the peasantry.[33] My objection is not against his explanation why the 1989 movement failed, but against the suggestion that the democratic agitation was somehow un-Chinese. Huntington explains it away, reducing his transcivilizational commonalities to an extremely weak and toothless version of common humanity.

Huntington’s writing off of oppositional currents and other agents for change follows from his concept of civilization. He consistently reifies the concept, overstating the homogeneity of civilizations and treating them as organic wholes. It is one of the main theses of this book that the reification of the concept of civilizations is deeply misleading and cannot account for the dynamics of world history. In all known civilizations, homogeneity is a goal pursued by state elites and guardians of the canon, a goal that is, as a rule, only partly realized. What is striking in the history of the last three centuries is the volatility of state power and culture in a world subjected to the unceasing acceleration of modernity. Coming back to the Chinese example, we should recall that most nineteenth-century European observers characterized China as a stagnating Confucian civilization that would not change greatly in the foreseeable future. The British ethnologist John Crawfurd made similar dismissive predictions about Japan in 1867, a year before the start of the Meiji Reform era. The chain of Chinese upheavals, from the Taiping Rebellion to the demise of the imperial system in 1911, demonstrated that the idea of an unchanging Chinese civilization was a myth. Huntington himself, writing in the aftermath of the fall of Soviet Communism, must have known that most Western experts regarded Michael Gorbachev as just another reform Communist in the style of Khrushchev. Even such an astute student of Soviet history as Moshe Lewin, in The Gorbachev Phenomenon, a book published in 1988, foresaw a “democratized one-party system” as the most likely outcome in the medium term.[34] That the Soviet Union itself would fall apart was beyond his imagination. Once more, not a few experts banked on a continuity that would soon prove illusory.

Huntington’s reified conception of civilizations is unable to deal with the heterogeneous social and intellectual trends unfolding at the present time on all continents. Likewise, he appears to underrate the porosity of the frontiers of civilizations and the borders of empires. Today, all states in the world, including the West, are engaged in heroic efforts to domesticate the internet and to control migration. To a certain extent they have succeeded, but time and again their bans and filters are circumvented by angry swarms of nerds and hackers. A rapidly growing economy like the Chinese cannot forever isolate itself from the global flows of communication without impairing its own vitality. Economic globalization, though less complete than certain pundits loudly proclaim (see above), is slowly but inexorably opening up frontiers and borders. Likewise with migration: everywhere states seek to monitor and control the flow of people across their borders, but nowhere have such controls stopped migration. Like the internet, migration is a double-edged phenomenon. It may disrupt social policies and demographic balances, but no dynamic economy can do without the inflow of new people and ideas.

In line with McNeill’s 1990 self-critical review of The Rise of the West, I have conceived of civilizations as rather heterogeneous entities with contentious boundaries.[35] A civilization is better pictured as a turbulent conglomerate than as a homogeneous cultural jelly. The amount of homogeneity they are able to retain depends to a great extent on the power and capabilities of political and intellectual elites, in particular in large empires such as China, the United States, Russia, and the European Union (though the latter is a special case). World history is made within and by empires and states, but it is also forged by ecumenical trends and transcivilizational flows. Despite his discussion of “commonalities” Huntington’s analysis of global trends does not seriously engage with transcivilizational flows of goods, services, money, people, images, and ideas. Absent a reckoning with the disruptive effects of global communication it seems hazardous to make predictions about the future of civilizations. The foregoing is not to say, of course, that there are no global conflicts that are pursued under the banner of civilizations or world religions. It would be utterly foolish to deny it. But, just as with nationalism, we should pay close attention to who are erecting themselves as the mouthpieces of a civilization. The history of all nations consists of clashes between differing representations of the “same” nation. The same is true of civilizations. Historians and political analysts should pay as much attention to the clashes within civilizations as to the clashes between them.

Moreover, empires are as important as civilizations—and frequently more important. Actually, Huntington’s own book is an exemplary case of a treatise on imperial strategy. He advises the West to promote the further westernization of Latin America and to maintain or increase the westernization of Japan. By contrast, he is adamantly opposed to multiculturalism in the core regions of the West. The cultural integrity and regional interests of Russia and China are to be respected, but their eventual attempts to expand their spheres of influence must be contained.[36] The status of culture in Huntington’s analysis remains thoroughly unclear and ambiguous. Sometimes, he theorizes it as a deep historical reality that should be treated with the utmost caution by state elites, but at other times, such as in his recommendations for Latin America and Japan, he discusses it as a simple object of imperial strategy. He mentions cleavages and frictions within civilizations incidentally, but they play no significant role in his assessment of the impending geopolitical conflicts between them.

Finally, let us examine the normative foundations underpinning Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations.” The hard core of his politics is not the universality but the uniqueness of the West. This is the twenty-first-century pendant of old-style Eurocentrism. The moral stature of non-Western people in his theoretical framework is unclear, to put it mildly. The West should retain its paramount position in the world as the bastion of Civilization with a capital C.[37] Other civilizations should be contained, but when they are powerful empires, such as China and Russia, there must be no attempts to interfere with how they treat their own subjects. In other regions, such as Latin America and Japan, soft interventionism to make them more Western is allowed. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that for Huntington maintaining the primacy of the West is the bedrock value, while all other issues are subservient to imperial strategy and tactics. His use of Civilization with a capital C recalls the discussion of the law of nations in Diderot’s Encyclopedia. Its point of departure is the thesis of a universal morality but in the course of the analysis that universality is metonymically linked to the “Civilized” parts of the world.[38] The needs and claims of non-Western peoples are recognized in general pronouncements, but whenever a conflict arises they are sacrificed to the needs of imperial realpolitik. In the long run, Huntington hopes that the commonalities between civilizations will result in world peace and a decent life for all people on earth, but his short- and medium-run scenarios are entirely dominated by the politics and the interests of the West, and in particular of the American Empire.

The Prospect of Human Rights

Let us now reassess the prospects of human rights in the contemporary world and consider how advocacy of human rights differs from the perspective of the clash of civilizations. The first difference is that human rights advocates, be they legal professionals or NGO activists, focus on claims on states made by individuals and communities. Accordingly, the conflicts subtending human rights issues are conflicts within states, empires, and “their” civilizations. Second, the advocacy of human rights is predicated upon the principle of nondiscrimination. All inhabitants of the earth, without exception, are entitled to the same bundle of rights. While Huntington recommends a weak universalism, human rights are grounded in a strong universalism. Third, human rights actors focus on the concerns of ordinary people and the rule of law, while Huntington foregrounds states and empires. They are looking at the same world but they privilege different actors and trends.

Fourth, the perspective of human rights entails another perspective on the West itself. Huntington’s portrayal of the West is downright triumphalist. Human rights advocates, by contrast, do not restrict themselves to human rights violations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but also criticize violations within the West. As such violations frequently concern the rights of immigrants and minorities they call into question Huntington’s ban on multiculturalism within the West. Two major examples are African American citizenship in the United States and Muslim citizenship in Europe. In both cases, there have been frequent attempts to combine recognition of their individual rights with nonrecognition of their status as communities who demand a place for their cultural traditions and their history within the collective memory and public culture of the nation. Recently, for example, many European politicians have addressed Muslim citizens along the lines of “we respect you as free and equal fellow citizens, but we summon you to divest yourselves of your loathsome and backward culture.” My paraphrase, I regret to say, is more polite than many of the originals. Such language violates the standards for a decent society posited by the Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit. According to Margalit, the institutions and leaders of a decent society must not constantly humiliate some of its denizens, regardless of their legal status as citizens. “In a decent society,” Margalit declares, “there are no second-class citizens.”[39] It follows that any decent society has to accept a certain amount of multiculturality.

It does not follow, however, that human rights entail the acceptance of wholesale multiculturalism. The rights of individuals, we should recall, can also be invoked against the cultural communities in which they are born and reared, especially if such communities are governed in an authoritarian way. Ultimately, individual rights have primacy over the claims of groups and institutions. No community can forbid an adult individual to leave, and the rights of minors within communities are protected by the law, as in the outlawing of female circumcision. In a democracy, the law protects individuals within communities and it sets limits to what communities can rightfully do to their “members.” But laws should not curb the liberties of minorities beyond the strictly necessary. A good example of a law that does just that is the 2004 French law outlawing the headscarves of Muslim pupils in state schools. Once more, we witness a conflict on the interface of gender and cultural difference. The girls vindicating their headscarves conceived of themselves as persons with rights, expressing their identities as Frenchwomen while identifying themselves as Muslims. Without allowing for difference, they contended, equality turns into exclusion. Collectively asserting their rights these women entered the public sphere and claimed their agency as modern citizens. Similar conflicts and collective agitation surrounded the resurgence of the headscarf in other European countries, in Turkey and Egypt, and in the United States.

Curbing liberty to ensure equality as sameness, we may add, contravenes John Stuart Mill’s “very simple principle” that harm to others is the only acceptable ground for legal restrictions of individual freedom. Finally, the French state did not consider all religions as equally problematic. In Alsace-Moselle, Christian symbols on the walls of classrooms in state schools were not touched by the new law (on dubious and contradictory historical grounds). Apparently, these Christian symbols, not worn by individual pupils but reflecting the institutional authority of the school in a region with a population of almost three million (4.8% of the population of France), did not endanger the secular Republic, but the presence of a few hundred Muslim girls with headscarves did. In this case, an arbitrary restriction of liberty coincided with a treatment of Muslims as second-rate citizens. The French example brings us back to the two faces of modern equality. It also demonstrates that the clash of civilizations, insofar as it exists, happens within as well as on the frontiers of nations and civilizations.

How should we evaluate the two faces of modern equality at the beginning of the twenty-first century? To begin with, I want to underline that cross-cultural equality does not imply that diversity is always better than homogeneity. That has to remain an open question. Every viable community needs homogeneity as well as diversity. In some respects, such as rights and liberties, a more homogeneous world is probably desirable. The doctrine that human rights are a “Western” imposition on other civilizations is a spurious claim of dictators and tyrants who seek to ward off any and all critique of their self-serving policies. That being said, it must be noted that human rights and democracy are procedural norms that should not impinge more than strictly necessary on the differing conceptions of the “good life” cherished by different communities. As noted above, issues of gender and sexuality tend to be the most sensitive in conflicts about the boundaries of procedural norms and thick conceptions of the “good life.”

Even so, it should be kept in mind that culturally thick communities are not necessarily coeval with civilizations or nation-states. In the last two centuries, massive migrations have made sizable ethnic and religious minorities a worldwide reality. Consequently, states and empires should renounce the prospect of cultural homogenization beyond the minimal requirements of procedural justice, efficient communication, and participation in economic and civic life. Cultural homogenization across the board is a far more radical and dangerous proposition. In this book we have seen that since the Columbian Exchange its relentless drive has destroyed the life worlds of entire peoples. In some cases, the European modernization of the world resulted in the genocidal extermination of the very peoples it purported to “save” from idolatry, savagery, and barbarism. That dismal history should make us aware of the lethal side of a worldwide imposition of equality as sameness.

Finally, an enduring lesson can be distilled from the making of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 1948, the important thing was to reach agreement on a comprehensive list of rights that would stand the test of time, and to reach such agreement in time. Eleanor Roosevelt and her colleagues managed to bring it off by foregoing a metaphysical foundation. Thereby they left us a valuable legacy. The global dissemination of a cross-cultural modern equality does not depend on the dissemination of a globally uniform culture and still less on a global metaphysical consensus. Quite the contrary; people can start from disparate ideas of common humanity, rooted in Confucianism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, or Enlightenment philosophy, and the list goes on. That is, they can—and probably should—acquire a cosmopolitan outlook without entirely abandoning their rootedness in local, national, religious, or civilizational communities, an attitude that has been defined by Kwame Anthony Appiah as “rooted cosmopolitanism.”[40]

The ensuing agreement about human rights drawing on such diverging cultural wellsprings may contribute to an awareness of the changeability and the perspectival nature of the seemingly massive cultural differences in the world. A cross-cultural discourse of equality grafted on human rights is not the same as multiculturalism because it acknowledges individuals as well as communities and sets limits to the authority of communities to determine the life courses of “their” individuals. Modern equality, we should remember, recognizes the rights of individuals to act according to their own lights but also the rights of groups of individuals to collective action. The Universal Declaration enshrines individual rights but it also posits that “everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his [sic!] personality is possible.”[41]

In the near future, we may conjecture, human rights as well as the clash of civilizations will be marshaled in global debates on equality and cultural difference. We probably shall encounter unexpected mixtures of the two competing discourses. I have no pretension to predict the future course of world history. The history told in this book remains open-ended. It has taken the shape of an ever-ongoing series of inventions and reinventions of common humanity and equality. The series will never be terminated and its future agents and theorists will have to deal with historical contingencies we cannot possibly foresee. What we can foresee in the medium term, however, is an enduring tension between common humanity and equality on the one hand and the doctrine of the clash of civilizations on the other.

■ NOTES

■ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

■ INDEX

NOTES

Introduction

1. See Siep Stuurman, “Humanity,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization, 5 vols., ed. George Rizter (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 2:963–971.

2. Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), xii.

3. See Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 55, 73–83.

4. Diodorus Siculus, 12 vols., trans. C. H. Oldfather (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 1:33 [= I:9, 2].

5. Jan Assmann, The Mind of Egypt, trans. Andrew Jenkins (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), 151.

6. See Quentin Skinner, “Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action,” and “Language and Social Change,” in Meaning and Context, ed. James Tully (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 109–118, 132.

7. See Russell Meiggs, “The Crisis of Athenian Imperialism,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 67 (1963), 1.

8. See Siep Stuurman, “The Voice of Thersites: Reflections on the Origins of the Idea of Equality,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 65 (2004), 171–189.

9. See Robert R. Palmer, “Equality,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, 5 vols., ed. Philip Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1973), 2:138.

10. See J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

11. See David Armitage, “What’s the Big Idea: Intellectual History and the Longue Durée,” History of European Ideas, 38 (2012), 493–507; Darrin M. McMahon, “The Return of the History of Ideas?” in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, ed. Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 13–31.

12. See Siep Stuurman, “Herodotus and Sima Qian: History and the Anthropological Turn in Ancient Greece and Han China,” Journal of World History, 19 (2008), 2–3.

13. Herodotus, The Persian Wars, 4 vols., trans. A. D. Godley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 2:473 [= II:158].

14. See Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 29–30; George Macklin Wilson, “Time and History in Japan,” American Historical Review, 85 (1980), 560.

15. See Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time, 237

16. Mencius, trans. D. C. Lau (London: Penguin Books, 1970), 82 [= II:A:6].

17. See Philip C. Salzman, “Is Inequality Universal?” Current Anthropology, 40 (1999), 31–61; Flannery and Marcus, Creation of Inequality.

18. See Otto Dann, Gleichheit und Gleichberechtigung (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1980), 17.

19. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, 3 vols. (Paris: Éditions Garnier, 1958), 1:20.

20. See John W. Cook, Morality and Cultural Differences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

21. See F. W. Walbank, Polybius (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 168.

22. Polybius, The Histories, 6 vols., trans. W. R. Paton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 3:289 [= VI:9:13–14].

23. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 14.

24. Immanuel Kant, Werke, 12 vols. (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1968), 11:53, 59.

25. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 27–46.

26. Psalms 37:16.

27. Cited in Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), 35.

28. The Analects of Confucius, trans. Simon Leys (New York: Norton, 1997), 36 [= 8:11].

29. See Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 2003).

30. See Siep Stuurman, “The Canon of the History of Political Thought: Its Critique and a Proposed Alternative,” History and Theory, 39 (2000), 165–166.

31. On the methodological problems of global intellectual history, see Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, eds., Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).

32. Pascal, cited in Pierre Nicole, De l’Éducation d’un prince (Paris: Veuve Ch. Savreux, 1670), 273–285.

33. Analects of Confucius, 77 [= 15:21].

34. Ibid., 16 [= 4:9].

35. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1967), 47–49.

36. See Anna Wierzbicka, Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

37. See Michael Werner and Benedicte Zimmerman, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory, 45 (2006), 30–50; see also A. G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History (London: Pimlico, 2002); Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmaier, eds., Competing Visions of World Order (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Color Line (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008; Carol Gluck and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, eds., Words in Motion: Towards a Global Lexicon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra, eds., Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

38. See Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen, 20, 105–113.

39. Cited in A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty (London: Dent, 1986), 170n1.

40. See Siep Stuurman, François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

41. Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), 14.

42. See Stuurman, “Canon.”

43. See Stuurman, “The Deconstruction of Gender in Seventeenth-Century Feminism and Modern Equality,” in Women, Gender and Enlightenment, ed. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 371–388.

44. See Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation (London: Atlantic Books, 2006).

45. See Cyrus Masroori, “Cyrus II and the Political Utility of Toleration,” in Religious Toleration, ed. John Christian Laursen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 13-36; Vincent A. Smith, The Edicts of Asoka (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1992).

46. See S. A. M. Adshead, T’ang China (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 51; Jerry Bentley, Old World Encounters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 83.

47. See Sudipta Kaviraj, “Modernity, State, and Toleration in Indian History,” in Boundaries of Toleration, ed. Alfred Stepan and Charles Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 233–266.

48. See Sebastian Conrad, “The Enlightenment in Global History,” American Historical Review, 117 (2012), 999–1027.

49. William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), xvi.

50. Ibid., xx–xxi.

1. Visions of a Common Humanity

1. Karl Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Bucherei, 1955), 14, 19.

2. Romans 13:4. All references to the Bible are to the King James Authorized Version.

3. The Analects of Confucius, trans. Simon Leys (New York: Norton, 1997), 56 [= 12:7].

4. Ibid., 41 [= 9:14].

5. Jacques Proust, L’Europe au prisme du Japon (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997), 176, 188.

6. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), 10.

7. Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 5–8.

8. See Joachim Latacz, Troia und Homer (Munich: Piper Verlag, 2003), 222–225; Kurt A. Raaflaub, “Homer und die Geschichte des 8. Jh.s v. Chr,” in Zweihundert Jahre Homerforschung, ed. Joachim Latacz (Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1991), 205–256; Raaflaub, “Homer to Solon: The Rise of the Polis,” in The Ancient Greek City-State, ed. Mogens Herman Hansen (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1993), 41–105.

9. See Herbert Bannert, “Versammlungsszenen bei Homer,” in Homer: Beyond Oral Poetry, ed. J. M. Bremer, I. J. F. de Jong, and J. Kalff (Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 1987), 15–29.

10. See Iliad, 1:231, 2:233–234. All references to Homer are to book and line in Iliad, 2 vols., trans. A. T. Murray, rev. William F. Wyatt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Odyssey, 2 vols., trans. A. T. Murray, rev. George E. Dimock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

11. See Siep Stuurman, “The Voice of Thersites: Reflections on the Origins of the Idea of Equality,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 65 (2004), 171–189.

12. Odyssey, 3:236–237, 3:48, 8:252–253.

13. Ibid., 9:174–176.

14. Ibid., 9:270–276.

15. See Justin Glenn, “The Polyphemus Folktale and Homer’s Kyklopeia,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 102 (1971), 133–181.

16. Hesiod, Theogony, 139–146. References are to Theogony/Works and Days/Testimonia, trans. Glenn W. Most (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), giving short title and line.

17. Odyssey, 8:547.

18. Ibid., 24:482–486.

19. See Eva Cantarella, Ithaque: De la vengeance d’Ulysse à la naissance du droit (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003).

20. See Matthew W. Dickie, “Dike as a Moral Term in Homer and Hesiod,” Classical Philology, 73 (1978), 99–100.

21. François Hartog, Memories of Odysseus: Frontier Tales from Ancient Greece (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 25.

22. See Robert Lamberton, Hesiod (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 104.

23. On similarities between Homer and Hesiod, see Dickie, “Dike as a Moral Term.”

24. Hesiod, Works and Days, 5–8.

25. Ibid., 11–16.

26. See Jenny Strauss Clay, Hesiod’s Cosmos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 141–142.

27. Hesiod, Works and Days, 67, 80–82.

28. See Frederick J. Teggart, “The Argument of Hesiod’s Works and Days,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 8 (1947), 50; Patricia Marquardt, “Hesiod’s Ambiguous View of Woman,” Classical Philology, 77 (1982), 283–291.

29. Teggart, “Argument,” 58–63.

30. See Hesiod, Works and Days, 96n7 (translator’s note).

31. Hesiod, Theogony, 486.

32. Lamberton, Hesiod, 75.

33. Hesiod, Theogony, 613.

34. Hesiod, Works and Days, 613.

35. Lamberton, Hesiod, 94–95.

36. On the uneasy coexistence of the older gods and the “new” Zeus in Hesiod, see E. F. Beall, “Theism and Mysticism in Hesiod’s Works and Days,” History of Religions, 43 (2004), 177–193.

37. See Joseph Fontenrose, “Work, Justice, and Hesiod’s Five Ages,” Classical Philology, 69 (1974), 10.

38. See E. F. Beall, “Hesiod’s Treatise on Justice,” Classical Journal, 101 (2005–2006), 162–182.

39. Hesiod, Works and Days, 134–136.

40. See Beall, “Hesiod’s Treatise on Justice,” 166.

41. Hesiod, Works and Days, 159–161.

42. Ibid., 217–218.

43. Ibid., 273.

44. Ibid., 277–280.

45. See Beall, “Hesiod’s Treatise on Justice,” 172–173.

46. See Jon Pairman Brown, “From Hesiod to Jesus,” Novum Testamentum, 35 (1993), 316.

47. Hesiod, Works and Days, 225–229, 236–237.

48. See Irene J. Winter, “Homer’s Phoenicians,” in The Ages of Homer, ed. Jane B. Carter and Sarah P. Morris (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 247–271.

49. See Teggart, “Argument,” 1947, 59–67; M. L. West, The East Face of Helicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 276–333; Brown, “From Hesiod to Jesus.”

50. See A. A. Long, “The Scope of Early Greek Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy, ed. A. A. Long (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 13.

51. See Reimpe Algra, “The Beginnings of Cosmology,” in Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy, 47–48.

52. Sarah Broadie, “Rational Theology,” in Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy, 205–206.

53. Xenophanes of Colophon, Fragments: Text and Translation, ed. J. H. Lesher (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), fragment 30.

54. Ibid., fragment 38.

55. Ibid., fragments 11, 12.

56. Ibid., fragment 15.

57. Ibid., fragment 16.

58. Ibid., fragments 23, 24.

59. Ibid., fragments 25, 26.

60. See M. L. West, “Towards Monotheism,” in Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity, ed. Polymnia Athanassiadi and Micheal Frede (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 33.

61. Xenophanes, fragment 2.

62. See Herbert Granger, “Poetry and Prose: Xenophanes of Colophon,” Transactions of the American Philological Association, 137 (2007), 425–429.

63. See James H. Lesher, “Xenophanes’ Scepticism,” Phronesis, 23 (1978), 8–9; but cf. Michael Eisenstadt, “Xenophanes’ Proposed Reform of Greek Religion,” Hermes, 102 (1974), 142–150.

64. See W. A. Heidel, “Hecataeus and Xenophanes,” American Journal of Philology, 64 (1943), 264.

65. Exodus 20:2–5.

66. See Karen Armstrong, The Bible: The Biography (London: Atlantic Books, 2007), 16–17.

67. Karel van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 248–249.

68. Armstrong, Bible, 30.

69. Van der Toorn, Scribal Culture, 252–259.

70. Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 56–60.

71. See C. F. Whitley, “The Pattern of Creation in Genesis, Chapter 1,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 17 (1958), 38.

72. Genesis 1:27.

73. Genesis 3:5.

74. Genesis 6:3.

75. Genesis 6:13.

76. Genesis 9:6.

77. Genesis 9:12.

78. See Theodore Hiebert, “The Tower of Babel and the Origin of the World’s Cultures,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 126 (2007), 38.

79. Hiebert, “Tower of Babel,” but cf. the convincing criticism in John T. Strong, “Shattering the Image of God,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 127 (2008), 625–634.

80. Cited in Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. 2: The New Kingdom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 98; see also Jan Assmann, The Mind of Egypt (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), 219.

81. Genesis 28:16.

82. See Richard H. Moye, “In the Beginning: Myth and History in Genesis and Exodus,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 109 (1990), 580.

83. Psalms 37:14–15.

84. See “Wealth,” in The Eerdmans Bible Dictionary, ed. Allen C. Myers (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1987), 1049.

85. See e.g. Nehemiah 5:1–13; Isaiah 58:10; Jeremiah 22:13–19, 34:8–22; Ezekiel 18:5–13, 34:1–31; Amos 5:7–13; Micah 2:1–5.

86. Exodus 34:13; Deuteronomy 7:5.

87. Leviticus 26:7; Deuteronomy 7:2.

88. Numbers 25:6–8, 31:7–18.

89. Deuteronomy 20:10–17.

90. See Daniel Bardu, “The Jewish Sacking of Ancient Temples: ‘Limits of Toleration’ in a Comparative Perspective,” History of Religions, 50 (2010), 21–42.

91. Leviticus 19:33–34; see also Exodus 22:21, 23:9; Deuteronomy 10:19, 24:17–18.

92. Numbers 15:18.

93. See Marcel Simon, Verus Israel: A Study of the Relation between Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1996), 33–34.

94. See Glen W. Bowersock, The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Howard N. Lupovitch, Jews and Judaism in World History (London: Routledge, 2010), 70.

95. Isaiah 45:1, 49:6.

96. See Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation (London: Atlantic Books, 2006), 211–214; D. W. van Winkle, “The Relationship of the Nations to Yahweh and to Israel in Isaiah XL–LV,” Vetus Testamentum, 33 (1985), 446–458; Lisbeth S. Fried, “Cyrus the Messiah? The Historical Background to Isaiah 45:1,” Harvard Theological Review, 95 (2002), 373–393; Yoel Kaminski and Anne Stewart, “God of All the World: Universalism and Developing Monotheism in Isaiah 40–66,” Harvard Theological Review, 99 (2006), 139–163.

97. See Cyrus Masroori, “Cyrus II and the Political Utility of Religious Toleration,” in Religious Toleration, ed. John Christian Laursen (London: Macmillan, 1999), 13–36.

98. Acts 13:47.

99. See Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 75–76.

2. Religious and Philosophical Universalisms

1. See Charles Holcombe, The Genesis of East Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), 38–52.

2. See Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).

3. See Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 8–9.

4. Matthew 5:27–28 (all Bible citations refer to the King James Authorized Version).

5. Matthew 15:17–18.

6. Matthew 5:21–22.

7. Matthew 22:37–40.

8. Matthew 5:3–10.

9. Matthew 5:20.

10. Matthew 22:20–21.

11. See Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 288–312.

12. Cited in Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 3.

13. Mark 9:1; see L. Michael White, From Jesus to Christianity (New York: HarperSan Francisco, 2004), 125–127.

14. A. N. Wilson, Paul: The Mind of the Apostle (London: Pimlico, 1998), 113.

15. Luke 10:30–36.

16. Ehrman, New Testament, 127; Mordechai Cogan, “For We, Like You, Worship Your God: Three Biblical Portrayals of Samaritan Origins,” Vetus Testamentum, 38 (1988), 286–292.

17. See Michel Gourgues, “The Priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan Revisited,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 117 (1998), 709–713.

18. See Morton S. Enslin, “Luke and the Samaritans,” Harvard Theological Review, 36 (1943), 280–281, 289.

19. Riemer Roukema, “The Good Samaritan in Ancient Christianity,” Vigiliae Christianae, 58 (2004), 57, 69–70.

20. Acts 1:8, 10:35, 13:47.

21. See Wilson, Paul, 121–122.

22. Ibid., 121.

23. Brown, Rise of Western Christendom, 71–72.

24. Acts 13:46, 18:6.

25. Galatians 3:28; Colossians 3:11; see also 1 Corinthians 12:13.

26. 1 Corinthians 14:10–11.

27. See Jaroslav Pelikan, What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 108.

28. See Adam Serfass, “Slavery and Pope Gregory the Great,” Journal of Early Christian Studies, 14 (2006), 77–103.

29. Frederick Pijper, “The Christian Church and Slavery in the Middle Ages,” American Historical Review, 14 (1909), 675–695.

30. Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe (London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 1993), 63.

31. Brown, Rise of Western Christendom, 178–179.

32. Its size and importance are uncertain; Martin Forward, Muhammad (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1997), 8.

33. Fred M. Donner, “The Historical Context,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Qur’an, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 24–25.

34. See Toshihiko Izutsu, God and Man in the Qur’an (Kuala Lumpur: Islamic Book Trust, 2002), 113–114.

35. See Harald Motzki, “Alternative Accounts of the Qur’an’s Formation,” in Cambridge Companion to the Qur’an, 59–75.

36. See Glen W. Bowersock, The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 118, 125–132.

37. References (Q) are to The Qur’an, trans. M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Q 2:40–74, 3:58–64; Daniel A. Madigan, “Themes and Topics,” in Cambridge Companion to the Qur’an, 84.

38. Donner, “Historical Context,” 27.

39. Malise Ruthven, Islam in the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 52.

40. See Claude Gilliot, “The Creation of a Fixed Text,” in Cambridge Companion to the Qur’an.

41. Michael Cook, The Koran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 125–126.

42. F. E. Peters, The Monotheists: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Conflict and Cooperation, vol. 1: The Peoples of God (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 84.

43. Forward, Muhammad, 32.

44. Q 3:67.

45. See Tarif Khalidi, The Muslim Jesus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 12.

46. Madigan, “Themes and Topics,” 79–80.

47. Q 6:97; Madigan, “Themes and Topics,” 81.

48. Q 57:20.

49. Q 7:19–27, 2:35–36.

50. See Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 87.

51. Q 4:11, 4:34.

52. Q 2:282.

53. See Ahmed, Women and Gender, 41–43.

54. See ibid., 79–88.

55. See ibid., 72–73.

56. Q 33:35.

57. Q 33:73; see “Femme,” in Dictionnaire du Coran, ed. Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2007), 338–343.

58. Q 11:48.

59. Ruthven, Islam in the World, 61.

60. Q 2:177.

61. Q 3:26.

62. See Louise Marlow, Hierarchy and Egalitarianism in Islamic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1–6.

63. Q 2:115, 2:142.

64. Q 49:13.

65. See Ibn Khaldun, The Mugaddimah, 3 vols., trans. Franz Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958), 1:320–321.

66. Q 2:256.

67. See Sami A. Aldeeb Abu-Sahlieh, “The Islamic Conception of Migration,” International Migration Review, 30 (1996), 40–46.

68. See Q 2:62, Q 5:69.

69. See Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 62–63.

70. See Marietta Stepaniants, “The Encounter of Zoroastrianism with Islam,” Philosophy East and West, 52 (2002), 163.

71. Q 2:135.

72. Aldeeb Abu-Sahlieh, “Islamic Conception of Migration,” 42.

73. See Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund, A History of India (London: Routledge, 1998), 187–190.

74. Q 9:5.

75. Q 9:29.

76. See “Guerre et Paix,” in Dictionnaire du Coran, 372–377.

77. See e.g. Ali S. Asani, “‘So That You May Know One Another’: A Muslim American Reflects on Pluralism and Islam,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 588 (2003), 40–51; Paul O. Ingram, “‘That We May Know Each Other’: The Pluralist Hypothesis as a Research Program,” Buddhist-Christian Studies, 24 (2004), 135–157.

78. William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 193, 212.

79. See M. L. West, The East Face of Helicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003); Walter Burkert, Die Griechen und der Orient (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2003).

80. See Daniel Fleming, Democracy’s Ancient Ancestors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Mogens Herman Hansen, ed., A Comparative Study of Thirty City-State Cultures (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel’s Forlag, 2000).

81. See Josine Blok, Van Oude en Nieuwe Burgers (Utrecht: Utrecht University, 2002).

82. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 4 vols., trans. C. H. Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), 3:159 [= V:89].

83. Ibid., 179 [= V:116].

84. See Cynthia Farrar, The Origins of Democratic Thinking: The Invention of Politics in Classical Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 38–39.

85. Plato, Lysis/Symposium/Gorgias, trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 385–387 [= Gorgias, 483c–484a].

86. Plato, Republic, 2 vols., trans. Paul Shorey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 1:47–49 [= 338d–e].

87. Mogens Herman Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 116–124.

88. See Peter Garnsey, The Idea of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 125–127.

89. Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 27 [= 1255a].

90. See W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 116.

91. Michael Gagarin and Paul Woodruff, eds., Early Greek Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 261–262 [= DK (Diels and Kranz) 25].

92. Ibid., 186–187 [= Diogenes Laertius: 9:51].

93. Ibid., xliii (comment), 244–245 [= DK 44]; see also Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 218–221; Rosalind Thomas, Herodotus in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 131–132.

94. Strabo, Geography, 8 vols., trans. Horace Leonard Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989–2000), 6:301–307 [= XIV:2:28].

95. Hall, Inventing the Barbarian, 78–79.

96. Gagarin and Woodruff, Early Greek Political Thought, 276.

97. See Garnsey, Idea of Slavery, 75–77.

98. See Janet Coleman, A History of Political Thought: From Ancient Greece to Early Christianity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 229.

99. D. Graham J. Shipley and Mogens H. Hansen, “The Polis and Federalism,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Hellenistic World, ed. Glenn R. Bugh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 68.

100. Cited and translated in Bugh, introduction to Cambridge Companion to the Hellenistic World, 1.

101. See A. N. Sherwin-White, The Roman Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 150–155.

102. Cicero, De Republica/De Legibus, trans. Clinton Walker Keyes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 375 [= De Legibus, II:ii:5].

103. See Claude Nicolet, “The Citizen,” in The Romans, ed. Andrea Gardina (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 20.

104. Sherwin-White, Roman Citizenship, 251–263.

105. Cited in ibid., 426–428.

106. See Paul Veyne, “Humanitas: Romans and Non-Romans,” in The Romans, 342–369.

107. Andrew Erskine, “Zeno and the Beginnings of Stoicism,” Classical Ireland, 7 (2000), 55.

108. See Garnsey, Idea of Slavery, 130.

109. Cited in ibid., 142.

110. Malcolm Schofield, The Stoic Idea of the City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 69.

111. Andrew Erskine, The Hellenistic Stoa (London: Duckworth, 1990), 138.

112. Ibid., 161–171; D. R. Dudley, “Blossius of Cumae,” Journal of Roman Studies, 31 (1941), 94–99.

113. Erskine, Hellenistic Stoa, 46–47.

114. Garnsey, Idea of Slavery, 138, 150–152.

115. Erskine, Hellenistic Stoa, 51.

116. Neal Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 45–46, 55–61.

117. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, rev. Martin F. Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 10 [= I:101].

118. Cicero, De Natura Deorum/Academica, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 213 [= Natura Deorum, II:xxxvii].

119. Ibid., 167 [= II:xvii].

120. A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, eds., The Hellenistic Philosophers, vol. 1: Translations of the Principal Sources, with Philosophical Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 275; Maryanne Cline Horowitz, “The Stoic Synthesis of the Idea of Natural Law in Man,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 35 (1974), 10–15.

121. David Johnston, “The Jurists,” in The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought, ed. Christopher Rowe and Malcolm Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 621.

122. Cicero, De Officiis, trans. Walter Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 183 [= II:v]; H. C. Baldry, The Unity of Mankind in Greek Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 180–182.

123. Long and Sedley, Hellenistic Philosophers, 424, 427.

124. Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought, 148.

125. Gretchen Reydams-Schils, The Roman Stoics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 151.

126. Hans Erich Bödeker, “Menschheit, Humanität, Humanismus,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982), 3:1064–1065.

127. Cicero, De Officiis, 195 [= II:viii].

128. Hermann Strassburger, “Poseidonios on Problems of the Roman Empire,” Journal of Roman Studies, 55 (1965), 44–47.

129. Thomas L. Pangle, “Socratic Cosmopolitanism: Cicero’s Critique and Transformation of the Stoic Ideal,” Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue Canadienne de science politique, 31 (1998), 251.

130. P. G. Walsh, “Livy and Stoicism,” American Journal of Philology, 79 (1958), 355–375.

131. Mark Edward Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 4.

132. See Michael Loewe, “The Former Han Dynasty,” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 1: The Ch’in and Han Empires, ed. Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 153–154.

133. H. G. Creel, Confucius and the Chinese Way (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 16–17.

134. The Analects of Confucius, trans. Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont Jr. (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999), 7–9 (translators’ introduction).

135. Homer H. Dubs, “The Victory of Han Confucianism,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 58 (1938), 435–449.

136. Basic Writings of Mo Tzu, Hsün Tzu, and Han Fei Tzu, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964): Han Fei Tzu, 102, 103.

137. Sarah A. Queen, From Chronicle to Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 128.

138. Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).

139. See H. G. Creel, “Sinism—A Clarification,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 10 (1949), 135–140.

140. Analects of Confucius, trans. Simon Leys (New York: Norton, 1997), 56 [= 12:7].

141. Confucius (Ames & Rosemont), 130 [= 9:17].

142. Ibid., 26–27 (translators’ introduction).

143. On the “secularization” of Chinese thought and the role of Confucianism in it, see Arthur Waley, The Way and Its Power (New York: Grove Press, 1958).

144. Confucius (Leys), 50 [= 11:12].

145. Confucius (Ames & Rosemont), 7 [= 2:11].

146. Fingarette, Confucius, 68.

147. See Norman Kutcher, “The Fifth Relationship: Dangerous Friendships in the Confucian Context,” American Historical Review, 105 (2000), 1615–1629.

148. See Leys’s comment in Confucius (Leys), 105–107.

149. Confucius (Ames & Rosemont), 123 [= 8:11].

150. Ibid., 91 [= 4:11].

151. Ibid., 104 [= 6:4].

152. Ibid., 112 [= 7:7].

153. Ibid., 122 [= 8:9].

154. Analects of Confucius, trans. D. C. Lau (London: Penguin Books, 1979), 97 [= 9:18], 134 [= 15:13]; Confucius (Leys), 41 [9:18].

155. Ames and Rosemont translate: “putting oneself in the other’s place.” Leys opts for “reciprocity.” See also Confucius (Leys), 17 [= 4:15] and 55 [= 12:2].

156. The Analects of Confucius, trans. Arthur Waley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 27 (translator’s introduction).

157. Confucius (Ames & Rosemont), 3:5 (translators’ introduction); this passage has also been read as a pro-barbarian inversion, but see the note in Confucius (Leys), 121–123, for a cogent critique of such a reading.

158. Creel, Confucius, 128.

159. Ssu-ma Ch’ien [Sima Qian], The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. VII: The Memoirs of Pre-Han China, ed. William Nienhauser Jr. (Blooomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 179.

160. Mencius, trans. D. C. Lau (London: Penguin Books, 1970), 83.

161. Ibid., 78.

162. See Pengwei Zhang, Qiyong Guo, and Bei Wang, “New Insights into Mencius’ Theory of the Original Goodness in Human Nature,” Frontiers of Philosophy in China, 3 (2008), 36.

163. Mencius, 79.

164. Ibid., 87.

165. Ibid., 166.

166. Ibid., 169.

167. Ibid., 128.

168. Ibid., 184–185.

169. David Schaberg, A Patterned Past: Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 74.

170. Ibid., 130–135.

171. Mencius, 115.

172. Ibid., 179.

173. Ibid., 103.

174. Ibid., 162–163.

175. Irene Bloom, “Mencian Arguments on Human Nature (Jen-hsing),” Philosophy East and West, 44 (1994), 19–53; Bloom, “Human Nature and Biological Nature in Mencius,” Philosophy East and West, 47 (1997), 21–32.

176. Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works, vol. 1, trans. John Knoblauch (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 3–35.

177. Scott Cook, “The Debate over Coercive Rulership and the ‘Human Way’ in Light of Recently Excavated Warring States Texts,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 64 (2004), 399–440; Michael Puett, “Nature and Artifice: Debates in Late Warring States China Concerning the Creation of Culture,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 57 (1997), 471–518.

178. Hsün Tzu, Basic Writings, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 157.

179. As paraphrased by Knoblock in Xunzi, 9.

180. D. C. Lau, “Theories of Human Nature in Mencius and Xunzi,” in Virtue, Nature, and Moral Agency in the Xunzi, ed. T. C. Kline III and Philip J. Ivanhoe (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2000), 202–203.

181. Kim Chong Chong, “Xunzi’s Systematic Critique of Mencius,” Philosophy East and West, 53 (2003), 221–222; Janghee Lee, Xunzi and Early Chinese Naturalism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 24–31.

182. Cook, “Debate over Coercive Rulership,” 424.

183. Hsün Tzu, 171.

184. Ibid., 33, 16; see also Xunzi, 14 (Knoblock’s introduction).

185. Hsün Tzu, 36, 45.

186. Ibid., 15.

187. Cited in Holcombe, Genesis of East Asia, 51.

188. Hsün Tzu, 27.

189. Ibid., 48, 115.

190. Ibid., 43.

191. Ibid., 121.

192. Puett, “Nature and Artifice,” 488.

193. T. C. Kline III, “Moral Agency and Virtue in the Xunzi,” in Virtue, Nature and Moral Agency, 167–170.

194. See Joseph Chan, “Territorial Boundaries and Confucianism,” in Confucian Political Ethics, ed. Daniel A. Bell (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 72–73.

195. Cited in Holcombe, Genesis of East Asia, 51.

196. See e.g. Frederick G. Whelan, “Justice: Classical and Christian,” Political Theory, 10 (1982), 435–460.

197. Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation (London: Atlantic Books, 2006), 395.

3. History, Ethnography, and the Anthropological Turn

1. On the complexity of the “barbarian” societies, see V. Y. Murzin, “Key Points in Scythian History,” in Scythians and Greeks, ed. David Braund (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2005), 33–38; Nicola di Cosmo, “Ancient Inner Asian Nomads,” Journal of Asian Studies, 53 (1994), 1092–1126; Peter S. Wells, The Barbarians Speak: How the Conquered Peoples Shaped Roman Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 49–63.

2. William H. McNeill, The Shape of European History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 47.

3. See Jerry Bentley, Old World Encounters (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 32.

4. See Charles W. Fornara, Herodotus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 46–58.

5. Herodotus, I:1. All references are to book and section in Herodotus, The Persian Wars, 4 vols., trans. A. D. Godley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997–2000). For a time, Herodotus’s cultural relativism has been downplayed in the historiography; see François Hartog, Le Miroir d’Hérodote (Paris: Gallimard, 1991); James S. Romm, Herodotus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); James Redfield, “Herodotus the Tourist,” in Greeks and Barbarians, ed. Thomas Harrison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 24–49; Vivienne Gray, “Herodotus and the Rhetoric of Otherness,” American Journal of Philology, 116 (1995), 185–211; recently, however, such assessments have been convincingly challenged by Rosalind Thomas, Herodotus in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Rosaria Vignolo Munson, Telling Wonders: Ethnographic and Political Discourse in the Work of Herodotus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); Munson, Black Doves Speak: Herodotus and the Languages of Barbarians (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2005); Tim Rood, “Herodotus and Foreign Lands,” in The Cambridge Companion to Herodotu, ed.Carolyn Dewald and John Marincola(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 290–305.

6. Herodotus, II:158.

7. See Rood, “Herodotus and Foreign Lands,” 298.

8. Herodotus, I:5.

9. Richmond Lattimore, “The Wise Adviser in Herodotus,” Classical Philology, 34 (1939), 31.

10. See Cyrus Masroori, “Cyrus II and the Political Utility of Toleration,” in Religious Toleration, ed. John Christian Laursen (London: Macmillan, 1999), 20–21; Amélie Kuhrt, The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period (London: Routledge, 2010), 122–124, 827–830.

11. See Munson, “The Madness of Cambyses,” Arethusa, 24 (1991), 43–54.

12. Herodotus, III:38.

13. Ibid., III:38. I have slightly modified the translation. Godley renders pasi anthropoisi as “to all nations,” which sounds a bit anachronistic. I prefer Walter Blanco’s translation (“every people”) which underlines that Herodotus refers to collective judgments; see Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Walter Blanco, ed. Walter Blanco and Jennifer T. Roberts (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 137.

14. See Martin Ostwald, “Pindar, Nomos, and Herakles,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 69 (1965), 109.

15. Matthew Christ, “Herodotean Kings and Historical Inquiry,” Classical Antiquity, 13 (1994), 185.

16. Munson, Telling Wonders, 42.

17. Chester G. Starr, The Influence of Sea Power on Ancient History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 38.

18. See Mason Hammond, “Ancient Imperialism: Contemporary Justifications,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 58 (1948), 109–110; Russell Meiggs, “The Crisis of Athenian Imperialism,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 67 (1963), 1.

19. See James S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 45–81; Hartog, Miroir d’Hérodote.

20. See Ellis H. Minns, Scythians and Greeks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), 37, 283–291, 438–441; Braund, Scythians and Greeks; Thomas, Herodotus, 54–74.

21. See Balbina Bäbler,” Bobbies or Boobies: The Scythian Police Force in Classical Athens,” in Braund, Scythians and Greeks, 114–122.

22. Herodotus, IV:1.

23. Ibid., IV:132.

24. Ibid., IV:46.

25. Ibid., IV:3–4.

26. Ibid., IV:46.

27. Hippocrates, Airs, Waters, Places/Epidemics/Oath/Precepts/Nutriments, trans. W. H. S. Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 117–127; on mostly negative depictions by later authors, see James William Johnson, “The Scythian: His Rise and Fall,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 20 (1959), 250–257.

28. Herodotus, IV:76; but note that Herodotus says that the Scythians share their aversion to foreign ways with all other peoples: “They too [kai houtoi] are very keen to avoid …”

29. See A. M. Armstrong, “Anacharsis the Scythian,” Greece and Rome, 17 (1948), 18–23.

30. Herodotus, IV:142; see also Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 131–132.

31. Herodotus, I:106.

32. See Sara Forsdyke, “Athenian Democratic Ideology and Herodotus’ Histories,” American Journal of Philology, 122 (2001), 329–358.

33. Herodotus, VII:10.

34. Ibid., I:131–140.

35. David Schaberg, “Travel, Geography, and the Imperial Imagination in Fifth-Century Athens and Han China,” Comparative Literature, 51 (1999), 154.

36. Burton Watson, Ssu-ma Ch’ien: Grand Historian of China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 11.

37. See Ying-shih Yü, “Han Foreign Relations,” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 1: The Ch’in and Han Empires, ed. Denis Twittchett and Michael Loewe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 378–381; Nicola di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 6–7.

38. See Charles Holcombe, The Genesis of East Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), 8–29.

39. Ssu-ma Ch’ien, The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. 9: The Memoirs of Han China, Part II, ed. William H. Nienhauser Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), xii.

40. See Grant Hardy, Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo: Sima Qian’s Conquest of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 16–18.

41. Di Cosmo, Ancient China, 268–269.

42. Shiji 130, quoted in Watson, Ssu-ma Ch’ien, 50.

43. See Sarah A. Queen, From Chronicle to Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 119.

44. See David Schaberg, A Patterned Past: Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 258–270; Queen, Chronicle to Canon, 118–119.

45. Hardy, Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo, 127.

46. Owen Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), 495; A. F. P. Hulsewé and M. A. N. Loewe, China in Central Asia: The Early Stage: 125 BC–AD 23: An Annotated Translation of Chapters 61 and 96 of the History of the Former Han Dynasty (Leiden: Brill, 1979), 40–43.

47. The original version of Chapter 123 of the Shiji, which contains the description of the western lands, is lost, except for the introductory paragraph; what we now have is an interpolation from the Han Shu by Ban Gu [Pan Ku], which was in turn based on Sima Qian’s text; see Hulsewé and Loewe, China in Central Asia, 14–39.

48. Shiji 123: Han II, 235–236. References to the Shiji are to chapter numbers in Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian: Han Dynasty II/Records of the Grand Historian: Qin, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

49. Shiji 123: Han II, 234.

50. Herodotus, III:102.

51. See Di Cosmo, “Ancient Inner Asian Nomads.”

52. On the Xiongnu state, see Nicola di Cosmo, “State Formation and Periodization in Inner Asian History,” Journal of World History, 10 (1999), 1–40; Thomas Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 32–84.

53. See Barfield, Perilous Frontier, 41–46.

54. Shiji 15: Qin, 85; see also Hardy, Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo, 171–172.

55. Shiji 5: Qin, 23.

56. Erica Brindley, “Barbarians or Not? Ethnicity and Changing Conceptions of the Ancient Yue (Viet) Peoples, ca. 400–50 BC,” Asia Major (Third Series), 16 (2003), 29.

57. Shiji 112: Han II, 202.

58. See Robert B. Crawford, “The Social and Political Philosophy of the Shi-chi,” Journal of Asian Studies, 22(1963), 402–403; Karen Turner, “War, Punishment, and the Law of Nature in Early Chinese Concepts of the State,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 53 (1993), 293–294, 305–307.

59. Shiji 110: Han II, 129.

60. Shiji 110: Han II, 137–139.

61. Shiji 110: Han II, 129.

62. Shiji 110: Han II, 137.

63. Herodotus, IV:17.

64. Shiji 110: Han II, 138–139.

65. Shiji 110: Han II, 143.

66. See Hulsewé and Loewe, China in Central Asia, 126–127.

67. Shiji 110: Han II, 143–144.

68. Shiji 110: Han II, 144.

69. Shiji 123: Han II, 239–240.

70. Di Cosmo, Ancient China, 271. Likewise: Joseph Allen III finds Sima Qian’s treatment of the Xiongnu “quite sympathetic,” especially considering that they were China’s most enduring enemies; Allen, “An Introductory Study of the Narrative Structure in the Shiji,” Chinese Literature, Essays, Articles, Reviews, 3 (1981), 36n46.

71. Shiji 110: Han II, 147.

72. Shiji 123: Han II, 236.

73. Cited in Watson, Ssu-ma Ch’ien, 53.

74. See Thomas, Herodotus, 11–12.

75. See Kidder Smith, “Sima Tan and the Invention of Daoism, ‘Legalism,’ etcetera,” Journal of Asian Studies, 62 (2003), 129–156.

76. Queen, Chronicle to Canon, 2–3, 22–23.

77. See G. E. R. Lloyd, The Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 18–20.

78. See Wells, Barbarians Speak, 133.

79. Publius Cornelius Tacitus, Histories, Book IV–V, trans. C. E. Moore/Annals, Book I–III, trans. J. Jackson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 249 [= Annals I:iii].

80. Tacitus, Agricola, trans. M. Hutton/Germania, trans. M. Hutton/Dialogus, trans. W. Peterson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980) 189 [= Germania 37:3].

81. Tacitus, Histories/Annals, 245 [= Annals I:ii].

82. John Percival, “Tacitus and the Principate,” Greece and Rome, 27 (1980), 128.

83. See Walter Jens, “Libertas bei Tacitus,” Hermes, 84 (1956), 331–352; M. A. Fitzsimons, “The Mind of Tacitus,” Review of Politics, 38 (1976), 473–493.

84. Tacitus, Agricola/Germania/Dialogus, 47 [= Agricola 11:2, 4].

85. Ibid., 49 [= Agricola 12:2].

86. Cited in Eric Adler, Valorizing the Barbarians: Enemy Speeches in Roman Historiography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 123–126.

87. See Christopher M. Bulst, “The Revolt of Queen Boudicca in A.D. 60,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, 10 (1961), 503–506.

88. Tacitus, Agricola/Germania/Dialogus, 81 [= Agricola 30:3–5].

89. See W. Liebeschuetz, “The Theme of Liberty in the Agricola of Tacitus,” Classical Quarterly, 16 (1966), 126–139.

90. Tacitus, Histories/Annals, 25 [= Histories IV:14].

91. Ibid., 33 [= Histories IV:17].

92. See Stephen L. Dyson, “Native Revolts in the Roman Empire,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, 20 (1971), 239–274.

93. Tacitus, Histories/Annals, 115–117 [= Histories IV:59–60].

94. Ibid., 145–147 [= Histories IV:73–74].

95. Tacitus Agricola/Germania/Dialogus, 67 [= Agricola 21:2].

96. Tacitus, Annals, Book XIII–XVI, trans. J. Jackson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 95 [= Annals 13:54].

97. Tacitus, Agricola/Germania/Dialogus, 143 [= Germania 8:2].

98. Ibid., 157 [= Germania 18:1].

99. Ibid., 145 [= Germania 9:1].

100. See Barbara Patzek, “Die historischen Bedingungen des Fremdverstehens in Tacitus’ ‘Germania,’” Historische Zeitschrift, 247 (1988), 33.

101. Adler, Valorizing the Barbarians, 165–173.

102. See Martin Hose, “‘Libertas an Pax’: Eine Beobachtung zu Tacitus’ Darstellung des Bataveraufstandes,” Hermes, 126 (1998), 307.

103. See Q. Edward Wang, “History, Space, and Ethnicity: The Chinese Worldview,” Journal of World History, 10 (1999), 285–305.

104. Thomas Harrison, Divinity and History: The Religion of Herodotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 31–63.

105. Herodotus, III:64.

106. Shiji 30: Han II, 63.

107. Joseph Needham, “Time and Knowledge in China and the West,” in The Voices of Time, ed. J. T. Fraser (New York: George Braziller, 1966), 101; Needham regards the temporality of Chinese historiography as basically linear, though not “developmental” in the modern European sense. For views emphasizing the cyclical elements, see Nathan Sivin, “Chinese Conceptions of Time,” Earlham Review, 1 (1966), 82–92; Jaroslav Prusek, “History and Epics in China and the West,” Diogenes, 42 (1963), 20–43.

108. See Mark Edward Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China (Albany: State University of New York, 1999), 308–317.

109. See Benjamin Schwarz, “History in Chinese Culture: Some Comparative Reflections,” History and Theory, 35 (1996), 27–29.

110. Joachim Gentz, “Wahrheit und historische Kritik in der frühen historiographischen Tradition,” Oriens Extremus, 43 (2002), 37.

111. Schaberg, Patterned Past, 276.

112. Hardy, Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo, 127–135, 120.

113. See Herbert W. Benario, “Tacitus and the Fall of the Roman Empire,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, 17 (1968), 37–50.

114. See Martin Pulbrook, “Tacitus and the Dilemma of Imperial Rome,” Maynooth Review, 14 (1989), 22–24.

115. Tacitus, Histories, Book I–III, trans. C. H. Moore (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 223 [= Histories II:38].

116. Tacitus, Agricola/Germania/Dialogus, 211 [= Germania 33:9].

117. Nathan Sivin, “State, Cosmos, and Body in the Last Three Centuries B.C.,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 55 (1995), 7–8, 34–36; the same point is made by Mark Edward Lewis, “The City-State in Spring-and-Autumn China,” in A Comparative Study of Thirty City-State Cultures, ed. Mogens Herman Hansen (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 2000), 359–374.

118. Tacitus, Histories/Annals, 181–183 [= Histories V:5]; see also Patzek, “Historische Bedingungen,” 40–42.

4. Thinking across Frontiers in Medieval Islam

1. Li Chih-Ch’ang, The Travels of an Alchemist, trans. Arthur Waley (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1931), 83.

2. Archibald Lewis, Nomads and Crusaders: AD 1000–1368 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 27.

3. Lewis, Nomads, 35.

4. Peter B. Golden, Central Asia in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 60–61.

5. See Richard C. Foltz, Religions of the Silk Road (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 96–97.

6. See Svat Soucek, A History of Inner Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 68–69.

7. Foltz, Religions of the Silk Road, 106–108.

8. See Xinru Liu, “A Silk Road Legacy: The Spread of Buddhism and Islam,” Journal of World History, 22 (2011), 57–58.

9. See Xinru Liu, The Silk Road in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 64.

10. Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 138–139; Liu, Silk Road in World History, 98.

11. Golden, Central Asia, 67; Liu, “Silk Road Legacy,” 70–71.

12. Aisha Khan, Avicenna (Ibn Sina): Muslim Physician and Philosopher (New York: Rosen Publishing, 2006), 43.

13. See S. Frederick Starr, “Rediscovering Central Asia,” Wilson Quarterly, 33, no. 3 (2009), 33.

14. Hakim Mohammed Said and Ansar Zahid Khan, Al-Biruni: His Times, Life and Works (Karachi: Hamdard Academy, 1981), 53.

15. See C. Edmund Bosworth, The Ghaznavids: Their Empire in Afghanistan and Eastern Iran, 994–1040 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1963), 46–47.

16. Al-Biruni, The Chronology of Ancient Nations, trans. Edward C. Sachau (London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1879), xiii (Sachau’s introduction).

17. Said and Khan, Al-Biruni, 65.

18. Bosworth, Ghaznavids, 132–133.

19. Ibid., 77.

20. Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund, A History of India (London: Routledge, 1998), 153–154.

21. See M. S. Khan, “Al-Biruni and the Political History of India,” Oriens, 25–26 (1976), 86n2.

22. See A. B. Bosworth, “The Historical Setting of Megasthenes’ Indica,” Classical Philology 91 (1996): 113–127.

23. Cited in Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 133–134.

24. Al-Biruni, India: An Account of the Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Geography, Chronology, Astronomy, Customs, Laws and Astrology of India, 2 vols., trans. Edward C. Sachau (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 2004), 1:3 (italics in original).

25. Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 39–40, 81–82.

26. Al Biruni, India, 1:20.

27. Al-Biruni, Chronology of Ancient Nations, 27–28.

28. Al Biruni, India, 1:67.

29. Ibid., 1:50.

30. Ibid., 1:74–76.

31. Ibid., 1:86–87.

32. Ibid., 1:94–98.

33. Ibid., 1:100.

34. Ibid., 1:104.

35. Ibid., 2:161.

36. Ibid., 1:110.

37. Ibid., 1:181.

38. Ibid., 1:179.

39. Ibid., 1:186.

40. Ibid., 1:111–112.

41. Ibid., 2:112.

42. Ibid., 1:196–212.

43. See Ancient India as described by Megasthenes and Arrian, trans. John Watson McCrindle (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1877), 97–103, 120–122.

44. See Jacqueline Chabbi, “Soufisme,” in Dictionnaire de l’Islam: Religion et Civilisation (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997), 793–797.

45. Farid al-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds, trans. Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis (London: Penguin Books, 2011), xii (Davis’s introduction).

46. See Nargis Virani, “‘I Am the Nightingale of the Merciful’: Rumi’s Use of the Qur’an and Hadith,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 22 (2002), 108.

47. See Nile Green, Sufism: A Global History (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 1–10.

48. Ibid., 104–107.

49. Leonard Lewisohn, “Sufi Symbolism in the Persian Hermeneutic Tradition: Reconstructing the Pagoda of Attar’s Esoteric Poetics,” in Attar and the Persian Sufi Tradition: The Art of Spiritual Flight, ed. Leonard Lewisohn and Christopher Shackle (London: Tauris Publishers, 2006), 255.

50. Hudud al Alam (The Regions of the World: A Persian Geography), trans. and ann. Y. Minorsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 102.

51. See Harry S. Neale, “The Zoroastrian in Attar’s Tadkiratu’l-Awliya,’” Middle Eastern Literatures, 12 (2009), 151.

52. Attar, Conference, 46.

53. Ibid., 54–55.

54. Ibid., 234–235.

55. Ibid., 150.

56. Ibid., 157.

57. Ibid., 19–20.

58. Ibid., 194.

59. Ibid., 3.

60. Attar, Muslim Saints and Mystics, trans. A. J. Arberry (London: Arkana, 1990), 133–134; see also Neale, “Zoroastrian,” 137–138.

61. Neale, “Zoroastrian,” 148, 152.

62. Attar, Conference, 68–86; see also Franklin Lewis, “Sexual Occidentation: The Politics of Conversion, Christian Love and Boy-love in Attar,” Iranian Studies, 42 (2009), 696–699.

63. Cited in Lewisohn, “Sufi Symbolism,” 256.

64. Ibid., 261–262.

65. Attar, Muslim Saints, 146.

66. Ibid., 40.

67. Cited in Cyrus Masroori, “Rumi’s Criticism of Religious Persecution,” Political Research Quarterly, 63 (2010), 249.

68. See ibid., 251.

69. Ibid., 253.

70. See Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress, The Berbers (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 83, 283n5; Aziz Al-Azmeh, “Barbarians in Arab Eyes,” Past and Present, 134 (1992), 3–18.

71. See N. Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins, eds., Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2006), 65, 85 (Al Bakri), 111, 119 (Al Idrisi); see also Richard L. Smith, “What Happened to the Ancient Lybians: Chasing Sources across the Sahara from Herodotus to Ibn Khaldun,” Journal of World History, 14 (2003), 493–494.

72. Brett and Fentress, Berbers, 134–135.

73. See Guliana Turroni, Il Mondo della Storia secondo Ibn Khaldun (Rome: Jouvence, 2002), 116.

74. See Stefan Leder, “Bedouin Arabs—Origin [and] Signification of a Khaldunian Concept,” in Ibn Khaldun: Aux sources de la modernité: Actes du colloque international organisé à l’occasion du 6me centenaire de sa mort (Carthage: Académie tunisienne des sciences, des lettres et des arts, 2008), 184, 187; Abdesselam Cheddadi, Ibn Khaldun: L’homme et le théoricien de la civilization (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 251.

75. See Brett and Fentress. Berbers, 83–91.

76. Jamil M. Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 94.

77. See Allen James Fromherz, Ibn Khaldun: Life and Times (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 40–44.

78. Ibn Khaldun, Autobiographie, trans. Abdesselam Cheddadi (Casablanca: Maison des Arts, des Sciences et des Lettres, 2006), 134–135.

79. See N. J. Coulson, A History of Islamic Law (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 90–91.

80. Ibn Khaldun, Autobiographie, 242–249.

81. See Fromherz, Ibn Khaldun, 125.

82. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, 3 vols., trans. Franz Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958), 3:99–103.

83. Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 214.

84. Cited in Walter J. Fischel, Ibn Khaldun in Egypt: His Public Functions and His Historical Research (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 84.

85. Ibn Khaldun, Ibar, book V, cited by Fischel, Ibn Khaldun in Egypt, 83.

86. Ibn Khaldun, Autobiographie, 145.

87. See Franz Rosenthal’s notes of the genesis of the text in Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, 1:civ–cvii.

88. See Roland A. Messier, “Rethinking the Almoravids, Rethinking Ibn Khaldun,” Journal of North-African Studies, 6 (2001), 59–80.

89. See Walter J. Fischel, “Ibn Khaldun’s Sources for the History of Jenghiz Khan and the Tatars,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 76 (1956), 91; Michael Brett, “The Way of the Nomad,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 58 (1995), 251–252.

90. Mushin Mahdi, Ibn Khaldun’s Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 65–73; Donald R. Kelley, Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 10.

91. Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, 1:6.

92. Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 165.

93. See Fischel, Ibn Khaldun in Egypt, 112–114.

94. Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, 1:65.

95. Both quotations in Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 185.

96. Ibn Khaldun, Histoire des Berbères et des dynasties musulmanes de l’Afrique septentrionale, trans. Baron de Slane, ed. Paul Casanova (Paris: Geuthner, 1982), 5.

97. See Ibn Khaldun, Histoire des Berbères, 4 (De Slane); Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, 1:lxxviii–lxxx (Rosenthal); Cheddadi, Ibn Khaldun, 279, 290; Fromherz, Ibn Khaldun, 29–30; see also Mahdi, Ibn Khaldun’s Philosophy of History, 196n1.

98. Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, 1:264.

99. Ibid., 1:249–250.

100. Ibid., 1:249–253.

101. Ibid., 1:251.

102. Ibid., 1:253.

103. Ibid., 2:291–297.

104. Ibid., 3:315.

105. Ibid., 2:411.

106. Ibid., 2:431–432.

107. Ibid., 1:278–280.

108. Ibid., 1:336–355.

109. Ibid., 1:314–315.

110. Ibid., 1:305–306.

111. Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, 1:322–327; Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 21.

112. Mahdi, Ibn Khaldun’s Philosophy of History, 68.

113. Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, 1:473.

114. Ibid., 1:444; see also Briton Cooper Bush, “Divine Intervention in the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun,” History of Religions, 7 (1968), 317–329.

115. See Fuad Baali and Ali Wardi, Ibn Khaldun and Islamic Thought Styles (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), 94–121.

116. Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, 3:64.

117. Ibid., 1:168.

118. Ibid., 1:169.

119. Ibid., 1:169–170.

120. Ibid., 1:173.

121. Baali and Wardi, Ibn Khaldun, 116.

122. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (New York: Continuum, 1991), 27.

123. On this, I agree with Cheddadi, Ibn Khaldun, 295–296.

124. Q 49:13.

5. The Atlantic Frontier and the Limits of Christian Equality

1. See Richard Cole, “Sixteenth-Century Travel Books as a Source of European Attitudes towards Non-White and Non-Western Culture,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 116 (1972), 59–67.

2. See Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review, 106 (2001), 866–905.

3. See Lawrence A. Clayton, Bartolomé de Las Casas and the Conquest of the Americas (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 3; Nathan Wachtel, La Vision des vaincus: Les Indiens de Pérou devant la conquête espagnole (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 145–152.

4. See Brian Sandberg, “Beyond Encounters: Religion, Ethnicity, and Violence in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” Journal of World History, 17 (2006), 1–25.

5. David Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 228.

6. David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 98.

7. See William C. Sturtevant, “Indian America: First Visual Impressions in Europe,” in Christopher Columbus and the Age of Exploration, ed. Silvio A. Bedini (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 337–345.

8. See Patricia Seed, “‘Are These Not Also Men?’: The Indians’ Humanity and Capacity for Spanish Civilization,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 25 (1993), 649.

9. George M. Frederickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 41–42.

10. Cited in Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1965), 17.

11. “Preamble,” The Laws of Burgos, http://faculty.smu.edu/bakewell/BAKEWELL/texts/burgoslaws.html.

12. “Article 1,” Laws of Burgos.

13. “Article 24,” Laws of Burgos.

14. “Article 9,” “Article 17,” Laws of Burgos.

15. “Valladolid Amendment 1,” Laws of Burgos.

16. Cited in Clayton, Bartolomé de Las Casas, 62.

17. Cited in Hanke, Spanish Struggle, 43.

18. Ibid., 43–45.

19. James Muldoon, Popes, Lawyers, and Infidels: The Church and the Non-Christian World, 1250–1550 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 140.

20. Thomas Aquinas, The Political Ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. and trans. Dino Bigongiari (New York: Hafner Press, 1974), 48–51.

21. Ibid., 179–181.

22. Muldoon, Popes, Lawyers, and Infidels, 14.

23. Cited in James Brown Scott, The Spanish Origin of International Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 79.

24. Cited in ibid., 80.

25. Cited in Martti Koskenniemi, “Empire and International Law: The Real Spanish Contribution,” University of Toronto Law Journal, 61 (2011), 5.

26. Francisco de Vitoria, Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance, trans. Jeremy Lawrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 233, 237–238.

27. See Muldoon, Popes, Lawyers, and Infidels, 138.

28. Cited in Hanke, Spanish Struggle, 147.

29. See Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 69–70.

30. Vitoria, Political Writings, 84–85.

31. Ibid., 92–93.

32. Ibid., 260.

33. Ibid., 250.

34. Ibid., 251.

35. Ibid., 264–277.

36. Ibid., 276.

37. Ibid., 281.

38. Ibid., xxvii (introduction by Pagden and Lawrance); Manuel M. Martínez, “Las Casas on the Conquest of America,” in Bartolomé de Las Casas in History, ed. Juan Friede and Benjamin Keen (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971), 319.

39. Martínez, “Las Casas,” 323.

40. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, Book 12: The Conquest of Mexico, ed. and trans. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe, NM: The School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1975), 30.

41. Vitoria, Political Writings, 282–283.

42. Ibid., 285–286.

43. Ibid., 289.

44. Ibid., 291 (italics in original).

45. Clayton situates Vitoria’s standpoint much too close to Las Casas; Clayton, Bartolomé de Las Casas, 108–109.

46. See Arthur Ripstein, “Distinctions of Power and the Power of Distinctions: A Response to Professor Koskenniemi,” University of Toronto Law Journal, 61 (2011), 37–43.

47. See Pierre Vilar, A History of Gold and Money (London: New Left Books, 1976), 104.

48. See Helen Rand Parish and Harold E. Weidman, “The Corrected Birthdate of Bartolomé de Las Casas,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 56 (1976), 385–403.

49. Clayton, Bartolomé de Las Casas, 28–29.

50. See Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 46–47.

51. Clayton, Bartolomé de Las Casas, 39.

52. Bartolomé de Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, trans. Nigel Griffin (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 28–29.

53. Daniel Castro, Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de Las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 65.

54. Clayton, Bartolomé de Las Casas, 49–51.

55. Ibid., 142; see also Clayton, “Bartolomé de Las Casas and the African Slave Trade,” History Compass, 7 (2009), 1526–1541.

56. Clayton, Bartolomé de Las Casas, 78–80.

57. Ibid., 112.

58. Cited in Lewis Hanke, All Mankind Is One: A Study of the Disputation between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda on the Religious and Intellectual Capacity of the American Indians (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994), 66–67.

59. Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians (London: Hollis and Carter, 1959), 29.

60. Ibid., 38.

61. Ibid., 44.

62. Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 63 [= 1260a].

63. Cited in Peter Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 114.

64. Ibid., 125–126.

65. Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians, 47.

66. Bartolomé de Las Casas, In Defense of the American Indians, ed. and trans. Stafford Poole (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992), 221–225; Benjamin Keen, The Aztec Image in Western Thought (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 97.

67. Paraphrased in Keen, The Aztec Image, 97.

68. Cited in D. A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State,1492-1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993),86.

69. Cited in Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians, 47.

70. Las Casas, Defense, 28–35.

71. 1 Corinthians 14:10–11.

72. Las Casas, Defense, 39–40.

73. Ibid., 49–50.

74. Ibid., 340–341.

75. See Anthony Pagden, “Ius et Factum: Text and Experience in the Writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas,” Representations, 33 (1991), 151.

76. Las Casas, Defense, 42–43.

77. Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians, 55.

78. Cited in ibid., 49.

79. Las Casas, Short Account, 33.

80. Las Casas, Defense, 329.

81. Las Casas, Short Account, 51–52.

82. See Louise M. Burkhart, “The Solar Christ in Nahuatl Doctrinal Texts of Early Colonial Mexico,” Ethnohistory, 35 (1988), 252–253.

83. Brading, First America, 117.

84. See ibid., 103.

85. Cited in Miguel León-Portilla, Bernardino de Sahagún: First Anthropologist (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 102.

86. Miguel León-Portilla, ed., The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico, trans. Lysander Kemp (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 185–186.

87. Ibid., 187.

88. Inga Clendinnen, The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 50.

89. Keen, The Aztec Image, 58–59.

90. Bernal Diaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 192.

91. de Sahagún, Florentine Codex, 1–3.

92. Ibid., 20.

93. Ibid., 31.

94. Clendinnen, Cost of Courage, 75.

95. de Sahagún, Florentine Codex, 57.

96. Clendinnen, Cost of Courage, 89.

97. Cited in León-Portilla, The Broken Spears, 137–138.

98. Las Casas, Defense, 329.

99. Clayton, Bartolomé de Las Casas, 150.

100. Seed, “‘Are These Not Also Men?’” 636–637.

101. Sabine Maccormack, “‘The Heart Has Its Reasons’: Predicaments of Missionary Christianity in Early Colonial Peru,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 65 (1985), 454.

102. Clayton, Bartolomé de Las Casas, 151–153, 177.

103. Castro, Another Face of Empire, 180–185.

104. See Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 249–250.

105. Ibid., 252.

106. José de Acosta, Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias, ed. José Alcina Franch (Madrid: Promo Libro, 2003), 8.

107. Claudio M. Burgaleta, José de Acosta S.J., 1540–1600 (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1999), 38.

108. Ibid., 33–34; Brading, First America, 137.

109. See list in Acosta, Historia Natural y Moral, 39–40.

110. Cited in Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 155.

111. Acosta, The Natural and Moral History of the Indies (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1880), 390–391, 449 (all references are to this edition, a facsimile reproduction of the 1604 London translation by James Edward Grimston).

112. Acosta, History of the Indies, 530.

113. See Pagden, Fall of Natural Man.

114. Acosta, History of the Indies, 295.

115. See Laura Ammon, “Bernardino de Sahagún, José de Acosta and the Sixteenth-Century Theology of Sacrifice in New Spain,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 12, no. 2 (Fall 2011).

116. Acosta, History of the Indies, 324-325.

117. Ibid., 90–101.

118. Ibid., 20.

119. Karl W. Butzer, “From Columbus to Acosta: Science, Geography and the New World,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 82 (1992), 557.

120. See Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, 146–147, 154–155, 160.

121. See Lee Eldridge Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492–1729 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967).

122. Acosta, History of the Indies, 57; see also Thayne R. Ford, “Stranger in a Foreign Land: José de Acosta’s Scientific Realizations in Sixteenth-Century Peru,” Sixteenth-Century Journal, 29 (1998), 19–33.

123. Acosta, History of the Indies, 59.

124. Ibid., 60.

125. Ibid., 70.

126. Ibid., 72.

127. Ibid., 449–450.

128. Ibid., 72.

129. Ibid., 409–411.

130. Ibid., 436–437.

131. Ibid., 400–402.

132. Ibid., 403–405.

133. Ibid., 421, 424–425.

134. See Karen Viera Powers, “Andeans and Spaniards in the Contact Zone: A Gendered Collision,” American Indian Quarterly, 24 (2000), 511–536.

135. Acosta, History of the Indies, 296.

136. Ibid., 301.

137. Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Theology, Ethnography, and the Historicization of Idolatry,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 67 (2006), 590.

138. Brading, First America, 257.

139. Ibid., 258.

140. Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Commentaires royaux sur le Peru des Incas, 3 vols., trans. René L. F. Durand (Paris: La Découverte, 2000), 1:67.

141. Ibid., 1:105–106.

142. Ibid., 1:115–119.

143. See Brading, First America, 263–264; Wachtel, Vision des vaincus, 244–245.

144. Acosta, History of the Indies, 526–527. I have modified the translation slightly, in order to avoid a non sequitur that does not occur in the Spanish original; cf. Acosta, Historia Natural y Moral, 478–479.

145. Acosta, History of the Indies, 528–529; Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, 167.

146. Alan Levine, Sensual Philosophy: Toleration, Skepticism, and Montaigne’s Politics of the Self (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001), 25.

147. Ibid., 171–172, 198–199.

148. J. H. Kennedy, Jesuit and Savage in New France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950), 17.

149. See Frank Lestringant, Le Brésil de Montaigne (Paris: Chandeigne, 2005), 11.

150. Joel Cornette, Le Livre et le glaive: Chronique de la France au XVIe siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1999), 279.

151. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985), 158–159.

152. Ibid., 150–152; Lestringant, Brésil de Montaigne, 12; David Quint, “A Reconsideration of Montaigne’s Des cannibales,” in America in European Consciousness, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 168.

153. Lestringant, Brésil de Montaigne, 32.

154. Montaigne, Essays, 150.

155. Ibid., 150.

156. Ibid., 152.

157. Ibid., 154–155.

158. Ibid., 155.

159. Ibid., 156.

160. Ibid., 149; I have rendered homme as “human being” instead of “man.”

161. Ibid., 149.

162. Ibid., 387–388.

163. Ibid., 694–695.

164. Quint, “Reconsideration,” 179.

165. Montaigne, Essays, 519.

166. Ibid., 519.

167. Ibid., 692–693.

168. See Lestringant, Brésil de Montaigne, 63.

6. Global Equality and Inequality in Enlightenment Thought

1. See Henry E. May, The Enlightenment in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 266–345.

2. See Sebastian Conrad, “Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical Critique,” American Historical Review, 117 (2012), 999–1027.

3. See “Égalité naturelle,” in Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (Paris: 1751–1772), 5:415. All references to the Encyclopédie are to the online ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, University of Chicago, https://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/.

4. See Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3; Siep Stuurman, “The Canon of the History of Political Thought: Its Critique and a Proposed Alternative,” History and Theory, 39 (2000), 161; Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 23.

5. See Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Frederick G. Whelan, “Oriental Despotism: Anquetil Duperron’s Response to Montesquieu,” History of Political Thought, 22 (2001), 619–647; Siep Stuurman, “Cosmopolitan Egalitarianism in the Enlightenment: Anquetil Duperron on India and America,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 68 (2007), 255–278; Sunil Agnani, Hating Empire Properly: The Two Indies and the Limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013); Anoush Fraser Terjanian, Commerce and Its Discontents in Eighteenth-Century French Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

6. See Daniel Baugh, The Global Seven Years War (London: Routledge, 2014), 662–665.

7. Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, 10 vols. (Geneva: Jean-Leonard Pellet, 1782), 1–2.

8. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 89.

9. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (New York: Mentor Books, 1965), 343.

10. François Bernier, Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi, 7 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 1992), 7:286.

11. See Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).

12. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur les sciences et les arts/Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (Paris: Flammarion, 1971), 38–39.

13. See Urs Bitterli, Cultures in Conflict (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 166–167; Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 142–143.

14. Charles-Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu, Lettres Persanes (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 116 (Letter 38).

15. Cited in Fatma Müge Göçek, East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 45.

16. Yirmisekiz Çelebi Mehmed, Le Paradis des infidèles, trans. Julien-Claude Galland (Paris: Maspéro, 1981), 55.

17. See Eviatar Zerubavel, Terra Cognita: The Mental Discovery of America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 59–63.

18. See Peter C. Perdue, “Boundaries and Trade in the Early-Modern World: Negotiations at Nerchinsk and Beijing,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 43 (2010), 341–356.

19. See Sanjay Subramanyam, Aux Origines de l’histoire globale (Paris: Collège de France-Fayard, 2014), 55.

20. See Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chap. 1.

21. See John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2007), 245.

22. Cited in P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind (London: Dent and Sons, 1982), 1.

23. See Edwin J. van Kley, “Europe’s ‘Discovery’ of China and the Writing of World History,” American Historical Review, 76 (1971), 380.

24. Joseph de Guignes, Histoire générale des Huns, des Turcs, des Mongols, et des autres Tartares Occidentaux, 4 vols. (Paris: Dessaint & Saillant, 1756–1758), 1:vi; Nathaniel Wolloch, “Joseph de Guignes and Enlightenment Notions of Material Progress,” Intellectual History Review, 21 (2011), 435–448.

25. See James Llana, “Natural History and the Encyclopédie,” Journal of the History of Biology, 33 (2000), 5, 10–11.

26. Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations, 2 vols. (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1990), 1:55.

27. See Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 50–51.

28. See Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, trans. Gene Patterson-Black (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

29. Frank Lestringant, Le Cannibale: Grandeur et decadence (Paris: Librairie Perrin, 1994), 129–130.

30. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 66, 71.

31. Richard Yeo, “A Solution to the Multitude of Books: Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopedia,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 64 (2003), 67.

32. See Richard Tuck, “Grotius and Selden,” in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 520.

33. Ibid., 515.

34. See Henning von Reventlow, “L’Exegèse humaniste de Hugo Grotius,” in Le Grand Siècle et la Bible, ed. Jean Robert Armogathe (Paris: Beauchesne, 1989), 147.

35. See Aram Vartanian, Diderot and Descartes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), chap. 4.

36. See Hugo De Groot, Remonstrantie Nopende de Ordre dije in de Landen van Hollandt ende Westvrieslandt dijent gesteldt op de Joden, ed. J. Meijer (Amsterdam: Coster, 1949), 108–111; Jacob Meijer, “Hugo Grotius’ Remonstrantie,” Jewish Social Studies, 17 (1955), 99–104; Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 501–502.

37. A. S. P. Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty (London: Dent, 1986), 170.

38. Richard Simon, “Comparaison des céremonies des Juifs et de la discipline de l’Église,” in Les Juifs présentés aux Chrétiens par Léon de Modéne, ed. Jacques le Brun and Guy G. Stroumsa (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1998), 157.

39. John Toland, Raison de naturaliser les Juifs en Grande Bretagne et en Irlande, ed. Pierre Lurbe (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), 117.

40. See Nabil Matar, “The Toleration of Muslims in Renaissance England,” in Religious Toleration, ed. John Christian Laursen (London: Macmillan, 1999), 131

41. See Pierre Bayle, Pensées diverses sur la comète, vol. 2 (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1994), 77–78.

42. Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary, trans. Richard H. Popkin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1991), 400.

43. Montesquieu, Lettres Persanes, 204 (Letter 83).

44. Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs, 1:65, 181, 2:809.

45. See Jonathan Sheehan, “Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization,” American Historical Review, 108 (2003), 1061–1080.

46. See Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 167–199.

47. On Montaigne as source, see Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, L’Anthropologie cartésienne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), 170.

48. Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 11 vols. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1996), 6:2, 7.

49. Ibid., 6:16.

50. Ibid., 9:45–46.

51. For an extensive discussion of Poulain, see Siep Stuurman, François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

52. Poulain de la Barre, De l’égalité des deux sexes (Paris: Fayard, 1984), 54.

53. See Tjitske Akkerman and Siep Stuurman, eds., Perspectives on Feminist Political Thought in European History (London: Routledge, 1998).

54. Poulain, De l’éducation des dames (Paris: Jean Dupuis, 1674), 311.

55. Poulain, Égalité, 17.

56. Poulain, Éducation, 58.

57. Poulain, Égalité, 16.

58. Ibid., 21.

59. Poulain, De l’excellence des hommes (Paris: Jean Dupuis, 1675), 325–326.

60. See Stuurman, Poulain, 286–289.

61. Poulain, Excellence, 62, 313–314.

62. Poulain, Égalité, 27.

63. Louis de la Forge, Traité de l’esprit de l’homme (Paris: Robin, Le Gras and Girard, 1666), 354.

64. Poulain, Égalité, 38.

65. Poulain, Excellence, 323.

66. Poulain, Égalité, 19; Poulain, Excellence, 26.

67. François Bernier, Suite des mémoires du Sieur Bernier sur l’empire du Grand Mogol (The Hague: Reinier Leers, 1671), 140–141; Jean Thévenot, Relation d’un voyage fait au Levant (Rouen: Maurry, 1665), 107.

68. Poulain, Excellence, 73–74.

69. Ibid., 68.

70. Ibid., 83.

71. Baruch de Spinoza, Traité des authorités théologique et politique, trans. Madeleine Francès (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 69, 92, 100, 127–133, 199.

72. See Stuurman, Poulain, 277–289.

73. See ibid., 285–286.

74. See Jean Haechler, L’Encyclopédie de Diderot et de . . . Jaucourt (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1995), 463–464.

75. See “Égalité naturelle,” in Encyclopédie, 5:415; See also “Devoir,” 4:915–917.

76. See “Traite des nègres,” in ibid., 6:532–533.

77. See David Brion Davis, “New Sidelights on Early Antislavery Radicalism,” William and Mary Quarterly, 28 (1971), 585–594.

78. See “Démocratie,” in Encycl., 4:816.

79. See “Femme (Droit naturel),” in ibid., 6:471–472.

80. See “Sauvages,” in ibid., 14:729.

81. See “État de nature,” in ibid., 6:17–18.

82. See “Iroquois,” in ibid., 8:906.

83. See Harvey Chisick, “The Ambivalence of the Idea of Equality in the French Enlightenment,” History of European Ideas, 13 (1991), 215–223.

84. See Siep Stuurman, “The Deconstruction of Gender,” in Women, Gender and Enlightenment, ed. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 371–388.

85. See “Droit des gens,” in Encyclopédie, 5:126–129.

86. Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2008), 216.

87. Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, The Principles of Natural and Politic Law, trans. Thomas Nugent (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2006), 455.

88. Jennifer Pitts, “Empire and Legal Universalism in the Eighteenth Century,” American Historical Review, 117 (2012), 94.

89. Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des Lois, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1979), 2:68 [= EdL XXI:21].

90. See “Europe,” in Encyclopédie, 6:211–212.

91. Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia, trans. Richard N. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 101.

92. See “Juif,” in Encycl., 9:24–25.

93. See “Japon,” in ibid., 8:453–455.

94. See J. A. G. Roberts, “The Philosophes and the Religions of Japan,” Monumenta Nipponica, 44 (1989), 151–169.

95. See Roberts, “L’Image de la Chine dans l’Encyclopédie,” Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie, 22 (1997), 87–105.

96. See “Islam,” in Encyc., 8:915.

97. See “Sarrasins,” in ibid., 14:662–663; “Mahométisme,” 9:864–868.

98. See Rebecca Joubin, “Islam and Arabs through the Eyes of the Encyclopédie,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 32 (2000), 207–210.

99. Devin Vartija, “Racial Hierarchies and Natural Equality,” MA Thesis (Utrecht University, 2012), 63–75.

100. See ibid., 74–75, 77–82.

101. Denis Diderot, Political Writings, trans. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 6.

102. See “Droit naturel,” in ibid., 17.

103. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights (New York: Norton, 2007), 27.

104. Diderot, Political Writings, 18.

105. See “Droit naturel,” in Encycl., 5:115–116.

106. Diderot, Political Writings, 20–21.

107. Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Oeuvres complètes, 8 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 1989–1996), 2:415.

108. Ibid., 3:197–198.

109. See Jean Dagen, L’Histoire de l’esprit humain dans la pensée française (Paris: Klincsieck, 1977).

110. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1982), 459.

111. Journal des Sçavans, 30 June 1681.

112. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 86–87.

113. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols. (London: Dent, 1964), 1:11.

114. See Stephen Buckle, Natural Law and the Theory of Property (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 42–50.

115. Herman Lebovics, “The Uses of America in Locke’s Second Treatise of Government,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 47 (1986), 575–578.

116. Locke, Two Treatises, 333 (italics in original).

117. Ibid., 343 (italics in original).

118. See ibid., 146–161 (Appendix B); William G. Batz, “The Historical Anthropology of John Locke,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 35 (1974), 663–670.

119. Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 119–120.

120. Locke, Two Treatises, 337.

121. See Annie Jacob, Le Travail, reflet des cultures (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), 190–201.

122. See Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost their Land (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 46–48.

123. Ibid., 49–84.

124. See E. Adamson Hoebel, “William Robertson: An 18th-Century Anthropologist,” American Anthropologist, 62 (1960), 648–649.

125. William Robertson, The History of America. (Philadelphia: Simon Probasco, 1821), 1:123.

126. Ibid., 1:142.

127. Ibid., 1:156.

128. Ibid., 1:146.

129. Ibid., 2:101–102.

130. Ibid., 1:156–157.

131. See Smith, Wealth of Nations, 2:58, 66.

132. See J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 4: Barbarians, Savages and Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 190.

133. See Jean-Claude Perrot, “Économie politique,” Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich, vol. 8 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1988), 71.

134. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 65.

135. Ibid., 98; see also Robert Wokler, Rousseau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 42–54.

136. See Jane Rendall, “Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization,” in Women, Gender and Enlightenment, 70.

137. George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, De l’Homme, ed. Michèle Duchet (Paris: Maspéro, 1971), 132–133.

138. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Les Six Voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, 1re partie (Paris: G. Clouzier, 1682), 300–303.

139. Pierre Petit, De Amazonibus Dissertatio (Amsterdam: J. Wolters and Y. Haring, 1687), 107.

140. Raynal, Histoire des deux Indes, 4:74–75.

141. Robertson, History of America, 1:161.

142. Montesquieu, Lettres Persanes, 350 (Letter 161).

143. Silvia Sebastiani, The Scottish Enlightenment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 134.

144. Ibid., 146–147.

145. Ibid., 162.

146. Ibid., 148.

147. See Jeannette Rosso, Études sur la fémininité aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Pisa: Libreria Goliardica, 1984), 189–211.

148. See Akkerman and Stuurman, Feminist Political Thought; Sarah Gwyneth Ross, The Birth of Feminism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

149. See Stuurman, Poulain, 283–289.

150. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), 147; see also Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 63–64, 72–74.

151. See Wilt Idema and Beata Grant, The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asia Center, 2004), 347.

152. See Dorothy Ko, “Pursuing Talent and Virtue: Education and Women’s Culture in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century China,” Late Imperial China, 13 (1992), 9–39.

153. Idema and Grant, The Red Brush, 617.

154. Ibid., 613.

155. Ibid., 573.

156. See Siep Stuurman, “François Bernier and the Invention of Racial Classification,” History Workshop Journal, 50 (2000), 1–20.

157. See Philip R. Sloan, “The Gaze of Natural History,” in Inventing Human Science, ed. Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 119–120, 124–125.

158. See Bruce Baum, The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 66.

159. See Michael Benton, “The Classification of Races in Europe and North America, 1700–1850,” International Social Science Journal, 111 (1987), 45–60; Nicolas Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to “Race’: The Origins of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29 (1996), 247–264.

160. See Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to “Race,’” 253.

161. Buffon, Histoire Naturelle, 9:8–9, 129–130, http://www.buffon.cnrs.fr.

162. See Jacques Roger, Buffon (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 537–541.

163. Buffon, Histoire Naturelle, 9:2.

164. See Jacques Roger, The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 471.

165. Article on the ass in Buffon, Histoire Naturelle, vol. 4, cited in Philip Sloan, “The Buffon-Linnaeus Controversy,” Isis, 67 (1976), 370.

166. Philip Sloan, “Buffon, German Biology, and the Historical Interpretation of Biological Species,” British Journal for the History of Science, 12 (1979), 111.

167. See Walter Demel, “Wie die Chinesen Gelb wurden,” Historische Zeitschrift, 225 (1992), 625–666; Michael Keevak, Becoming Yellow (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

168. See Nancy Shoemaker, “How Indians Got to Be Red,” American Historical Review, 102 (1997), 627–631.

169. Buffon, De l’Homme, 318.

170. Ibid., 320.

171. Ibid., 319.

172. Ibid., 317.

173. Roger, Life Sciences, 672n220; see also 460–466.

174. Buffon, De l’Homme, 277.

175. Ibid., 279.

176. David Northrup, Africa’s Discovery of Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 10–14.

177. Buffon, De l’Homme, 283.

178. Ibid., 308.

179. Ibid., 296.

180. Ibid., 327.

181. Ibid., 369.

182. Ibid., 370–371.

183. Richard McCausland, “Particulars Relative to the Nature and Customs of the Indians of North America,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 76 (1786), 232.

184. Ibid., 229 (italics in original).

185. See Andrew Wells, “Race and Racism in the Global European World before 1800,” History Compass, 13 (2015), 440.

186. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, trans. Thomas Bendyshe (London: Longman and Green, 1865), 31.

187. Ibid., ix.

188. Ibid., 98–99.

189. Ibid., 264.

190. See Timothy Lenoir, “Kant, Blumenbach and Vital Materialism in German Biology,” Isis, 71 (1980), 80–81.

191. Blumenbach, Anthropological Treatises, 210–215.

192. Ibid., 113.

193. Ibid., 99.

194. Ibid., 99.

195. Ibid., 265.

196. See Baum, Caucasian Race, 84–85.

197. Blumenbach, Anthropological Treatises, 269.

198. Ibid., 413.

199. See Miriam Claude Meijer, Race and Aesthetics in the Anthropology of Petrus Camper (Amsterdam: Rodopi Editions, 1999), 101–123.

200. Blumenbach, Anthropological Treatises, 271–273.

201. See Sara Eigen, “Self, Race, and Species: J. F. Blumenbach’s Atlas Experiment,” German Quarterly, 78 (2005), 277–298.

202. See Baum, Caucasian Race, 76–80.

203. Blumenbach, Anthropological Treatises, 271.

204. Ibid., 305–312.

205. See Justin E. H. Smith, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 252–263.

206. See Pauline Kleingeld, “Kant’s Second Thoughts on Race,” Philosophical Quarterly, 57 (2007), 573–588.

207. Meijer, Race and Aesthetics, 84.

208. Lecture printed in ibid., 183–192.

209. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Men, 2 vols., 3rd ed. (Dublin: James Williams, 1779), 1: 41–42.

210. Ibid., 36.

211. Baum, Caucasian Race, 63–64.

212. Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, The Book That Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

213. See ibid., 153–160.

214. Ibid., 160–162.

215. Nancy Vogeley, “‘Religion’ as an Enlightenment Concept,” Eighteenth Century Studies, 44 (2011), 403.

216. Hunt, Jacob, and Mijnhardt, The Book, 215.

217. Ibid., 221.

218. Ibid., 226.

219. Ibid., 248.

220. Ibid., 217.

221. Cited in Jacques Revel, “The Uses of Comparison,” in Bernard, Picart, and the First Global Vision of Religion, ed. Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 331.

222. Ibid., 344n2.

223. Hunt, Jacob, and Mijnhardt, The Book, 241.

224. See Stuurman, “Cosmopolitan Egalitarianism,” 258–259.

225. Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, Voyage en Inde, 1754–1762 (Paris: École Française d’Extrème Orient, 1997), 81–82, 90, 126, 127, 184, 296, 400, 426.

226. Ibid., 164–172, 237, 272, 311, 363, 97, 268, 142, 398–399.

227. See Raymond Schwab, Vie d’Anquetil Duperron (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1934), 23; Anquetil-Duperron, Voyage, 76.

228. Anquetil-Duperron, Législation orientale (Amsterdam: Marc Michel Rey, 1778), 140–171.

229. Ibid., 178.

230. Ibid., ii.

231. Ibid., 178.

232. Anquetil-Duperron, L’Inde en rapport avec l’Europe, 2 vols. (Paris: De Lesguillez, An 6 de la République [=1798]), 1:27–28.

233. Anquetil-Duperron, Législation, 29.

234. Ibid., 110–111.

235. Anquetil-Duperron, L’Inde, 1:59.

236. Anquetil-Duperron, Considerations philosophiques, historiques et géographiques sur les deux mondes (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 1993), 206.

237. Encyclopédie, 5:953.

238. Anquetil-Duperron, Considérations, 101–102.

239. Ibid., 148, 162, 245, 261.

240. Ibid., 99.

241. Ibid., 2.

242. Ibid., 62.

243. Ibid., 306–308, 316.

244. Israel, Enlightenment Contested, chap. 30–33.

245. Denis Diderot, Supplément au voyage de Bougainville/Pensées philosophiques/Lettre sur les aveugles (Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1972), 146.

246. Diderot, Supplément, 147; Diderot, Political Writings, 41–42.

247. Diderot, Supplément, 149. Hope and Wokler’s translate empoisonneur as “scourge,” but a literal rendition better conveys the metaphorical meaning of the passage.

248. Ibid., 148; Diderot, Political Writings, 42.

249. See Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire, 268.

250. Diderot, Supplément, 170; Diderot, Political Writings, 61.

251. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Voyage autour du monde (Paris: La Découverte, 1992), 156–157.

252. Dana Lepofsky, “Gardens of Eden? An Ethnohistoric Reconstruction of Maohi (Thahitian) Cultivation,” Ethnohistory, 46 (1999), 4–5, 21.

253. See Andy Martin, “The Enlightenment in Paradise: Bougainville, Tahite, and the Duty of Desire,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 41 (2008), 203–216.

254. See Michéle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), 459–463.

255. See ibid., 129–136, 172–177.

256. See Raynal, Histoire des deux Indes, 6:128–139.

257. See Jonathan I. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 420–436.

258. Diderot, Correspondance, ed. Laurent Versini (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1997), 779.

259. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 231.

260. See Jean Tarrade, “Colonialisme,” Dictionnaire européen des Lumières, ed. Michel Delon (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), 235–236.

261. Raynal, Histoire des deux Indes, 1:2.

262. Ibid., 4:160.

263. Ibid., 4:161.

264. Ibid., 3:216.

265. Anthony Strugnell, “Diderot’s Anti-Colonialism: A Problematic Notion,” in New Essays on Diderot, ed. James Fowler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 82–84.

266. Madeleine Dobie, “Going Global: Diderot, 1770–1784,” Diderot Studies, 31 (2009), 22–23.

267. Raynal, Histoire des deux Indes, 2:190–197.

268. Ibid., 2:149–162.

269. Ibid., 2:352–355.

270. Ibid., 6:138–139.

271. See Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint l’Ouverture (New York, Pantheon Books, 2007), 61.

272. Raynal, Histoire des deux Indes, 7:287–288.

273. Ibid., 1:175.

274. Ibid., 10:297.

275. On Burke’s critique, see Mehta, Liberalism and Empire.

276. Raynal, Histoire des deux Indes, 10:155.

277. Ibid., 10:166–168.

278. Ibid., 10:168.

279. See Terjanian, Commerce and Its Discontents, 185.

280. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment, 438–442.

281. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 225.

282. Raynal, Histoire des deux Indes, 10:298.

283. Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire, 232.

284. Raynal, Histoire des deux Indes, 10:298–300.

285. See Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourses on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).

286. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 3 vols. (New York, The Modern Library, 1954), 2:439–444.

287. Anquetil-Duperron, Législation orientale, v.

288. Cited in Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire, 239.

289. Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, vol. 1 (Leipzig: J. F. Hartknoch, 1841), 184–185.

290. See Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire, 236.

291. See Elizabeth and Robert Badinter, Condorcet: Un intellectual en politique (Paris: Fayard, 1988), 172–174.

292. Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat de Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1988), 265–266.

293. Ibid., 270.

294. Ibid., 269.

295. Ibid., 271.

7. Modern Equality and Scientific Racism in the Nineteenth Century

1. Seymour Drescher, “The Limits of Example,” in The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. David P. Geggus (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 12.

2. See Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights (New York: Norton, 2007), 145–151.

3. See David J, Robinson, “Liberty, Fragile Equality and Inequality in Early-Republican Spanish America,” Journal of Historical Geography, 16 (1990), 55–56.

4. Reinhart Koselleck, “Some Reflections on the Temporal Structure of Conceptual Change,” in Main Trends in Cultural History, ed. William Melching and Wyger Velema (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 11.

5. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (Hardmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), 120.

6. Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, 2 vols. (Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1981), 2:361.

7. See Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 216.

8. See Patrick Manning, Migration in World History (New York: Routledge, 2006), 149.

9. Adam McKeown, “Global Migration, 1846–1940,” Journal of World History, 15 (2004), 156, 184.

10. Cited in Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998), 97.

11. Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 483.

12. Ibid., 19–20.

13. Ibid., 10.

14. Frederick Douglass, Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner and Yuval Taylor (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 285.

15. See Bruce Mazlish, Civilization and Its Contents (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 71–72; Brett Bowden, The Empire of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

16. Samuel George Morton, introduction to Crania Americana (1839), reprinted in Louis Ruchames, Racial Thought in America, 2 vols. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1969), 1:441–448.

17. William Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 32.

18. Cited in A. Blonk and J. Romein, Leerboek der Algemene en Vaderlandse Geschiedenis, deel 3 (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1960), 91.

19. Robert Knox, The Races of Men (London: Henry Renshaw, 1862), 6, 8, 224–230.

20. Josiah Nott and George R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co; London: Trübner & Co., 1855), 50, 52–53; see also Herbert Odom, “Generalizations on Race in Nineteenth-Century Physical Anthropology,” Isis, 58 (1967), 4–18.

21. Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 135–136.

22. Cited in Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 91.

23. Malcolm Crook, Elections in the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 39

24. Robert Badinter, Libres et égaux: L’émancipation des Juifs sous la Révolution française (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 144.

25. Shanti Marie Singham, “Betwixt Cattle and Men: Jews, Blacks, and Women and the Declaration of the Rights of Man,” in The French Idea of Freedom, ed. Dale van Kley (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 118.

26. Badinter, Libres et égaux, 150–151.

27. Olivier le Cour Grandmaison, Les citoyennetés en revolution (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), 243.

28. Ronald Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715–1815 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 19.

29. Singham, “Betwixt Cattle and Men,” 118.

30. Stanislas Clermont Tonnerre, “Discours contre la discrimination … des Juifs,” in Orateurs de la Révolution française, vol. 1, ed. François Furet and Ran Halévy (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 247.

31. Ibid., 247–248.

32. Badinter, Libres et égaux, 215.

33. Ibid., 216–218.

34. David Feuerwerker, L’Émancipation des Juifs en France (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976), 437–441.

35. Le Cour Grandmaison, Citoyennetés, 245–251.

36. Badinter, Libres et égaux, 117–118.

37. Cited in Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews, 88

38. Ibid., 89.

39. See Rita Hermon-Belot, L’Abbé Grégoire (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 262–263.

40. See Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews, 86–87.

41. Ibid., 93.

42. Ibid., 7–10.; see also Frederic Cople Jaher, The Jews and the Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 71.

43. Jaher, The Jews, 91–92.

44. Ibid., 93.

45. Cited in Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 51–52.

46. Cited in ibid., 54–55.

47. See Jane Abray, “Feminism in the French Revolution,” American Historical Review, 80 (1975), 52.

48. Cited in Le Cour Grandmaison, Citoyennetés, 291.

49. Cited from the full translation in Felicia Gordon and P. N. Furbank, Marie-Madeleine Jodin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 176–204, at 181–182.

50. Abray, “Feminism,” 55.

51. Cited in Scott H. Lytle, “The Second Sex (September, 1793),” Journal of Modern History, 27 (1955), 26.

52. See e.g. Le Cour Grandmaison, Citoyennetés, 275–282.

53. See Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery (London: Verso, 1990), 163.

54. See Ronald Segal, Islam’s Black Slaves (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), 4.

55. See Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint l’Ouverture (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007), 8–9.

56. Cited in Jeremy Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 33.

57. See Popkin, You Are All Free, 11–12.

58. See Valerie Quinney, “Decisions on Slavery, the Slave Trade and Civil Rights for Negroes in the Early French Revolution,” Journal of Negro History, 55 (1970), 120–123.

59. Cited in Blackburn, Overthrow, 174.

60. Cited in Philip D. Curtin, “The Declaration of the Rights of Man in Saint Domingue,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 30 (1950), 169.

61. Valerie Quinney, “The Problem of Civil Rights for Free Men of Color in the Early French Revolution,” French Historical Studies, 7 (1972), 550.

62. Curtin, “Declaration,” 169.

63. Cited in ibid., 170.

64. Quinney, “Decisions on Slavery,” 124.

65. Quinney, “Problem of Civil Rights,” 551–552; see also David Geggus, “Racial Equality, Slavery, and Colonial Secession during the Constituent Assembly," American Historical Review, 94 (1989), 1297–1302.

66. Popkin, You Are All Free, 72.

67. See Singham, “Betwixt Cattle and Men,” 134.

68. See Quinney, “Problem of Civil Rights,” 556.

69. See Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012), 21–23.

70. Curtin, “Declaration,” 172.

71. See Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 97–98.

72. Cited after Dubois, Aftershocks, 91–92; see also C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (London: Allison and Busby, 1984), 87.

73. See Dubois, Avengers, 100.

74. Cited in Bell, Toussaint l’Ouverture, 40.

75. See e.g. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, introduction to Toussaint Louverture, The Haitian Revolution, ed. Nick Nesbitt (London: Verso, 2008), 5.

76. See Bell, Toussaint l’Ouverture, 43.

77. Ibid., 61, 83, 193–194.

78. Ibid., 162, 195.

79. Popkin, You Are All Free, 212.

80. Cited in John K. Thornton, “‘I Am the Subject of the King of Congo’: African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History, 4 (1993), 181.

81. Ibid., 186–187.

82. See Popkin, You Are All Free, 235.

83. See ibid., 212–213.

84. Ibid., 271–278.

85. Cited in Bell, Toussaint l’Ouverture, 18.

86. Popkin, You Are All Free, 354.

87. Ibid., 362.

88. See Bell, Toussaint l’Ouverture, 107–108.

89. The memorandum is in Toussaint Louverture, Haitian Revolution, 81–116.

90. See Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 133–134; Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 78.

91. Smith, Civic Ideals, 159.

92. See Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 54–55.

93. David Brion Davis, Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 75.

94. Cited in David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 252–253.

95. Cited in Smith, Civic Ideals, 231.

96. Cited in Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People’s History of the United States (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004), 124–125.

97. Diane L. Barnes, Frederick Douglass (New York: Routledge, 2013), 40.

98. Cited in Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 92.

99. Cited in ibid., 100.

100. Ibid., 107–115.

101. See Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 260.

102. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, written by himself (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), xxiv.

103. See William M. Ramsey, “Frederick Douglass, Southerner,” Southern Literary Journal, 40 (2007), 20.

104. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1999), 69–70.

105. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 31.

106. Ibid., 36.

107. Ibid., 50, 54.

108. Ibid., 54.

109. See Margaret Kohn, “Frederick Douglass’s Master-Slave Dialectic,” Journal of Politics, 67 (2005), 504.

110. See Barnes, Frederick Douglass, 24–25.

111. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (San Bernardino, CA: American Classics Library, 2012), 176.

112. Ibid., 177–178.

113. Ibid., 183.

114. Ibid., 185–186.

115. Douglass, Selected Speeches, 116.

116. Cited in Nicholas Buccola, “‘Each for All and All for Each’: The Liberal Statesmanship of Frederick Douglass,” Review of Politics, 70 (2008), 414.

117. See Nick Bromell, “A ‘Voice from the Enslaved’: The Origins of Frederick Douglass’s Philosophy of Democracy,” American Literary History, 23 (2011), 708–710.

118. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 80–81.

119. Douglass, Bondage, 193–194.

120. Ibid., 214.

121. Ibid., 219–220.

122. Cited in Douglass, Selected Speeches, 91.

123. Ibid., 101.

124. Stanton, Leopard’s Spots, 80–81.

125. Ibid., 100; Edward Lurie, “Louis Agassiz and the Races of Man,” Isis, 45 (1954), 227–242.

126. See Nott and Gliddon, Types of Mankind, 259.

127. Cited in Bruce Baum, The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race, (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 108.

128. See Lurie, “Agassiz,” 232.

129. Baum, Caucasian Race, 107.

130. Douglass. Selected Speeches, 284.

131. Ibid., 290.

132. Ibid., 294–295.

133. See Michael Miller Topp, “Racial and Ethnic Identity in the United States, 1837–1877,” in Race and Ethnicity in America, ed. Ronald H. Bayor (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 65–69.

134. See Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: Norton, 2010), 143–150.

135. Douglass, Selected Speeches, 295.

136. Stanton, Leopard’s Spots, 47–51.

137. Douglass, Selected Speeches, 292 (italics in original).

138. Ibid., 290.

139. Cited in Robert S. Levine, “Road to Africa: Frederick Douglass’s Rome,” African American Review, 34 (2000), 226.

140. Ibid., 221.

141. Douglass, Selected Speeches, 285.

142. Ibid., 517.

143. Cited in David Brion Davis, “He Changed the New World,” New York Review of Books (31 May 2007), 55.

144. Douglass, Selected Speeches, 740–746.

145. Knox, The Races of Men, 229–230.

146. Figures in Shanti S. Tangri, “Intellectuals and Society in Nineteenth-Century India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 3 (1961), 377, 394.

147. John Crawfurd, “On the Classification of the Races of Men,” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, 1 (1861), 377, 358.

148. Crawfurd, “On the Aryan or Indo-Germanic Theory,” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, 1 (1861), 270.

149. Crawfurd, “Classification,” 372–373.

150. Crawfurd, “On the Physical and Mental Characteristics of the European and Asiatic Races of Men,” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, 5 (1867), 59.

151. Ibid., 58.

152. Ibid., 65.

153. Ibid., 71–73.

154. Ibid., 75–76.

155. Ibid., 80.

156. Ibid., 71–72.

157. R. P. Masani, Dadabhai Naoroji (London: Allen and Unwin, 1939), 57–59.

158. Uma Das Gupta, “The Indian Press, 1870–1880,” Modern Asian Studies, 11 (1977), 226–227.

159. Masani, Naoroji, 26.

160. Ibid., 27.

161. Ibid., 62–66.

162. Ibid., 57–58.

163. See http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Queen Victoria’s Proclamation.

164. Masani, Naoroji, 82.

165. See Mary Cumpston, “Some Early Indian Nationalists and Their Allies in the British Parliament,” English Historical Review, 76 (1961), 279–297.

166. Dadabhai Naoroji, “Observations on Mr. John Crawfurd’s Paper on the European and Asiatic Races,” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, 5 (1867), 127–128.

167. Ibid., 130–131.

168. Ibid., 135.

169. Ibid., 142.

170. Ibid., 144.

171. Masani, Naoroji, 88–89.

172. Naoroji, “Observations,” 144.

173. Ibid., 145.

174. Ibid., 148.

175. See Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (Delhi: C. P. Gautam, 2006).

176. Naoroji, Essays, Speeches, Addresses and Writings (Bombay: Caxton Printing Works, 1887), 131–136.

177. Masani, Naoroji, 226; John R. McLane, Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 52.

178. Masani, Naoroji, 242.

179. Ibid., 263.

180. Antoinette Burton, “Tongues Untied: Lord Salisbury’s ‘Black Man’ and the Boundaries of Imperial Democracy,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 42 (2000), 641–642.

181. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (Fairfield, NJ: Augustus Kelley, 1987), 9–20.

182. Ibid., 104.

183. Eileen P. Sullivan, “Liberalism and Imperialism: J. S. Mill’s Defense of the British Empire,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 44 (1983), 612.

184. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (South Bend, IN: Gateway Editions, 1962), 121–122.

185. Ibid., 122.

186. Ibid., 20–26.

187. Ibid., 49–50.

188. Ibid., 76–79.

189. Ibid., 338–339.

190. Ibid., 346.

191. Cited in Elmer Cutts, “The Background of Macaulay’s Minute,” American Historical Review, 58 (1953), 845.

192. Cited in Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 200.

193. John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 176.

194. Ibid., 143–144. The qualified defense of Mill presented by Margaret Kohn and Daniel L. O’Neill does not notice his silence on the 1857 executions in India and misreads his theory of representative government as a safeguard against oligarchical class rule; Kohn and O’Neill, “A Tale of Two Indias: Burke and Mill on Empire and Slavery in the West Indies and America,” Political Theory, 34 (2006), 192–228.

195. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor-Mill, Essays on Sex Equality, ed. Alice S. Rossi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 77.

196. Ibid., 148.

197. Cited in Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 111.

198. See Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 153.

199. Ibid., 136–137.

200. Ibid., 140–143.

201. Qasim Amin, The Liberation of Women/The New Woman, trans. Samiha Sidhom Peterson (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 42.

202. Ibid., 12, 49.

203. Ibid., 104–106.

204. Ibid., 122–124, 168.

205. Beth Baron, “Unveiling in Early Twentieth-Century Egypt,” Middle Eastern Studies, 25 (1989), 380.

206. Lydia H. Liu, The Clash of Empires (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 32–58.

207. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Color Line (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 3.

208. Kris Manjapra, “Communist Internationalism and Transcolonial Recognition,” in Cosmopolitan Thought Zones, ed. Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 159–170.

209. Multatuli [Eduard Douwes Dekker], Max Havelaar or the Coffee Auctions of a Dutch Trading Company (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 122–124.

210. Karl Marx, “Die künftigen Ergebnisse der Britischen Herrschaft in Indien,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Studienausgabe IV: Geschichte und Politik (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Bücherei, 1966), 147–150.

8. The Globalization of Equality

1. Paul Gordon Lauren, Power and Prejudice (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 69–70.

2. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).

3. Anténor Firmin, The Equality of the Human Races, trans. Asselin Charles (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 19.

4. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam Classics, 1989), 62, 63.

5. Cited in Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 83.

6. See Andrew Arsan, Su Lin Lewis, and Anne Isabelle Richard, “Editorial: The Roots of Global Civil Society and the Interwar Moment,” Journal of Global History, 7 (2012), 157–165.

7. See Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 456–464; Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra, eds., Cosmopolitan Thought Zones (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmaier, eds., Competing Visions of World Order (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); A. G. Hopkins, Globalization in World History (London: Pimlico, 2002).

8. Times, 5 March 1896, cited in Lauren, Power and Prejudice, 72.

9. Cited in Pamela S. Brown and Fassil Yirgu, eds., One House: The Battle of Adwa (Chicago: Nyala Publishing, 1996), 92.

10. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1958 et seq.), 4:466–467.

11. Rotem Kowner, The Impact of the Russo-Japanese War (London: Routledge, 2007), 220, 304.

12. See Robert John Holton, “Cosmopolitanism or Cosmopolitanisms? The Universal Races Congress of 1911,” Global Networks, 2 (2002), 158, 164.

13. Cited in Immanuel Geiss, The Pan-African Movement, trans. Ann Keep (New York: Africana Publishing, 1974), 190.

14. Paul W. van der Veur, “E. F. E. Douwes Dekker: Evangelist for Indonesian Political Nationalism,” Journal of Asian Studies, 17 (1958), 551–566.

15. Savitri Prastiti Scherer, “Harmony and Dissonance: Early Nationalist Thought in Java,” MA thesis (Cornell University, 1975), 72.

16. Ibid., 299–300 (from her translation of the entire article).

17. Ibid., 301.

18. Ibid., 73–76.

19. See E. Kedourie, “The Middle East, 1900–1945,” in The New Cambridge Modern History, 12 vols., ed. C. L. Mowat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 12:274–279.

20. Indian Opinion, 3 February 1906, in Collected Works of Gandhi, 5:183.

21. Lauren, Power and Prejudice, 73.

22. Cited in Peter Duus, “Nagai Ryutaro and the ‘White Peril,’” Journal of Asian Studies, 31 (1971), 44.

23. Cited in Geiss, Pan-African Movement, 204–205.

24. Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, introduction to Firmin, Equality of Human Races, xvi.

25. Firmin, Equality of Human Races, liv.

26. Ibid., 7.

27. Ibid., 56–57, 80.

28. Ibid., 77–78.

29. Ibid., 74–76.

30. Ibid., 10.

31. Ibid., 390.

32. Cited in Marguerite Fisher, “José Rizal,” Journal of Modern History, 28 (1956), 261.

33. Cited in John D. Blanco, “Bastards of the Unfinished Revolution,” Radical History Review, 89 (2004), 98.

34. José Rizal, Noli me Tangere, trans. Harold Augenbraum (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 220.

35. Rizal, Political and Historical Writings (Manila: National Historical Institute, 1989), 116–118.

36. See Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags (London: Verso, 2007), 95.

37. Rizal, Political and Historical Writings, 119.

38. Ibid., 111.

39. Ibid., 136.

40. Ibid., 131.

41. Ibid., 116.

42. See Austin Craig, Lineage, Life and Labors of José Rizal (Tutis Digital Publishing Private Limited, 2008), 128-129.

43. Ibid., 144–145.

44. See Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 7.

45. See Leonard B. Glick, “Types Distinct from Our Own: Franz Boas on Jewish Identity and Assimilation,” American Anthropologist, 84 (1982), 545–565.

46. A Franz Boas Reader, ed. George W. Stocking Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 41.

47. Glick, “Types Distinct from Our Own,” 553.

48. See Matti Bunzl, “Franz Boas and the Humboldtian Tradition,” in Volkgeist as Method and Ethic, ed. George Stocking Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 17–78.

49. Franz Boas, “A Journey in Cumberland Sound,” Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York, 16 (1884), 253.

50. Boas, “A Year among the Eskimo,” Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York, 19 (1887), 402.

51. Ludger Müller White, ed., Franz Boas among the Inuit of Baffin Island, 1883–1884: Journals and Letters, trans. William Bart (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 159.

52. Ibid., 171 (letter of 22 January 1884).

53. Douglas Cole, Franz Boas: The Early Years,1858-1906 (Vancouver: University of Washington Press, 1999), 81.

54. Boas, “The Indians of British Columbia,” Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York, 28 (1896), 230–231.

55. Boas, Race, Language and Culture (New York: The Free Press, 1966), 253.

56. Boas, “Indians of British Columbia,” 232.

57. Ibid., 232.

58. Boas, “The Mind of Primitive Man,” Journal of American Folklore, 14 (1901), 1.

59. Ibid., 3.

60. See Franz Boas Reader, 221–242.

61. Boas, “Mind,” 5.

62. Ibid., 6.

63. Ibid., 11.

64. Ibid., 1.

65. Ibid., 10.

66. Ibid., 10–11.

67. Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 27.

68. Ibid., 29.

69. Ibid., 7–8.

70. Ibid., 249.

71. Ibid., 16–17.

72. Frederick JacksonTurner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (New York: Continuum, 1991), 27.

73. See Ken Harper, Give Me My Father’s Body: The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo (Iqaluit, Frobisher Bay NWT: Blacklead Books, 1989), 32–33, 41–44; Cole, Franz Boas, 208–209.

74. Cited in Mae M. Ngai, “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law,” Journal of American History, 86 (1999), 75.

75. See Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: Norton, 2010).

76. Boas, Mind, 245.

77. See George M. Frederickson, Racism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 99–101.

78. Boas, Mind, 15–16.

79. Ibid., 270.

80. Boas, “The Outlook for the American Negro,” in Franz Boas Reader, 311.

81. Ibid., 312.

82. Cited by Lewis in Boas, Anthropology and Modern Life, ed. Herbert S. Lewis (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004), 280.

83. See Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt and William Shedrick Willis, Franz Boas and W. E. B. du Bois at Atlanta University, 1906 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2008), 51–53.

84. Afterword by Lewis in Boas, Anthropology, 279–280.

85. Vernon J. Williams Jr., Rethinking Race: Franz Boas and his Contemporaries (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 25.

86. Ibid., 8.

87. Ibid., 33–36.

88. Boas, Anthropology, 70.

89. Ibid., 70–71.

90. Ibid., 85.

91. See Daniel T. Rodgers, “Exceptionalism,” in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 25

92. See Ngai, “Architecture of Race.”

93. Boas, Anthropology, 83.

94. Ibid., 92.

95. Ibid., 245–246.

96. George Stocking Jr., “Anthropology as Kulturkampf: Science and Politics in the Career of Franz Boas,” in The Uses of Anthropology, ed. Walter Goldschmidt (Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association, 1979), 45.

97. Boas, Race and Democratic Society (New York: J. J. Augustin, 1945), 28–37.

98. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 2.

99. See David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 15–17.

100. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 45.

101. Ibid., 52.

102. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (London: Verso, 1999), 116–117.

103. See Lewis, Du Bois, 127–130.

104. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Battling with Du Bois,” New York Review of Books (22 December 2011), 84.

105. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay towards an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 47.

106. Cited in Lewis, Du Bois, 175.

107. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 37.

108. Ibid., 38.

109. Cited in Lewis, Du Bois, 419.

110. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 41.

111. Ibid., 131–132.

112. Ibid., 8.

113. See Lewis, Du Bois, 416.

114. Figures in ibid., 539, 544.

115. See Carol M. Taylor, “W. E. B. du Bois Challenge to Scientific Racism,” Journal of Black Studies, 11 (1981), 458.

116. See Lewis, Du Bois, 420–421.

117. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices From within the Veil, intr. David Levering Davis (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), 21.

118. Ibid., 21–22.

119. See Julia Liss, “Diasporic Identities: The Science and the Politics of Race in the Work of Franz Boas and W. E. B. Du Bois,” Cultural Anthropology, 13 (1998), 148.

120. Du Bois, Darkwater, 24.

121. Ibid., 24–25.

122. Ibid., 27.

123. Ibid., 28.

124. Ibid., 31.

125. See Lewis, Du Bois, 503–504.

126. De Bois, Darkwater, 75.

127. Ibid., 78.

128. Ibid., 37.

129. See Geiss, Pan-African Movement, 238.

130. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 267.

131. See Anthony W. Marx, Making Race and Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 220–222.

132. See Ben F. Rogers, “William E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Pan-Africa,” Journal of Negro History, 40 (1955), 158.

133. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 277–278.

134. Ibid., 304–306.

135. Ibid., 296.

136. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 3.

137. See David W. Blight, “Lewis’s Du Bois: The Race Man as All Too Human Genius,” Massachusetts Review, 35 (1994), 331–332.

138. See Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3–4.

139. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 285.

140. Ibid., 286.

141. Ibid., 288.

142. Ibid., 320–321.

143. Cited in Harold Brackman, “A Calamity Almost Beyond Comprehension: Nazi Antisemitism and the Holocaust in the Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois,” American Jewish History, 88 (2000), 60–61.

144. Cited in ibid., 66.

145. Cited in ibid., 65.

146. Cited in ibid., 84.

147. Cited in ibid., 86.

148. See Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Color Line (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 112–133.

149. See Bhiku Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi’s Political Discourse (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999), 56–57.

150. See Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. Anthony Parel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2–3.

151. See Parekh, Gandhi, 1–3.

152. See Stephen Hay, “Between Two Worlds: Gandhi’s First Impressions of British Culture,” Modern Asian Studies, 3 (1969), 308–311.

153. See Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 18–19.

154. Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, “The New Courage: An Essay on Gandhi’s Psychology,” World Politics, 16 (1963), 111–112.

155. Natal Advertiser, 23 September 1893, in Collected Works of Gandhi, 1:75–76.

156. Figures in Lake and Reynolds, Global Color Line, 118.

157. Times of Natal, 26 October 1894, in Collected Works of Gandhi, 1:135–137.

158. Petition to Lord Ripon, 17 July 1894, in ibid., 1:122–123.

159. Cited in Lake and Reynolds, Global Color Line, 131.

160. “Grievances of the British Indians,” Collected Works of Gandhi, 2:1–52.

161. Ibid., 2:50–51; see also R. A. Huttenback, “The British Empire as a ‘White Man’s Country”—Racial Attitudes and Immigration Legislation in the Colonies of White Settlement,” Journal of British Studies, 13 (1973), 108–137; and Lake and Reynolds, Global Color Line.

162. See Paul F. Power, “Gandhi in South Africa,” Journal of Modern African Studies, 7 (1969), 445.

163. Times of India, 19 August 1899, in Collected Works of Gandhi, 3:85.

164. Speech on 15 September 1901, in ibid., 3:206.

165. See Power, “Gandhi in South Africa,” 443.

166. Indian Opinion, 10 September 1903, in Collected Works of Gandhi, 3:437–440.

167. Indian Opinion, 2 March 1905, in ibid., 5:55.

168. Power, “Gandhi in South Africa,” 446.

169. Cited in ibid., 453.

170. Collected Works of Gandhi, 5:420.

171. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 129.

172. Cited in Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform, 95.

173. See Rajmohan Gandhi, Mohandas: A True Story of a Man, His People, and an Empire (New York: Penguin-Viking, 2006), 94.

174. Gandhi, The Political and Moral Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, ed. Raghavan Iyer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986/1987), 1:77.

175. The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Juan Mascaro (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962), 100–101 [= 13:14 and 13:15].

176. Ibid., 105 [= 14:25].

177. Cited in Sharon Kay Dobbins, “The Principles of Equity and the Sermon on the Mount as Influence in Gandhi’s Truth-Force,” Journal of Law and Religion, 6 (1988), 133.

178. See Gandhi, Selected Political Writings, intr. Dennis Dalton (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1996), 37–40.

179. Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform, 159.

180. Cited in Rajmohan Gandhi, Mohandas, 150.

181. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 37.

182. Ibid., 17.

183. Ibid., 39–41.

184. Ibid., 49.

185. Ibid., 52.

186. Ibid., 52–53.

187. Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform, 160.

188. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 21.

189. See Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 375.

190. See Rajmohan Gandhi, Mohandas, 219–225.

191. Ibid., 222.

192. Ibid., 331–341.

193. Gandhi, The Political and Moral Writings, 3:499.

194. Cited in Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform, 238.

195. Ibid., 250.

196. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 94.

197. Ibid., 175–176.

198. Gandhi, Political and Moral Writings, 1:395.

199. Ibid., 1:467.

200. Cited in Rajmohan Gandhi, Mohandas, 453.

201. Gandhi, Political and Moral Writings, 1:85.

202. Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform, 100.

203. Gandhi, Political and Moral Writings, 1:541.

204. Gandhi, “Equality of Religions,” in ibid., 1:542–543.

205. Ibid., 1:545.

206. Ibid., 1:572.

207. Ibid., 1:332.

208. Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform, 85.

209. Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), 1–3.

210. Kowner, Impact of the Russo-Japanese War, 20, 219–220.

211. See Aydin, Politics of Anti-Westernism.

212. See Conrad and Sachsenmaier, Competing Visions of World Order, 12–16.

213. Cited in Naoko Shimazu, Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (London: Routledge, 1998), 20.

214. Ibid., 9.

215. Ibid., 57–59.

216. Andrew Clapham, Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 34.

217. See Jan Herman Burgers, “The Road to San Francisco,” Human Rights Quarterly, 14 (1992), 449–450.

9. The Age of Human Rights

1. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 413.

2. Alexis de Tocqueville, L’Ancien régime et la revolution (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), 277.

3. See Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 84–87; Stephan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ed., Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 14.

4. My view of human rights is indebted to Sunil Amrith and Glenda Sluga, “New Histories of the United Nations,” Journal of World History, 19 (2008), 251–274; Mark Mazower, “The Strange Triumph of Human Rights,” Historical Journal, 47 (2004), 379–398; Mazower, No Enchanted Palace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); and Moyn, Last Utopia. However, I think Moyn’s wholesale debunking of the Universal Declaration is not warranted by his and Mazower’s revisionist accounts, in particular when the failure of universal human rights in the first half of the twentieth century is taken into account.

5. Sunil Amrith, “Asian Internationalism,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 6 (2005), 558.

6. Talbot C. Imlay, “International Socialism and Decolonization during the 1950s,” American Historical Review, 118 (2013), 1111.

7. See Mazower, “The End of Civilization and the Rise of Human Rights,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, 29–44.

8. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 36.

9. See Burbank and Cooper, Empires, 420.

10. Mazower, “Strange Triumph,” 380.

11. Brian Urquhart, “Finding the Hidden UN,” New York Review of Books (27 May 2010), 27.

12. Mazower, “Strange Triumph,” 385.

13. See Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (London: The Bodley Head, 2015), 264–267.

14. Hansard, House of Lords, 17 December 1942.

15. Cited in Daniel Roger Maul, “The International Labour Organization,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, 301.

16. Christopher A. Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 79, 101.

17. Marika Sherwood, “There Is No New Deal for the Blackman in San Francisco,” International Journal of African Studies, 29 (1996), 72–73.

18. See Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 139.

19. Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 56.

20. Cited in Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, 7.

21. Raymond F. Betts, Decolonization (London: Routledge, 1998), 22.

22. Benedict Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution (Jakarta: Equinox Publishing, 2006), 36.

23. Cited in Richard Wright, The Color Curtain (Jackson, MS: Banner Books, 1994), 109.

24. See Ian Buruma, Year Zero: A History of 1945 (London: Atlantic Books, 2013), 223–224.

25. Betts, Decolonization, 30.

26. Paul Gordon Lauren, “First Principles of Racial Equality,” Human Rights Quarterly, 5 (1983), 11–12.

27. Ibid., 14.

28. Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 2.

29. Mazower, “Strange Triumph,” 392.

30. Cited in Lauren, “First Principles,” 14.

31. Marilyn Lake, “Chinese Colonists Assert Their ‘Common Human Rights,’” Journal of World History, 21 (2010), 378.

32. Lauren, “First Principles,” 14.

33. Lake, “Chinese Colonists,” 390.

34. Lauren, “First Principles,” 16.

35. See Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001), 13.

36. Lauren, “First Principles,” 17.

37. Glendon, World Made New, 12–13.

38. Cited in Morsink, Universal Declaration, 3.

39. Sherwood, “No New Deal for the Blackman,” 77.

40. See Sebastian Conrad, “Enlightenment in Global History,” American Historical Review, 117 (2012), 999–1027.

41. UN General Assembly, Resolution 217 A(III), “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” 10 December 1948, Article 2.

42. Cited in Glendon, World Made New, 67.

43. See Allida Black, introduction to Eleanor Roosevelt, What I Hope to Leave Behind, ed. Allida Black (New York: Carlson Publishing, 1995), xxi–xxiii.

44. A. J. Hobbins, On the Edge of Greatness: The Diaries of John Humphrey (Montreal: McGill University Libraries, 1994), 15–17.

45. Glenda Sluga, “René Cassin,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, 111.

46. Ibid., 110.

47. Glendon, World Made New, xx.

48. See Paolo Carozza, “From Conquest to Constitutions,” Human Rights Quarterly, 25 (2003), 285–286.

49. Cited in Glendon, World Made New, 11–12.

50. See Ruth H. C. Cheng and Sze-Chuh Cheng, Peng Chun Chang, 1892–1957 (San Jose, CA: privately printed, 1995), 20–36.

51. Oral history interview with Hansa Mehta, 10 October 1969, Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge.

52. Glendon, World Made New, 90.

53. Manu Bhagavan, “A New Hope: India, the United Nations and the Making of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Modern Asian Studies, 44 (2010), 332–343.

54. Morsink, Universal Declaration, 33.

55. Cited in Glendon, World Made New, 111–112.

56. Ibid., 161.

57. Ibid., 146–148.

58. American Anthropological Association, “Statement on Human Rights,” American Anthropologist, 49 (1947), 543.

59. Julian H. Steward, “Comment on the Statement on Human Rights,” American Anthropologist, 50 (1948), 351.

60. See Glendon, World Made New, 51.

61. Lauren, Evolution of International Human Rights, 215.

62. UNESCO, Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations (Paris, UNESCO, 1948), 185–189.

63. Ibid., 192.

64. Ibid., 201.

65. Ibid., Appx. II:3.

66. Ibid., Appx. II:10.

67. Glendon, World Made New, 76–77.

68. Morsink, Universal Declaration, 25.

69. Glendon, World Made New, 168.

70. Susan Waltz, “Universal Human Rights: The Contribution of Muslim States,” Human Rights Quarterly, 26 (2004), 817.

71. Cited in Morsink, Universal Declaration, 25–26.

72. Ibid., 24.

73. Cited in Waltz, “Universal Human Rights,” 821.

74. See the list in Ashley Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 261–267.

75. Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 61.

76. Roger Normand and Sarah Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 193.

77. Carozza, “From Conquest to Constitutions,” 285–289.

78. See Kamala Visweswaran, “Race and the Culture of Anthropology,” American Anthropologist, 100 (1998), 72.

79. Ruth Benedict, Race and Racism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), vii, 9.

80. Leonard Lieberman, Andrew Lyons, and Harriet Lyons, “An Interview with Ashley Montagu,” Current Anthropology, 36 (1995), 839.

81. Ibid., 838.

82. Ibid., 840.

83. Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth, 32–33.

84. Ibid., 40.

85. Ibid., 31–32.

86. Ibid., 44.

87. Ibid., 68, 73.

88. Ibid., 72.

89. Ibid., 54–55.

90. Ibid., 59.

91. Thomas Guglielmo, “‘Red Cross, Double Cross’: Race and America’s World War II-Era Blood Donor Service,” Journal of American History, 97 (2010–2011), 63–90.

92. UNESCO, The Race Concept: Results of an Inquiry (Paris: UNESCO, 1952), 5

93. See Montagu, Statement on Race (New York: Henry Schuman, 1951), 3–20.

94. Cited in “U.N.E.S.C.O. on Race,” Man (1950), 138.

95. Cited in Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 96

96. UNESCO, The Race Concept, 103.

97. Ibid., 98.

98. Ibid., 98.

99. Ibid., 100.

100. Ibid., 100.

101. Ibid., 102.

102. Ibid., 103.

103. “U.N.E.S.C.O. on Race,” 138.

104. Barkan, Retreat, 102.

105. UNESCO, The Race Concept, 91.

106. Ibid., 11–12.

107. Ibid., 13.

108. Ibid., 12.

109. Barkan, Retreat, 343–344.

110. UNESCO, The Race Concept, 15.

111. Edward Steichen, “Photography,” Wisconsin Magazine of History, 41 (1958), 160.

112. Ibid., 167.

113. The Family of Man (New York: Maco Magazine Corporation, 1955), 4.

114. Steichen, “Photography,” 161.

115. Family of Man, 178–192 (the picture of the H-Bomb is part of the exhibition but is not in the book).

116. Ibid., 176–177.

117. Victoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, “Denied Images: ‘The Family of Man’ and the Shoa,” in The Family of Man 1955–2001, ed. Jean Back and Victoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 2004), 80–99.

118. Cited in Penelope Niven, Steichen (Fort Washington, PA: Eastern National, 2004), 633.

119. Eric Sandeen, “‘The Family of Man’ on Tour in the Cold War World,” in The Family of Man 1955–2001, 103.

120. Cited in Niven, Steichen, 633.

121. John Roberts, “Photography and Its Truth-Event,” Oxford Art Journal, 31 (2008), 467 (italics in original).

122. Aimé Césaire, Poésies, Théâtre, Essais et Discours (Paris: CNRS-Présence Africaine, 2013), 69.

123. Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1983), 20.

124. Ibid., 24–25.

125. Ibid., 25.

126. Ibid., 57–58.

127. Ibid., 60.

128. Césaire, Poésies, Théâtre, Essais et Discours, 1422.

129. Ibid., 1433–1435.

130. Ibid., 1447.

131. Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 32–33.

132. Ibid., 35 (italics in original).

133. Ibid., 35–36 (italics in original).

134. Ibid., 36. Pinkham’s translation has quotation marks around “coolies” and “niggers”; as these are absent from the French original I have deleted them and changed “niggers” into “Negroes”; see Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2004), 14.

135. Césaire, Discourse, 37.

136. Gary Wilder, “Untimely Visions,” Public Culture, 21 (2009), 127.

137. Césaire, Discourse, 42–43.

138. Césaire, Poésies, Théâtre, Essais et Discours, 1501–1502.

139. Césaire, Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai. Entretiens avec Françoise Vergès (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005), 30–31.

140. Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 225, 239.

141. Ahmed, A Border Passage: From Cairo to America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999), 5.

142. Ibid., 6.

143. Ibid., 145.

144. Ibid., 243.

145. Ibid., 245.

146. Ibid., 141.

147. Ibid., 6.

148. Ibid., 225.

149. Ibid., 267.

150. Ibid., 240–241.

151. Ahmed, Women and Gender, 162.

152. Ibid., 145–160.

153. Ibid., 136–137.

154. Ibid., 64–67.

155. Fatema Mernissi, Islam and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2002), 160.

156. Ahmed, Women and Gender, 1992, 55.

157. Ibid., 220–229; see also Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).

158. On this duality, see also Nilüfer Göle, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).

159. Ahmed, Women and Gender, 237.

160. Ahmed, Quiet Revolution, 298.

161. Andrew Clapham, Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 48–50.

162. Cited in A. W. Brian Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 663.

163. Cited in Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 94.

164. Moyn, Last Utopia, 129–175.

165. Amnesty International, News Release, 16 June 1999.

166. Césaire, Entretien avec Françoise Vergès, 69.

Epilogue

1. Jerry Bentley, “Myths, Wagers, and Some Moral Implications of World History,” Journal of World History, 16 (2005), 80.

2. Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: Norton, 2006), 23–39.

3. Christopher Hill, “Conceptual Universalization in the Transnational Nineteenth Century,” in Global Intellectual History, ed. Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 150–152.

4. Donald B. Brown, Human Universals (New York: McGraw Hill, 1991); Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism (New York: Norton, 2006), 94–99.

5. John W. Cook, Morality and Cultural Differences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

6. George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 2.

7. Siep Stuurman, François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

8. See Blandine L. McLaughlin, “Diderot and Women,” in French Women and the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Samia I. Spencer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 297–298.

9. Immanuel Kant, Werke, 12 vols. (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1968), 3:13.

10. Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia, trans. Richard N. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 90.

11. Sudipta Kaviraj, The Imaginary Institution of India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 35.

12. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 5–6, 27–29.

13. Joseph-Emmanuel Sieyès, Écrits politiques, ed. Roberto Zapperi (Paris: Édition des archives contemporaines, 1985), 60.

14. Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1911), 127.

15. Paul Bairoch, “The Main Trends in National Economic Disparities since the Industrial Revolution,” in Disparities in Economic Development, ed. Paul Bairoch and Maurcise Lévy-Leboyer (London: Macmillan, 1981), 7.

16. Yves Lambert, “New Christianity, Indifference, and Diffused Spirituality,” in The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, ed. Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 63–78.

17. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), 288 (italics in original).

18. Pankaj Ghemawat, World 3.0 (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011), 26.

19. Ibid., 11, 34–35, 213–214.

20. Ibid., 232.

21. Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 108–109.

22. See Robert McCrum, Globish (London: Penguin-Viking, 2010), 8.

23. Jürgen Osterhammel, “Globalizations,” in Oxford Handbook of World History, ed. Jerry H. Bentley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 101.

24. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest (Summer Issue, 1989), 6.

25. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London: The Free Press, 2002), 13, 20.

26. Ibid., 20.

27. Ibid., 129–130.

28. Lydia H. Liu, The Clash of Empires (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 1.

29. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, 318.

30. Ibid., 312.

31. Ibid., 195–196.

32. Leila Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011); Fatema Mernissi, Islam and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2002); Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Heretic (New York: Harper Collins, 2015).

33. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, 105.

34. Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 151.

35. Sen, Identity and Violence, 10–12.

36. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, 311–312.

37. Ibid., 320.

38. Bruce Mazlish, Civilization and Its Contents (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 17.

39. Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society, trans. Naomi Goldblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 151.

40. Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), chap. 6.

41. UN General Assembly, Resolution 217 A(III), “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” 10 December 1948, Article 29 (1).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

With books it is always hard to pin down a beginning, but it was during my work on a book about the French Cartesian feminist François Poulain de la Barre in the 1990s that I hit upon the idea of writing a history of equality. I have to thank the Amsterdam cultural center De Balie for inviting me to give a talk on the history of equality in January 1998. If a “beginning” can be ascertained, it was then and there.

Thanks are also due to Phyllis Mack, who invited me to participate in a conference on the varieties of religious experience at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio in 1999 and who some years later commented on the first version of the book. I also cherish the memory of the discussions and the intellectual companionship in the London-based research project on Gender and Enlightenment, led by Barbara Taylor and Sarah Knott from 1998 to 2003. The same is true of my stay at UCLA in spring 2001, where Margaret Jacob and Lynn Hunt were beloved friends as well as challenging intellectual sparring partners. Furthermore, I want to thank Mark Bevir for inviting me to Berkeley in 2003; Dror Wahrman and Jonathan Sheehan, who enabled me to participate in a conference on “the global eighteenth century” at the University of Indiana in 2004; and Carolyn Lougee for her invitation to give a paper on Anquetil Duperron and Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism at Stanford in 2005. Other stimulating venues were the conferences of the International Society for Intellectual History, in Chicago (2000), Istanbul (2003), and London (2007). In particular, I wish to thank Constance Blackwell for encouraging me to publish some of my work-in-progress in Intellectual News, then the official journal of the ISIH, of which she was the indefatigable editor.

A great stride forward in putting together the theoretical framework for the book was made in 2005 when I was a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. I want to thank Jonathan Israel for the opportunity to participate in his seminar on Enlightenment thought and Nicola di Cosmo for helping me find my way in the history of Han China and its steppe enemies. In fall 2005 I presented a tentative outline of what would eventually become the book in the European History and Culture Colloquium at UCLA. I wish to thank Margaret Jacob, Lynn Hunt, and Ellen du Bois for their helpful comments. In fall 2007 I presented a paper to the New York Area Seminar in Intellectual History, where Jerrold Seigel and Melvin Richter presented insightful commentary and critique. Furthermore, I am indebted to several anonymous referees for the Journal of the History of Ideas and the Journal of World History. Discussions with Donald Kelley were also most stimulating.

In 2010, I gave my farewell lecture at Erasmus University. The Festschrift I received from colleagues was entirely devoted to the history of common humanity and equality. I wish to thank the editors Maria Grever, Ido de Haan, Dienke Hondius, and Susan Legêne, as well as Wiep van Bunge, Dick Douwes, Thijl Sunier, Karin Hofmeester, Hanneke Hoekstra, Stefan Dudink, Marianne Braun, Tjitske Akkerman, Berteke Waaldijk, Gabriël van den Brink, and Ed Jonker for their contributions to the book. From 2010 to 2015 I was a fellow of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University. I want to thank its inspiring director, Rosi Braidotti, for inviting me to join the centre.

Sustained work on the project began in 2004, when I taught a two-month course on the history of equality at Sabanci University in Istanbul. Beginning in 2004 I taught a yearly master seminar on equality and cultural difference in world history at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. In the late spring of 2006 I taught the same course at Xiamen University in China. From 2010 to 2015 I taught a research master seminar on common humanity, equality, and cultural difference at Utrecht University. I would like to thank the numerous students who participated in those seminars for their incisive questions and suggestions.

In 2009 I published De Uitvinding van de Mensheid with Amsterdam publisher Prometheus/Bert Bakker. I would like to thank its director, Mai Spijkers, for his confidence in the project and Marieke van Oostrom for her careful editorial assistance. In 2010, Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori invited me to take part in a conference on Global Intellectual History in New York. The conference and the work on the book that resulted from it (published with Columbia University Press in 2013) were just what I needed to give my project its final push. With Sudipta Kaviraj, one of the other contributors to the 2010 conference, I taught a master class on global intellectual history at the University of Amsterdam in May 2014 that was very congenial and helpful. Over the last three years discussions with my PhD student Devin Vartija were likewise inspiring. I am grateful for his permission to cite his unpublished MA thesis “Natural Equality and Racial Classification in Enlightenment Encyclopedias.” Furthermore, I wish to thank the Dutch Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for inviting me to deliver the 2010 Burgerhart Lecture “Global Equality and Inequality in Enlightenment Thought.” Discussions about intellectual history and world history with my colleagues Floris Cohen and Rens Bod were helpful as well as pleasurable.

Christian Lange, Maaike van Berkel, and Rudi Künzel kindly read my chapter on medieval Islam; their critical comments were most welcome and saved me from some errors. Annelien de Dijn shared her ideas on intellectual history with me and read a version of Chapter 9. Over the years, intellectual cooperation with my Rotterdam colleague Maria Grever, with whom I organized a conference on the canon of modern history and coedited the book that resulted, has been a precious and valuable experience that has contributed in several ways to the present book. I am also indebted to the two anonymous readers who commented on my book for Harvard University Press.

I wish to express my gratitude to Kathleen McDermott, who has been my editor at Harvard since 2001, when she guided my book on Poulain de la Barre from book project to publication. Kathleen’s guidance helped me to keep the faith during the long period from project to book.

Finally, there is Selma Leydesdorff. We have been together for more than forty years, and most of that time both of us were working on a book. We have always read each other's drafts. Selma has read The Invention of Humanity at least twice over. I am grateful for that, but even more for sharing her life with mine.

INDEX

- Abel, 58

- Abraham, 34, 59–60, 68, 79, 84

- Abyssinia, 193

- Achilles, 37

- Acosta, José de, 29, 202, 236–247, 251, 256–257, 261, 272, 291–292, 312

- Adam, 17, 57–58, 80, 278

- Adler, Eric, 148

- Adorno, Theodor, 524

- Adrian VI, Pope, 220

- Adwa, 422–423

- Afghanistan, 159, 161, 170, 568

- Africa, 29, 77, 82, 116–121, 156–157, 167, 191–196, 240, 265, 278, 285–289, 294–298, 303–311, 334, 340, 343, 350–351, 369, 390–391, 419–428, 441–442, 492, 531, 564–565, 575

- African American Emancipation: three-fifths compromise in American Constitution, 377; rise of abolitionism, 377–379; life story of Frederick Douglass, 379–386; rise of polygenist racism, 387–388; Douglass’s critique of scientific racism, 388–393; the color of ancient Egypt, 390–391; Franz Boas on, 440–446; W. E. B. Du Bois on, 446–453; in the making of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 496

- African civilization: Buffon on, 306–307; Blumenbach on, 314; polygenists on, 315–316; role in Haitian Revolution, 370, 373, 376; Frederick Douglass on, 390–391; battle of Adwa, 422–423; Pan–African Conference, 423–424; Anténor Firmin on, 427–428; Franz Boas on, 442; W. E. B. Du Bois on, 442, 455, 457, Gandhi on, 467–468; Aimé Césaire on, 528–529

- Agamemnon, 37, 93, 253

- Agassiz, Louis, 387, 390

- Agricola, Gnaeus Julius, 142–143

- Ahmed, Edward Lane, 537

- Ahmed, Leila, 30, 80, 410, 412, 489, 533–541

- Ahuma, Attoh, 426

- Akbar, 24, 84

- Akhenaten, 59

- Al-Adawiya, Rabe’a, 176–177

- Al-Bakri, 178

- Al-Biruni, Abu al-Rayhan, 29, 157–158, 161–168, 197–199

- Al-Bukhari, 161

- Al-Din Attar, Farid, 29

- Alexander the Great, 55, 89, 91, 95, 214

- Alexander VI, Pope, 212

- Al-Farabi, 161

- Algeria, 457, 488, 531

- Al-Hadrami, 180

- Al-Hamawi, Yaqut, 185

- Al-Idrisi, 178, 182

- Al-Khwarazmi, 160

- Alkidamas, 89

- Al-Kindi, 161

- Allende, Salvador, 498

- Al-Mas’udi, 163, 184–185

- Al-Quwatli, Shukri, 493

- Al-Razi, 161

- Al-Tahtawi, 410, 538

- Al-Vasati, 173

- Amaru, Tupac, 237

- Amazon, 249, 291

- America, 13, 16, 20, 28–29, 200–202, 212, 218–219, 240–241, 254, 257–261, 303, 307–308, 317, 323, 328–336, 340, 350–351, 365, 376–378, 420, 439, 490–497, 562. See also North America; South America

- Amin, Ahmed, 538

- Amin, Qasim, 411–412, 538

- Anacharsis, 125

- Anaximander, 50

- Andrade, Rodrigo de, 223

- Anquetil-Duperon, Abraham-Hyacinthe, 261–262, 319–322, 339–341, 399, 439, 538, 553–554, 559

- Anthropological turn, 9, 12–14, 555–556; in Xenophanes, 53–54; in Herodotus, 121–122; in Sima Qian, 134–139; in Tacitus, 142–148; in Al–Biruni, 163–164; in Bartolomé de Las Casas, 228, 234; in Bernardino de Sahagún, 229–230; in Montaigne, 249, 254; in Inca Garsilaso de la Vega, 245; in Montesquieu, 264–265; in Anquetil Duperron, 322; in Diderot, 324–325; in Raynal, 330; in Frederick Douglass, 383–384, 391; in Dadabhai Naoroji, 400–401; in Soewardi Soerjaningrat, 424–425; in Anténor Firmin, 426; in José Rizal, 430; in Franz Boas, 434–437, 441, in W. E. B. Du Bois, 453–457; in Aimé Césaire, 527–529, 531

- Antiphon, 88–89, 109, 121

- Antoinette, Marie, 364

- Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 578

- Aquinas, Thomas, 209, 216

- Arabian Peninsula, 62, 69, 76–77, 82, 191, 193

- Aral Sea region, 159–160

- Archelaus, 87

- Arcos, Miguel de, 211

- Arctic, 157, 241, 289, 307, 311, 433, 521–523

- Aristides, Aelius, 90

- Aristotle, 50, 87, 89, 91, 161, 195–196, 223, 240, 274, 406

- Armenia, 156, 185, 455

- Arminius, 139, 144–145, 148

- Armitage, David, 8

- Armstrong, Karen, 113

- Arnold, Edwin, 465

- Artabanes, 127

- Artemis, 93

- Asia, 29, 32, 62, 67–68, 77, 82, 96, 116–118, 131, 156–157, 200–201, 265–267, 278, 290–298, 303, 310–311, 321, 334, 340–343, 350–351, 394–396, 402, 419–426, 490–492, 564–565, 575

- Asia Minor, 50, 85, 87, 119–121, 126

- Asoka, Emperor, 24

- Assmann, Jan, 5

- Assyria, 65, 76

- Atatürk, 409, 481

- Athens, 7, 86–87, 91, 119, 123–124, 227, 267, 563

- Attar, Farid al-Din, 29, 157–158, 169–178, 196–199, 551

- Augustine, 71–74, 216, 230

- Augustus, Octavianus, 141

- Auld, Sophia, 380

- Auld, Thomas, 381, 383

- Auschwitz, 488, 523

- Australia, 29, 265, 310–311, 351, 393–394, 436, 463, 466–467, 484, 495

- Austria, 441, 542

- Averroes, 180, 191

- Avicenna, 161

- Avignon, 360

- Axial Age, 23, 31–33, 556

- Aydin, Cemil, 482

- Aztecs: European judgements of, 227, 243;

- views on Spanish invasion, 229–233

- Baali, Fuad, 194

- Babylon, 62–63, 65, 76, 119

- Bactria, 131

- Bahamas, 291

- Bailey, Harriet, 380

- Baker, Polly, 327

- Balbus, 93–94

- Banner, Stuart, 292

- Barbarians: in the New Testament, 75; in the Sophists, 87–89; in Mencius, 105–106; in Xunzi, 108–111; in antiquity, 117–119; in Herodotus, 121; in Sima Qian, 130–134; in Tacitus, 141–149; “Berbers” as barbarians, 178–179; in Sepúlveda, 225; in Bartolomé de Las Casas, 226–227; in Acosta, 238; in Montaigne, 250; in Enlightenment philosophical history, 338–339

- Bardaisan, 72, 83

- Barkan, Elazar, 518

- Barnave, Antoine, 367–368

- Baroody, Jamil, 505–506

- Bayle, Pierre, 261, 271, 285, 558

- Bayly, C. A., 350, 564

- Bayonne, 355

- Beaglehole, Ernest, 512

- Beaune, 364

- Beckwith, Christopher, 160

- Belair, 370–371

- Belgium, 491, 542

- Bell, Madison Smartt, 371

- Belley, Jean-Baptiste, 375

- Belorussia, 506

- Bendyshe, Thomas, 309

- Benedict, Ruth, 508–509, 513

- Bengal, 332, 341, 470, 473, 531

- Bentham, 405, 428

- Bentley, Jerry, 118, 552

- Bering, Vitus, 265

- Bernard, Jean Fréderic, 262, 316–318

- Bernier, François, 264, 278, 296, 301, 310–311, 320

- Berr, Isaac, 359–360

- Bhadrakh, 319

- Biassou, 370–371

- Bischheim, 357

- Black Sea region, 85, 87, 121, 124

- Bloom, Irene, 106

- Blossius, 92

- Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 302, 309–315, 352, 428

- Boas, Franz, 13, 30, 422, 432–446, 454, 462, 482–484, 508–509, 513

- Boas-Meyer, Sophie, 432

- Bombay, 350, 397–398, 403

- Bordeaux, 248, 355

- Bosworth, Edmund, 162

- Botany Bay, 265

- Boucher d’Argis, Antoine Gaspard, 282–283, 330, 554

- Boudicca, Queen, 142–143, 145, 148

- Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de, 265, 288, 323–326, 435, 540, 554

- Bradlaugh, Charles, 465

- Brazil, 202, 242, 291, 348, 495, 565

- Brindly, Erica, 132

- Britain, 289, 308–309, 313, 340, 379, 385, 398–408, 414–418, 484–485, 489–494, 512, 542–544

- Britannia, 95–96, 116, 142–143, 146

- Broca, Paul, 426–427

- Brown, Peter, 77

- Brown, William Wells, 378–379

- Buffon, George-Louis Leclerc de, 266–267, 286, 296–298, 302–315, 320–321, 342–344, 387–388, 392–394, 427, 546, 559

- Burbank, Jane, 486

- Burghardt, Mary Silvina, 447

- Burgos, 205–206, 220, 222

- Burgundy, 364

- Burke, Edmund, 266, 334, 339–341, 349, 531

- Burlamaqui, Jean-Jacques, 283, 286

- Burma, 481, 492–493

- Burton, Antoinette, 404

- Butler, Colonel, 308

- Butterfield, Herbert, 23

- Bystricky, Rudolph, 543

- Caesar, Augustus, 144

- Caesar, Julius, 71, 90, 252

- Cain, 58

- Cairo, 181–183, 188–189, 392, 410, 538

- Calgacus, 143–145

- Callicles, 87

- Cambyses, King, 121–122, 128, 150

- Canada, 261, 291–292, 322, 434, 463, 467

- Cano, Melchor, 214

- Caonao, 219

- Cap Français, 372

- Capac, Guayna, 237

- Capac, Manco, 245

- Cape of Good Hope, 310

- Cape Verde, 306

- Capitein, Jacob Joseph Eliza, 313

- Caribbean, 202, 248, 291, 365–366, 379, 391, 419, 422, 526

- Carpenter, Edward, 465

- Carr, E. H., 501

- Carter, Jimmy, 544

- Carthage, 15, 96, 240

- Cassin, René, 498, 500, 505, 543

- Castillo, Diaz del, 230–231

- Castro, Daniel, 236

- Cato, 90

- Caucasian race, 311–313

- Central America, 348, 439

- Central Asia, 82, 96, 131, 156–161, 169–170, 178–180, 182, 198

- Cerialis, Petillius, 145, 151

- Césaire, Aimé, 30, 488–489, 526–534, 548

- Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 16, 344, 562

- Chamberlain, Joseph, 466

- Chambers, Ephraim, 268

- Charles, King, 220–221

- Charles V, Emperor, 212, 222–223, 231

- Charles IX, King, 249

- Charron, Pierre, 318, 320

- Cheddadi, Abdesselam, 186

- Chen An, 111

- Chile, 242, 499, 506, 545, 565

- China, 8, 16, 19, 24, 27, 82, 97–98, 101–111, 116–118, 128–139, 150–159, 167, 182, 185, 198, 242, 266, 278, 285, 290, 300–301, 318, 323, 350–353, 414, 419, 424, 481–482, 492–494, 499, 544, 565, 568, 572–574

- Christ, 68–76, 79, 81, 204, 209, 213, 226, 234–239, 253, 270, 278, 284, 372, 384, 453, 461, 470, 479

- Chung-Shu Lo, 502

- Churchill, Winston, 475, 490, 492

- Cicero, 90, 93–96

- Circassia, 193

- Cisneros, Francisco Ximenéz de, 220

- Cisneros, Jiménez de, 207

- Civilis, Julius, 144–145, 148

- Civilization, 26–27, 34, 149–155; Rousseau on, 264; in Diderot’s Encyclopedia, 280–284; racialized in nineteenth century, 351; Gandhi on European civilization, 421, 472–474; Huntington on, 574

- Civilizing mission: in Raynal and Diderot, 337–338; in Condorcet, 342–344; in John Stuart Mill, 404–409; in Egypt, 409–412; Gandhi on British imperial citizenship, 421, 466–467; in Aimé Césaire, 530–531

- Clark, William, 387

- Clash of civilizations, 30, 38, 533, 569–575

- Clayton, Lawrence, 236

- Clendinnen, Inga, 230–231

- Columbus, Christopher, 29, 200–202, 212, 217–218, 292

- Columbus, Diego, 204–205, 219

- Comas, Juan, 512

- Common humanity, 1–3, 6–7, 10–12, 32–34, 65–66, 111–114; and empire, 34–36; in Homer, 38–42, in Hesiod, 49–50; in Xenophanes, 54; in the Hebrew bible, 56–61; in the New Testament, 72–75; in the Quran, 80–83; in Greek Sophists, 87–89; in Stoicism, 92, 94–95; in Confucianism, 101, 103, 105, 108; in Al–Biruni, 166–167; in Attar, 173–174; in Ibn Khaldun, 191–196; in Antonio de Montesinos. 204; in Vitoria, 213; in Bartolomé de Las Casas, 226–227, 234–236; in Acosta, 238–240, 246–247; in Montaigne, 250–255; limits of on the Atlantic frontier, 255–257; in Enlightenment, 260–261; in Montesquieu and Voltaire, 271; in Poulain de la Barre, 275–277; in Diderot, 287; in Buffon, 305; in Blumenbach, 311; in Bernard and Picart, 318; in Anquetil Duperron, 321; in Raynal and Diderot, 335–336; in Frederick Douglass, 388–390; and imagined globalization, 392–393; in Soewardi Soerjaningrat, 424–425; in Anténor Firmin, 426–428; in José Rizal, 429–431; in Franz Boas, 433, 437–438,443–444; in W. E. B. Du Bois, 451–452; in Gandhi, 475–481; in Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 498, 501–508; in UNESCO Statements on Race, 513–515, in The Family of Man, 523; in Aimé Césaire, 528–529; dynamic version of, 545; as Archimedean point in moral history of humanity, 556; not consistent with ethical relativism, 554

- Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat Marquis de, 25, 299, 342–343, 362–363, 558, 563–564

- Confucianism, 97–111

- Confucius, 17, 19, 32–33, 35, 97–112, 129

- Congo, 369, 373

- Conrad, Joseph, 36

- Conrad, Sebastian, 497

- Constantine, Emperor, 69

- Cook, Captain, 265

- Cook, Michael, 78

- Cooper, Frederick, 486

- Córdoba, Pedro de, 218, 220

- Corinth, 15, 90

- Cortéz, Hernán, 200, 208, 230–233, 239

- Cosmo, Nicola di, 137

- Costa Pinto, L. A., 512–513

- Covey, Edward, 381–382, 384, 454

- Craniometry, 315, 387

- Crawfurd, John, 394–404, 414, 416, 572

- Critias, 87

- Cromer, Lord, 410–411

- Cronos, 45–46

- Cuba, 219, 495

- Cultural identity: not a primordial “fact,” 550; not unitary, 551; hybridity the normal case, 552

- Cultural relativism, 13; not to be conflated with ethical relativism, 13–14, 554; in Herodotus, 122; in Al–Biruni, 163–164; in Montaigne, 253–254; in Anquetil Duperron, 322; in Diderot, 326; as methodological rule in Franz Boas, 437

- Cumana, 221

- Curzon, Lord, 473

- Cuzco, 237, 245

- Cyaxares, 126

- Cyprus, 91

- Cyrenaica, 85, 119

- Cyrus, 24, 63, 247

- Czechoslovakia, 491, 506

- Dakiki, 161–162

- D’Alembert, Rond, 284, 561

- Damascus, 181

- Darius, King, 122, 124–126

- Darwin, Charles, 427, 514, 546

- Davis, David Brion, 377

- De Felice, Fortunato Bartolomeo, 286

- De Pauw, Cornelius, 286, 308, 315, 321

- De Slane, Baron, 186

- Debs, Eugene, 453

- “Decent society” and multiculturalism, 575–576

- Dekker, Eduard Douwes, 428

- Dekker, Ernest Douwes, 424–425

- Denmark, 542

- Descartes, 269, 272–275, 277, 284, 299, 348, 561

- Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 375

- Dewey, John, 499

- Dhingra, Madanlal, 471

- Diderot, Denis, 12, 259, 261–262, 267–268, 279–280, 285–288, 296, 299, 321–332, 335, 339–344, 435, 540, 553–554, 558–560, 562–563, 574

- Dio, Cassius, 148

- Dionysius, 184

- Disraeli, Benjamin, 563

- Dobie, Madeleine, 331

- Dominican Republic, 495

- Dong Zhongshu, 98–99, 129

- Douglass, Frederick, 351, 376–393, 400, 409, 414–415, 427, 446, 450–451, 454, 463, 531

- Du Bois, Alfred, 447

- Du Bois, W. E. B., 30, 420–426, 442–443, 446–463, 468, 481–484, 496, 526

- Du Port, Adrien, 356

- Dubçek, Alexander, 543

- Duncan, David, 524

- Dürer, Albrecht, 227

- Dutch Indies, 424–425, 457. See also Indies

- Dutty, Boukman, 370

- Dyer, Reginald, 474–475

- Dyson, Stephen, 145

- East Asia, 32, 68, 290

- Efendi, Jusuf, 313

- Efendi, Mehmed, 265

- Egypt, 43, 49, 62, 76, 85, 119–122, 128, 181, 390–392, 409–412, 427–428, 495, 505, 534–535, 539

- Ehrenberg, Israel, 508

- Eigen, Sara, 313

- Empire, 34–36, 113; Christianity and Roman Empire, 74–75; Islam and Arabic Empire, 82–83; Stoicism and Empire, 89–91, 96; Confucianism on Empire, 110; Maritime Athenian empire, 123; in Eurasia, 160; and Christian natural law in America, 208–217; early-modern European, 266; territorial colonialism in India, 332; empires as important as civilizations, 570, 574

- Engels, Friedrich, 432

- England, 289, 308–309, 340, 385, 405, 414, 512. See also Britain

- Enlightenment, 24; as a turning point in world history, 258–259; modern equality and modern inequality in, 259–260; as series of controversies, 260; global equality and critique of colonialism, 261–262; religious wars and global encounters, 263–268; secularization of intellectual culture, 272; robustness of anti-imperialism, 341; conclusions on, 556–561; Jonathan Israel on, 558–560; metatext on critique moves beyond religion, 561; procedural liberalism, 561; disruptive novelty of, 562

- Environmentalism: in Xunzi, 108–109; in Enlightenment thought, 274–277; in Buffon, 305; in Condorcet, 343; in Anténor Firmin, 427; in José Rizal, 430; in Franz Boas, 435

- Epictetus, 92, 372

- Epimetheus, 44

- Epirus, 92

- Equality effect, 17–18, 468–471, 548–549

- Erskine, Andrew, 91

- Espinal, Alfonso Del, 205

- Ethical relativism, 13–14; Gandhi on, 479

- Ethiopia, 56, 121, 419, 422–423, 427–428

- Euclid, 161

- Eurasia, 15–16, 29, 31–32, 113, 117–118, 160, 191, 195–196, 240, 289, 310, 321

- Europe, 4, 15–16, 19, 23–24, 29, 96, 117, 157, 193, 200–201, 265, 267, 278, 283–285, 289–290, 295–306, 310, 321–323, 332–345, 350, 394–396, 402, 409–423, 488–491, 531, 544, 558–565, 573–577

- Eve, 17, 57–58, 60, 80, 278

- Eyre, Edward John, 408

- Ezra, 55

- Fanon, Frantz, 526

- Farouk, King, 534

- Feminism: in early–modern Europe, 274, 298–301; in Poulain de la Barre, 274–279; in Mary Wollstonecraft, 299; in Condorcet, 343; in French Revolution, 361–365; in colonial Egypt, 409–412; in John Stuart Mill, 409; in W. E. B. Du Bois, 451; in the making of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 495, 489–499; and religious fundamentalism, 566; globalization of, 571

- Ferdinand, King, 205, 220

- Ferghana, 131, 156

- Festa, Lynn, 336

- Feuerwerker, David, 357

- Filipina, Liga, 430–431

- Fingarette, Herbert, 99

- Firdawsi, 170

- Firmin, Anténor, 30, 420, 422, 426–428, 431, 439, 455

- Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de, 288–289, 309, 317, 323

- Forge, Louis de la, 277

- Forster, Georg, 315

- Foucault, Michel, 547

- France, 242, 248–252, 261, 265, 272–273, 278, 289, 298–299, 316, 332, 353–360, 365, 373, 409, 444, 456, 484–485, 489, 493, 495, 531–532

- Frazier, Franklin, 512

- Frederickson, George, 203, 441

- Friedman, Thomas, 565

- Fromherz, Allen James, 181, 186

- Frontiers, 6, 26–27; and empires, 27–28; in Homer, 38, 42–43, in antiquity, 117–119; in Herodotus, 119–124; in Sima Qian, 130–137; in Tacitus, 139–141; Atlantic frontier, 200–201

- Fukuyama, Francis, 567–570

- Fuller, Margaret, 378

- Galba, 141

- Galen, 161, 274

- Gandhi, 17, 20, 30, 421–423, 426, 463–484, 499, 536, 562

- Gaozi, Emperor, 98, 134

- Garcilaso de la Vega, 244–245, 255–256

- Garnsey, Peter, 223

- Garrison, William Lloyd, 378–379, 382–384

- Garvey, Marcus, 458

- Gaul, 140, 144–146, 152

- Gender: in Homer, 42, in Hesiod, 44; in the Hebrew bible, 60; in the New Testament, 75; in the Quran, 80–81; in Athenian democracy, 86; in Roman Stoicism, 95; in Hinduism, 165–166; in Peru, 243–244; in Poulain de la Barre, 273–279; Jaucourt on, 281; in philosophical history, 296–301; Diderot on Tahiti, 325–327; women’s citizenship in French Revolution, 361–365; abolitionism and feminism in the United States, 378; Douglass on votes for women, 386; John Crawfurd on Asia, 396; Dadabhai Naoroji on India, 400; in colonial Egypt, 409–412; in Franz Boas, 438, 441; in Gandhi, 478; in Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 500, 505–506; in The Family of Man, 521–522; in Islam, 533–541; and clash of civilizations, 571

- Genghis Khan, 156

- Germania, 116, 118

- Germany, 30, 432–434, 457–463, 488–493, 500, 542

- Ghazna, 159, 161–162, 198

- Ghemawat, Pankaj, 565

- Gibbon, Edward, 335, 340

- Gilroy, Paul, 448

- Ginzberg, Morris, 512

- Gladstone, Herbert, 404

- Gliddon, George, 387, 390

- Global color line: in John Stuart Mill, 408; response to anticolonialism, 413–418; and gender, 420; criticized by Anténor Firmin, 420; in Du Bois, 422, 454; Du Bois on “the souls of white folk,” 454–457; contradictory stance of Gandhi on, 467; women as human rights activists, 566

- Global intellectual history, 18–22; serial contextualism, 8–9; metaconcepts, 18–19; ideas and social experiences, 20–22

- Global migration, 350

- Globalization: in Raynal, 261–262; in mid-eighteenth century, 265; global ethnography, 266; of human rights, 548-549; often overestimated, 565; acceleration of in the 1990s, 566–567

- Globalization of anti-colonialism: in late nineteenth century, 416; in early twentieth century, 421–422; Ethiopia defeats Italian invasion, 422–423; Japan defeats Russia, 423; first Pan-African Conference, 423–424; Iran, Turkey, Indonesia, Russia and America, 424–426; global impact of “1905,” 481; Du Bois on global conditions of black liberation, 457

- Gobryas, 124–125, 127

- Goethe, 432

- Gomera, 231

- Gorbachev, Mikhail, 572

- Gouges, Olympe de, 299, 364

- Gournay, Marie de, 298

- Gracchus, Tiberius, 92

- Granger, Herbert, 53

- Greece, 19, 42, 90, 116, 119, 123–128, 139, 154, 317, 491, 500

- Greenland, 307, 310, 433, 440

- Grégoire, Henry, 358, 366–367, 529

- Grimké, Angelina, 378

- Grotius, Hugo, 261, 268–271, 290

- Grouchy, Sophie de, 342, 362

- Guatemala, 242

- Guignes, Joseph de, 266

- Habib, Haji, 468

- Haiti, 365–379, 393, 422, 426–428, 457

- Haitian Revolution, 365–376; “gens de couleur” in, 365–368; speech of Boukman Dutty, 370; Toussaint L’Ouverture, 371–372; influence of Congolese political ideas, 373; abolition of slavery, 375; three languages of equality, 376; influence of Haiti on the United States, 378–379

- Halde, Jean-Baptiste de, 284

- Halicarnassus, 119, 184

- Han Fei, 98

- Hanke, Lewis, 223

- Hann Xin, 134

- Happamaruji, 35

- Hardy, Grant, 151

- Hartog, François, 42, 123

- Hastings, Warren, 332

- Hatuey, 219

- Hecataeus, 54

- Henry II, King, 249

- Herder, Johann Gottfried, 261, 339, 341–342, 432, 445

- Hermes, 44

- Herodotus, 4, 8, 12–15, 24, 89, 115–134, 137–139, 149–157, 197–199, 224, 250–252, 338, 406, 553, 555

- Hesiod, 40, 43–53, 57, 60, 65, 112

- Hiebert, Theodore, 58

- Hinduism: Al–Biruni on, 161–168; metempsychosis as main tenet of, 164; Islamic equality versus caste, 164–165; gender regime in, 165–166; scientific achievements in, 167

- Hindustan, 320–321, 323, 396

- Hippocrates, 125, 161, 274

- Hispaniola, 201–204, 207–208, 218, 221, 292, 330, 365

- History: origins of, 115–116; includes geography and ethnography, 116

- Hitler, Adolf, 460–461, 483, 488, 490–492, 501, 531

- Ho Chi Minh, 458

- Hobbes, Thomas, 263–264, 269, 281, 299

- Hobsbawm, Eric, 564

- Holcombe, Charles, 111

- Holy War: in the Hebrew bible, 61–64; in the New Testament, 75–78; on Islam, 83–85

- Home, Henry, 315–316

- Homer, 4, 10, 36–43, 45, 49–53, 56, 65, 112, 125, 554

- Horace, 90

- Horkheimer, Max, 524

- Hugo, Victor, 428

- Human rights: in Hugo Grotius, 268-269; in Jaucourt, 280; in Diderot, 286-288; in Anquetil Duperron, 321; in American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, 346–347; in Jewish emancipation, 356, 359–360; in rights of women, 361; Condorcet and Marie-Madeleine Jodin on, 362–364; rights of “colored people,” 366–368; in emancipation of slaves, 371–375; Frederick Douglass on the Declaration of Independence, 384; after the Second World War, 486–488; in Atlantic Charter, 490; in United Nations Charter, 493–497; in Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 497–508; pictorial representation in Family of Man, 520–521, 525–526; Aimé Césaire on, 531–533; new human rights politics in the late twentieth century, 541–545

- Humboldt, Alexander von, 432, 445

- Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 432, 445

- Hume, David, 292, 315

- Humphrey, John, 498, 500, 506

- Hungary, 441

- Hunt, Lynn, 286, 316–317, 347

- Huntington, Samuel, 533, 569–575

- Hurston, Zora Neale, 443

- Iberian Peninsula, 201, 256

- Ibn al-Athir, 185

- Ibn Battutah, 183, 442

- Ibn Harb, Ahmad, 176

- Ibn Khaldun, 4, 15, 24, 29, 83, 157–158, 178–199, 261, 338

- Ibn Rushd, 180, 191

- Ibn Salâma, 181, 183

- Ibn Sina, 161

- Iceland, 542

- Ikramullah, Shaista, 505

- Imagined humanity, 1, 31

- India, 84, 120, 157, 159, 163, 167, 197, 261, 278, 290, 321, 331–332, 350, 353, 394, 400–409, 463–481, 495, 499–500, 531, 565

- Indies, 202–203, 210–212, 218–223, 227, 238–239, 246, 250, 261, 336, 424–425, 457

- Indochina, 117, 416

- Indonesia, 416–419, 424, 429, 481, 492–493, 565

- Innocent IV, Pope, 209–210, 212, 226

- Inuit: Boas on, 433–434; in Diderot’s Encyclopedia, 553

- Iphigeneia, 93, 253

- Iran, 76–77, 80–84, 120, 158–161, 168–170, 290, 320, 397, 419, 424–426, 481, 533, 543–544

- Iraq, 168, 182, 185, 189, 193, 496, 568

- Ireland, 385, 389, 403, 542

- Isaac, 34, 60

- Isaiah, 63, 74, 174, 247

- Islam: and gender, 80-81, 533-541; centrality of, in 1000 CE, 156-157; world historical agency, 190–191; in Diderot’s Encyclopedia, 285; in Bernard and Picart, 317

- Israel, 61, 63, 240, 354, 358, 424, 535, 539, 559, 575

- Israel, Jonathan, 323, 328, 334

- Italy, 85, 119, 278, 402, 409, 423, 441, 444, 484, 542

- Iwanowitsch, Feodor, 313

- Jacob, 34, 59, 79

- Jacob, Margaret, 316–317

- Jaher, Frederic, 359

- Janvier, Louis-Joseph, 426

- Japan, 30, 35, 67, 242, 285, 350, 352, 396, 419; defeats Russia, 423, 481–482; proposal on race equality at Versailles, 484–485; anti-colonial propaganda in World War Two, 492–493

- Jaspers, Karl, 31, 503

- Jaucourt, Louis de, 259, 279–281, 284–286, 299, 321

- Jean-François, 370–371

- Jefferson, Thomas, 342

- Jenghiz Khan, 182

- Jerome, 70

- Jerusalem, 33, 55, 73, 201, 267

- Jews: racialized in Spain, 203; Acosta on, 240; Grotius, Simon, and Toland on, 270–271; in Diderot’s Encyclopedia, 284; emancipation in French Revolution, 353–360; Frederick Douglass on, 389; Franz Boas on anti-Semitism in America, 444; Du Bois on the Holocaust, 460–461; Aimé Césaire on Holocaust, 488; Allied declaration on Holocaust, 491

- Jihad, 83–85

- Jodin, Marie Madeleine, 363

- Jones, William, 352–353, 399

- Josephus, Flavius, 55

- Judea, 35, 55

- Kabir, Humayun, 502, 512

- Kabul, 156, 159

- Kahn, Zafrullah, 505

- Kames, Lord, 315–316

- Kant, Immanuel, 15, 261, 287, 315, 341, 432, 561

- Karski, Jan, 491

- Kaviraj, Sudipta, 561

- Keen, Benjamin, 224

- Kemal, Mustafa, 481

- Khalidi, Tarif, 181, 184

- Khrushchev, Nikita, 572

- Khurasan, 170, 189

- King, Martin Luther, 20, 483, 543

- Knox, Robert, 352–353, 393

- Ko, Dorothy, 300

- Kohn, Margaret, 381–382

- Korea, 67, 131, 524, 544, 565

- Koselleck, Reinhart, 348–349

- Krackowizer, Marie, 434

- Kumânâ, Darab Sorabjee, 319

- Laertius, Diogenes, 94

- Lafitau, Joseph-François, 307, 317

- Lake, Marilyn, 414

- Lakshmi Pandit, Vijaya, 497

- Lamartine, 428

- Lamberton, Robert, 46

- Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 29, 202, 207–208, 214–215, 217–229, 234–240, 246–257, 272, 293, 317, 555

- Las Casas, Pedro de, 217–218

- Latin America, 419, 522, 545, 548, 564–566, 570, 574–575

- Law of Nations: Stoic origins, 94; in Francisco de Vitoria, 214; as brief for European colonization, 217; in Diderot’s Encyclopedia, 282–284

- Lebanon, 493, 499, 505

- Leclerc, Georges-Louis, 302

- Lenin, Vladimir, 456, 490

- Léry, Jean de, 249, 291

- Lestringant, Frank, 267

- Levi-Strauss, Claude, 512

- Lewin, Moshe, 572

- Lewis, Archibald, 156

- Lewis, Herbert, 443

- Lewis, Mark Edward, 97

- Lewis, Meriwether, 387

- Lewisohn, Leonard, 169

- Li Chih-Ch’ang, 156

- Li Ling, 129

- Li Ruzhen, 300

- Liberia, 393, 419, 457

- Liguria, 85

- Lima, 237, 240

- Lincoln, Abraham, 377, 393

- Linnaeus, Carolus, 302, 304

- Liu, Lydia, 414, 570

- Livy, 15, 96, 148

- Locke, John, 261, 263–264, 267–268, 275, 281, 290–292, 329

- London, 283, 313, 350, 423–424

- Lucretius, 93, 248, 253

- Luke, 69, 72, 74–75

- Luo Qilan, 300

- Lutz, Bertha, 495

- Luxemburg, 491, 542

- Lygdamis, 119

- MacArthur, Douglas, 498–499

- Macaulay, 398, 408

- Macaya, 373–374

- MacCormack, Sabine, 235–236

- Machiavelli, Niccolo, 181, 190, 372

- MacIntyre, Alasdair, 37

- Madagascar, 331

- Magellan, 430

- Maghrib, 178–180, 183, 185, 187–189, 195

- Mahdi, Musin, 184, 190

- Mahmud, King, 161–162, 171, 198

- Major, John, 228

- Malay Peninsula, 311, 416

- Malcolm, John, 399

- Mali, 193

- Malik, Charles, 499, 501, 503

- Malinowski, Bronislaw, 433

- Malthus, 340, 546, 563

- Manchuria, 131, 350, 460

- Mandela, Nelson, 20, 483, 492

- Maodun, King, 131, 135

- Margalit, Avishai, 575–576

- Maritain, Jacques, 501–502

- Martinique, 368, 526–529, 532

- Marx, Karl, 5, 417–418, 432, 461, 503, 530

- Matthew, 71

- Maury, Abbé, 354

- Mazower, Mark, 489, 491

- McCarthy, Joseph, 524

- McCausland, Richard, 308–309

- McKeon, Richard, 501

- McKeown, Adam, 350

- McNeill, William, 26, 118, 569, 573

- Mead, Margaret, 513

- Mecca, 76–78, 156

- Medina, 76–78, 80

- Mediterranean, 42, 55, 70, 90, 153, 180, 290, 298

- Meek, Ronald, 264

- Mehta, Hansa, 499–500

- Meiners, Christoph, 311

- Melos, 86

- Mencius, 11, 99, 103–108, 110, 112, 117, 137, 555

- Mendel, Gregor, 509

- Mendelsohn, 461

- Menelik II, Emperor, 422

- Mengzi, 11

- Mernissi, Fatema, 539

- Mesopotamia, 43, 49, 55–56, 80, 82, 85–86, 120

- Mexico, 29, 222, 229–231, 235–245, 253, 256, 290, 293, 307, 317, 323, 337, 341, 494–495

- Middle East, 80, 183, 290, 397, 410, 537

- Mijnhardt, Wijnand, 316–317

- Mill, James, 352–353, 404

- Mill, John Stuart, 404–409, 412, 416, 428, 576

- Miller, Wayne, 524

- Mirabeau, 366, 376

- Mishra, Pankaj, 481

- Moctezuma, 230–233, 239

- Modena, Léon de, 270

- Modern equality, 22; world-historical significance of, 258–259; in Diderot’s Encyclopedia, 259; two faces of, 262–263, 338–345; underwritten by states, 346; universalization of after 1945, 495–498, 506–508

- Modern inequality, 24; in Enlightenment, 259–260, 280–282. See also Philosophical history; Race

- Molina, Luis de, 210

- Monogenism: in Hebrew Bible, 56–58; in Christianity, 70; in Quran, 80; in Acosta, 240–241; in Buffon, 303–305; in Blumenbach, 311–312; in Frederick Douglass, 389–390; in paleo-anthropology, 546

- Mons Graupus, 142

- Montagu, Ashley, 508–514, 516, 520

- Montaigne, Michel de, 13, 29, 202, 247–257, 272, 288, 291, 320, 445, 555

- Montchrétien, Antoine de, 292

- Montesinos, Antonio de, 201, 204–205, 211, 218, 255–256, 293

- Montesquieu, 12, 264–265, 271–272, 279, 284–285, 290, 297–299, 320–321, 396, 406, 562

- Morga, Antonio de, 430

- Morgan, Clement, 448

- Morton, Samuel, 352–353, 387–388, 390, 394

- Moses, 54–55, 61, 68, 76–77, 79, 177–178, 461

- Mosse, George, 557

- Moye, Richard, 59

- Moyn, Samuel, 544

- Müller, Max, 399

- Multatuli, 417, 424, 429

- Munro, Thomas, 407–408

- Murray, Anna, 382

- Muthu, Sankar, 326, 341

- Nagai, Ryutaro, 426

- Naidu, Sarojini, 499

- Naoroji, Dadabhai, 347, 393, 397–409, 413–418, 421, 428, 431, 439, 455, 463–465

- Napoleon, 343, 348, 375, 413, 422, 424, 561

- Nasser, 535–539

- Nationalism: Franz Boas on analogy with racism, 444–445; discourse of inclusion and exclusion, 557

- Native Americans: origins of, 240–242; Laws of Burgos on, 205–208; Vitoria on, 213, 216; Sepúlveda on, 224–225; Bartolomé de Las Casas on, 226–227; Sahagún’s oral history of, 229; Acosta on, 238–244; Inca Garcilaso de la Vega on, 244–245; Emer de Vattel on, 283; Fontenelle on, 289; Jaucourt on, 281; Locke on, 291; Antoine de Montchrétien on, 292; William Robertson on, 293–294; Buffon on, 307; alleged beardlessness of, 308–309; Blumenbach on, 313; Anquetil Duperron on, 323; Raynal and Diderot on, 330, 333–334; 337; Frederick Douglass on, 393–394; Franz Boas on, 434, 436, 438–440

- Natural equality: in Stoicism, 68, 89–96; in Sophists, 88–89; in Enlightenment, 259, 262–263, 269–270; among savages, 263–264; in Descartes, 272–273; in Poulain de la Barre, 274–279; in Jaucourt, 280–281; a habit of the heart, 286. See also Human rights

- Nazi Germany, Du Bois on, 460–463

- Neale, Harry, 175

- Nebuchadnezzar, 55

- Nehru, Jawaharlal, 475

- Nero, 146–147

- Nerrière, Jean-Paul, 566

- Netherlands, 424–425, 491, 500, 542

- New Zealand, 311, 351, 393, 463, 467, 495, 512

- Nguyen Tat Thanh, 458

- Nienhauser, William, 128

- Nishapur, 159–160, 169–170, 176

- Nkrumah, Kwame, 526

- Noah, 58, 81, 192–193, 240–241, 311

- North Africa, 31–32, 77, 82, 116, 118, 121, 156, 178, 181, 196, 311, 490, 493

- North America, 20, 280, 292, 304, 308–310, 317, 347, 353, 376–391, 400, 409, 413, 419, 440–446, 463, 545. See also United States

- Northrup, David, 306

- Norway, 491, 542

- Nott, Josiah, 352, 387

- Ocampo, Gonzalo di, 207

- Occllo, Isabel Chimpu, 245

- Odysseus, 36–42, 49

- Ogé, Jacques, 366

- Ogé, Vincent, 368

- Omai, 313

- Ometochtzin, Carlos, 229–230

- Oran, 181

- Orou, 325–326, 435

- Osterhammel, Jürgen, 567

- Ovando, Nicolás de, 208

- Oviedo, 231

- Pagden, Anthony, 247

- Paine, Thomas, 342, 349

- Painter, Nell, 441

- Pakistan, 493, 505

- Palestine, 55, 65, 72, 85, 120, 141

- Panaetius, 94

- Panama, 202, 495, 506

- Pandora, 44, 60

- Parable of the Good Samaritan, 551

- Parekh, Bhikhu, 471, 477, 480–481

- Paris, 210, 265, 286, 347–348, 356, 363–370, 374–375, 392

- Parthia, 131, 140

- Pasamonte, Miguel de, 208

- Pascal, Blaise, 19

- Paul, 32, 63, 74–75, 81, 278, 479

- Paul III, Pope, 221

- Penelope, 41–42

- Peng Chun Chang, 499, 501, 503

- Pericles, 7, 123

- Persia, 122, 124, 128, 253, 323

- Peru, 29, 202, 211, 222, 235–245, 253, 290–291, 293, 307, 323, 337, 341, 439

- Petit, Pierre, 296

- Philippines, 419, 428–431, 481, 492, 495, 499

- Philosophical history, 288–301; Fontenelle on Native Americans and Ancient Greeks, 288–289; progress of the human mind, 289; the four stages of history in Adam Smith, 289–290; history of property in, 290–292; William Robertson on America, 292–294; Rousseau on, 295; gender in, 296–301; gendering of progress, 296–297

- Phoenicia, 86, 119

- Picart, Bernard, 262, 316–318

- Pickens, William, 460

- Pierrot, 374

- Pigafetta, Antonio, 430

- Pitts, Jennifer, 283

- Pizan, Christine de, 274, 299

- Pizarro, 211, 239

- Plato, 36, 87, 91, 161

- Plutarch, 128, 248

- Pocock, J. G. A., 8, 18–19, 328, 335

- Poland, 402, 424, 491, 506, 565

- Polybius, 15, 148

- Polyphemos, 39–41

- Pondichéry, 319

- Portugal, 212, 457

- Poseidon, 40

- Poseidonios, 96

- Poulain de la Barre, François, 22, 261, 273–280, 288, 296, 299, 338, 363

- Poverel, Étienne, 372, 374

- Powell, Enoch, 537

- Progress: Rousseau’s critique of, 264; and European global pedagogy, 558

- Prometheus, 44, 48, 457

- Protagoras, 87

- Protestantism, and worldview of Spanish conquistadores, 201

- Proust, Jacques, 35

- Ptolemy, 161

- Puett, Michael, 109

- Pufendorf, 290

- Puntambekar, S. V., 502

- Pytheas of Massilia, 95

- Qin, 107, 110, 131–133

- Qiu Chuji, 156

- Quevedo, Juan de, 220

- Quint, David, 254

- Race: classification in Bernier and Linnaeus, 301–302; classification as foundational concept, 302–303; Buffon, 302–309; climate, 303–304; definition of species, 304; historicity of nature, 304; white skin as global standard, 305; Buffon on Africans and slavery, 306–307; Blumenbach, 309–315; Blumenbach’s genealogy of races, 311–314; Polygenism, 315–316; world history as a “war of races,” 352; scientific racism in America, 386–390; imperial racism in Britain, 393–396; genocidal racism, 393; Naoroji’s critique of racism, 397–402; John Stuart Mill on race, 408–409; dismantling of racism from within by Franz Boas, 445; Du Bois on race and double consciousness, 446; Du Bois on progress across the color line, 452; Ashley Montagu’s proposal to abolish concept on, 508–512; UNESCO on, 512–520; in Family of Man, 522–523; Aimé Césaire on, 527–529, 548; Leila Ahmed on, 536–537; scientific racism dominant in 1800–1945 era, 561

- Ranke, 432

- Raymond, Julien, 366

- Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas, 261–262, 286, 296–297, 323, 328–340, 372, 531, 560, 562–563

- Regimes of temporality, 14–15; and anthropological turn, 15–16; in ancient historians, 149–155; in Ibn Khaldun, 199; in Acosta, 246–247; in Raynal and Diderot, 338–345; revolutionary politics and “concepts of movement,” 348–349; contingency of European progress, 415, 455; world–historical time changing gears, 463; and hyper–reality of the West, 562–565; “industry” as a fifth stage of humanity, 563

- Reubell, Jean-François, 354, 356–357, 368

- Revel, Jacques, 318

- Reynolds, Henry, 414

- Richardson, Egerton, 543

- Rizal, José, 30, 422, 426, 428–431, 455, 469

- Roberts, John, 526

- Robertson, William, 266, 292–294, 297, 313, 339, 560

- Robespierre, 364, 368

- Roger, Jacques, 306

- Roland, Madame, 364

- Rome, 15, 35, 72, 74, 92, 96, 116, 139–154, 267, 317, 392

- Romm, James, 123

- Romulo, Carlos, 496, 498–499

- Roosevelt, Eleanor, 498–501, 577

- Roosevelt, Franklin D., 458–459, 490, 498, 500

- Rooted cosmopolitanism, 578

- Rosenthal, Franz, 183

- Rosso, Jeannette, 299

- Rouen, 249

- Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 264, 276, 279, 281, 295, 299, 327, 339, 362–364, 428, 483, 560

- Rubiés, Joan-Pau, 244

- Rufus, Musonius, 95

- Ruggles, David, 382

- Rumi, 169, 177–178

- Ruskin, John, 20, 477, 481

- Russia, 265, 350, 423–426, 441–443, 456–460, 481, 485, 492–493, 532, 565, 568, 573–574. See also Soviet Union

- Russian Revolution: source of hope for anti–colonialism, 458–459; Du Bois on, 459

- Sachau, Edward, 162, 165

- Sahagún, Bernardino de, 229–233, 235, 256

- Said, Edward, 3–4, 12, 331, 338, 535

- Said, Jean, 535

- Saint-Domingue, 333, 347, 365–375, 379, 413

- Saint-Étienne, Rabaut, 357

- Salisbury, Lord, 404

- Sallust, 148

- Samos, 119

- Santa Cruz, Hernán, 498, 500

- Santo Tomás, Domingo de, 235–236

- Satyagraha (Truth–Force): equality effect of, 468–471; Gandhi’s rejection of terrorism, 471–472

- Saudi Arabia, 505–506

- Savages: in Homer, 39–43; in Herodotus, 123; in Tacitus, 153; in Ibn Khaldun, 192–193; in Columbus, Vespucci, and Spanish colonists, 202–203; in Enlightenment, 263–264; in European past, 275; Poulain de la Barre on, 277; in Diderot’s Encyclopedia, 281–283, 286; in Condorcet, 343

- Schaberg, David, 128, 151

- Schechter, Ronald, 359

- Scherer, Savitri, 424

- Schiller, 432

- Schmoller, Gustav, 449

- Schoelcher, Victor, 529

- Scotland, 142, 289

- Scott, Joan, 301, 349

- Scyles, 125

- Scythia, 119, 123–126, 131, 192

- Sebastiani, Silvia, 298

- Sebond, Raymond, 252

- Secularization: of state power, 270; of virtue, 271–272; of intellectual culture, 272; Gandhi’s inability to understand it, 480; in Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 500–501, 504–505; after 1945, Western Europe the only secularized region, 564; disruptive modernity and staying power of religions, 565–566

- Seed, Patricia, 235

- Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, 223–228, 255–256

- Seven Years War, as first global conflict, 261

- Shakespeare, William, 509

- Shaqiq, 174–175

- Shimazu, Naoko, 484

- Shun, 105

- Siberia, 29, 131, 265, 293, 306–307, 322, 329, 350

- Siculus, Diodorus, 2

- Sieyès, Abbé, 362, 366, 563

- Silk Roads, 118, 159

- Sima Qian, 8, 12, 15, 24, 103, 115–118, 128–139, 149–155, 192, 198–199, 338, 556

- Sima Tan, 128–129

- Simon, Richard, 261, 270–271, 354

- Sivin, Nathan, 154

- Sjahrir, Sutan, 493

- Slavery: in Christianity, 75; Sophist critique of, 89; Stoics on, 91, 93; Ibn Khaldun on, 192–193; critique of natural slavery in Bartolomé de Las Casas and Acosta, 223–226, 240; in Diderot’s Encyclopedia, 280; abolition in Haiti, 369–376; in the United States, 377–379; Frederick Douglass’s critique of, 380–393; Du Bois compares Holocaust with, 460

- Sloan, Phillip, 304

- Smith, Adam, 261, 289–295, 339, 342, 405, 560, 562

- Smuts, Jan, 492, 506

- Soerjaningrat, Soewardi, 424–425

- Sonthonax, Léger Félicité, 372, 374–375

- Soto, Domingo de, 210–211, 223

- Soto, Francisco de, 221

- Soto, Hernando de, 245

- South Africa, 20, 422, 463–474, 492, 497, 506, 544

- South America, 221, 248–249, 308, 348, 377, 391, 419, 428

- South Asia, 32, 167, 310, 323, 419

- South Korea, 544, 565

- South Pacific, 29, 265, 310–311, 350

- Southeast Asia, 157, 266, 310–311, 350, 490

- Soviet Union, 459, 488, 490–495, 506, 543–544, 569, 572. See also Russia

- Spain, 156, 179, 201–212, 223–224, 238, 242, 248, 373, 428–431

- Sparta, 86, 92, 123

- Spartacus, 328, 333

- Spinoza, 261, 269, 279, 285, 299, 558

- Sri Lanka, 493

- Stalin, Joseph, 483

- Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 386

- Starr, Chester, 123

- Steichen, Edward, 520–526

- Stocking, George, 445

- Stoicism, 89–96

- Stoler, Ann, 420

- Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 379

- Street, Jessie, 495

- Strugnell, Anthony, 331

- Suárez, Francisco, 210

- Sufism, 168–178; concept of god in, 168; Islamo–centric tolerance, 168–169, 178; insignificance of human hierarchy, 171–172; Golden Rule more important than ritual, 172–173; female saints in, 176–177; truth and cultural difference in, 178; in Ibn Khaldun, 181–182

- Sun Yat-sen, 481

- Sweden, 542

- Switzerland, 457

- Syria, 83, 86–87, 182, 493, 505

- Tacitus, Publius Cornelius, 12, 15, 115–118, 126, 139–149, 151–155, 192, 242, 288, 338

- Tahiti, 323–327, 344

- Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste, 296

- Taylor, Harriet, 412

- Telemachus, 42

- Tenochtitlan, 215, 228, 230–233, 294

- Thayendanega, 308, 313

- Thersites, 37–38, 42

- Thévenot, Jean, 278

- Thevet, André, 249

- Thoreau, Henry David, 471

- Thrace, 87

- Thucydides, 86

- Tocqueville, Alexis de, 349, 486

- Togo, Admiral, 481

- Toland, John, 261, 271, 284

- Toledo, Francisco de, 237

- Toleration: in polytheism, 61; Islam and “peoples of the book,” 83–84; Sufi tolerance, 176–178; limits of Christian toleration in America, 235; Enlightenment and religious wars, 263–268; Grotius, Simon, and Toland on the Jews, 270–271; toleration of Muslims, 270–271; of atheists, 271–272; Voltaire on, 271; rational examination of religions, 275; comparative religion, 316–319

- Tolstoy, Leo, 471, 481

- Tonnerre, Clermont, 354–355, 357–358

- Totalitarianism, 25

- Toussaint L’Ouverture, 333, 335, 371–379

- Toynbee, Arnold, 26, 569

- Transoxania, 158, 189

- Trasymachus, 87

- Treitschke, Heinrich von, 449

- Trogus, Pompeius, 148

- Troy, 38, 46, 93

- Tuck, Richard, 268

- Turgot, 405, 560

- Turkey, 278, 409, 424, 457, 542

- Turner, Frederick Jackson, 195, 439–440

- Tyson, Edward, 302

- Ukraine, 123, 506

- United Kingdom, 491, 542. See also Britain

- United States, 245, 323, 346–347, 375–377, 382, 385, 389–391, 402, 413, 419, 422, 428, 431–432, 440–444, 453–457, 460, 463, 484, 490–497, 506, 510–512, 522, 526, 541–543, 564–570, 573–576

- Universal syncretism, 318

- Universalisms, 34–36; universalism and ethnocentrism, 36; imperialist and anti-imperialist universalisms, 113; Janus-face of Enlightenment universalisms, 342; Huntington’s weak universalism, 574

- Uruguay, 495

- Valladolid, 205, 207, 210, 223–229, 234, 249

- Vartija, Devin, 285

- Varus, Quintilius, 139–140, 144

- Vattel, Emer de, 283, 292, 330

- Velázquez, Governor, 219–220

- Velleius, 93

- Venezuela, 221

- Vercingetorix, 145–146

- Versailles, 457, 484–485, 487, 490, 494–495

- Vespasian, 141, 144–145

- Vespucci, 202

- Victoria, Queen, 398, 408, 467

- Vietnam, 67, 481, 493, 530–531, 543

- Virey, Julien-Joseph, 315

- Vitellius, 141, 144

- Vitoria, Francisco de, 202, 210–217, 222–223, 226–228, 246, 255–256, 330

- Voltaire, 93, 267, 271–272, 284–285, 315, 318, 342, 428

- Wagner, Adolf, 449

- Waley, Arthur, 103

- Walker, Francis, 441

- Wallis, Captain, 265

- Wardi, Ali, 194

- Washington, Booker T., 443, 450–452, 468

- Washington, George, 377–378

- Wen, Emperor, 105–106, 131, 135, 138

- West Africa, 156, 198, 426

- West Asia, 67–68, 77, 116, 118, 193

- West Indies, 212, 457. See also Indies

- Whig history, 23–25

- Wierzbicka, Anna, 19

- Willie, Curzon, 471

- Wilson, Woodrow, 458, 484, 490

- Wittgenstein, 19–20

- Wollstonecraft, Mary, 298–299, 349

- Woodson, Carter G., 443

- Women. See Feminism; Gender

- World history, 26; views of Ibn Khaldun on, 183–186, 196, 198–199; Acosta on, 240–243; Montaigne on, 254–255; Voltaire on, 267; in Philosophical History, 288–301; as part of natural history, 304–305; Boas on expanding circles of identification, 437–438; Du Bois on recentering world history, 461; human rights as future world history, 508

- Wright, Richard, 526

- Wu, Emperor, 97–98, 128–129, 132, 138

- Xenophanes, 50–54, 65, 86

- Xerxes, 127, 252

- Xunzi, 99, 106–111

- Yan An, 132–133

- Yugoslavia, 491, 506, 520

- Yupanqui, Tupac Inca, 245

- Zeno, 91, 93

- Zeus, 36, 38–52, 60, 62, 94, 164

- Zhang Qian, 128

- Zhonghang Yue, 135–138

- Zhou, Duke of, 17, 97, 102, 106

- Zigong, 99

- Zilu, 100

- Zoroaster, 63, 162, 319, 400, 404

- Zoroastrianism, 158, 175–176, 319

- Zumwalt, Rosemary, 443