Blaut's "Eight Eurocentric Historians"

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the book, "Eight Eurocentric Historians": Max Weber, Lynn White, Jr., Robert Brenner, Eric L. Jones, Michael Mann, John A. Hall, Jared Diamond, and David Landes. This paper describes the book's thesis that challenges the concept of European diffusionism, the belief that the rise of Europe to modernity and world dominance is due to some unique European quality of race, environment, culture, mind or spirit and that progress for the rest of the world results from the diffusion of European civilization. The paper author states that the role of each of these eight historians in generating colonialist understandings of history is not only proven to be extinct but also to be based on fallacious assumptions.

From the Paper:

"The book first defines the eurocentric diffusionist model of the world as one that invents a permanent world core, an "Inside," in which cultural evolution is natural and continuous, and a permanent periphery, an "Outside," in which cultural evolution is mainly an effect of the diffusion of ideas, commodities, settlers and political control from the core. The ethno history of the doctrine is traced from its 16th-century origins, through its efflorescence in the period of classical colonialism, to its present form in theories of economic development, modernization and new world order. Blaut demonstrates that most "Western" scholarship is to some extent diffusionist and based implicitly on the idea that the world has one permanent center from which culture-changing ideas tend to emanate. Eurocentric diffusionism has shaped our attitudes concerning race and the environment, psychology and society, technology and politics."

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