Pride & Prejudice: The Danger of Western Exceptionalism
Charles W. King
Today much of the Western public and many Western policy-makers and diplomats have a dangerous conception of world history. In this popular version history Western liberal democracy is the inevitable result of hundreds of years of unbroken prosperity and progress towards ever greater suffrage and markets, and the collapse of Eastern empires in Russia, China and the Middle East in the twentieth century was a death rattle of a disease that lasted just as long. This is a profound misunderstanding of history and leads to an erroneous perception of Eastern nations being not only behind, but centuries behind the West. Acting on this incorrect conception of history demonstrates massive hubris, and makes it difficult to understand foreign perspectives and formulate good strategies and foreign policy.
The free market is one of the hallmarks of Western liberalism. Some historians and pundits have drawn a direct line from modern free trade back five hundred years to rudimentary markets in European towns and villages. This connection demonstrates a failure to understand how different medieval market trade and modern capitalism are. The former was not unique to Europe and the latter is a much more recent and dramatic change than this version of events would indicate. Stock exchanges may have existed for more than a hundred years when Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, but Britain would remain a mercantilist empire for another hundred years.
The point at which Europe set foot on the path would lead to its dominance in the twentieth century is possibly the most controversial ongoing debate in academic history. The problematic connection of medieval markets to industrial capitalism represents a small set of historians and others who have gone looking to find that divergence as far back as possible. There is much more convincing evidence to suggest that the divergence between Europe, Asia and the Middle East happened much later than many people believe.
Another major milestone of Western liberalism is the commoditization of land. In feudal systems land was ruled by lords, held in common, and rights to use a given plot of land were not inheritable. Enclosure and the Doctrine of Improvement in English Common Law changed this. As a commodity land could be traded, as something owned privately investment in increased productivity was worthwhile. The commoditization of land in Western Europe was an essential innovation that provided the agricultural output needed to fuel empire, or so the story goes. Except commoditization of land was not unique to England at the time, or even unique to Europe. Ottoman tax records from Palestine, Iraq, and Anatolia show that land was being traded as a commodity there too, independent of similar innovation in Europe. The failure of the Ottoman Empire’s Tanzimat reforms in the nineteenth century are frequently used as evidence of the empire’s status as ‘The Sick Man of Europe’ but this ignores the fact that the Empire was implementing these reforms not decades after its European counterparts but in the same time frame and its efforts, while not as successful as either the UK or Germany, were more successful than Spanish or Austro-Hungarian reforms. Treating the Ottoman Empire and the states that descend from it as backwards is a serious error.
That Western empires and their resulting liberal democracies have had a dominant position on the world state recently is not arguable. But this has not always been the case, and it is important that historians and policy makers avoid conceptions of history that emphasize how, and for how long Europe has been dominant. It leads to erroneous conclusions and poses significant problems for policy-making and the conducting of diplomacy. It makes it difficult to apprehend and understand the perspective of nations in Asia and the Middle East, and it prevents good policy-making by treating liberal democracy deterministically.
Further Reading
Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasats in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Pres: 1995).
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).