Westernized World History
MENON, B. P.
Westernized World History Man Through the Ages By John Bowle Atheneum. 312 pp. $13.95. Reviewed by B. P. Menon Author, "Global Dialogue" We study history for many and complex reasons. Perhaps...
...Perhaps the most widely acknowledged of these is the need to properly choose our direction, to avoid repeating past errors and being condemned to relive them...
...The pastoral, patriarchal invaders had become, by the early first millenium, dark glittering princes, adept at diplomacy and intrigue, sitting crosslegged in their divans...
...But one must regrettably note that the work he set out to write remains to be written...
...Indeed, it is feasible that instead of invading, the Aryans came more or less peacefully into a vast and sparsely populated plain, heavily wooded and inhabited by a number of tribes besides the Dasas, including the one responsible for the high Indus valley civilization...
...Some chapters are persuasive, with judgments well shored up by explanation and detail...
...Style does not fare much better than substance...
...The Preface, too, augurs well when it chides that most contemporary historians "are as little concerned with the Ming or the Gupta, the Ashanti or the Incas, as they are with biochemistry...
...But there were more Dasas than Aryans...
...Similarly, in discussing the Aryan invasion of India (itself largely conjectural and based on disputed interpretations of existing data), the author speaks of caste as a failed system of racial separation...
...And that phrase sums up the main weakness of Man Through the Ages...
...racial apartheid failed...
...Until new techniques for dealing with historical material quite unlike the European are developed, it may be inevitable that a Western view of the world's past will continue to harbor a distorting ethnocentrism...
...This European colonialist characterization of the East, applied to a society that thrived 4,000 years ago, has absolutely no justification...
...others display a shocking ignorance of what would be elementary facts to any historian...
...Bowle states and restates, for instance, that poverty and famine are age-old characteristics of Indian society...
...And it is just as feasible that caste developed as a system for the inter- and intra-tribal division of labor...
...One applauds John Bowle's motives in undertaking a world history...
...Even if we forgive for the moment the women's gothic novel images, there is no way Bowle could know that there were "more Dasas than Aryans...
...Thus the native Dasas (in Sanskrit 'slave') were to be held in permanent subjection...
...Not the sort Arnold Toynbee or H. G. Wells wrote, looking out a bit fearfully from the Western ramparts to see what caused civilizations to rise and fall, but the kind that focus on the continuous and continuing linkage of humanity...
...Nothing bears this out in the writings of foreign observers, ranging from Megasthenes to Marco Polo...
...Most visitors, in fact, were impressed with the fertility of the Indian fields and the abundance of food...
...The publisher's blurb for this book promises something along this line: "A world history of stunning scope from archaic origins to the present, dealing not only with the West but with the entire globe...
...There are sentences that lead one to wonder if there has been some mixup in the printing, such as this one: "After wandering as Bedouin in the Sinai peninsula, these Israelites settled into Palestine, where there were probably other Jews, and where the Canaanites, in part, perhaps, distantly descended from the Natufians of Carmel and the inhabitants of Stone Age Jericho, practiced fertility cults revolting to the austerer Hebrews, and were harried by the Philistines, with their maritime Levantine background...
...Every aspect of Merovingian Gaul has been researched, while vast tracts of Asian and African history remain unheeded, and where patches of the home ground are exhaustively cultivated, they are unrelated to the outer world...
...There is therefore simply not enough information available today...
...Relatively recently, it has also become necessary for us to know the probable course of once distant societies: To see what deep currents mix in the hell's gate of our times, we must analyze the forces shaping events in other hemispheres...
...In other words, this should be the age of world histories...
...But this uncertainty is nowhere evident in Bowle's interpretation, which is filtered through the modern European experience of racism...
...His book, however, suffers seriously from being based less on original sources than on distillations by others...
...Or this capsule biography of one of the Turkish Caliphs: "He called his principal mistress 'little sugar plum,' and was strangled in 1648...
...Of course, no one can know for sure...
...The deficiency cannot be blamed wholly on Bowle, because most of the world's peoples have not yet voiced their opinion about their past...
...Man Through the Ages suffers from another overall flaw, in this case solely attributable to its author...
...At the same time, the author adds that his book is designed to introduce the reader to the essentials of world history "as they appear to a Western European...
...Moreover, in India and China alone there exist enough unpublished studies and untranslated texts to warrant a giant cautionary footnote to any all-embracing survey...
...For example, Bowle writes of ancient Mesopotamia that "beneath the wealth, we sense the already ancient dust, disease and squalor of the teeming East...
...Bowle tells us in the Preface that he has been the editor for 15 years of the Concise Encyclopedia of World History, and he acknowledges his debt to the writers of that work...
Vol. 60 • November 1977 • No. 22
