Poor choice this year ... I quickly discovered that I really didn't care why criminals commit crimes. So when I went to Texas early in January, I went to the half off price book store and picked up two "history" books.
From reading the 2019 spy books based in the Middle East, I came to acknowledge my lack of knowledge about that part of the world; so, I picked up After Tamerlane by John Darwin. Too bad I did not "accentuate the first two "syllables." This was a 506 page volume about all empires POST Tamerlane. In the first "orientation" chapter of the book, Darwin says Tamerlane's was the "last real attempt to challenge the partition of Eurasia between the states of the Far West, Islamic Eurasia and Confuscian East Asia ... and revealed that power had begun to shift back from the nomad empires to the settled states."
He goes on further to cite Max Weber's explanation of "modern capitalism" that requires "an activist, rationalizing mentality, Chinese Confucianism (rational but inactive), Islam (active but irrational), and Hinduism (inactive and irrational) ..." And so his book goes on to integrate colonial history, underlined by basic assumptions, such as:
Rejecting the idea of a linear change in the course of modern world history, in which Europe progressively rise to pre-eminence, then fell and rose again. Instead to think in terms of conjunctures, periods of time when general conditions in other parts of the world coincided to encourage or check the enlargement of trade, the expansion of empires, the exchange of ideas or the movement of people,
Seeing Europe's age of expansion firmly in its Eurasian context, for example contrasting naval power with the invention and expansion of railroads.
He concludes that given the propensity of humans to accumulate power on an extensive scale is countered by the ethnic basis and gravitational pull of culture, making this tension the default mode of political organization throughout most of history.
I continue to emphasize Darwin's underlining perspectives; he sees modernity as a very slippery idea: its convention meaning is based on a scale of achievement; in political terms its key attributes are an organized nation state, with definite boundaries, an orderly government with a loyal bureaucracy ti carry out its commands; an effective means to represent public opinion; a code of rights to protect ordinary citizens and encourage the growth of civil society. Economically, it means the attainment of rapid, accumulation economic growth through industrial capitalism; the entrenchment of individual property rights, and the systemic exploitation of science-based knowledge. Culturally, the separation of religion and the supernatural from the mainstream of thought (by secularization and disenchantment of knowledge and social behavior; the diffusion of literacy and a sense of common origins and identity.
Most of the above have been typed from Darwin's opening pages (so don't think either that I write like this or came up with these clear ideas on my own). After reading the rise and fall of several "nations" and their attempts at empire building, and then overlaying the concept of economic globalization, I have to pull back and ponder on what is different of special about America and where other human aggregates are on the scale of becoming a "nation." So much for the arrogance of "nation building" by force, occupation or holding up one model as one size fits all.
Like the book 1492, the best parts of this book align different parts of the world at several points of time to assess what was simultaneously happening within an area to impact the rest. This is not a reprise of what was taught as "world history" in schools decades ago.
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