European Perceptions of Islam and America from Saladin to George W. Bush: Europe's Fragile Ego Uncovered

European Perceptions of Islam and America from Saladin to George W. Bush

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European Perceptions of Islam and America from Saladin to George W. Bush Europe’s Fragile Ego Uncovered

Peter O’Brien

EUROPEAN PERCEPTIONS OF ISLAM AND AMERICA FROM SALADIN TO GEORGE W. BUSH

Copyright © Peter O’Brien, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–61305–8 ISBN-10: 0–230–61305–5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Integra Software Services First edition: January 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Jane Marie Crusius Key

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Part I

Eurocentrism

1

Introduction

3

2

The Quest for Subjective Eurocentrism

Part II

19

Rival to the East

3

The Discovery of Islamic Superiority (1095–1453)

47

4

Lingering Asian Superiority (1453–1776)

71

Part III

Rival to the West

5

The Real American Revolution (1776–1820)

93

6

America Ascendant (1820–1914)

111

7

World America (1918–Present)

139

Notes

161

Bibliography

205

Index

219

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Acknowledgments

T he idea for this book first came to me in 1996 while residing in Istanbul and serving as Fulbright Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Bog˘aziçi University. Though the bulk of the research for the project would transpire much later, my hospitable and distinguished colleagues at that august university nestled in the hills overlooking the Straits of Bosporus provided me with free time, research assistance, and scholarly stimulation that inspired me to pursue what was at that time little more than a hunch. Nermin Abadan-Unat, Kemal Kiriuci, and Binnaz Toprak contributed especially to making my experience in the erstwhile Ottoman capital en iyi. A second Fulbright opportunity at Berlin’s historic Humboldt University in 2005–06 afforded me the unencumbered time to gestate the most substantial draft of the manuscript. I cannot possibly thank enough my host, Gert-Joachim Glaeßner (and his able team), at the Institute for Social Sciences. Others in the German capital, particularly Barbara Gügold, Frank Gottsmann, and Doris Thürmann, helped to make my living arrangements fabelhaft. Between and during the two Fulbright opportunities Trinity University awarded me much appreciated leaves of absence and summer stipends. My departmental colleague at Trinity, Mary Ann Tetreault, deserves thanks for alerting me to the work of Lucette Valensi that figures prominently in Part II. Chairs Tucker Gibson and Sussan Siavoshi were always accommodating when I needed to ask for more time and resources to complete the project. Arleen Harrison skillfully superintended a dedicated cadre of research assistants who competently and promptly fulfilled my seemingly endless requests for this or that piece of information. I am grateful to Toby Wahl at Palgrave Macmillan for expeditiously guiding the manuscript through to publication. For his meticulous and critical review of an early draft of the manuscript I am eternally grateful to Jacques Barzun. I doubt Jacques will ever fully know just how much his subtle combination of harsh critique and mentoring encouragement inspired me forward. I express like appreciation for their criticisms of earlier drafts to John Armstrong, who

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taught me as a graduate student to seek insights beyond conventional boundaries and periods, and to S.M. (Ghazi) Ghazanfar, who sent reassuring words at times when I thought the project might be infeasible. Always good-spirited but tough, the incisive questions regarding my argument from Garth and Elizabeth Fowden during annual visits to their home in Greece forced me to anticipate and counter (effectively, I hope) potentially damaging criticisms of the book. The rest of my unconventionally woven extended family in the United States buttressed me with steadfast interest in my work and unconditional support for my life choices. Finally, I dedicate the book to Jane Key. In addition to accompanying me to the far-flung places my research necessitated I visit, Jane was my most intimate and constant dialogue partner, who expressed just the right mixture of doubt and confidence in my arguments. She has enriched my life in countless ways that go far beyond the completion of this book.

PART I

Eurocentrism

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction If we succeed, in 50 years, Europe will have changed its role in the world. It will be respected and listened to.1 Valéry Giscard d’Estaing

Introduction Might Europe presently be undergoing a transformation on par with the Renaissance or Reformation? Needless to say, it is too early to know. Nevertheless, the current project of European integration shares at least one salient characteristic with the earlier movements of rebirth and reform, namely, scathing self-criticism accompanied by nervous apprehension regarding perceived rivals. From the lips and pens of European elites flows a steady stream of complaints and concerns over Europe’s waning influence in a world increasingly dominated by non-European powers, the United States of America in particular. German historian Christian Meier remarks that Europe “now lags behind others (chiefly the United States) and has generally fallen back into the ranks . . . becoming one civilization among others (if one can still apply that lofty word to it at all).”2 Across the Rhine, Claude Allègre fears that Europe will soon regress “to the level of the underdeveloped countries in a world that will be dominated by the United States and China.”3 If Europe fails to unite, warns Umberto Eco, “it will become, no offense to anyone, Guatemala.”4 Taking an “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” approach, Régis Debray, in The Edict of Caracalla, sarcastically urges his fellow Europeans to join the United States so as to form a behemoth “United States of the West.” This, he avers, is the most assured way for Europeans to “be able to exert some influence over what happens to them.” After all, “Bush, whether you like it or not, is your president as well as mine.” Debray facetiously adds that he is “realizing rather than renouncing our millennial heritage by anticipating

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its only possible future.” For “becoming Americanized in the twenty-first century is like becoming Romanized in the first.”5 What ails the Old Continent? According to Stephen Haseler, erstwhile British MP, “the institutions of Europe . . . are outdated and unreconstructed . . . the continent is simply uncompetitive.”6 He, like countless other diagnosticians, has in mind a stifling welfare state, an overbearing tax regime, and an intractable unemployment problem, all of which are left to fester thanks to a political institutional apparatus too slow to change. In a similar vein, Tony Blair has charged that the European Union (EU) is not equipped to deal with inescapable globalization.7 And Jacques Chirac has begrudged that “other great entities in the world are moving ahead faster than we are.”8 The EU has drafted a constitution, presumably to reform its beleaguered institutions. However, it has met with much sniping. Former EU President Romano Prodi complained that the document “lacks vision and ambition.”9 The French and the Dutch derailed the ratification process with their decisive no votes in May and June 2005, prompting current EU President José Manuel Durão Barroso to warn of permanent crisis and paralysis.10 The vote of no confidence moved one French analyst to contemplate “the end of Europe”: The debacle is significant evidence, therefore, that the European project is undergoing the most serious crisis of its half-century history. The French and Dutch votes did not produce the crisis; they simply brought it to the surface and then aggravated it. It was the economic, social, and political shortcomings of the existing EU that brought about the rejection of the treaty, not the other way around.11

Surprisingly, European intellectuals concede defeat even in the realm of culture where they have traditionally considered themselves the trendsetters. German publicist Claus Leggewie writes: “The American way of life has long become the model for the emerging world culture.”12 French counterpart Camille Paglia concurs: “France has frozen into a museum, while Hollywood produces dynamic art and technology that seduce the masses of every continent. Very little of what the French have produced in the last fifty years will last.”13 Jacques Derrida has announced that European philosophy no longer deserves a central place in the history of ideas.14 Agnes Heller felt Europe so moribund that she delivered its eulogy: “Europe, the mighty, the leader of the world, no longer exists; Europe, the source of inspiration for all higher cultures, has been exhausted. May she rest in peace.”15 Walter Laqueur has recently penned his own Epitaph for an Old Continent.16 Popular books and magazines manifest an equally lugubrious Zeitgeist. The Economist entitled its edition, which coincided with the EU’s fiftieth

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birthday, “Europe’s mid-life crisis.”17 In 2005 the same magazine’s cover page printed a reproduction of Jacques-Louis David’s famous “Death of Marat” with the headline, “The Europe that Died.”18 European bookshelves are filled with titles like Divided Europe, Europe Adrift, Euro-Skepticism, Faltering Europe, Menace in Europe, The Last Days of Europe.19 Such melancholy notwithstanding, Europe’s leaders, often the very ones who pity or pillory their society, stoically refuse to abandon efforts to revive the Old Continent. Chirac, for instance, has advanced that “we need a means to struggle against American hegemony.” Prodi has expressed the desire to fashion the EU into “a superpower . . . that stands equal to the United States.”20 And Barroso has pledged to work against American “arrogance.”21 Prominent European intellectuals have joined the revivalist chorus. Led by Jürgen Habermas and inspired by the massive demonstrations against the Iraq War that took place in every major European city on February 15, 2003, Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, Fernando Savater, and other luminaries simultaneously published in their respective land’s leading newspapers epistles calling for the “rebirth of Europe” as a sorely needed counterweight to the American Leviathan.22 Like-sounding voices mixing foreboding self-deprecation with hopeful selftransformation could be heard during the approach of both the Renaissance and the Reformation, except that the menacing rival then was Islam rather than America. As Part II of this book shows, the Italian innovators, though they envied and dreaded an Islamic civilization that, in contrast to their own, had not foolishly abandoned the rich heritage of letters and learning bequeathed by the ancient Greeks and Romans, nevertheless remained optimistic that by reviving that grand heritage they could one day surpass the “Saracens.” Likewise, the religious reformers to the north protested the thoroughgoing corruption of the Church of Rome and blamed its wayward impiety for the failure of repeated crusades against the advancing Muslims. But the Protestants also strove tirelessly to purify Christianity in the hope of regaining God’s good favor. This book examines Europeans’ perceptions of their most salient nonEuropean rivals over the course of the last millennium. The study focuses primarily, though not exclusively, on the premodern rivalry with Islamic civilization, lasting roughly from the First Crusade in 1095 until the final Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, and on the modern rivalry with the United States of America, from independence in 1776 until the present. In addition to manifesting predictable arrogance and ignorance vis-à-vis Europe’s “Others,” the perceptions, on closer inspection, also reveal persistent solicitude regarding Europe’s capacity to lead the world. I contend that this heretofore largely overlooked diffidence figured prominently in promoting the medieval and early modern transformations that eventually propelled

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Europe past its once superior Islamic adversary. Relatedly, long-standing selfrecriminations over having forfeited its dominant position in the modern era have helped spur the contemporary project of European unification and may very well be positioning the EU to be able one day to counter the hegemony of an overly smug America. Unknowable eventualities aside, frail, if not low, self-esteem—a fragile ego in other words—has long played an important role in the formation of European identity.

Eurocentrism Aspiration on the part of Europe’s elites to lead the world forms the underlying premise of this study. I hasten to add, however, that leadership has been understood variously in Europe by different people at different times. Its meaning has ranged along a continuum from domination to stewardship to influence, but has always manifested a desire for some kind of Eurocentric world—understood quite literally as “Europe at the center of things.” In our times, the term “Eurocentrism” has multiple connotations that can generate muddle. Let me, therefore, be as precise as possible. In this book I distinguish between three types of Eurocentrism: objective, paradigmatic, and subjective. Objective Eurocentrism connotes actual European centrality in world affairs in any number of facets such as geopolitics, economics, and culture. Paradigmatic Eurocentrism is the scholarly but popularized theory that Europe, or, more broadly, European civilization, represents the globe’s central axis. Subjective Eurocentrism means Europeans’ own confidence that the world pivots around Europe. Furthermore, such confidence, for reasons clarified below, relies heavily on believing that non-Europeans acknowledge Europe’s foremost position. In the pages that follow, I advance an argument about subjective Eurocentrism only. I seek to demonstrate that Europe, in the estimation of Europeans themselves, rarely if ever lived up to the high benchmark set by subjective Eurocentrism, not merely since World War II or I, but during most of the last millennium. Though my interpretation belies many tenets of paradigmatic Eurocentrism, in the final analysis it is not my brief to spell ruin for this well-established worldview. That undertaking exceeds the scope of this limited study and is pursued properly elsewhere.23 Nor do I draw a definite conclusion regarding objective Eurocentrism. Rather, the book explores Europeans’ state of mind—how they have evaluated their place in world affairs. Against the putative understanding that Europeans have long been superciliously convinced of their own superiority and dominance I depict subjective Eurocentrism as a protracted and largely unfulfilled yearning—not, that is, as the fait accompli posited within the Eurocentric paradigm.

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The Argument in Brief My analysis opens with the Crusades first launched in 1095 and eventually famously fought against Saladin (1137–93). Far more than a mere campaign against a religious adversary, the Crusades, assert Chapters 2 and 3, represented Western or Latin Christendom’s attempt to seize control of the perceived core of the known world. That nucleus lay southeast of geographic Europe in the appropriately named Mediterranean basin, from which Catholics had been irksomely alienated since the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE. With the First Crusade, Urban II (1035–99) sought to establish himself and his see as the preeminent power in the religious world. Here begins the first endeavor by a representative of (a still barely self-conscious) Europe to transform the continent into the world’s axial civilization. Here begins the quest for subjective Eurocentrism. The Crusades ultimately failed. As detailed in Chapter 3, from 1095 until the final botched campaign of 1395 the lion’s share of the victories went to the Muslims. They lost control of Jerusalem in 1099 but, led by Saladin, regained it in 1187 and then went on to maintain control, with only brief interruptions, until British occupation in 1917. Islamic states regularly threatened and vanquished Christian lands along a vast frontier that arced from Russia south to the Balkans and from there west to the Iberian Peninsula. In 1453 the Saracens captured Constantinople, where Constantine had established the capital of the first Christian empire in 330. With Christendom’s two most important cities firmly in his grasp, the Ottoman sultan, speaking on behalf of Islam, could proudly and credibly declare his religion and his kingdom to be the rightful heir to the allegedly universal civilization of antiquity established by Alexander the Great and extended by the Roman Empire. In the meantime, Rome, and with it the whole of Catholic Europe, enviously remained on the periphery of its world’s locus. Chapter 3 also relates how defeat and humiliation at the hand of their rivals occasioned intense introspection and self-criticism among Europeans. Their time-honored strategies for universal power and influence were clearly not succeeding. In a long and momentous period of profound self-examination that originated with the so-called Renaissance of the twelfth century and extended through the Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, and the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European savants first cautiously questioned but eventually vehemently castigated the medieval Catholic order in all its dimensions. Reformers of various stripes, in place of the discredited outlook, proposed new viewpoints—some secular, some sacred, some both— all of which, however, endeavored in part to resuscitate Europe and provide it with a bright future. Expressed differently, they chased the same dream of

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subjective Eurocentrism that motivated the papacy in 1095; they simply differed with the pontiff on how to fulfill the dream. It would be reckless, of course, to suggest that the rivalry with Islam single-handedly caused these seismic ruptures in European history. But I do assert that relations with the archenemy played a larger role than paradigmatic Eurocentrism teaches. One standard theory of the paradigm professes that these same reform movements in the early modern period paved the way for Europe to dominate the globe in the modern era. I do not sharpen my pen against this notion in particular. However, Chapter 4 does argue that large numbers of early modern Europeans did not share this perspective, which successors won through the advantage of hindsight. In the midst of sustained hopes of European ascendancy, contemporaries encountered a pertinacious Islamic foe that regularly menaced Europe until the final Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683. Furthermore, European exploration in the Far East in the wake of Vasco da Gama’s (1460–1524) circumnavigation of Africa in 1497 brought the Westerners into contact with splendid empires (Indian and Chinese) of which the newcomers were far less in control than in awe. Though Europeans would eventually establish colonies in the Orient, their initial encounters there prompted considerable diffidence about Europe’s prospects for global greatness. On the home front, too, grave concern abounded. There Europeans witnessed their civilization in wrenching turmoil, torn asunder first by religious and later by national discord in such devastating hostilities as the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) and the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). Chapter 5 maintains that at roughly the same time that Europeans could finally confidently boast of their global hegemony, some of Britain’s colonies in the New World severed their links to the motherland with the American Declaration of Independence in 1776. Thomas Jefferson’s at the time seemingly innocuous declaration would have borne scant consequences for subjective Eurocentrism had that historic gunshot in Lexington not eventually stirred an avalanche of lost European colonies in the New World. Worse, from the vantage point of desired subjective Eurocentrism, numerous prominent European observers discerned in the maverick republic’s actions the harbinger of things to come. Long before, then, the United States of America achieved objective geopolitical parity with European powers at the end of the nineteenth century, Europeans had to stomach a regular diet of predictions that America would become the modern trendsetter. In other words, subjective Eurocentrism—understood as Europeans’ unflinching confidence in their own superiority—enjoyed precious little time to sustain itself. Europeans could, of course, take solace in their widening colonial domination outside the Western Hemisphere. But these colonies were won largely through military conquest resisted, if futilely, by the colonized. Subjective

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Eurocentrism, however, demands more. The vanquished should prize their assumption into the European orbit—precisely what the Americans refused to do. Meanwhile, the vexing upstarts did nothing to mollify European premonitions of American ascendancy. Instead, the freshman democracy, in its first 50 years, went on to develop itself into a peerless polity and society that in the view of many Europeans lay poised to overtake the Old Continent. This very solicitude, however, helped to prepare the fertile ground out of which grew the democratic strivings in Europe that originated with the French Revolution and persisted, however fitfully, throughout the nineteenth century. Chapter 6 explores Europeans’ reactions to events in America and Europe between 1820 and 1914. I narrate a story in which subjective Eurocentrism’s nightmares turned real. During that period, America emerged as a globally appealing democratic, industrial, and eventually consumerist land—a singular modern civilization—that European illuminati felt compelled to presage, if typically amidst heartfelt aspersions, as a regrettably irresistible entity that was eclipsing Europe’s bid to universal civilization. America’s irritating luster further unnerved Europeans because they could not deny having misbegotten this desultory power. In fact, they had to all but idly sit by and witness the frittering away of their cherished mores as the bastard birth child spread its debauched wares and ways in noble but defenseless Europe. Arrant Americanization was not what the Enlightenment had envisaged. How could things have possibly gone so wrong? By the end of World War I, European intellectuals, as if swamped by a tide, acknowledged that America enjoyed the kind of unmatched power and influence in the world that subjective Eurocentrism reserved for Europe. Loathing indignation over this shameful turn of events helped pave the way for fascism, a surely less successful but no less ambitious movement for European reform than the celebrated ones that transpired before and after it. Chapter 7 explains how postwar America, to Europe’s chagrin, reinvented itself as a postmodern society. To be sure, European thinkers took philosophical charge of the post-Holocaust era to declare a world in which no value system, however touted or believed, could rightfully remain supreme in the aftermath of such an ethical nadir. Gurus such as Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) contended that humans could count on nothing but their raw existence out of which they must strive against the greatest of odds to fashion something worthwhile. Worthwhile or not, America crafted itself into something different, while Europe languished in selfslashing debates over what it had left, if anything, to offer the world following its tragic debacle. Europeans brooded at the profoundest of levels. But Americans mindlessly busied themselves, styling a TV utopia in which every hope seemed immediately realizable. Whether one was economically,

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ethnically, or racially disadvantaged, one could, with fortitude, “make it” in America. The Panglossian hope that one could fulfill one’s dreams in America or a world dominated by the dream maker became the aspiration of most of the planet’s inhabitants. Virtually everyone, as flummoxing as it might seem, wanted to be American—both before and behind the Iron Curtain. Via, in particular, the consumerist-driven medium of the screen America “softly”24 conquered its adversaries, that is, without pounding them into involuntary submission. The “American way of life” became envied and emulated around the world. Chafed European elites, who first diagnosed postmodernity and held out some, however gossamer, hope that their continent could be the bedrock where the new era would be experienced and enjoyed as both pioneering and meritorious, had to concede that a far less deserving America reigned as the locus of postmodern longings. It was, however, amidst these same bleak assessments that efforts to reinvigorate Europe took shape in the 1980s, continuing to gain momentum to the present day. I conclude with choice musings on why it behooves us to view Europe from the perspective of a fragile ego rather than from that of paradigmatic Eurocentrism. The paradigm, despite reigning for two centuries in comparative historiography,25 has, as mentioned, been examined more thoroughly in works other than this book. Indeed, rebuking the theory is in vogue these days. At least since Edward Said published Orientalism in 1978, scores of scholars have labored to correct the distorted image of Afro-Asia perpetuated by Eurocentric Orientalists.26 Though few would label it specifically “anti-Eurocentric,” a still larger corpus of literature, beginning with Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835–40), deals with America’s separation from, competition with, and ultimate influence over Europe.27 To the best of my knowledge, this book is the first to integrate these two areas of study into a unified interpretation of Europe’s experiences with rivals to both its east and its west during the last millennium. The book’s subtitle, Europe’s Fragile Ego Uncovered, suggests a psychological approach to the study of European identity. Readers should initially be wary of “pyschologizing,” that is, attempting to psychoanalyze an entire people, indeed a civilization, in the same way a therapist would treat a patient reclining on the office sofa. Here, I do not ply this popular trade. The psychoanalytic analysis stops with the subtitle, which I use to convey, in admittedly simplistic shorthand, a pervasive self-doubting European state of mind. It falls to me to demonstrate that the study employs scrupulous analysis, both quantitative and qualitative. To this end I supply two sorts of evidence to buttress my reading. First, I mine mainly, though hardly exclusively, anti-Eurocentric scholarship for actual developments

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that must have belied subjective Eurocentrism because educated Europeans were aware of them. Second, I extensively quote prominent Europeans who expressed doubt over Europe’s unrivaled greatness. These seemingly endless quotations can come forth as overbearing, even gratuitous, at times, but I employ them to show that such sentiments were voiced and heard across the whole of Europe. Mine is an interpretation that ultimately casts its lot with circumstantial evidence. Learned Europeans, I aver, had to know the developments I depict just as they had to confront the misgivings of their peers. Whether the case I build persuades, I obviously leave it to the reader to decide. Additional Caveats A study of this sort that traverses disparate fields of specialization, not to mention time and space, does well to annunciate several prefatory caveats beyond those just discussed. For all my talk of civilizations, I do not seek to chime in with the great debate over what constitutes “civilization.” This dialogue can be intriguing even if ultimately inconclusive.28 I advance no definition. To those who cannot suffer undefined concepts, I offer Samuel Huntington’s subjectivist, though problematic, definition of “the biggest ‘we’ within which we feel culturally at home as distinguished from all the other ‘thems’ out there.”29 Nor do I join the debate over what constitutes empire.30 In this work empire functions not as a precise unit of scientific analysis, but as a rather nebulous aspiration by which European elites evaluate their achievements. Their notion, even dream, of a universal empire changes with time but is normally grounded in some form of coveted subjective Eurocentrism. Desired subjective Eurocentrism also defies exact definition. In my analysis it operates much like what Max Weber (1864–1920) terms “Weltanschauung,” Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) “Dasein,” Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) “horizon,” Michel Foucault (1926–84) “discourse,”31 that is, a given, intuitively anticipated, widespread way of interpreting one’s world shared by one’s peers. Weber, like the others mentioned, justified this approach by arguing that no human, however open-minded, can immediately engage a mesmerizing world absent presuppositions of how it ought to appear.32 Furthermore, reinforcing this study’s stress on Europe’s rivals, many of the German sociologist’s successors profess that such ineluctable presuppositions invariably trade on equally axiomatic expectations of the “Other.”33 This methodology in no way discounts those who begged to differ with the predominant notion of desired subjective Eurocentrism. Instead, the strategy values and utilizes the concept of Weltanschauung—or whatever epithet one prefers despite acknowledged, subtle differences distinguishing them to specialists—precisely because its opponents

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felt obliged to counter rather than ignore it. Desired subjective Eurocentrism constituted ground zero. To enlist debate without assuming Europe ought to be first among civilizations lay outside most Europeans’ mien. Imprecise designations for civilizations and regions simply cannot be avoided. The meaning of “Europe” itself alters through time (and continues to do so today).34 Indeed, people who inhabited the geographical space we call Europe probably did not begin to think of themselves as “Europeans” until the sixteenth century, though evidence of “proto-Europeanness” surfaces much earlier.35 As far as the rivalry to the east goes, “Europe” generally means “Christendom.” That said, many Christians (such as Copts or Armenians) lived outside and many Muslims (Moors or Turks) inside geographical Europe. Moreover, this study trains its eye on Latin Christendom, that is, on those Christian communities who recognized, if sometimes in dissent, the See of Rome and the rites and rules of Roman Catholicism. When it comes to the rivalry with America, the designated continent stretching between the Atlantic and the Urals usually adequately represents “Europe.” However, some quoted observers refer to the “Old World,” of which they see Europe as merely a part. I think it safest to think of Europe (in this book at least) as that civilization which, while influenced by the heritage of ancient Greece and Israel, generally understands itself as originating in the Western Roman Empire, rebuilding itself after the disintegration of that storied empire (fifth century) through Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire (eighth and ninth centuries), reinforcing and expanding that basis during the first three centuries of the second millennium, going on to create and experience the crucial modern developments associated with the Italian Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution, and culminating in the tragedies of the two world wars and the endeavor to reunite Europe in their aftermath. Why America falls outside this European civilization will become clear in Part III.36 Europe’s eastern rival also changes with time. As long as we are dealing with Latin Christendom, Islam mostly represents Europe’s great adversary to the east. The “infidels” not only contended with Christianity for the role of leading monotheistic power, but also for control of that part of the world (essentially the Mediterranean zone) that Europeans judged most precious. But Islam is no monolith. In the first place, the religion, though integral, does not totally define the culture of Muslims. In this book, I deal with the larger entity of Islamic civilization as a whole, by which I mean something similar to Christendom, or “Islamdom.” Because the term “Islamdom” is foreign to most readers, I press into service the inexact label “Islam” to connote the civilization that Muslims erected and endeavored to advance.

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Use of the shorthand “Islam,” like the equally problematic generalizations of “Europe” and “America,” keeps the prose moving less cumbersomely in ways I hope readers will appreciate. Islamic civilization, in fact, envelops various ethnic groups—Persians, Arabs, Turks, and more. From roughly 1095 through 1300, “Islam” in these pages means chiefly Arab Islam, thereafter mainly Turkish Islam. All the same, non-Muslim Mongols seriously troubled Christian Europeans during the thirteenth century, though they ultimately embraced the Quran. Finally, once da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and ventured east of the Mediterranean into the Indian Ocean, Europeans’ conception of their eastern rivals broadened to include Mughal India and Ming China. “America” may stand as the most unproblematic epithet but it is approximate nonetheless. I apologize to all those Americans who live outside the United States of America. So many of the sources I quote in Part III refer to the USA as “America” that, for the sake of consistency and flow, I have reluctantly adopted the geographical misnomer in my prose. However, some references to “America” before 1776 will indeed mean the entire New World. And yet, allusions to the “New World” after 1776 most often imply the United States of America alone. Classifying civilizations is inescapably a matter of perspective. From the vantage point of this book, it makes sense to distinguish Islam, Europe, and America. But from another angle, one can imagine the three regions encompassed within a single civilization with its roots in Platonism and monotheism (and different from, say, Chinese civilization with its roots in Confucianism and polytheism).37 Indeed, the three monotheistic “civilizations” represent rivals in no small part because they vied for the same thing— convincing heirship to the sacred universalism connected with Israel and the secular universalism associated with Athens. I am not adverse, therefore, to thinking of the three as rival regions within a single civilization. I choose to use the label “civilization” because it connotes a broader meaning of people, institutions, culture, and so on, that I prefer over the geographically bounded “region.” Dates are less problematic. In Chapters 1 and 2, I provide birth and death dates for each person the first time he or she is mentioned. Because each of the remaining chapters is associated with a definite period in the title, in those pages I stop providing the dates, except for persons who lived well outside the treated period. I am no historian and this book is no bona fide history. Though the tale I narrate unfolds chronologically, I in no way purport to write the entire story of Europe’s relations with rival civilizations during the last millennium. To quote Dante (1265–1321),

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I cannot here describe them all in full; My ample theme impels me onward so: What’s told is often less than the event.38

I very selectively highlight evidence from the last 1000 years in order to exemplify themes rather than to paint a complete picture. I rely almost exclusively on secondary sources and make no pretense of offering “original” scholarship about any specific period. I concur wholeheartedly with Robert Solomon when he complains: Depth has become a euphemism, as well as the excuse, for a possibly fatal intellectual irresponsibility that has brought into ill repute and nearly eliminated “accessible” (worse still, “popular”) interdisciplinary studies aimed at a general audience, while favoring instead the secure insularity of technical specialization.39

I am also neither an Asianist nor an Americanist. Though I have lived in both areas and speak one language from each, I am the first to recognize that this does not qualify me as an expert on either region. I lean heavily on specialists, but readily imagine errors of transliteration or other intricacies I commit in these pages. I avoid the argot of specialists and opt for a style of prose congenial to lay readers. I am a bona fide Europeanist. This book may at times appear to be about Asia or America, but at heart it is always about Europe, or more to the point, about how Europeans viewed and experienced their rivals. The information about Asia or America is that which a well-educated European can be reasonably assumed to have possessed. This means that the book deals with European intellectuals (though in the broadest sense of that term) and not with commoners. Reading the European intelligentsia, however, proves trickier than it might first seem. For many, not all, European literati have spoken about their rivals with less than total candor. European wordsmiths frequently disguise their real feelings through distortion, silence, or arrogance. I have had to infer and imagine those hidden sentiments with the support of circumstantial evidence. I must warn that conclusive proof of the kind one would demand in a court of law is not to be found here. I aim to provoke rather than foreclose debate. Readers might detect a disparaging tone toward Europeans that suggests a chip on the author’s shoulder. Actually, I esteem most, if not all, of the Europeans I treat below. My argument is that they did not esteem themselves, at least not as much as paradigmatic Eurocentrism has spellbound many into believing. To counter that spell I have admittedly accentuated the negative over

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the positive. My audience can rest assured that I am aware of more positive renderings of the things I describe. I elect this less than perfectly balanced approach because I believe it can open our eyes to nuances hitherto overlooked. Such gains should become apparent throughout the text, but I will attend to them specifically in the closing chapter. The book is not systematic. I do not apply identical objective measurements to the two rivalries because they were anything but identical. European elites experienced the bout with Islam like a war of attrition between two formidable enemies. Presumably, objective criteria—tallying and comparing battles won, territories taken, souls converted, riches amassed, and so on— are in order here because Europeans gauged the antagonism in the same way. The rivalry with America was completely different. America never sought to conquer Europe and, in fact, has more often than not made league with its transatlantic neighbors. Comparing the tangible power and wealth of America with Europe fails to capture the essence of the transatlantic relationship before the twentieth century. I liken the relationship to the acquisition of a rookie sensation who promises one day to sideline the star player. America threatened Europeans less for what it actually was and more for what it seemed destined to become. The book, let me repeat, concentrates on Europeans’ attitudes and not on Asian or American views. If Asians or Americans viewed themselves differently than I show Europeans experiencing them—as they no doubt did—that does not change what Europeans saw through their own lenses. Similarly, some may argue that Americans or Asians too had self-doubts vis-à-vis Europe. These, again, are of no concern here. Finally, it remains to parry the predictable objection that the study irresponsibly lumps all Europeans together. Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975) once scoffed at the idea of a single European civilization as “egocentric illusion,” “folly,” and “chimaera.”40 And yet, we can point to many equally prominent Europeans who insist on the unity of European culture. Thus Charles Louis Montesquieu (1689–1755) called Europe “a nation composed of several provinces,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) “a real community with a religion and moral code, with customs and even laws of its own,” both Voltaire (1694–1778) and Edward Gibbon (1737–94) a “great republic.”41 Edmund Burke (1729–97) wrote of “the great vicinage of Europe” and claimed that no European could feel an exile in any other part of Europe.42 Benjamin Constant (1767–1830) observed that despite differences Europeans “are essentially homogeneous in their nature.”43 Nietzsche, who used the word “Europe” 400 times in his writings, referred to himself as a “bad German [but] a very good European.”44 According to John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), “Europe is solid with herself. France, Germany, Italy,

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Austria and Holland . . . throb together, and their structure and civilization are essentially one.”45 Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) discerned among the descendants of the Western Roman Empire “a common [Christian] consciousness which transcended the frontiers that separated them and which, as it gradually became secularized, turned into a specifically European awareness.”46 Gadamer sees “Europe . . . as a unity.”47 The truth, of course, is that European identity, like any, is fluid and relative. Derrida observes, “I feel European among other things . . . [I]t is up to the other, and up to me among them, to decide.”48 The French philosopher puts into words the commonplace experience of, say, a Dane who in Asia or Africa feels European but in Italy feels Danish. Because this book constantly deals with Europe in relationship to non-Europeans, it makes sense to gloss over the diversity within Europe.49 As mentioned, I primarily treat intellectual elites who in European history have traditionally shared a common culture, be it through the Catholic clergy in medieval times50 or through the republic of letters in modern times.51 As Peter Gay perspicaciously observes, “while it may be hard to live with generalizations, it is inconceivable to live without them.”52 Conclusion All books, including ones about the past, are ineludibly written from the vantage point of the present. Today we inhabit a globalized planet in which the people, ideas, and experiences of once largely separated, insulated domains constantly interpenetrate. America’s influence, whether opprobriously or approbatively received, is felt practically everywhere. Millions of Muslims permanently reside in Europe. The EU is presently negotiating with Turkey to include an additional 70 million. The coincidence, if not necessarily the clash, of civilizations will surely intensify with time. If this book teaches anything, it is that Europeans have long dealt with such cross-cultural encounters. Indeed, as the ensuing pages convey, Europeans have formed and reformed their identity through ceaseless experience with and reference to non-Europeans. I dare to say that no other people have devoted so much time and energy to comparing themselves with foreigners. Europeans, then, possess longer and deeper familiarity with confronting “Otherness.” It, therefore, behooves us at present to delve into and learn from this wealth of experience. It is in part for this reason that I employ the subjective approach adumbrated above. I wish to directly expose my audience to the ponderings of both past and present Europeans. I hope, for instance, that Eurocentric readers exhibiting a tendency to reject out of hand anti-Eurocentrism as nothing more

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than postcolonial ax grinding will note that many of their own intellectual heroes registered grave solicitude regarding Europe’s centrality in world affairs. I express equal hope that readers involved with or moved by the sensationalized hullabaloo surrounding the presence of Islam in Europe today will note the considerable respect (if not favor) with which many of their learned forefathers looked upon this same religion and its adherents in centuries past. Furthermore, it would please me if the consumers of these pages who are wont to dismiss current European opposition to America as angry or envious ad hominem directed at George W. Bush (and his administration) would recognize how and why Americans’ ways of going about their business have deeply troubled for centuries some of the sagest Europeans. But these remain tangential goals of the book. Its primary aim is to present and to analyze European perceptions of chief rivals during the last millennium.

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CHAPTER 2

The Quest for Subjective Eurocentrism [N]o culture was ever so little centered on itself and so interested in the other ones as Europe.1 Rémi Brague

Introduction Rémi Brague rejects putative charges of Eurocentrism leveled against Western civilization. The Frenchman prefers to characterize the West as “eccentric,” meaning off center. He equates Western civilization with Europe and understands it as that civilization which exfoliated out of the western half of the Roman Empire and with time differentiated itself from two other progenies of antiquity: the Byzantine and Islamic civilizations. He labels Europe eccentric because it stands (physically and figuratively) on the periphery of its professed universal core. Ancient Hellenism and Christianity compose that core. Following Leo Strauss,2 Brague employs the symbols of Athens and Jerusalem. “Its [Europe’s] culture comes down to two elements that cannot be reduced to one another. These two elements are the Jewish and the later Christian tradition, on the one hand, and the tradition of pagan antiquity on the other. ‘Athens and Jerusalem’ has been proposed as an expression to symbolize each of these currents with a proper name.”3 Curiously, neither core city has historically been considered part of Europe proper.4 This marginality runs much deeper than mere geography. Ancient Rome derived its culture and institutions from Greek Hellenism and Europe its civilization from its Roman predecessor. Europeans have had, then, only indirect or secondary access via Rome and Latin to ancient Greece and Greek. Similarly, God made His Covenant, not with Christians, but with Jews in their language. “Christianity is to the old Covenant what the Romans were to

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the Greeks. The Christians know—even if they are constantly in danger of forgetting, as they have done on several occasions—that they are grafted onto the Jewish people and onto their experience of God.”5 Greeks, however, feel directly connected to God because the Good News of His Incarnated Son was spread and canonized in their language in the supposedly superior New Testament.6 Thus, Catholic Europeans had to settle for only secondary linguistic access to both Holy Scriptures. “The Church is ‘Roman’ because it repeats the operation carried out by the Romans in regard to Hellenism, but in relation to Israel.”7 Oddly, Europeans are distanced, even “estranged,”8 from the purported essence of their own civilization. Though I generally see eye to eye with Brague, I nevertheless rescue the notion of Eurocentrism from his barrage. Eurocentrism operates in these pages as an apposite description of what Europeans themselves perceived so long as it applies more to a yearning that persistently both vexed and spurred the Latins than to an accomplished achievement that soothed and satisfied them. As the introductory chapter explained, I choose to call this coveting “subjective Eurocentrism” and to distinguish it from the (“paradigmatic”) Eurocentrism with which the Frenchman takes issue. The current chapter proceeds by recapitulating Brague’s argument that this “Roman attitude” or sense of “secondarity” has saddled Europe with a profound “feeling of inferiority” tied to its origins.9 I go on to recount that from the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century until the emergence of the Carolingian (Frankish) Empire in the eighth century, Latin Christians could do little to mitigate their own sense of inadequacy and marginality. However, Charlemagne (ca. 742–814) and his successors in the Holy Roman Empire (not officially so named until 1157) conquered, fortified, and unified enough people and territory in France, Italy, Germany, and beyond that, by the thirteenth century, probably earlier, Roman Catholics not only first began to think of themselves collectively as “Europeans” but increasingly nursed hopes that they could produce a universal civilization of their own to outshine (symbolic) Jerusalem and Athens. The ambition essentially involved the attempt to shift the (perceived) central axis of world power and influence from the Mediterranean East to the Atlantic West. The chapter closes with a detailed interpretation of subjective Eurocentrism, that is, with what Europeans have believed they must accomplish in order to transform that shift from aspiration to reality. Europe as Parvenu In Brague’s estimation, a crisis of self-confidence runs deep in European civilization. It stems not, as with others, from momentary losses—a military defeat here, a diplomatic concession there—that might be proudly explained

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away, but from the very sources Europe draws on to define itself. These sources are Latin, or Roman, and as such are secondary to or derivative from a previous culture. Europeans’ “Romanity” reveals as much what Rome is not—not Athens, not Jerusalem—as what it and its progeny are. Their Roman origins constantly remind Europeans, if not always consciously, that they are “latecomers,” “parvenus,” in relation to their own tradition.10 Because their progenitors were not the original authors of the tradition, Europeans cannot identify themselves as fully legitimate heirs. As a consequence, “a certain feeling of bastardy”11 besmirches European civilization. Obviously, Europeans are hardly the only people to derive their civilization from a previous one. They stand out, according to the French philosopher, because they failed to overcome their secondarity. Greeks, as mentioned, developed their identity directly from ancient Hellenism and Christianity, as did the Muslims. Brague explains: Unlike Byzantium, Europe has not been able to perdure through the continuity of a language that has been the support of a very great literature, in peaceable possession of a classical heritage that assured it the feeling of cultural superiority. Nor, like the Muslim world, has it been able to compensate for its initial dependence on exterior sources through the impression of ennobling and enlarging the knowledge it inherited in making it attain the language chosen by God for His ultimately unadulterated message, and by diffusing it over the territory His definitive religion covered. Europe, therefore, had to confront a consciousness of having borrowed, without hope of restitution, from a source that it could neither regain nor surpass.12

The “Roman attitude”13 situates Europeans in an uneasy liminality between the Absolute and barbarity. On the one hand, the identification with Athens and Jerusalem provides a sense of being informed by transcendental truth and included in catholic civilization. On the other hand, secondarity makes estrangement from universal culture and descent into ignorance and irrelevance an ever-present possibility. This precarious position “between the uphill classical and downhill barbarity”14 drives Europeans to ceaseless selfreflection and self-improvement. For genuine culture is not something Europeans simply possess. It is rather something that they must assiduously acquire and vigilantly safeguard. Brague attributes the recurrent “renaissances” (for example, the Italian, but also the Reformation and the Enlightenment) to the need to reconfirm Europe’s attachment to the Absolute. Similarly, he contends that the numerous, determined endeavors to convert or civilize so-called barbarian peoples (such as Celtic, Slavic, and Scandinavian tribes in medieval

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times or Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans in modern times) were motivated in part by convenient self-assurances that Europeans had not slipped into barbarity themselves.15 Brague wants nothing to do with the idea of an independent, unchanging European identity. Instead, what is understood as Europe unfurls from “a constant movement of self-Europeanization,”16 that is, an ongoing process of evaluation, appropriation, and redefinition, always undertaken in comparison to other civilizations. “In this way, the question of the cultural identity of Europe cannot be posed in an independent fashion. It is indissolubly tied to the question of the relation of Europe to other civilizations, anterior and/or exterior to it.”17 This conviction undergirds the French scholar’s inclination to abandon the adjective “Eurocentric” to describe Europe. “[N]o culture was ever so little centered on itself and so interested in the other ones as Europe. China saw itself as the ‘Middle Kingdom.’ Europe never did. ‘Eurocentrism’ is a misnomer. Worse: it is the contrary of the truth.”18 Furthermore, Brague detects no cause for shame in Europe’s inveterate sense of secondarity and inferiority. On the contrary, it fuels the dynamism that has propelled his civilization to the forefront of world affairs in the modern era. Unlike rival, self-centric civilizations— Islamic, Chinese, Byzantine—that have smugly maintained their own superiority, often against overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Europe has remained open to new ideas and criticisms, from within and without, which it has exploited to better itself. Ceaseless self-doubt and the accompanying reform constitute peerless attributes that Europeans should embrace and cherish.19 The Dark Ages The European enthusiast, however, stops short of bucking the conventional wisdom that the lands that would one day be known as Europe exhibited no such dynamism during the so-called Dark Ages. Between the fifth and eighth centuries Latin Christians all but fell off the civilized world into an abyss of barbarity. Their sense of secondarity and inferiority ballooned. Forebodings surfaced as early as 330 CE. At a battle outside Rome near the Milvian Bridge in 312, the emperor Constantine (ca. 280–337) fancied that he was inspired to victory by the One God of the Christians. In recognition of this divine intervention, the shrewd leader subsequently turned against Roman pagan beliefs and set in train events that would eventually make Christianity the official imperial religion. The “miracle” of the Milvian Bridge seemed to augur the fusion of the two great traditions of Athens and Jerusalem with Rome as the new nucleus. However, in 330 the first great Christian emperor elected to found his capital, “New Rome,” at Byzantium, further east in the heart of the civilized world.

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As Constantinople’s star ascended during the rest of the century, Rome’s descended. In 410 the erstwhile capital was sacked by Alaric the Visigoth (370–410). With time the entire western half of the Roman Empire fell susceptible to recurrent invasions and conquests from barbarian hordes, such as Goths, Huns, Vandals, and Lombards, who menaced the vulnerable Romans of Gaul. Constantinople was too preoccupied securing the more important eastern empire to safeguard its western flank. Finally, in 476 the Western Roman Empire perished when the barbarian warrior Odacer (433–93) deposed Romulus Augustulus (emperor 475–76).20 The western frontier subsequently transformed into an “immense ‘Middle Ground,’ where Christian and pagan met” and where Christianity turned into a “religion on the defensive.”21 Seeing themselves as a small island of lettered men in a vast sea of uncouth reprobates, the Latin Christians initially thought they would either have to be rescued by their Christian brethren from the civilized “mainland” or, more likely, be swamped by the tide of ignorance and depravity. Hydatius (ca. 397–470), Bishop of Chaves in northwestern Spain, limned his environs in 455 as “within Gallaecia, at the edge of the entire world . . . not untouched by all the calamities of this wretched age . . . [faced with] the domination of heretics, compounded by the disruption brought by hostile tribes.”22 With time, however, the stranded Christians came to admire select attributes of the pagans and to make common cause with them. In the fifth and sixth centuries, pagan and Christian intermixed to such an extent that the once unmistakable ancestral line of demarcation between them vanished.23 The Church could take some solace in the extensive Christianization of encountered barbarians—something the venerated Catholic bishop, Augustine of Hippo, had predicted. But this offered only a jejune substitute for the shriveling influence of the Bishop of Rome. St. Peter’s successor had always professed greater ecclesiastical suzerainty over Christendom than he actually enjoyed. But with the deterioration of Rome into a desolate, peripheral city—a mere “rundown window on the west”24—the Holy See was reduced to just one bishopric among many vying for influence. Even in the west, where papal power was expected to enjoy greater sway, the Church splintered into what Peter Brown dubs “micro-Christendoms,”25 locally focused, typically syncretic collections of Christian and pagan beliefs and rituals that shared little more than the sign of the Cross. If all this were not enough bad news, in the seventh century Muslim conquests in the Maghreb, the land of St. Augustine, cut off North African Roman Catholics from their brothers to the north.26 With tenuous relations at home, strained ones to the east, and severed ones to the south, the view from Rome was dismal indeed. Expressed in Brague’s terms, Latin Christians, during the Dark Ages, slid precipitously down the slippery slope between the Absolute and barbarity.

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Charlemagne The first, though faint, sign of halting the slide appeared in the eighth century in the figure of Charlemagne’s grandfather. At Poitiers in 732, Charles Martel (ca. 688–741), “the Hammer,” stifled the advance of Muslim raiders intent on sacking Tours. Though unable to penetrate the Iberian Peninsula, much of which Muslims had controlled since first invading from across the Straits of Gibraltar in 711, Charles’s revived Franks eventually managed to defeat rivals across a territory stretching from Aquitaine to the Rhine, Thuringia, and the Danube. Imperiled by surrounding Muslims and Lombards and keen to hitch his fortune to a swelling Christian military force, Pope Stephen II crossed the Alps in the icy winter to reach Francia, where in 754 he legitimated Charles’s much maligned family line by crowning his son, Pippin III (714–68), the sole rightful king of the Franks (or “Carolingians” as they would become known as the successors of Charles). At court the pontiff was escorted by the king’s 12-year-old son, later dubbed Charles le magne (the Elder) to distinguish him from his own offspring of the same name. Once he ascended to the throne in 771, it did not take long for the epithet to be reinterpreted as “Charles the Great,” deservedly so. For in subduing such tribes as the Lombards to the south, Saxons to the north, and Avars to the east, Charlemagne expanded his kingdom from Ravenna to Utrecht—a larger area united under one ruler than any in western Christendom since the heyday of empire building under the likes of Constantine and Diocletian in the fourth century.27 Charlemagne aspired to resurrect the Roman Empire in the west and place it on an equal footing with Byzantium. To this end he erected his own “New Rome” at Aachen in 796 and outfitted it with an imperial complex befitting a Roman emperor, namely Aix-la-Chapelle. To be sure, neither the city nor the palace ever matched the grandeur of Constantinople, but they did signify a powerful outpost of civilization once again firmly planted on western soil. In keeping with the Roman tradition, Charlemagne strove to unify his far-flung empire under one uniform legal code. He further set his energies to integrating the economy around a single silver currency, the denier. Intensifying the alliance between crown and tiara forged by his father, Charlemagne worked in tandem with the pope not only to convert pagans but to establish and enforce cultic unity throughout Roman Catholicism based on a more cultivated Latin distilled from the Vatican. In 800, he demonstrated his loyalty by journeying to Rome to reinstall Pope Leo III, whose enemies had waylaid him. On Christmas Day during mass at St. Peter’s Basilica, the grateful pontiff rewarded Charlemagne by anointing him Roman Emperor.28

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We should, however, resist the temptation—sweetened by hindsight—to read too much ambition or precociousness into the great Frank’s empire, despite its accomplishments. Even a Europhile such as Jacques Le Goff, editor of the prestigious series The Making of Europe, reminds that the empire’s dominions did not include the British Isles, which, in the hands of the Anglo-Saxons and the Irish, remained independent, the Iberian peninsula, which was mostly under Muslim control, southern Italy and Sicily, likewise in the hands of the Saracens, nor, finally, Scandinavia, which was still pagan and from which the Norman Vikings launched themselves either intent on pillage, or else in order to impose trading deals that were much to their advantage. Furthermore, the Carolingian Empire hardly impinged at all on territory to the east of the Rhine. Most of Germany lay beyond its grasp.29

Brown adds that, from the wider perspective of the entire Christian world, Charlemagne’s remained a micro-Christendom, albeit one camped in the foothills of universal ambition.30 The Byzantines, even in the face of their own waning power and influence, did not deign to recognize the purported universal authority of either the upstart emperor or the Bishop of Rome.31 This was in addition to the Muslims, who saw themselves as the ascendant heirs of antiquity.32 Truth be told, Charlemagne’s credentials as leader of the “civilized” world fell far short of unimpeachable. After all, his ancestors, including immediate ones, knew not Latin, and he himself learned the venerated tongue first as an adult. In other words, we are still dealing with a Latin Christendom struggling to tame its barbarian potential and clutch at its civilized pedigree. The First European Revolution More convincing yearnings to overtake the Byzantines or the Muslims as leaders of the civilized world gelled in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries at the end of what R.I. Moore terms “the First European Revolution.”33 Here is not the place to quibble with specialists over whether “revolution” as opposed to, say, “mutation” is the apt label for the period,34 or, for that matter, whether the developments were stirred by indigenous or exogenous stimuli.35 We need only stress that during what until that point—roughly the first three centuries of the second millennium, or the High Middle Ages—had been little more than the western promontory of Asia underwent, absent any specified architect or design, myriad mutually reinforcing transformations that together begat an entity—indeed a civilization—identifiable by insider and outsider

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alike as (proto)Europe (“our continent this-side-the-sea”).36 Sir Richard Southern referred to the development as a “secret revolution” with “no great events or decisive moments.”37 Unorchestrated yet advancing developments in politics, economics, demographics, and culture expanded, integrated, and vivified Europe in “a great surge forward”38 that spawned universalist aims among its inhabitants. During this “mediaeval renaissance”39 Catholic Christendom roughly doubled in size in terms of both population40 and territory.41 On the fringes of the Holy Roman Empire (the successor state to Charlemagne’s) Christians, once accustomed to being marauded by nonbelievers, turned aggressors, secured their own lands, and conquered new ones for Christ, though rarely securely. Often the vanquished infidels were routed, suppressed, or Christianized. From the Carolingian heartland of France, western Germany, and northern Italy the precarious expansion took place on every possible frontier. In the tenth and eleventh centuries German armies conquered north into Scandinavia and east into Prussia, Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary.42 The Normans, led by William the Conqueror (1028–87), crossed the English Channel in 1066 to seize England and lay the foundation for subsequent English domination of the Celtic regions.43 The Normans also pushed south down the Italian peninsula to win control of southern Italy from the Muslims by the close of the eleventh century, including for all intents and purposes Sicily.44 In 1085 the original Spanish conquistadores, from whom the New World warriors would derive their epithet, grabbed Toledo from the Moors and invigorated the reconquest of the Iberian peninsula that would not culminate until the capture of Granada in 1492.45 On the heels of the victorious armies marched bands of acquisitive nobles and their followers looking for new opportunity. Stemming from both town and country, the settlers labored to replicate in the colonies the conditions of the homeland. Replication promised to pay dividends, for the core territories experienced a significant spurt in economic growth—in agriculture and manufacturing alike—from the eleventh to thirteenth century in what at least one historian has not hesitated to call the “industrial revolution of the Middle Ages.”46 Driven by greed, the Frankish knightly class forced on the new colonies feudal forms of tenure and obligation that had proved lucrative back home. In a process of “dramatic urbanization,”47 the budding merchant class erected new trading centers, that is, chartered towns, with their multifarious institutions conducive to commerce. In 1000, for example, there existed in Europe an estimated 29 cities of more than 5,000 inhabitants; by 1200, there were 127.48 Commerce expanded on the seas as well. Hanseatic merchants turned the frigid waters stretching from the British Isles to the Baltic seaboards into a German lake. Though they hardly dominated the warmer

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Mediterranean, Venetian and Genoese sailors plied their trade in Byzantine and Muslim markets to the south. German and Italian seamen occasionally rubbed shoulders in the bustling new port towns of Flanders, so far did their networks extend.49 In these same years, Europe homogenized culturally, being steered along by that venerable custodian of spiritual life, the Catholic Church. Gregory VII (pope 1073–85) deserves the lion’s share of credit for initiating this unifying process. Bent on reversing the loss of ecclesiastical properties resulting from the practices of simony (sale of clerical offices) and nicolaitism (clerical marriages that wound up bequeathing church land to lay progeny), the subsequently canonized pontiff proscribed these costly practices. Such prohibitions marked just the beginning of what scholars have called “the Gregorian Revolution”50 or the “Reformation of the Twelfth Century”51—a sweeping movement of reform in the medieval Church that was not finally cemented into canon law until the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. The multifaceted reforms aimed at unmistakably bifurcating a clergy and laity that had become virtually indistinguishable. The former was to enjoy a separate, exalted status but one based on strict obedience to rules and rituals laid down by Rome that demarcated the sacred from the profane life. This maneuver enhanced the pope’s claim to sole authority over the Church—its personnel and property—but relied on the thoroughgoing enforcement of canon law down to the tiniest of village churches throughout Europe.52 Everywhere the papal monarch sought to stamp out heterodoxy, be that by compelling Sardinian priests to shave their beards or forbidding celebration of the liturgy in Mozarabic.53 As a result, the countless pious pilgrims who crisscrossed Europe en route to the holy shrine of their choice became increasingly aware that they all professed the same religion despite their regional differences.54 Three related developments abetted this “new institutional and cultural uniformity in the western Church.”55 The first was the establishment of numerous new bishoprics across Latin Christendom, including the recently Christianized periphery. Beginning with the founding of the first diocese east of the Elbe at Hamburg (831–34), bishoprics sprouted in places like Prague (973), Aversa (1053), and Toledo (1085). Installed bishops, often aided by the religious orders of knights, brought to heel those who dared to query or breach Rome’s directives. So did the 800 bishoprics formed by the year 1300 vastly lengthen the reach of the Curia’s tentacles.56 Second, newly established monastic orders loyal to the throne of St. Peter sent their mendicant monks far and wide in Europe to preach and teach orthodoxy. Traditionally, Benedictine monasteries had been locally oriented. Starting with the founding of the Order of Cluny in 910 and extending to the creation of the Cistercian Order in the twelfth and the Franciscan and

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Dominican Orders in the thirteenth century, the monastic houses became increasingly international in focus and more administratively sophisticated at communicating and enforcing statutes from one monastery to the next. For example, in their first 100 years the Cluniacs created a network of 500 houses; the Franciscans, 1,400.57 Furthermore, the universities, closely tied to the monastic orders, fostered cultural homogeneity. The High Middle Ages was the period when Europe’s prestigious institutions of higher learning, such as the universities of Bologna and Paris, were founded. Together they articulated a uniform definition of high culture and reared generations of prelates on practically identical educational diets.58 Third, acuter awareness of menacing foes forged a common sense of identity in what John France calls the “Catholic core, the zone of unequivocal acceptance of the final authority of Rome in spiritual affairs comprising what is now southern England, France, Germany and much of Italy.”59 As this core expanded, Catholics came to know their rivals better, including how they differed. Greater awareness of the “they” reinforced the sense of “we.” Theological and political skirmishes with Greek Orthodoxy, especially after the official schism of 1054, highlighted the peculiarities of Latin Christianity. Encounters with Muslims underscored the differences between Islam and Christianity.60 The threatening presence of heretics on its borders moved the Church to root out heterodoxy of all kinds at home in an effort to put forth a united front against religious adversaries.61 Moore concludes: If any single aspect of the twelfth century revolution in government was of decisive importance for the future it was the capacity developed by both secular and ecclesiastical powers to penetrate communities of every kind vigorously and ruthlessly, overriding the restraints of custom, and enlisting, or destroying, men of local standing and influence in the name of order, orthodoxy and reform.62

For better or worse, the inhabitants of Europe now shared a single culture in a way they had not two hundred years earlier.63 Needless to say, aspects of diversity persisted.64 This “Europeanization of Europe”65 worked to reverse the long-flagging confidence of Latin Christians. Robert Bartlett notes that “the Christendom that became newly aware of itself in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries was not the Christendom of Constantine, but an assertively western or Latin Christendom.”66 Elites of various stripes started musing about translatio imperii—the possibility that civilized culture and the earthly power to defend and extend it was shifting westward “from the Byzantine Empire to the Germanic one.”67 In this vein historian Otto von Freising wrote in the

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twelfth century: “All human powers and possibilities, in this case, wisdom, come from the East . . . in order to be completed in the West.”68 It helped that Byzantium had been steadily losing ground to the Muslims, not to mention the fact that Western crusaders overran Constantinople in 1204 and governed it until 1261. Still more hope than prophesy at this point, the attitude percolated that Europe had built the foundations of a civilization that could rival, perhaps surpass, the towering civilizations of the Mediterranean zone. Listen to Chrétien de Troyes (ca. 1176): Our books have informed us that the preeminence in chivalry and learning once belonged to Greece. Then chivalry passed to Rome together with that highest learning which now has come to France. God grant that it may be cherished here, that the honour which has taken refuge with us may never depart from France. God has awarded it as another’s share, but of Greeks and Romans no more is heard; their fame is passed and their glowing ash is dead.69

A few decades earlier the abbot Philippe de Harvengt wrote to a young disciple: “Impelled by a love for science, here you are in Paris, where you have found the Jerusalem desired by so many.”70 A new belief in this-worldly improvement began to gain traction. The conviction that temporal pursuits could only deter eternal salvation gradually gave way to the idea that profane and sacred success could go hand in hand.71 Relatedly, the proclivity toward venerating only the ideas handed down by tradition while denigrating all that was new receded behind a fresh outlook that countenanced respectful critique and reform of lore.72 Nurturing this more reflective orientation was a heightened appreciation of the power of reason, not yet over faith but in tandem with it. Particularly due to the fresh transmission of previously unknown Greek, Jewish, and Muslim scholarship in natural philosophy, Latin Christians learned that wisdom emanated from both the human and divine intellect and, moreover, that accumulated human knowledge was meritorious.73 Bernard of Chartes wrote: “We are dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. We therefore see more and farther than they, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and born aloft on their gigantic stature.”74 These shifts in intellectual temperament eroded unadulterated praise of the status quo and fostered budding hope in a brighter future. In this way, claims Le Goff, “medieval thought restarted history in the twelfth century.”75 To be sure, we anachronistically exaggerate when we liken this emerging mood to the later cult of “Progress” that formed during the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution. Nevertheless, Latin Christians, once largely

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resigned to a life of depravity and decline, started to fancy that their civilization should and could improve. Subjective Eurocentrism This “widening vision”76 spawned hope and avidity for subjective Eurocentrism. It pointed the way toward liberation from civilizational secondarity and the sense of inferiority it engendered. As stated in the introduction, aspiring subjective Eurocentrism breeds hope in (re)centering the world both temporally and spiritually about Europe. Absolute Truth is by definition universal and, therefore, only foolishly thought to be peculiar to Europe. European leaders did hope, however, to transform Europe into the fountainhead through which Truth would flow to all mankind. History was thought to teach that acting as the Absolute’s conduit brought with it unimpeachable éclat and insurmountable primacy. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) perhaps put it best in his Encyclopedia: “Because history is the configuration of the Spirit in the form of event, the people which receives the Spirit as its natural principle . . . is the one that dominates in that epoch of world history.”77 In that aspirant subjective Eurocentrism builds the premise of this book, it behooves us to examine it thoroughly before treating its impact on European identity. In what does desired subjective Eurocentrism consist? How does it manifest itself ? How can we know that it acts as a significant force in Europe during the second millennium? In this section I seek to answer these queries by underscoring Europeans’ veneration of universalism—understood as global sway guided by timeless Truth—where it was perceived to have been realized in the world, if always imperfectly. I stress that this retrospective regularly generated a related prospective that wished to see Europe as the possessor and distiller of the Universal. Simultaneously lionizing (perceived) universalists of the past while endeavoring to fashion oneself in a superior role in the present and future runs like a scarlet thread through the European tradition. I cannot here possibly describe all of the manifold articulations of this preoccupation with universalism. I italicize two: spiritual universalism because virtually all European universalists maintain that universalism must needs originate in the realm of abstract Truth; and political universalism—in essence global power—achievement of which supposedly demonstrates awareness of and devotion to the Absolute. The two reinforce one another. Spiritual universalism inheres in the confidence that a civilization—more precisely its savants—has occupied the Absolute, while political universalism is achieved when the rest of the world must play by the rules promulgated by the superintendents of universal civilization.

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Eminent thinkers of various persuasions concur about the pivotal role universalism plays in European thought. Isaiah Berlin (1907–97), for one, referred to universalism as the “backbone of the main Western tradition.” Spiritual universalism reposes on the notion that all things fit together in a perfectly designed Unity that never changes. In one of his famously simple but telling metaphors, Berlin likened the outlook to a “jigsaw-puzzle” approach to the world: There must be some way of putting these pieces together. The all-wise man, the omniscient being, whether God or an omniscient earthly creature—whichever way you like to conceive of it—is in principle capable of fitting all the various pieces together into one coherent pattern. Anyone who does this will know what the world is like: what things are, what they have been, what they will be, what the laws are that govern them, what man is, what the relation of man is to things, and therefore what man needs, what he desires, and how to obtain it.78

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) employed the analogy of a “God’s eye view,” a “single perspective on everything,” which, because it encompasses everything, is impervious to everything.79 Heidegger termed the Western penchant for universalism “the onto-theological tradition.”80 Something of this sort did Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) surely have in mind when he famously averred that “the European philosophical tradition . . . is a series of footnotes to Plato.”81 Plato (ca. 427–347 BCE) looms so large in the pantheon of great Western minds because he is credited with having anchored universalism despite facing a sea of relativism. During his time debate raged over whether order or disorder ruled the universe. The putative father of Western philosophy sided with unity over chaos. In the Timaeus, for instance, he wrote: “the creator made not two worlds or an infinite number of them; but there is and ever will be one only-begotten and created heaven.” Moreover, God desired that all things should be good and nothing bad, so far as this was attainable. Wherefore also finding the whole visible sphere not at rest, but moving in an irregular and disorderly fashion, out of disorder he brought order, considering that this was in every way better than the other . . . Mind, the ruling power, persuaded necessity to bring the greater part of created things to perfection, and thus and after this manner in the beginning, when the influence of reason got the better of necessity, the universe was created.82

Plato’s cosmology emphasized permanence over change, or as David Hall and Roger Ames put it, “logos over mythos and historia.”83 Logos signaled that

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the universe had singular meaning that could be articulated through language. For Plato that meaning consisted of Forms, eternal ideas or truths, harmoniously orchestrated by the governing Principle of the Good. The everyday world of concrete appearances, though shaped by the Forms, was not real, but merely fleeting. Despite the fact that man inhabited the phenomenal world, he could access the timeless, abstract realm through dialogue and dialectic, both designed to know the Forms and ultimately the Good through deliberation. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) alone rivals Plato’s pride of place in the European memory. For centuries disciples have learned that the Stagirite inverted Plato’s cosmology but did nothing to detract from its universalism. The dedicated but independent student choked on his mentor’s insistence that the Forms existed independently. For Aristotle, forms existed only in and through particular substances (stones, seeds, bodies) in the here and now. Nevertheless, all of those substances were governed by certain causes and related to one another by principles. Furthermore, the entire universe was set in motion toward a final end (telos) by God, the divine intellect, to which humans had potential access via their own active intellect (nous).84 To be sure, the mentor was an idealist, the student an empiricist, but for all their vaunted differences, Plato and Aristotle share a significant number of dispositions that render their disputes family quarrels among the proponents of a common culture. Each believes in a single-ordered world. Both have faith in the efficacy of reason in searching out the laws which define the structure of that world and the relation of the human mind to that structure. And this faith leads each to defend the philosophical system as a means of reflecting that structure and relationship.85

Similar universalist thinking permeated ancient Roman culture. Prominent Roman philosophers embraced wholeheartedly the metaphysics of their respected Greek predecessors. Marcus Tillius Cicero (106–43 BCE), for example, maintained that “reason . . . is certainly common to us all.”86 Marcus Aurelius (121–180 CE), similarly wrote in his Meditations (167): “reason speaks no less universally to us all with its ‘thou shalt’ or ‘thou shalt not.’ ” “So then there is a world-law; which in turn means that we are all fellow-citizens and share a common citizenship, and that the world is a single city.”87 Likewise, Gaius’s legal text of the second century, Institutiones, asserted that “the law which natural reason establishes throughout all mankind is followed by all peoples alike and is called the law of nations.”88 Pagan universalism profoundly colored Christianity once the monotheistic creed was recast in Greek and Roman philosophical molds. Europeans

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hold Paul (ca. 6 BCE—67 CE) in such high esteem in part because they see him as the principal (earthly) author of the providential union of Athens and Jerusalem.89 This was no mean achievement. After all, Paul grew up Jewish and as such the member of a relentlessly particularistic clan that believed God had singled it out as His Chosen People. But as a Roman citizen Paul also had opportunity to master Greek philosophy and rhetoric (most likely at the University of Tarsus).90 After the persecuting Pharisee underwent his dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus and dedicated his life to proselytizing his newly won faith beyond Jews to Gentiles in the wider Graeco-Roman world, he Hellenized the Christian message so effectively that Plato and Socrates (ca. 470–399 BCE) often turned up in early Christian icons portrayed as redeemed “Christians before Christ” (snatched up from the underworld by Christ himself despite their paganism).91 Luke, for instance, records that Paul preached to the Athenians that their “unknown god” was one and the same as the Christian God (Acts 17:23). Paul professed to the Colossians (3:10–11): “there cannot be Greek or Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman: but Christ is all and in all.” The itinerant preacher thus pressed into service universal terms that Greeks and other Gentiles could easily comprehend in order to make his message more palatable to its audience. He taught that Jesus was much more than a man, even a prophet. He was the Son of God and as such the Incarnation of God’s Divine Wisdom. Christ was not only proof that there existed a heavenly plan for the universe that His life and resurrection were propelling toward fruition. He also represented the living, flesh link between man and God that all persons could experience by following the example set by the Messiah. Paul, to put it bluntly, simplified and popularized the Absolute (in his sermons). What for Plato had been something accessible to only a few esoteric philosophers, the convert argued, everyone could know through God’s gift of his Incarnated Son. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), the insufferable elitist but also perspicacious student of Western thought, dubbed the saint’s teachings “Platonism for the people.”92 Augustine (354–430), who is especially revered by Latin Christians, reinforced the universalist bridge connecting Athens and Jerusalem. The Bishop of Hippo lauded Plato as “the one who shone with a glory which far excelled that of the others” and the one “nearest to us.”93 The African accepted the Greek’s theory of the Forms but tailored it to fit monotheism by arguing that they existed in the mind of God. In addition, he modeled his explanation of the Trinity on Plato’s tripartite division of the soul. Hall and Ames go so far as to label Augustine’s “The City of God . . . a latter-day Republic.”94

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Clearly, Christianity and Platonism differed markedly. The former was highly personal, the latter impersonal. The Christian God cared about, listened to, and even interceded on behalf of man. Platonism’s divine intellect stood alone and aloof, unaffected by and uninterested in man. The Christian deity incarnated His Son so that fallen man could easily and personally identify with God and gain redemption. The divine for Platonists bordered on the ineffable and was accessible only through painstaking, abstract deliberation. Christianity obligated its followers to have faith in Scripture—one book. Platonism exacted mastering, criticizing, and ultimately transcending a seemingly endless curriculum of arcane ideas and scripts. Finally, Christianity told a progressive tale that ends with the triumph of Christ and through Him man. Platonism infinitely recycled man. These important differences notwithstanding, Platonism’s universalism—the conviction that the One and the Many ultimately cohere—permeated Christian doctrine. Besides the central tenet that a single act, the Incarnation, offered salvation to all, Christianity espoused the Trinity—a godhead at once plural and singular. God created not merely the first man but through Adam the essence of all men. Christians could found countless individual churches but rest assured that the Universal Church inhered in each. “Although the Platonic Ideas per se were not central to the Christian belief system,” David Tarnas concludes, “the ancient and medieval mind was generally predisposed toward thinking in terms of types, symbols, and universals, and Platonism offered the most philosophically sophisticated framework for comprehending that mode of thought.”95 Thomas Aquinas (1225–78), among the earliest thinkers conscious of being European, revived Aristotle’s empiricism but in no way diluted Christian universalism. Beginning in the twelfth century, writings of the Greek master long lost to the Latin world began resurfacing. Aristotle’s work, on natural philosophy in particular, both contradicted Christian teachings (based on Scripture) and seemed incontrovertibly more sophisticated. This led some mavericks to doubt the Bible and to deem philosophy not only separate from, but superior to, theology. Aquinas parried this challenge and reconciled the realms of reason and faith. Reason, he insisted, operated in the world of sense perception by comprehending the principles according to which things functioned. Because God designed those very principles, the study of the natural world brought man closer to God. Yet, there were limits to what reason could know. Faith alone could yield understanding of the divine itself (not merely the things God created). Thus philosophy and theology did indeed address different subjects, even using different methods, but this did not make the two fields incompatible. On the contrary: Though the . . . truth of the Christian faith surpasses the ability of human reason, nevertheless those things which are naturally instilled in

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human reason can not be opposed to this truth. For it is clear that those things which are implanted in reason by nature, are most true, so much so that it is impossible to think them to be false. Nor is it lawful to deem false that which is held by faith, since it is so evidently confirmed by God. Seeing then that the false alone is opposed to the true, as evidently appears if we examine their definitions, it is impossible for the aforesaid truth of faith to be contrary to those principles which reason knows naturally.96

The universe remained governed by a single Unity even if there were plural ways for man to comprehend it. It is easy to see how universalism thrived in monotheism; not so easy, however, to see how it did so in humanism. But it did. Humanism, the ultimately secular worldview born of the Italian Renaissance and finally molded by the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, made man its starting point. When it was not denying God’s existence altogether (atheism), it was relegating the supreme diety to a minor role as a mere clockmaker who after creating his perfect machine winds it and lets it operate on its own (deism). In their celebration of man, humanists renounced all handed-down authority on the grounds that it enslaved man. Thus Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) declared: “Enlightenment is man’s exodus from his self-incurred tutelage . . . dare to know! Have the courage to use your own understanding; this is the motto of the Enlightenment.”97 Similarly, Denis Diderot (1713–84) enthused: The eclectic is a philosopher who, trampling underfoot prejudice, tradition, venerability, universal assent, authority—in a word, everything that overawes the crowd—dares to think for himself, to ascend to the clearest general principles, to examine them, to discuss them, to admit nothing save on the testimony of his own reason and experience.98

The unalloyed rational man discovers a rational universe. Once man dispels the calumnies done to nature by the prejudices of tradition, once man, in other words, disciplines himself to view the world impartially and dispassionately, he discerns a world that itself operates according to rational principles of cause and effect.99 As Hegel put it, “to him who looks at the world rationally the world looks rationally back.”100 This in turn means that rational man can not only comprehend, but also thereby control nature. What scientists like Isaac Newton (1643–1727) were doing for nature, philosophers like Kant were doing for morality: namely, providing it a rational foundation and its practitioners a sense of absolute certainty. Humanism, though it challenged established religion, ultimately emerged as confident and certain of its beliefs as any religion. And that confidence led to universalist aspirations as great as any worldview.101

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It should surprise no one, then, that humanists also revered the Ancients. Niccol`o Machiavelli (1469–1527) reflected: On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study; and at the door I take off the day’s clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and courtly; and reclothed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which only is mine and which I was born for.102

“The same HOMER who pleased at ATHENS AND ROME two thousand years ago,” observed David Hume (1711–76), “is still admired at PARIS and LONDON.”103 “Let us go to the ancients,” wrote Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) to Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86) in 1756. “What better teachers, after nature, could we choose?” Diderot exclaimed: “I shall not get weary of shouting at Frenchmen: Truth! Nature! The Ancients! Sophocles! Philoctetes!”104 Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) limned his enthusiasm for the Ancients as an “intoxication.”105 Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) predicted “they [ancient Greeks] are what we were; they are what we shall become again . . . by means of our reason and freedom.”106 French painter Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) declared simply: “I am a Greek.”107 The central universalist tenet of humanism maintained that all rational persons could and would think alike. Even Hume, the incurable skeptic, wrote: “Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature, by showing men in all varieties of circumstances and situations.”108 All persons could use the same methods to study nature and agree on the same conclusions. Moreover, all could learn and embrace a single rational morality. Marquis de Condorcet (1743–94) maintained that “Our hopes for the future condition of the human race can be subsumed under three important heads: The abolition of inequality between nations, the progress of equality within each nation, and the true perfection of mankind.”109 Once perfected or enlightened, all men’s interests would unite in felicitous harmony and “perpetual peace.”110 Listen to Paul-Henri Dietrich Holbach (1723–89) wax poetic: Despite all the efforts of tyranny, despite the violence and trickery of the priesthood, despite the vigilant efforts of all the enemies of mankind, the human race will attain enlightenment; nations will know their true interests; a multitude of rays, assembled, will form one day a boundless mass of light that will warm all hearts, that will illuminate all minds.111

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Because this boundless optimism was fueled in particular by the salient progress in scientific thought, Jacques Barzun has labeled it “scientism:” Science was the application of reason to all questions, no matter what tradition might have handed down. Everything will ultimately be known and “encircled” [the aim of Diderot’s famous Encyclopédia]. The goal of exploring nature and the mind and broadcasting results was to make Man everywhere of one mind, rational and humane. Language, nation, mores, and religion would cease to create differences, deadly as everybody knew.112

Robert Solomon termed the same conviction “the transcendental pretense.” “This was the self-congratulatory pretense that we—the white middle classes of European descent—were the representatives of all humanity, and as human nature is one, so its history must be one as well.”113 Romanticism renounced the transcendental claims of Enlightenment humanism but in the process spawned its own breed of universalism. It is not unusual to fall prey to the very thing we passionately reject. Romantics thundered against the arid, detached ratiocination of the Enlightenment. “The heart is the key to the world and life,” proclaimed Novalis (1772–1801).114 “Feeling is everything,” wrote Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), who traversed both movements.115 The Enlightenment’s sweeping analyses and conclusions, Romantics charged, glossed over the details of life in which, however, genuine profundity inhered. “To Generalize is to be an idiot,” insisted William Blake (1757–1827). “To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit.”116 The philosophes studied life. The point was to live it, to craft it. Romantics beseeched readers to probe the depths of their feelings, to unlock their passions, to embrace their surroundings, and to make their life an ongoing work of art and creativity. Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) felt in his heart “an intense longing to produce in all ways, to battle as much as possible against time that inexorably sweeps us along.”117 Collectively this same sentiment translated into a celebration of nations’ unique culture, history, and language (most notably in the work of Johann Gottfried von Herder [1744–1803]) and acted as a fillip to rising nationalism. Instead of rejecting the Middle Ages as a benighted epoch as had the rationalists, Romantics revived and reveled in medieval ways as both a passionate and integral part of European identity. The Enlightenment may have invented individualism, but Romanticism deepened and intensified it. That said, universalism still managed to creep into Romanticism.118 The latter held fast to the transcendental pretense, that the Romantic represented

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the finest, richest way of life for all. To eschew it meant closing oneself off from the sublime, the ultimately real. In this vein Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) mused: “The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and Prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.”119 In the Romantic mind, the artist—the ultimate temporal creator—took on Christlike qualities as a great redeemer. He was, in the eyes of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), “a true priest of the Highest in that he brings Him closer to those who are used to grasping only the finite and the trifling; he presents them with the heavenly and eternal as an object of pleasure and unity.”120 Percy Shelley (1792–1822) fancied poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”121 The universalist urge shows up most noticeably, though, in great philosophers touched by Romanticism, especially Hegel. His “Absolute Spirit,” coursing dialectically through history until it finally realizes itself in the integration of everything, essentially universalizes Romanticism’s Self as a constant and creative act of becoming. “Of the Absolute, it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only at the end is it what it is in truth; and just in that consists its nature, which is to be actual, subject, self-becoming, self-development.”122 And yet, by insisting that this great unfolding transpired rationally, Hegel reconciled the Enlightenment with Romanticism. The reconciliation was built of the utmost universalist pretensions, a grand and final synthesis and explanation of all periods, events, ideas, institutions—the end of history itself. Hegel’s was the “God’s eye view” par excellence. The high priest of modern European philosophy was the master “jigsaw-puzzle” solver. Nietzsche, Europe’s foremost critic of modernity, represents the first European thinker of distinction who successfully resisted the temptation of universalism, at least philosophically.123 The sire of postmodernism demystified religious truths (“God is dead.”124) as well as scientific certainties (“There are no facts, only interpretations.”125). All ideas were contingent upon their time and colored by the ulterior motives of their authors. Nietzsche substituted the will to power for the will to truth. He traded in the serene and rational Apollo as the Greek god to idolize for the frenzied and passionate Dionysus. He admonished man to ignore the stultifying conventions of Christian (or any other) morality and to fashion a superman (Übermensch) life of pure artistic creativity beyond good and evil.126 He advocated “great politics” in which a new aristocracy of poets would dominate Europe and from there the entire globe: From now on there will be more favorable preconditions for more comprehensive forms of dominion, whose like has never yet existed. And even

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this is not the most important thing; the possibility has been established for the production of international racial unions whose task will be to rear a master race, the future “masters of the earth”; a new, tremendous aristocracy, based on the severest self-legislation, in which the will of philosophical men of power and artist tyrants will be made to endure for millennia—a higher kind of man who, thanks to their superiority in will, knowledge, riches, and influence, employ democratic Europe as their most pliant and supple instrument for getting hold of the destinies of the earth, so as to work as artists upon “man” himself.127

What Nietzsche lacked in philosophical universalism, in other words, he made up for in political universalism. When he wrote approvingly in The Will to Power, “we are growing more Greek by the day,”128 he had in mind less Plato than Alexander the Great (356–23 BCE), especially the political hegemony Nietzsche and countless other Europeans believed the great emperor achieved. Nietzsche’s “great politics” exemplifies Europe’s penchant for political universalism. Though he did spurn philosophical universalism, the self-styled Anti-Christ shares with other Europeans the desire to see one’s ideas realized universally. For this reason “the philosopher must be a legislator.”129 Most of Europe’s profoundest thinkers, Nietzsche exempted, maintained that Truth (however defined) was utterly independent of any actions mere man might take. And yet, when one thinks one possesses absolute knowledge, it proves difficult if not impossible to resist the urge, in Berlin’s words, “to tidy the world up.”130 The universalist metaphysician is wont, in other words, to practice universalism. Daniel Dubuisson observes: “The step from a universalist goal to the spirit of conquest is probably no longer than that which leads from doctrinal rigor to intolerance.”131 In this same vein Harold James writes: “Europeans have greatly exaggerated expectations of what it is that politics can achieve . . . There are strong utopian, idealized elements that drive many European thinkers to imagine that it is possible by an act of political will to remake society and establish better people.”132 Plato cast the mold with his stint as advisor to the king of Syracuse during which he tried to put into practice his Republic. Aristotle schooled Alexander the Great, who clutched his mentor’s annotated copy of the Iliad wherever he ventured.133 Dante (1265–1321) penned political epistles to the Holy Roman Emperor. Machiavelli intended The Prince for Lorenzo de Medici. Erasmus (1466–1536) submitted The Education of a Christian Prince to Charles V (1500–1558). Both Sir Thomas More (1477–1535) and Francis Bacon (1561–1626) served as lord chancellor of England. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) wrote the political blueprint for Poland.

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Voltaire counseled Frederick the Great, and Diderot, Catherine the Great. If we add to this the fact that weaker minds find it even harder to remain exclusively in the cerebral realm, we can understand the urge of Europeans to see their cherished ideas actualized. So even if the validity of one’s beliefs in no way depends on their actualization, the perception, even aspiration of their realization comes as comforting confirmation to all but the most stubborn idealists. The connection, then, between philosophical and political universalism is neither consistent nor inevitable, but it is common. No one combined the two better (in the European imagination) than Alexander the Great, in whom legions of Europeans see the earliest and greatest architect of universal empire. The legendary severer of the “Gordian knot” is lionized in the European tradition for doing much more than merely vanquishing foe upon foe. In the first place, he conquered territories so vast (from Gibraltar to the Punjab) that they passed for the entire world. But more importantly, he politically and culturally Hellenized that world, even giving it a single (elite) language—koine. Moreover, this Hellinization has been considered so consequential because the Hellenized subjects supposedly favored their own transformation. Before allegedly drinking himself to death in 323 BCE on 12 pints of wine taken in a single draft, the self-proclaimed son of Zeus set the standard for universal empire, understood thence as the concurrent achievement of global military, political, and cultural hegemony.134 No wonder that Plutarch (ca. 46–120 CE) panegyrized him “as one sent by the gods to be the conciliator and arbitrator of the Universe.”135 Plutarch’s own empire—the Roman—has garnered nearly as much admiration from Europeans for its political universalism. Though unabashed emulators of the Greeks culturally, the Romans truly distinguished themselves in terms of military prowess and political integration by conquering and unifying the three smaller empires into which Alexander’s dissolved (and more). The Roman Empire was thought to have equaled Alexander’s in the most important attribute of universal empire, namely, that even “its subjects rejoice in it.”136 Thus along with the legendary Macedonian, Rome’s greatest emperors, Julius Caesar (ca. 100–44 BCE) and Augustus (63 BCE–14 CE) especially, have been celebrated by aspiring political universalists throughout Europe’s history. Dante famously enshrined the idea of universal empire and emperor in De Monarchia, likely written for the coronation of Henry VII (ca. 1269–1313) as Roman emperor by Pope Clement V (1260–1314) in 1311. The nostalgia for the Ancients comes through unmistakably: “at no time do we see universal peace throughout the world except during the perfect monarchy of the immortal Augustus.”137 Dante was likely influenced by the label caput orbis terrartum (“the head of the world”) applied to the Roman Empire by its most famous historian Livy, whose works were subsequently revered by countless Western men of letters.138

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Though he prompted Rome’s inevitable decline by moving his capital to Constantinople, Emperor Constantine, who on the occasion of dedicating New Rome in 330 had a gold coin struck with him in the image of Alexander the Great,139 nevertheless infected Latin Christendom with universal imperial ambition when he favored Christianity. After the empire ceased to exist in the west in 476 CE, it became the official (even if hopelessly ambitious) mission of the Roman Catholic Church to revive, in the name of Christ of course, what Cicero had called the respublica totius orbis (the “republic of all the world”140). Did not Holy Scripture teach that “the Lord has commanded us, saying: I have sent you to be a light for the gentiles, so that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth” (Acts 13: 46–8)? In a protracted process begun by Leo I (pope 440–61) and ending with the forged Donation of Constantine in the ninth century, the See of Rome arrogantly transferred to itself the formal title (summus pontifex) and power (plentitudo potestatis) of the Roman emperor.141 Gerard Delanty explains: The idea of a universal empire was taken over by the Church, which cultivated a historical memory based on nostalgia for the imperial past: the universal empire became the universal church and the cult of emperor worship was transposed to the papacy. In this transformation the Roman citizen became a Christian subject. The quest for universal imperialism was thus destined to become a crucial component in the identity of Europe.142

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) likely had the Church’s lofty ambition in mind when he referred to the papacy as the ghost of the Roman Empire.143 As discussed above, until it attached its political fortune to Charlemagne’s bandwagon, the Church’s goal of Imperium Christianum amounted to nothing more than a chimera. The self-styled “Father of the Europeans,” who carried Constantine’s Holy Lance which had allegedly pierced the side of the Savior,144 has typically earned so much veneration—to this day, the EU’s most prestigious award is the Charlemagne Prize—because he revived universal empire building.145 When, to the cheerless frustration of Catholics, the Carolingian empire crumbled, John XII (ca. 937–64) kept the idea of emperor alive by naming Otto the Great (912–73) Roman emperor in 962. Pope Urban II launched the Crusades in 1095 in an effort to revive universal Christendom.146 Pope and emperor did not always make good bedfellows, often vying over to whom ancient Roman authority rightfully passed,147 but they both were one in the ambition for universal empire. The divisive Reformation stymied the universalist designs of both the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire (though the latter formally

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survived until its dissolution by Napoleon in 1806). Nonetheless, in the wake of Luther’s stirrings, European universalism began to take secular form. Many seminal modern thinkers detested the division of Europe and espoused its unification, usually as a stepping stone to worldwide stewardship of some kind. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), who toyed with the invention of a universal tongue, led the charge with the idea of a united federation. William Penn (1644–1718) advanced a similar idea in Essay towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe (1693). Rousseau discerned an imminent age when “there is no longer a France, a Germany, a Spain, not even England, there are only Europeans.”148 Voltaire (1694–1778) uttered the same claim.149 Kant, who outlined in On Perpetual Peace (1795) a federation to unite Europe, predicted that “the political constitution of our continent . . . will probably legislate eventually for all other continents.”150 Likewise, Condorcet wished Europe “to civilize or cause to disappear . . . those savage nations.” Jeremy Bentham (1747–1832), who invented the adjective “international,” submitted “to the world a plan for an universal and perpetual peace.” Hegel too in Lectures on the Philosophy of History envisaged European(more precisely, Prussian) inspired universalism: “the Orientals knew only that one is free, the Greeks and Romans that some are free, while we know that all men absolutely, that is, as men, are free.” Victor Hugo (1802–85) in 1867 saw France, rather than Prussia, in the vanguard: “Farewell, Nation! Hail, Mankind! Accept your inevitable and sublime enlargement, O my homeland, and just as Athens became Greece, just as Rome became Christendom, you, France, become the world.” The list of literati who, if for different reasons, espoused some sort of European unification reads like a Who’s Who of great minds (Vico, Montesquieu, Hume, Goethe, Schelling, Novalis, Proudhon, Comte, Saint-Simon, Heine, Rossini, Madame de Staël, Marx, Richard Strauss, Nietzsche, Mann, Ortega).151 Needless to say, most of these schemes and visions amounted to little more than pipe dreams crafted by armchair intellectuals. And yet, many European soldiers, clerics, statesmen, and tradesmen took real steps to achieve universal empire. Indeed, the modern term “empire” derives from the Latin imperium.152 Bred on the classics, imperial soldiers and governors conquering and ruling farflung continents fancied themselves modern-day Alexanders and Caesars.153 Plainly, though, nostalgia alone hardly drove European imperialism. Greed, ambition, revenge, prejudice all figured prominently. Still, no self-respecting European official justified imperialism with reference to such base appetites. Rather, universal missions and goals were invoked, if most often with the utmost hypocrisy. Forced conversions were heralded as spreading the “Good News.” Trade on European terms and conditions was touted as “liberty.” Repression was a necessary part of the “white man’s burden.” European deeds

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were invariably wrapped in the mantle of “Christ,” “Commerce,” “Progress,” or some such other universal truth and legitimized as integral to what Napoleon (1769–1821) called the “civilizing mission.”154 The Little Corporal, though he conquered Alexandria in an effort to emulate Alexander the Great, made his real universalist mark at home. Napoleon unified much of the continent into a single empire, thereby fulfilling the unrealized dreams of countless heads of state before him. Convinced that “what is good for the French is good for everybody,”155 he felt fully justified in crowning himself emperor in 1804. This shameless self-aggrandizement earned him much scorn. And yet many saw in him the potential for genuine greatness of the kind Europe had long aspired to. Hegel, for instance, dubbed him the “World Spirit on horseback,”156 and Henri Beyle Stendhal (1783–1842), “the greatest man since Caesar.”157 And Nietzsche, who too wished “Europe to become one,” mourned Napoleon’s tragic failure to quash petty bickering and create a truly noble civilization.158 Though it lasted but a decade, the Corsican’s empire left an enduring legacy long after Waterloo. It kept alive the idea of European unity at a time when nationalism threatened to tear the continent to shreds. In fact, wellnigh every nationalist movement in Europe aspired to empire beyond nationstate.159 Even the Fascists of the interwar years, though commonly associated with rabid nationalism, actually propagated their movement as one bent on unifying Europe and strengthening its position in the world. “The Twentieth Century,” Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) boasted, “will be the century of fascism, the century of Italian power, the century during which Italy will become for the third time the leader of mankind.”160 Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), who ceremoniously accepted a replica of Charlemagne’s sword161 and initiated the tradition of running the Olympic torch from Greece to the site of the games (Berlin 1936), predicted that his Third Reich (“empire”) would rule the world for 1,000 years.162 Though pursued with different methods than the Führer’s, current efforts to broaden and deepen the EU owe much to the enduring dream to match the great achievement of the ancient forefathers by making Europe the unmistakable leader of the world. At the 2004 celebrations of the expansion of the Union, officials talked of the “revival of empire.”163 During the same year the EU heads of state convened in (symbolically laden) Rome to sign the new constitution.164 “Like no other continent,” maintains Timothy Garton Ash, Europe is obsessed with its own meaning and direction. Idealistic and teleological visions of Europe at once inform, legitimate, and are themselves legitimated by the political development of something now called the

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European Union. The name “European Union” is itself a product of this approach, for a union is what the EU is meant to be, not what it is.165

Conclusion Praise for great thinkers and leaders of yesteryear has never stopped at mere emulation. It has been part of an enduring aspiration to surpass the accomplishments of these lionized figures. The goal has been not only to transform Europe into the spiritual and temporal center of the world, but to do it in a way that bestows unprecedented greatness on European civilization. To feel unflinchingly confident that this singular feat has been achieved is what I mean by “subjective Eurocentrism.” The yearning for such self-assuredness resurfaced with the Crusades and has shaped European identity formation ever since. To the fate of that centuries-long quest we now turn.

PART II

Rival to the East

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CHAPTER 3

The Discovery of Islamic Superiority (1095–1453) The existence of Islam was the most far-reaching problem in medieval Christendom . . . [It] made the West profoundly uneasy.1 R.W. Southern

Introduction Paradigmatic Eurocentrism teaches that the Age of Discovery commenced around 1492 when Christopher Columbus set sail. In fact, the actual age of discovery began on November 27, 1095, when Pope Urban II summoned the First Crusade. The fabled Crusades marked the boldest expansion undertaken to that point by Catholic Christendom (and helped pave the way to subsequent European imperialism2). Targeting lands far beyond those contiguous with Europe, the purported campaigns for Christ represented nothing less than the attempt to colonize the core region of the known world in the Mediterranean zone—the perceived locus of universal civilization.3 The first four centuries of the age of distant colonization are not celebrated (by paradigmatic Eurocentrism) as ones of great discovery because they did not prove as successful as those launched in later centuries in peripheral areas like the Americas. But discover the Europeans surely did in those first 400 years. What they discovered was their own unequivocal inferiority vis-à-vis the “more advanced civilization”4 of Islam. Scrupulous historians now balk at the deprecating label “Dark Ages” to characterize medieval times. Not only do scholars better appreciate the progressive developments in late medieval Europe discussed in the previous chapter. More strikingly, authors like Bertold Spuler,5 K.N. Chaudhuri,6 and Janet Abu-Lughod,7 by depicting brilliant, vibrant civilizations east of Europe, have demystified the older paradigmatic Eurocentric historiography8

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that left the impression of the entire world wallowing with Latin Christendom through a dark age between the collapse of the Roman Empire and advent of the Italian Renaissance. But these revisionist studies do not go far enough. They neglect to explore fully the impact of the encounter with superior civilizations, in particular with Islam, on the prospect of subjective Eurocentrism—a shortcoming that should be excused since these writers tend to specialize in Afro-Asian rather than European studies. But this is a book about European self-consciousness, so we will assess the impact. Succinctly put, the encounter dashed fanciful hopes that Europe might rise to a position of recognized world leadership with comparative ease and speed. Through increased clashes with Islam the Europeans came face to face with a stronger military and political power, that is, with a contender for universal empire with an edge. Furthermore, closer contacts with Muslims eventually revealed a more sophisticated culture with a stronger claim to universal truth. Europe’s first momentous discovery in the full age of discovery, in other words, was that the Muslims were the more deserving heirs to the heritage of ancient Athens and Jerusalem. Universal Empire Denied Islam originated in conditions conducive to universalism. The Arabian Peninsula lay situated between two formidable, competing empires. For centuries the Sasanian (Persian) and Byzantine (Greek) empires vied for control of the Mediterranean world—to them the entire meaningful world. By establishing their capital at Damascus, deep in the heart of Byzantium in 661, Muhammad’s successors, the Umayyads, not only laid hold of much Greek territory but also absorbed a considerable amount of Greek culture. The Great Mosque of Damascus, originally a Christian basilica, still stands as powerful testimony to this impressive “cultural synthesis” soldered by the Umayyads.9 Their usurpers, the Abbasids, transplanted the capital in 762 to Baghdad (near the old Sasanian capital of Ctesiphon) and further absorbed into Islamic civilization Persian influences and peoples. For the next 200 years the Abbasids ruled a vast empire that stretched from the Iberian Peninsula to China. So marvelous and united was this empire that it was possible for a merchant to travel from Córdoba through Cairo and Damascus to Baghdad while conversing in a single language, Arabic, and using a single currency, the Abbasid dinar. Merchants, scholars, and government officials did travel, contributing to a massive circulation of people, money, goods, and information within the empire. Commerce and diplomacy extended beyond the Abbasid domain, as well, reaching the

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Khazars and Bulghars to the north, China to the east, the lower Indian peninsula and sub-Saharan Africa to the south.10

This extraordinary achievement of military conquest, political domination, and cultural synthesis—“the greatest political revolution ever to occur in the history of the ancient world”11—led Garth Fowden to declare the Abbasid “antiquity’s only politico-cultural world empire.” By the end of the first millennium of the “Christian Era,” then, it was Islam, not Christendom, that had realized the goal of universal empire bequeathed by the ancient Greeks and Romans.12 Latin Christians initially experienced the expanding Islamic world through its conquest of the Iberian Peninsula beginning in 711. Europeans’ first serious opportunity to compete with, as opposed to merely fend off, Muslims had to await the dissolution in the tenth century of the Abbasid empire at the hands of Biyuds and Seljuks in the east and Fatimids in the west. Christians had deplored the loss of their holiest city to the infidels since the Umayyads first captured Jerusalem in 638 and erected the splendid Dome of the Rock with its gold-plated inscription beseeching Christians to embrace Islam. Eventually the ambitious Bishop of Rome sensed the opportunity to accomplish what his Byzantine rivals had not. In summoning the First Crusade (as it was later dubbed) in 1095, Pope Urban II declared: “This royal city, therefore, situated, at the centre of the world, is now held captive by His enemies . . . She seeks therefore and desires to be liberated, and does not cease to implore you to come to her aid.”13 The Crusades, though complicated in intent and protean in shape,14 partly represented an effort by Latin Christendom to usurp Byzantium (severely weakened after the Battle of Manzikert in 1071) as the acknowledged leader of the Christian world. The lofty ambition attached to the First Crusade comes through in the comment of one contemporary who called it “the greatest event since the Resurrection.”15 Organized and inspired by heady visions of Catholic ascendancy articulated by Urban II, Frankish crusaders first captured the Seljuk capital at Iznik in 1097. The “army of God” then mopped up Edessa in 1098 and founded there the first crusader state. In the same year the zealots successfully invested Antioch, where they cannibalized the besieged. Under Godfrey of Bouillon the milites Christi took Jerusalem on July 15, 1099. The city was systematically ransacked for any and all valuables, sacred or mundane. Jews and Muslims were slaughtered— the former burnt inside their synagogue, the latter mutilated into severed body parts strewn along the streets. Eyewitness Raymond of Aguilers, though clearly embellishing his account with quotations from Revelation 14:20, reported that “crusaders rode in blood to the knees and bridles of their

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horses.” The last of the crusader states arose in Tripoli in 1109. As uplifting as these victories must have been, the upstart Franks never managed to sink their claws into the two biggest cities in the region (Aleppo and Damascus), though they did take control of most of the Levantine seaports (but nothing east of Edessa).16 The Muslims tarried not in regrouping. Roger of Antioch went down to defeat in 1119 at the battle of Balat (“Field of Blood”). The Muslim warrior Zengi retook Edessa in 1144. Eugenius III issued his Bull for a Second Crusade (1147–48) to recapture Edessa, but it ended in fiasco. Damascus was unsuccessfully besieged, and Edessa remained in Muslim hands.17 The disappointed Vicar of St. Peter referred to the expedition as “the most severe injury of the Christian name that God’s church has suffered in our time.”18 Eventually, Nur al-Din and his legendary deputy and eventual successor, Saladin (Yusuf Ibn Ayyub), reunited the Muslims, prevented the crusaders from conquering Egypt, and repossessed Jerusalem (on October 2, 1187).19 Upon hearing of the loss of the Holy City, it is said, Pope Urban III expired out of grief.20 His successor, Clement III, proclaimed in 1188 the Saladin Tithe, which requisitioned a tenth of the incomes of the laity and clergy.21 Of Kurdish extraction, Saladin proved a formidable, though not wholly invincible, adversary. The Christians managed to defeat him a few times, for instance at Jaffa in 1192. But he would go on to erect an empire that effectively enveloped the Fertile Crescent. He vowed not only to rid Palestine of the Christian militants but “to set sail to their islands to pursue them there until there no longer remain on the face of the earth any who deny God.” He grew a legendary reputation, especially in Europe, not only as a fierce warrior, but as a dexterous diplomat and magnanimous overlord. (He famously granted the cornered Franks of Jerusalem safe passage in 1187.) “In the world there was no court where he enjoyed not good report,” wrote the French poet Ambroise of Saladin shortly after his death in 1193. Dante thought enough of the “good pagan” to place him beside Hector, Aeneas, and Julius Caesar in Inferno.22 Frederick Barbarossa, Richard I (the Lionhearted), and Philip II all took the cross in the Third Crusade and in concert essayed to liberate Jerusalem. In the end they were forced to cut a deal that returned the Levantine seaports to Christian control but left the Holy City under Muslim tutelage. The Europeans reorganized, but the Fourth Crusade marched no further than Constantinople, which the Latins sacked and looted in 1204, further deepening the rift within Christendom itself.23 The Franks did negotiate for control of Jerusalem from 1228 to 1244. But thereafter the Mamluks forced the crusaders to beat an ignominious retreat. The Fall of Acre on May 18, 1291, is traditionally understood as the end of Frankish rule in the area. According

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to experts, the Franks never amounted to more than a “part of the Near Eastern political jigsaw,”24 the last of the barbarian invasions of the ancient civilized world.25 Others see the Franks as a “minor nuisance,”26 a mere “fleabite on the hide of Islam.”27 Whatever one’s final assessment, the Crusades scarcely signaled a leap in the direction of universal empire as originally envisaged by Urban II. Crusading missions continued after 1291 but amounted to a succession of humiliating defeats culminating in the trouncing delivered by the Turks in 1396 at Nicopolis. The repeated losses served only to remind Christians of their weakness vis-à-vis their foremost rival for universal empire, though scapegoats were naturally found in such groups as the Knights Templar, who were tried for allegedly conspiring with the Muslims.28 Not only were the Christians stymied in battle, but they failed to unite among themselves (in spite of the nobility of the mission). Time and time again, strategically important Christian forces (for example, the Genoese) took league with the enemy out of self-interest.29 In addition, the Catholics spread themselves too thin in crusading campaigns targeted at their southwest and northeastern flanks.30 The grand failure of the Crusades moved Voltaire to quip that the only thing Europe got from them was leprosy.31 Hume derided them as “the most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation.”32 If the Muslims of the Mediterranean were not handful enough, the Europeans had to wrestle with the advancing Mongol threat in the thirteenth century. Though the Mongols menaced mostly Orthodox Slavic Christians to the east, western Europeans feared they were living on borrowed time.33 The ravaging hordes pierced Russian frontiers in 1223, conquered Kiev in 1240, reached the Elbe in 1241 and the Adriatic in 1258 (not to mention Africa in 1260 and China in 1270), all along laying waste in their tracks.34 Employing such superior military tactics as the draft and the decimal system, the brilliant Jingiz Khan (“Universal Ruler”) became the first to take hold of the whole of the Central Asian steppe and amassed the largest land-based empire yet known to man. The successors of Jingiz, most notably Timur, whom Christopher Marlowe immortalized as “Tamburlaine the Great,” would have easily swallowed up western Europe but for contests over succession back home and the limited appeal of the peripheral, barbarian lands. China was far more alluring.35 It is true that the Europeans greeted first news of the Mongols with guarded optimism. The Muslims finally had a military rival who could defeat them, as exemplified in the sack of Baghdad in 1258. Better yet, if the Mongols could be Christianized by Nestorians among them or the mythologized Christian king “Prester John,” Islam could be pinched from both east

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and west.36 William of Roebroeck was one among many Franciscan friars dispatched by Pope Innocent IV and French king Louis IX to proselytize at Mongol courts.37 Though William earned the opportunity to present his creed along with spokesmen for Buddhism and Islam to Möngke Khan in 1254, the Mongol leader was not swayed.38 (The friar did not return home empty handed, though; he carried with him the recipe for gunpowder.39) Columbus later sailed west in hopes that he would discover heirs of the great khans waiting to hear the gospel.40 Leveler-headed Europeans entertained the opposite scenario with great trepidation. Upon hearing of the fall of Acre in 1291, for instance, Ramón Lull wrote: “It is much to be feared lest the Tartars receive the Law of Mahomet, for if they do this, either by their own volition or because the Saracens induce them to do so, the whole of Christendom will be in great danger.”41 Of course, Lull’s worst nightmare soon materialized. The Mongol khan converted to Islam in 1295. The most harassing Islamicized successor state to the Mongol Empire was the Ottoman Turks. Driven by their fiercer crusading zeal—jihad (Holy War)—the Ottomans would eventually conquer most of the Balkans and thereby thrust themselves into the very heart of Europe. The eponymous founder of the Ottoman Empire, Osman, consolidated power among rival Turkic tribes in Anatolia, but it was his son Orhan who led the charge against Christendom. In 1326, he seized Bursa and established there a capital befitting a major Mediterranean power, replete with the structures and institutions of high civilization. Orhan discharged further volleys in Europe’s direction at Gallipoli in 1354. Exploiting an earthquake that destroyed the city’s walls and scattered its dwellers, he captured the strategic settlement and established the first Turkish fortification in Europe. With control of both the Asian and European shores of the Dardanelles, the sultan enriched himself with tolls enforced on sea traffic through the straits.42 Orhan’s heir, Murad I, turned up the heat on Europe. In 1369, he overran Adrianople, moved his capital deeper into Europe, and both isolated Constantinople and reduced it to a client state. This sent a perspicuous message to Europeans that the sultan had cast a covetous eye on their homeland.43 As feared, Murad swept through Macedonia and marched into Bulgaria, taking Sofia in 1385. From there the unstoppable Turks carried their banners into Bosnia and Serbia, decimating the whole of the Serbian officer corps at the battle of Cernomen (1371). Nis was sacked in 1386. Dennis Hupchick writes of the Turks: “The Islamic holy war concept lent them a motivating morale that their European foes initially could not equal. Ottoman forces repeatedly overcame unfavorable battlefield odds to defeat their more numerous European enemies.”44 The Serbs would ride to heroic defense of their land in the legendary battle of Kosovo

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on the Plain of Blackbirds in 1389. Though they managed to slay Murad, they could not repel the mightier Ottomans. Christians throughout Europe heralded what was actually a temporary stalemate as a great victory ordained by God. In reality, the Christians of the Balkans were too divided over petty differences to muster either the religious zeal or the military muscle to match the infidels.45 Murad’s son Bayezid picked up his father’s mantle. Rumors flew about Europe that “the Thunderbolt” planned one day to feed his horse on the altar of St. Peter’s in Rome.46 Not only Catholic King Sigismund of Hungary but also Orthodox Emperor Manuel of Byzantium, who in the meantime had yielded Thessaloniki in 1387 and lay besieged in his capital, turned to Rome for help. The Vatican patched together a precarious crusading army with recruits from France and England (feuding in the Hundred Years War) as well as Germany. They locked horns with the infidel in 1396 at Nicopolis, where they were soundly whipped. In three hours virtually all the crusaders lay either dead or imprisoned. As Sigismund’s ship sailed through the Dardanelles on its return home, the Ottomans mocked him by parading their mauled prisoners naked along the shore before decapitating them.47 Taking the cross against the Muslims would recrudesce occasionally, but to little avail.48 Ironically, it was the Ottomans who stood the best chance of realizing Dante’s dream, articulated in De Monarchia (1311), of a revived Roman emperor with universal dominion. The Mongols turned out to be the only power deft enough to slow the Turks. In 1402, the former, led by the legendary Tamerlane, handed the latter a sound defeat at Ankara—including the fatal incarceration of Bayezid— and spun the Ottoman Empire into temporary disarray and division. But by 1413, the Turks had put their house in order and were back on the offensive.49 Finally in 1453, what Europeans had long dreaded transpired; Constantinople—often called “New Jerusalem” due to the stupendous collection of holy relics assembled there—fell to the infidels. Cosimo de Medici was said to have referred to the fall as the worst tragedy in centuries. Enea Silvio Piccolomini (to be named Pope Pius II in 1458) acknowledged that Christendom had been ceding lands to the Muslims for centuries; nevertheless, “we have never lost a city or a place comparable to Constantinople.”50 He wrote to Nicholas of Cusa: “The Turkish sword is now suspended over our heads, yet meanwhile we are engaging in internal wars, harassing our own brothers, and leaving enemies of the Cross to unleash their forces against us.”51 As if on cue, Catholic Europe vowed to liberate the harried city, but no crusade materialized. European princes were too embroiled in their own political and economic designs (and too suspicious of Rome’s insincerity) to supply

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anything more than verbal bellicosity. Silvio complained that dithering Christian Europe was “a body without a head, a republic without laws or magistrates . . . every state has a separate prince and every prince has a separate interest . . . If you lead a small army against the Turks you will easily be overcome; if a large one, it will soon fall into confusion.”52 In the end, Constantinople received no help whatsoever from the Latins. Meanwhile, Mehmed the Conqueror was intrepidly declaring himself Constantine’s rightful heir and splendiferously aggrandizing himself as a universal monarch. The Europeans could not help but gaze. One Italian observer said of the sultan: “In his view there should be only one empire, only one faith and only one sovereign in the whole world. No place was more deserving than Constantinople for the creation of this unity in the world. The Conqueror believed that thanks to this city he could extend his rule over the whole Christian world.”53 Emboldened by a vacillating foe, the insatiable, redoubtable Turk pushed on, vanquishing Athens and Serbia in 1459, the Morea in 1460, and Albania in 1463 (Herzegovina held out until 1481.). Still worse, he captured Negroponte in 1470 (“clipeus et propugnaculum omnium Christianorum”) and Otranto in 1480.54 He now lay poised to pinch Rome from two sides. And he likely would have but for his untimely death in 1481. The dreaded Conqueror may have been dead and the danger temporarily suspended. Nevertheless, the Europeans had to realize that they represented mere “petty principalities” in comparison to the mighty Sublime Porte.55 Military defeat brought with it revelations of European inferiority on a number of different planes. These further deflated aspirations for subjective Eurocentrism. Naturally, lackluster military prowess was most obvious. The Turks deployed highly disciplined professional corps like the storied Janissary battalions in contrast to the Europeans’ “undisciplined mounted feudal warriors supported by a ragtag infantry of oppressed peasants, urban militias, and freebooters.” Furthermore, lighter armor enabled the Turks to dance circles around lumbering Christian soldiers.56 The enemy also brandished finer weapons. They were “the acknowledged masters . . . of the art of gun-casting and the use of artillery,” particularly the harquebus.57 In the case of the conquest of Constantinople, even spiteful Christians could but marvel at the magnificent cannons the Turks employed to breach the city’s legendary walls.58 Finally, the sultan beat his foes at diplomacy. He gained control over much of the Balkans through strategic marriage and by playing Orthodox and Catholic off one another.59 It took no clairvoyant to discern superior political administration supporting the warriors. The Janissaries were supplied through an ingenious procurement system the likes of which Europe had not known. The Ottomans

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exacted an annual levy (devs¸irme) from Christian subjects of the best and brightest boys who were then rigorously instructed to become ranking officials in the sultan’s army and court. Merit promotions, coupled with luxurious reward for success and severe penalty for failure, produced a competence and loyalty European-style slavery could not duplicate.60 Christians, though converted to Islam as part of Janissary training, could rise to the highest echelons of the imperial bureaucracy (two-thirds of the grand viziers, for instance61), whence they often saw to it that their original families and villages were well cared for. Despite great vitriol poured on the devs¸irme from Rome and Constantinople, subject Christians actually welcomed the tax as a unique avenue of social mobility. Many even tried to bribe Ottoman officials to select their sons. Indeed, the occasional Muslim sought to pass his offspring off as Christian to secure a spot in the devs¸irme.62 The Janissaries made up the core of an expansive legal and administrative apparatus that afforded the sultan an extraordinary degree of centralized authority over a vast territory. By contrast, neither emperor nor pope in Europe could extend control much beyond his own palace. About the Ottoman political system we shall have more to say in the following chapter. For now, we remark with Hupchick that “the Ottoman government became the most effectively centralized in all of Europe from the late fourteenth through mid-sixteenth centuries and the envy of many rulers of Christian European states.”63 Such commanding military and political power frequently both stems from and leads to economic advantage. The Christians’ rivals built and benefited from an economy next to which the European paled. The Ottomans prospered because they were directly linked to a rich and expanding trading zone that spanned from the Mediterranean across the Indian Ocean to China. By the thirteenth century, argues Abu-Lughod, this commercial network constituted a genuine “world system” characterized by “economic integration and cultural efflorescence.” “If the lights went out in Europe (during the Dark Ages), they were certainly still shining brightly in the Middle East.”64 The Pax Mongolica from roughly 1200 to 1400 further enhanced this hitherto largely sea-based world system by opening up unprecedentedly long and stable land routes across Asia (the Silk Road, for example).65 Urban trading centers in the East dwarfed those of the West. While cities such as Baghdad, Cairo, and Constantinople housed over half a million dwellers, Europe’s medieval “metropolises,” for example Rome, Florence, Venice, or Cologne, typically played host to around 30,000–40,000 inhabitants.66 As discussed in the previous chapter, Europe did witness a surge in population and commerce between the years 1000 and 1300.67 Nevertheless, it remained in that time what the Third World is in our age. And like the

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latter, Catholics experienced economic life during the Middle Ages from the periphery, that is, from a position of undeniable inferiority.68 Practically all the finer things in life stemmed from the Orient—Persian silks, Burmese rubies, Indian emeralds, Ceylonese sapphires.69 Islamic glass, pottery, and paper all surpassed European counterparts.70 Córdoba’s leathers were recognized as the finest in Europe.71 Likewise, the most prized spices hailed from the East.72 Exotic foods (oranges, bananas, rice, sugar) first reached Europe from the Orient.73 Such products were made possible not only by different climates but also by superior agricultural technologies that non-Europeans had invented. The water mill, windmill, collar harness, and horseshoe all entered Europe via the East.74 The same holds for the pedal-operated loom and weight-driven clock.75 The Arabs’ accounting and business instruments and institutions also surpassed those of the Europeans and became common in Europe only through interaction with and emulation of Arab traders. Thus bills of exchange, letters of credit, checks, and private banks all have Arab origins,76 as does the commenda (a contractual agreement in which an investor finances the trip of a merchant).77 The only thing Europe exported east en masse was bullion.78 Consider too the many European words whose etymology originates in Arabic: alkali (from al-kali, “ashes”), saffron (from Izafaran), damask (from Damascus), muslin (from Mosul).79 Tales of opulence—gilded cities, ivory palaces, ceramic mosques—dazzled the European imagination as the numberless stories of streets paved with gold in America would do later in the millennium. The Catholic Eulogius of Córdoba observed: Córdoba . . . has been exalted by him [Abd al-Rahman] above all, elevated with honors, expanded in glory, piled full of riches, and with great energy filled with an abundance of all the delights of the world, more than one can believe or express. So much so that in every worldly pomp he exceeds, surpasses, and excels the preceding kings of his race. And meanwhile the church of the orthodox groans beneath his most grievous yoke and is beaten to destruction.80

Returning crusaders recounted similar stories.81 Though the times did not permit mass emigration, the millions of Europeans who became subjects of Arabs or Turks more often saw, like their heirs who crossed the Atlantic later, improvements in material life. To cite just one example, in the region of Thessalonica, captured by the Turks in the 1380s, the net cost of living shrank under Ottoman rule due to lower rents.82 Those not “lucky” enough to fall under enemy superintendence denounced the infidels with one breath

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while dispatching envoys to trade with them with the next.83 Indeed, it is not outlandish to speculate that contact with a more prosperous Islamic civilization helped to spawn the gradual transformation in Europe from medieval asceticism to early modern this-worldliness. Perhaps nothing caused Europeans greater solicitude than conversions to Islam. We have already encountered Western anxiety over the conversions of the Mongols. But they were pagans. Christian apostasy was something altogether different and more troubling. Large-scale voluntary conversions of Christians (including civic leaders) to Islam occurred in Andalusia.84 Many who remained Christian nonetheless became enamored of Arab speech, dress, cuisine, and customs and adopted them as their own. The emulators most likely were trying to elude the shameful label ily (“uncivilized”) that Arabs used to describe non-Muslims.85 To this day Spaniards regularly utter Arabic words such as alcazar, alazán, arsenal, and alameda. The love affair with Arab culture reached its apogee “at the hedonistic and disorderly court of Henry IV of Castile, [where] this affectation was pushed to extremes in which the Christian religion was derided, Moorish customs openly adopted, and the war against Islam forgotten or deliberately postponed.”86 Hear the laments of the committed Christian Paul Alvarus of Córdoba: The Christians love to read the poems and romances of the Arabs; they study the Arab theologians and philosophers, not to refute them but to form a correct and elegant Arabic. Where is the layman who now reads the Latin commentaries on the Holy Scriptures, or who studies the Gospels, prophets or Apostles? Alas! All talented young Christians read and study with enthusiasm the Arab books; they gather immense libraries at great expense; they despise the Christian literature as unworthy of attention. They have forgotten their language. For every one who can write a letter in Latin to a friend, there are a thousand who can express themselves in Arabic with elegance . . .87

Indeed, Alvarus’s own son composed poems in Arabic.88 Peter the Venerable too fretted over the allure of Islam. In Contra sectam siue haeresim Saracenorum (“Against the Sect or Heresy of the Saracens”) he hoped that “this tract will cure the hidden cogitations of some of our people, thoughts by which they could be led into evil if they think that there is some piety in those impious people and think that some truth is to be found with the ministers of lies.”89 In such an environment it should come as no surprise that five of the ten laws Alfonso the Wise decreed regarding interactions between Muslims and Christians for Castile and León addressed apostasy and punished it with death.90 The Vatican’s manual for rooting out sinners, Malleus Maleficarum of 1486,

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declared Christians who chose to adopt Muslim customs apostates: “There are two degrees of the Apostasy of perfidy. One consists in outward acts of infidelity, without the formation of any pact with the devil, as when one lives in the lands of the infidels and conforms his life to that of the Mohammedans.”91 The Turks too converted countless Christians. The former inclined to exhibit mercy, tolerance, even respect for Christian subjects and vassals. As mentioned, Turkish rule opened up new socioeconomic opportunities. With regard to religion, the sultans obeyed the teachings of the Quran and afforded “Peoples of the Book” (Old and New Testament) protection (zimma). But Ottoman policy went far beyond mere protection. It carved out for zimmis, so long as they eschewed rebellion and affront against Islam, extensive autonomy the likes of which was not known in Europe.92 Subject Christians warmed to the Turks. Pero Tafur of Spain (and thus perhaps already attuned to Islamic tolerance of Christians) in 1437 toured parts of Byzantium lost to the Turks and had to admit: “These Turks are a noble and truthful people. They live in their country like nobles . . . they are very merry and benevolent, and of good conversation, so much so that in those parts, when one speaks of virtue, it is sufficient to say that anyone is like a Turk.” Five years earlier, the Frenchman La Broquière visited the same area but wore Turkish garb he bought at market. Greeks welcomed him so long as they thought he was a Turk, but scorned him once they discovered his true (Latin) colors.93 Islam appealed to Christians on the spiritual as well as the material level. Imams who followed the troops into subdued territories welcomed Christians into the Islamic fold. Sufi dervis¸ orders in particular displayed great doctrinal flexibility toward converting Christians. Dervis¸es often occupied churches, venerated local patron saints, maintained holy shrines, and even adopted Christian sacraments such as confession and Holy Communion. The Bektas¸is went so far as to cross themselves to make Christian converts feel welcome. Plebeians were hardly the only ones to embrace Islam. Christian nobles in vassal states joined the Ottoman sipahi cavalry in droves. Most eventually received Islam. Their serfs then followed suit. Thus did the populations of Bosnia and Albania turn from mostly Christian to predominantly Muslim.94 The Roman Catholic Church, in particular, insisted that its flocks in the western Balkans apostatized out of fear or greed but remained clandestinely true to Rome. The Vatican has stubbornly clung to this myth despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. In the first place, with the exception of the small number of Christians inducted into the Janissaries, the Ottomans never instituted a policy of forced conversion. In the second place, few descendants of alleged “crypto-Christians” renounced Islam once they were

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free to do so.95 Apostasy from Islam to Christianity was not, of course, unheard of. The great fanfare with which the Church invariably celebrated it, however, reveals its rarity.96 Universal Knowledge Called into Question Defeat in trade, war, politics, and religion alarmed Europeans but did not necessarily undermine their confidence in universal truth as revealed through Scripture. With God on their side, they could soothe themselves with visions of the ultimate triumph of Christianity over its foes. Universal truth was the ultimate advantage Christians held. Without it, the perfidious infidel was destined to falter and fail, no matter how remote that eventuality may have seemed at any given moment. But closer contact with Islam in the eleventh and twelfth centuries delivered to lettered Europeans much acuter familiarity with the Muslim intellect. What they learned did not bode well for Christian universalism. The capture of Toledo in 1085 by Alfonso VI more than any other single event altered Christian understanding of the Muslims.97 There the victors discovered the extraordinary library compiled by al-Ma’mun. They came across hundreds of books and treatises of which they had neither knowledge nor understanding. Keep in mind that we are talking about a Europe in which many monarchs could neither read nor write.98 Southern says of the discovery: “A comparison of the literary catalogues of the West with the lists of books available to Moslem scholars makes a painful impression on a Western mind, and the contrast came as a bombshell to the Latin scholars of the twelfth century, who first had their eyes opened to the difference.”99 Daniel of Morley, for example, concluded that “since at present the instruction of the Arabs . . . is made available to all in Toledo, I hastened there to attend the lectures of the most learned philosophers in the world.”100 The brilliant thirteenth-century court of Frederick II in culturally Arabized Sicily also acted as an important font of Arab learning for the West. With Arabic as his native tongue, the oft excommunicated Holy Roman Emperor—who was nicknamed the “baptized sultan” perhaps because he maintained a harem— promoted Arabophilia at his court and there gave countless Christian scholars access to the Arab avant-garde.101 Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, initiated a centuries-long campaign to translate, comprehend, and absorb Arab learning. The works he ordered translated were compiled in the Corpus cluniacense, which became the most treasured source of Islamic writing in Europe.102 Christian scholars entertained no hopes of surpassing the Muslims. Merely learning what they already knew amounted to a “stupendous task” that occupied Europe’s brightest minds for at least three

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centuries.103 As Montgomery Watt observed, “Islam was [to Europeans] at one and the same time the great enemy and the great source of higher material and intellectual culture.”104 Europeans ventured to Arab lands to learn from them. Adelard of Bath and Ramón Lull, for example, both journeyed to the Levant in order to learn Arabic, study Arab texts, and carry the newly acquired knowledge back to Europe. It was Adelard who thus learned how to use the abacus and subsequently introduced it to the English Exchequer.105 “Many students from Italy, Spain and southern France attended Muslim seminaries in order to study mathematics, philosophy, medicine, cosmography, and other subjects, and in due course became candidates for professorships in the first European universities established after the pattern of Muslim seminaries.”106 So strong was the desire to learn from the Arabs that the Council of Vienna ordered several schools of Oriental languages to be founded in 1311.107 In fact, as Bernard Lewis notes, “until the Renaissance and Reformation . . . Arabic was probably the most widely translated language in the world.”108 This made it possible for those like Roger Bacon, who enjoyed not the luxury of visiting Arab lands, to engage the Arab intellect. Eventually, even nonArabic-speaking scholars could study the Arab mind as scores of translators produced hundreds of translations into Latin. Lynn White sagaciously cautions against projecting “into the Western Middle Ages the contempt for the Near East that has characterized the Occident in more recent centuries.”109 The new knowledge transferred in this “one-way traffic in ideas”110 was nothing short of staggering. It spanned every discipline across both the trivium (grammar, dialectics, rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy). It included many works of the ancient Greeks lost to the West after the breakup of the Roman Empire—writings of such masters as Plato, Aristotle, and Euclid. But also transmitted were the works of prodigious Islamic and Jewish thinkers, such as Musa al-Khwa–rizmı– (author of Algebra), al-Farabi, al-Ghazzali, Abu Ma’shar (Albumasar), Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averroës), and Maimonides. Such savants had not lost contact with the ancient heritage. In fact, they profoundly expanded and deepened ancient scholarship, especially as it pertained to monotheism.111 Dorothee Metlitzki does not exaggerate when she refers to the conquest of Toledo as “one of the most important events not only in the political but in the intellectual history of medieval Europe. At one stroke the Christian world took possession of a civilization next to which the Latin West, to quote Daniel of Morley, seemed ‘infantile,’ provincial and barbaric.”112 “Let us rob the pagan philosophers of their wisdom and their eloquence,” he exclaimed.113 Arab natural philosophy astounded Europeans. The latter learned alchemy as well as algebra via the Arabs. Arab astrology enjoyed such vogue

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that some could not resist the heresy of drawing up a horoscope for Christ.114 Ptolemaic astronomy reached the West through the Arabs and debunked the European delusion of a flat earth.115 Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) would base much of his work in the sixteenth century on that of Arabs Nasir al-Din al-Tusi and Ibn al-Shatir as well as the models developed at the Marâgha observatory in western Iran.116 Ernest Moody has demonstrated a direct connection between Ibn Bajja’s commentaries on Aristotle and Galileo Galilei’s (1564–1642) theory of free fall distilled some 400 years later.117 Ibn al-Haytham’s Optics (1028–38) deeply influenced European investigators, including Roger Bacon, Robert Grosseteste, Pecham, and Theodoric of Freiburg.118 The Arab scientist cast a long shadow well into the sixteenth century, earning the admiration of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)119 and inspiring Johannes Kepler’s (1571–1630) theory of retinal image.120 Arabs were on the cutting edge in medicine too. In fact, Europe’s first hospital, at Salerno in the tenth century, was staffed by Arab doctors.121 Europeans learned how to set up apothecaries and to write and fill prescriptions from the Arabs.122 Avicenna’s great eleventh-century medical work, the Canon, guided European scientists into the sixteenth century.123 Europeans would not be able to better Ibn al-Quff ’s detailed description of the capillary system in the thirteenth century until the middle of the seventeenth century, and then only with the extra aid of the microscope.124 Francis Bacon (1561–1626) is known to have admonished his infirm king, “Your Majesty’s recovery must be by the medicines of the Galenists and Arabians and not of the Chemists or Paracelsians.”125 Though Hindu-Arabic numerals became available to Christians in Spain around 960, it took Europeans until the end of the thirteenth century to master them.126 In other applied sciences the Arabs excelled with such inventions as the abacus, the conical valve, the astrolabe, and the lateen sail. No wonder that Alfonso X of Castile, “the Wise,” ordered the Libros del Saber written in 1277 for the express purpose of learning superior Arab technology.127 The scientific works conveyed to northern Europe by 1200 quickly became integral to the core curricula of European universities.128 Indeed, as noted, the “university,” as the West came to know it, originated as an Arab innovation copied by medieval Europeans. Phrases like holding a “chair” or being a “fellow” and practices such as wearing robes all have Islamic roots.129 There can be no denying that “the path leading to scientific revolution in Europe was paved most significantly by Arabic-Islamic scientists.”130 The arts were no different. Europe’s blue bloods cultivated refined tastes by aping the Arab leisurely class. They cherished genuine and imitation fabrics (muslin, damask, baldachin), carpets, and gilded leatherworks from the Arab world. Kufic, Arabic calligraphy, adorned many European goods,

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though the comely “words” styled in the script were gibberish. The Arab genius for decorative inscriptions appealed to European architects as well and found a prominent place, for instance, in Gothic ornamentation.131 Excommunicated William of Aquitaine, the putative father of European poetry, learned to compose courtly vernacular lyric in Muslim Spain, where he crusaded during the eleventh century in return for papal remission of his sins.132 Celebrated troubadours such as Guiraut de Borneil, Arnaut Daniel, Piere Vidal, Marcabru, Raimbaut d’Orange, and Piere d’Auvergne refined their art through similar contact with Muslims. In fact, the word “troubadour” likely stems from the Arabic Taraba, “to sing.”133 Lull advocated appropriating Islamic literature for Christianity because of its superior mythical and allegorical force.134 His advice was heeded. Numerous popular tales, such as Dame Sirith, have oriental origins, though the characters and settings were Europeanized.135 Dante, for one, clearly seems to have modeled The Divine Comedy on widely available Islamic miraj literature, in which Muhammad is guided through hell and heaven during a nocturnal journey.136 Marco Polo may have never set foot in China, and instead likely pilfered the stories and descriptions of the Far East from Persian and Arabic sources.137 Ample evidence exists of direct or indirect admissions by Latin literati of the debt owed the Arabs. Alfonso X, Peter the Venerable, and Frederick II are just three well-known cases of powerful men who ordered scholars around them to translate and study Arabic works. These translators regularly referred to the thinkers as our “Arab masters.”138 Learned men like St. Albert the Great donned Arab garb in Europe as a way to underscore their erudition.139 Petrus Alfonsi poured cold water on French astronomers for preferring inferior Latin to superior Arab texts.140 Adelard of Bath scoffed at the imbecility rampant in his homeland: “violence ruled among the nobles, drunkenness among the prelates, corruptibility among the judges, fickleness among the patrons, and hypocrisy among the citizens.” He looked forward to but one thing in this sodden place: “Arabum studia.”141 Roger Bacon put the matter plainly: “Philosophy is the special province of the unbelievers: we have it all from them.”142 He labeled Avicenna “the prince and leader of philosophy.”143 Albertus Magnus is known to have shared Bacon’s view.144 Although Aquinas toiled to refute Arab philosophers in such works as Tractatus de unitate intellectus contra Averroistas (1269–72), he must have reached moments of vexing frustration with European thought. For instance, in his attempt to debunk Avicenna’s claim that a created creature could not directly know God, Aquinas had to turn to his philosophical foe Averroës—so irrelevant was Christian theology to the subject.145 The lopsided exchange between the Arab and European intellect ultimately eroded Europeans’ confidence that they possessed genuinely universal

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knowledge. To be sure, most were too proud to admit that the Muslims had discovered ultimate truth and to embrace the Islamic brand of universalism.146 But the Christians lost considerable faith in what the papacy had preached through the ages. Many factors contributed to the so-called Renaissance of the Twelfth Century,147 which initiated the tradition of upbraiding ecclesiastical authority and paved the way for the (Italian) Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution.148 But none was more important than protracted exposure to Islamic civilization: “this renaissance, with all the significance it would have for the development of European intellectual and literary features thereafter, is more fully understood as a reaction to and absorption of the explosive impact of the European Arabic world, one whose own accomplishments and glory were just then reaching their culmination.”149 In Latin Christendom, the Church enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the definition and distribution of knowledge during most of the Middle Ages. It had appropriated and integrated into the Christian narrative the little Greek and Roman learning it retained from antiquity.150 Scripture stood as the ultimate source of all knowledge. In fact, the vulgate translation of the Bible was virtually equated with actual Scripture. Beyond that, the commentaries of the Church Fathers, above all Augustine, ranked a close second in terms of recognized authority. Practically all serious inquiry took place in monasteries under the aegis of the Roman Curia and amounted to little more than learning, developing, and occasionally modifying patristic dicta or Sentences, to quote the title of Peter Lombard’s oft cited collection.151 The earliest mavericks to stray from the Church’s watch were those who sought a more precise understanding of the infidel’s creed. They refused to content themselves with the prevailing image of Islam proffered at Rome. It portrayed Muslims as the offspring of Hagar who lose their way in the desert where they embrace paganism. In some accounts, like the famous Song of Roland, the idolaters believe in three gods—Apollo, Mahound, and Tervagant152—in others as many as 40. Invariably the infidels are limned as a lascivious, avaricious, credulous lot of heretics seduced, lured, and gulled into following their magician “prophet.”153 The first major challenge to the Church’s depiction ushered forth from the quill of Petrus Alfonsi. A convert from Judaism to Christianity, Alfonsi composed a theological dialogue between his former Jewish self (Moses) and new Christian self (Petrus) in which the latter emerges triumphant. But he also appended a not terribly inaccurate description of Islam to his Dialogi contra Iudeos (1110), which was cited across Latin Europe. Alfonsi could provide the fairer assessment because he relied not on the Church’s teachings, rather on his own Arabic education and personal experience. These he attained while growing up in al-Andalus

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(Muslim-occupied Spain), where adherents of all three monotheistic faiths regularly interacted.154 Peter the Venerable made the next leap forward. After visiting the Iberian Peninsula, the chief Cluniac commissioned Robert of Ketton to translate the Quran into Latin. Thenceforward from its publication in 1143, serious students of Islam did not have to rely on Scripture or myth; they could read the competing sacred text firsthand. Needless to say, caricatures of Islam hardly vanished inside Christendom after 1143. Indeed, misrepresentations often worsened in the wake of devastating defeats at the hands of the Saracens, such as Acre in 1291.155 But now the fulminations of fanatics had to stand alongside soberer studies. Take Roger Bacon for example. In his Opus maius (1266–68) penned for Clement IV, the Minorite labored to dissuade the pope not only from continuing the futile Crusades against a superior foe, but from relying on the Bible for an understanding of the Saracens. He outlined instead a new science of religions based on philosophy and eyewitness accounts. “Truth,” he professed, “can be perceived in a sect to the extent in which that sect contains knowledge of God in whatever way, because all sects refer to God.” “Three . . . [sects] are very rational: the sects of the Jews, the Saracens, and the Christians.” Make no mistake, Christianity was superior, but one had to preach it to Muslims in language they knew and respected—the language of reason. Deluding oneself that Satan worked through the Islamic heresiarch or that Muslims were duped dolts would only serve to weaken the Christian cause.156 Humbert de Romans, grand master of the Dominican Order, filed a report that concluded that Bacon’s ideas were widely held and not limited to the heretical fringe.157 William of Tripoli, for one, kept this more secular approach alive after Bacon landed in prison for deriding the Catholic clergy and admonishing them to study Arab philosophers.158 William, based in Acre, wrote an account of Islam for the archdeacon of Liége in 1273 that would have been unimaginable before the conquest of Toledo in 1085: “though their beliefs are wrapped up in many lies and decorated with fictions, yet it now manifestly appears that they are near to the Christian faith and not far from the path of salvation.”159 In Lull’s Libre del gentil the pagan protagonist is lectured to by three “wise” men—a Christian, Jew, and Muslim—who gloss over the differences between the three faiths to make the case for monotheism.160 Pronouncements on Islam were not the only Church doctrines called into question. The steady flow of Greco-Arab philosophy that poured into Europe north of the Pyrenees from Islamic civilization in the twelfth century eroded the ground from underneath the unified worldview of medieval Latin Christendom. Long before Galileo wrote to the Grand Duchess Christina in 1615, “the Bible tells us how to go to Heaven, but not how the heavens go,”161 students of the Arabs had developed an independence of mind that

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led them to doubt the Church Fathers. “Let no one be shocked,” warned Daniel of Morley, “if while dealing with the creation of the world I invoke the teachings not of the Fathers of the Church, but of the pagan philosophers, for, although the latter are not from among the faithful, some of their words . . . should be incorporated into our instruction.”162 Adelard of Bath, who was the first to translate Euclid’s Elements from Arabic and to introduce Arabic numerals to Europe, complained of his brethren back home: “It is difficult for me to discuss the nature of animals with you, because I learnt from my masters, the Arabs, to follow the light of reason, while you are led by the bridle of authority; for what other word than ‘bridle’ can I use to describe authority?”163 Peter Abélard (of the legendary love affair with young Héloïse) detailed the errors of Church doctrine in his popular twelfth-century book, Sic et Non (Yes and No). “Authority,” he averred, “is inferior to reason because it deals with opinions about truth rather than with truth itself, while reason concerns the thing itself and can settle the question.” “For I was taught by my Arab masters to be led only by reason, whereas you were taught to follow the halter of the captured image of authority.”164 Though he did not, like Abélard, name his son “Astrolabe,”165 William of Conches did read Arabic and urge others to do the same. He insisted, “it is not the task of the Bible to teach us the nature of things; this belongs to philosophy.”166 “And the divine page says, ‘He divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters that were above the firmament.’ Since such a statement as this is contrary to reason let us show how it cannot be thus.”167 Another Arabophile of the twelfth century, Thierry of Chartres, in De sex dierum operibus, set down one of the earliest attempts in the Christian West to explain the formation of the world through natural causes and to separate cosmology from theology.168 The ideas of these innovators made their way into the universities, which first rivaled and then, in the thirteenth century, surpassed monasteries as centers of learning.169 At Oxford, Paris, or Bologna, for example, it became as common to study Avicenna or Averroës as it was to study Augustine. Indeed, entire schools of Latin Avicennism and Averoism took root at different universities during the thirteenth century and became an integral part of the budding tradition of questioning Church authority.170 “For the first time in the history of Latin Christendom,” Edward Grant observes, “a comprehensive body of secular learning, rich in metaphysics, methodology, and reasoned argumentation, posed a threat to theology and its traditional interpretations.”171 The Church understandably sought to rebuke and repress the moderni, as the enthusiasts of the new ideas styled themselves. As mentioned, Bacon was imprisoned. A number of Abélard’s teachings were condemned, causing “such a state of despair that I thought of quitting the realm of Christendom

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and going over to the heathen [Saracens].”172 In 1210, 1215, and again in 1231 the University of Paris banned the natural works of Aristotle, which too had come to Europe through Arabic translations and commentaries. The Greek sage’s assertion that the world was eternal belied the Creation narrated in Genesis. His insistence on a single human intellect gave the lie to individual souls and salvation, to name just a few of the dilemmas Aristotelian notions created.173 Finally the bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, put his foot down. His 1277 condemnation of 219 propositions of Greco-Arab philosophy circulating among the savants is as revealing about those propositions as it was ultimately futile. Not to be tolerated were such heretical teachings as: “the absolutely impossible cannot be done by God”; “theological discussions are based on fables”; “nothing is known better because of knowing theology”; “the only wise men of the world are philosophers”; “there is no more excellent state than the study of philosophy.”174 Tempier’s censure backfired, prompting university scholars to defend their autonomy all the more vigorously. By the end of the thirteenth century, Aristotle’s works were entrenched in the liberal arts curriculum of practically all universities.175 The Arab allure in Europe both terrified and infuriated Dante; he composed La commedia at least in part to counter Islam’s appeal. It is telling that he had to borrow (consciously or unconsciously) the popular Arabic literary form of miraj in order to create his masterpiece praising fundamental Christianity.176 The only other medieval luminary who can stand shoulder to shoulder with the great Italian bard, Thomas Aquinas, cuts such a prodigious figure in Roman Catholic lore because he better defended ecclesiastical universalism. The Dominican penned Summa contra Gentiles (1259–64) to an audience versed in Greco-Arab philosophy. Like Bacon, he believed Christians could communicate effectively with Muslims (and their sympathizers) only through the voice of reason: “it is difficult to proceed against each particular error . . . because some, as Mohammedans and Pagans, do not agree with us in recognizing the authority of any scripture . . . as we can argue against the Jews from the Old Testament, and against heretics from the New. But these receive neither: hence it is necessary to have recourse to natural reason, which all are obliged to assent to.”177 Eugene Myers goes so far as to assert that both Thomas and his mentor, Albertus Magnus, made it “the goal of their lives to reconcile Aristotelian and Moslem philosophy with Christian theology.”178 By their time, the notion of the “two truths” had become dangerously widespread. Attributed to Averroës, the idea theorized two paths to the Absolute, one passing through theology, the other through philosophy. Indeed, many purveyors of the doctrine held that philosophy was the superior path. The Church, unwilling to countenance the alleged victory

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of reason over faith, set its best minds to work refuting the seductive teaching.179 Will Durant notes that “the industry of Aquinas was due not to the love of Aristotle but to fear of Averroës.”180 Rather than renounce natural philosophy, Aquinas shrewdly co-opted it into the service of theology.181 As discussed in the previous chapter, Thomism asserted that reason alone could comprehend the natural world. Yet, philosophy could not possibly contradict theology because God ordained the very principles according to which nature operates. More importantly, God’s infinite wisdom could be accessed through faith alone. “Though the . . . truth of the Christian faith surpasses the ability of human reason, nevertheless those things which are naturally instilled in human reason can not be opposed to this truth.”182 Thus did the eminent Dominican reconcile the purported divergence between faith and reason. Rome warmed to the revised universalism, canonized it, and used it to renounce unorthodox teachings.183 In fact, optimism swelled that a more rational Christianity could finally sway the infidels. Converting Muslims belonged to one of the founding missions of the Dominican Order. Aquinas composed Summa contra Gentiles in response to his brothers’ call for help in preaching to Saracens. With the same purpose in mind he authored Reasons for the Faith against the Muslims for the cantor of Antioch. A similar rational defense of Christianity, Explanatio symboli Apostolorum, friar Ramon Martí translated into Arabic and presented to the king of Tunis in an unsuccessful bid to convert him.184 The only real rival to the Dominicans at the time, the Franciscans, too made proselytizing among Muslims a priority. Francis himself preached to the sultan, and the final rule of the order deals with the conversion of Muslims.185 Jacques de Vitry, while on the Fifth Crusade, wrote of Francis: “he came into our army, burning with the zeal of faith, and was not afraid to cross over to the enemy army. There he preached the word of God to the Saracens but accomplished little.”186 The same was true elsewhere. Missionaries did in fact find Muslims to engage in reasoned debate. But the latter were not convinced by Christian arguments. Worse, conversions of pagans and Christians to Islam continued apace, as did losses on the battlefield. Optimism soured into pessimism. One hears the despair in Five Letters on the Fall of Acre written by Dominican Riccoldo da Montecroce shortly after the humiliating defeat. The friar proselytized for 12 years in the East, including unsuccessfully among the Mongol khans. What more can we Christians do, he laments. We have sent our bravest knights and finest kings, including “Louis, Saint, King of France,” to smite the Saracens only to be repelled. To win their hearts and souls we have sent our wisest and holiest teachers, including Francis and Dominic themselves, to no avail.

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Suddenly, in this sadness, swept up into an unaccustomed astonishment, I began, stupefied, to ponder God’s judgment concerning the government of the world, especially concerning the Saracens and the Christians. What could be the cause of such massacre and such degradation of the Christian people? Of so much worldly prosperity for the perfidious Saracen people? Since I could not simply be amazed, nor could I find a solution to this problem, I decided to write to God and his celestial court, to express the cause of my astonishment, to open my desire through prayer, so that God might confirm me in the truth and sincerity of the Faith, that he quickly put an end to the law, or rather the perfidy, of the Saracens, and more than anything else that he liberate the Christian captives from the hands of the enemies.187

The questions he poses to God demonstrate how profoundly the encounter with Islam had rattled his faith. Is God indifferent to the blasphemies enunciated in the Quran? “As you know, frequently, as I read the Koran in Arabic, with great grief and impatience in my heart, I would place this book on Your altar, before the image of You and your holy mother and say: ‘Read! Read what Muhammad says!’ And it seemed to me that you did not want to read.”188 Overwhelmed with doubt, he asks Jesus if what the Quran teaches is true, namely, that the Christian Savior was actually a Muslim who never purported to be God. A gross anachronism apparently unbeknownst to its author, Jesus’ belief in Islam would make more sense of the Saracens’ victories, Riccoldo admits. He asks the apostles if they too are Muslims. Finally, in the fifth letter, Riccoldo reports that he heard a voice telling him that God does not answer individual questions, but that His infinite wisdom abides in Scripture. Riccoldo was hardly the only European grasping at elusive answers. Christendom’s protracted and multifaceted humiliation vis-à-vis Islam motivated European thinkers to look beyond conventional authority for universal knowledge. Rome’s slippery grip on the determination of what counted as knowledge is too well known to recount here in detail. Three overlapping but still distinguishable avenues of inquiry into new understandings of universal knowledge stand out. One sought a purer, uncorrupted Christianity, beginning with the likes of Marsellio of Padua (1270–1342) or Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260–1328), continuing through reformers such as John Wycliffe (ca. 1320–84) and Jan Hus (1370–1415), and culminating in Martin Luther (1483–1546) and the Reformation. Along a second path, ultimately en route to the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, curious minds like Nicholas Oresme (1323–82), Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Réne Descartes (1596–1650), and Isaac Newton (1642–1727)

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plumbed the depths of natural philosophy and human intellect for new knowledge and authority. A third route pointed back in the direction of antiquity. Men of letters like Francesco Petrarch (1304–74), Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75), and Bruni (1370–1444) exalted the this-worldliness of ancient (and it seems Ottoman189) thinkers and sought in their rhetoric renewal and rebirth. It was Renaissance scholars who coined the term “Middle Ages”—a long, moribund period between antiquity and its rediscovery and revival in the quattrocento—and fabricated the notion of a direct, continuous link between Greece, Rome, and Catholic Europe.190 Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) recognized the pluralism of his epoch, which had replaced medieval unity: “surely the first place is due to holy scripture; but sometimes I find some things written by the ancients, by pagans and poets, so chaste, so holy, so divine, that I am persuaded a good genius enlightened them. Certainly there are many in the communion of saints who are not in our catalogue of saints.”191 Nevertheless, the loyal Roman Catholic believed that he had glimpsed a rising new age of authentic Christian grandeur. “What a world I see dawning,” “the near approach of a golden age” in which true Christian piety, the restoration of learning to humanity and lasting concord of Christendom would be achieved.192 Conclusion The previous chapter made the case that Latin Christians from at least 1095 on aspired to vie with Byzantium and Islam for world leadership. As far as Islam is concerned, the present chapter suggests, the aspiration went unfulfilled—at least in the immediate term. Though greater ambition occasioned closer contact with Islam, that very contact exposed a Europe far less equipped than its adversary to build a universal empire and culture. Expressed differently, these (proto)Europeans experienced first hand the myriad advantages that accrued to Islam because it controlled the core territories of the ancient world. By the same token, the disadvantages of European marginality were reinforced. This perspective of the simultaneously experienced aspiration and frustration to make headway toward subjective Eurocentrism at the close of the Middle Ages casts in new relief the three monumental developments that ushered Europe into the modern era: the (Italian) Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. We unmistakably discern the pivotal role Islamic civilization played. Failure in the rivalry with Islam helped to plant the seeds of doubt that led Europeans to look beyond the medieval Church for stewardship in the quest for universal knowledge and empire. At the same time, the determined quest for subjective Eurocentrism

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steeled Europeans against embracing Islam as a superior universalist civilization. While sensing the inefficacy of the medieval formula, Latin Christians remained determined to discover a new recipe for universalism within their tradition. They refused to resign themselves to a future in which Europe followed rather than led the civilized world. The dynamic tension born of ambition and disappointment provided the spark that ignited the fire of European modernity. But as the next chapter shows, the European glow took much longer to outshine its rival than is conventionally presumed.

CHAPTER 4

Lingering Asian Superiority (1453–1776) Atlantic civilization gradually created by European expansion from the sixteenth century, despite its enormous potential, was extremely brittle for its first three hundred years; but over the same period of time a shift of resources helped to ensure that when the crisis of Atlantic civilization was over, the world faced a brief, uneasy spell of western supremacy.1 Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

Introduction Conventional wisdom marks 1492 or thereabouts as the origin of European revival on the world stage. In that year, the Spaniards expelled the Muslims once and for all from the Iberian Peninsula, and Columbus discovered the New World. Twelve years earlier Ivan III had thrown off the Tartar yoke. In 1497 Vasco da Gama circumnavigated Africa, and in 1522 Fernando de Magellan circled the globe. Furthermore, the Renaissance was by that time in full flower, spreading its potent pollen well beyond Italy. As the epithet “rebirth” implies, Europe began emerging from its “Dark Ages” to endeavor to claim the prized world dominance once (supposedly) enjoyed by its ancient Greek and Roman ancestors. As the two previous chapters revealed, in fact, the seeds of modern Europe were sown in the High Middle Ages.2 Whatever its exact origins, modernity is understood by most Eurocentrists as an age dating to somewhere around 1,500 and characterized by “The Rise of the West,”3 “the Resurrection of Western Europe,”4 “The Origins of the European World-Economy,”5 or simply “The European Miracle.”6 Asianists beg to differ. They delight in pointing out not only that Shiha¯b al-Din Ahmad Ibn Ma¯jid rounded the Cape of Good Hope (westwards) several decades before Vasco da Gama, but also that the Portuguese captain was

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led by a Gujarati Muslim pilot.7 They date European hegemony much later than Eurocentrists. K.N. Chaudhuri, for instance, insists that Asian hegemony lasted until the Battle of Plassey in 1757.8 R. Bin Wong claims China matched or surpassed Europe in standard of living and proto-industrialization until the end of the eighteenth century.9 Kenneth Pomeranz sees no “great divergence” between occidental and oriental economies before 1800.10 André Gunder Frank, in the cleverly titled book ReOrient, maintains that China remained at the core of the world economy until 1870!11 My argument at once benefits and diverges from these welcome Asiacentric revisions. They imply a feeling of inferiority among Europeans but neither unequivocally demonstrate it nor fully explore its ramifications. This has the unintended consequence of enabling reformed Eurocentrists—by which I mean those willing to concede some of the revisions of anti-Eurocentrists—to persist in the depiction of early modern Europeans as confident of their superiority over other peoples. The reformed view acknowledges that the key features of modernity hardly sprang forth independently from a sui generis Europe. Rather, they emerged through intensive interaction between Europeans and non-Europeans. But reformed Eurocentrists tend nonetheless to represent the encounter as the imminent and inevitable victory of European over non-European interests, thus leaving the impression—whether intended or not—that the early modern period provided Europeans with steadily increasing cause for confidence in themselves vis-à-vis rivals. Like unreformed paradigmatic Eurocentrism, the reformed school views early modern Europeans through the anachronistic advantage of hindsight as the eventual winners.12 The current chapter argues that European leaders may have feigned but rarely felt a sense of definite superiority over Asians until late in the eighteenth century. Encounters through the skein of relations with neighbors to the east between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries served in many respects to perpetuate or intensify, rather than mollify, the feeling of inferiority Europeans inherited from antiquity and failed to banish in late medieval times. The upper hand accruing to Europe vis-à-vis its rivals that reformed Eurocentrists underscore was lost on Europeans of those centuries. In fact, the latter witnessed their civilization tearing apart at the seams, first due to the Reformation and later to incipient nationalism. Lingering Eastern Dominance The Russians may have slipped out from underneath the Tartar Yoke in 1480, but the rest of Christendom remained imperiled by the menacing Turk until 1683 (the last siege of Vienna). Near the close of the fifteenth century, the Ottomans, long feared only as a land power, fortified their navy and expanded

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their control in the Mediterranean—not to mention the Black Sea13—so that Europeans traded only on Ottoman terms. Between 1499 and 1503 the Turks defeated the venerable Venetian fleet and weighed anchor in the Gulf of Corinth, captured Lepanto, and forced Venice to pay annual tribute to the Sublime Porte. They took Rhodes in 1522, Algiers in 1529, Tripoli in 1551, Cyprus in 1571, and Tunis in 1574.14 These victories secured a naval monopoly for the Ottomans on the “liquid continent” (as the Mediterranean was called) and enabled the likes of the legendary Barbarossa to torment the southern coast of Europe, thus practically nullifying the Spanish pacification of the Arabs in 1492.15 Tales spread through Europe of Christian women enslaved and fattened up on bread dipped into syrup to enhance their salability,16 of Christian leaders skinned alive so that their hide could be stuffed with straw and burned in effigy.17 Miguel de Cervantes was captured by corsairs in 1575 and spent five years incarcerated in Algiers, the experience of which inspired Don Quixote.18 Long, then, before Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart immortalized the nightmare of the European imprisoned by the Turk in Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1782)—not to mention Gioachino Rossini’s Italiana in Algeri (1813)—Europeans dreaded the hapless eventuality. For nearly a century the Europeans could do little to stymie Ottoman naval gains. In fact, the young zealot Loyola had his heart set on missionary work in Jerusalem in 1537 but had to settle for Rome due to Ottoman domination of sea routes (so thank the Turks for the Jesuits!).19 Don Juan of Austria, commanding the Catholic League, finally made a stand at Lepanto in 1571. Europeans touted it as a victory of crusadelike proportions—Ali Pasha’s head was ceremoniously mounted on a spike on the prow of a Turkish vessel while the crescent was replaced with a cross, the day of victory was declared a holiday in perpetuity, and the victors were feted like returning Caesars.20 The result, however, hardly turned the Mediterranean into a European lake or the Ottoman Empire into a vassal. Rather, the two foes reached a naval stalemate of sorts.21 Hans Khevenhu˝ller, who fought at Lepanto, noted in his diary that the trumpeted victory failed to secure a single additional yard of territory for Christianity. The grand vizier said to the Venetian emissary: You come to see how we bear our misfortune. But I would have you know the difference between your loss and ours. In wresting Cyprus from you, we deprived you of an arm; in defeating our fleet, you have only shaved our beard. An arm when cut off cannot grow again; but a shorn beard will grow all the better for the razor.22

As predicted, at Alcazarquivir in Morocco in 1578, a Muslim army reinforced with Ottoman janissaries lethally trained its guns on Don Juan’s

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nephew and king of Portugal, Dom Sebastian, as well as most of the Portuguese nobility settled there. Needless to say, this battle was never celebrated in such masterpieces as Titian’s Allegory of the Battle of Lepanto.23 Venetian senator Costantino Garzoni, who authored a report of his travels to Istanbul after Lepanto, could still write of the sultan: “This most powerful emperor’s forces are of two kinds, those of the sea and those of the land, and both are terrifying.” The Grand Turk continued to have the power “to torment all of Christendom.”24 In 1573, the ambassador to the Ottoman capital from the Republic of St. Mark reported back to his government that the sultan lay poised to establish universal monarchy: “the Ottoman emperor has in the course of continuing victories seized so many provinces and brought so many kingdoms under his yoke and, in so doing, has made the whole world fear him, [that] it is not beyond reason to wonder if he might not finally go so far as to establish a universal monarchy.” The next ambassador insisted that only unalloyed vanity could lead Europeans to fancy staunching the Turkish onslaught (barring, naturally, divine intervention). It should be added that these diplomatic reports were subsequently published (in French too) and widely read throughout Europe well into the seventeenth century.25 As indicated, the implacable Turks continued their ravaging campaigns on land. In 1499, they sallied forth to occupy Otranto and then used that foothold to maraud villages surrounding Venice. Small wonder that Machiavelli lauded the discipline and morale of Turkish troops over and beyond that of Christian soldiers.26 In La Mandragola he has the protagonist ask in fearful expectation: “Do you think the Turk will make it to Italy this year?”27 In all likelihood, the Ottomans could have made the whole of Europe their own if it were not for their troops’ distaste for wintering far from home.28 Truth be told, Europe was not much of a prize. The Ottomans set their sights on the more alluring kingdoms in the world’s nucleus. Selim I conquered Mamlukian Syria and Egypt in 1516 and 1517. But Turkish forces did become embroiled in conflicts with the Persians to the east.29 Nevertheless, numberless European plebeians came to believe in the prophesy that they would be overrun by the Turks—a sentiment Luther felt compelled to denounce in his “War Sermon” of 1529.30 Two years earlier, Pope Clement VII had ordered the arrest of the popular seer Brendano, who divined Turkish victory over the whole of Europe by 1530.31 In 1551, controversy broke out around Rabbi Isaac Abravanel, who contended that the Ottomans were fulfilling the Prophesy of Daniel. The legend foretold that a universal monarchy of God on earth was destined to follow in the wake of the four great ancient pagan kingdoms (Babylonian-Assyrian, Persian, Greek, and Roman).32

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Even half-hearted Ottoman excursions into Europe made headway, so formidable was the Turkish war machine.33 In a series of Danubian campaigns the Turks first galloped into Belgrade (1521) and from there crossed the Hungarian plain—routing the royal army at Mohacs in 1526 in a mere two hours34—to lay (unsuccessful) siege to Vienna in 1529. The Habsburgs were forced to tolerate in Hungary, long the critical buffer zone between them and the Turks, the Ottoman puppet regime of John Zapolyai. Over the ensuing decades, the infidels positioned themselves to swallow up all of St. Stephen’s dominions, including Buda in 1541, and beyond into southern Ukraine and Lithuania. Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I stopped the assault only by brokering a deal in 1562 whereby Hungary was partitioned into three parts—two loyal to the Grand Signior.35 Further embarrassment came to the Habsburgs in the Treaty of Adrianople six years later, which stipulated that they had to pay annual tribute to Istanbul. Selim II generously referred to it as a “gift” to spare Maximilian II disgrace.36 Turkish confidence understandably brimmed. In 1560, Suleiman ordered inscribed above the entrance to the newly erected Great Mosque in Istanbul the following words: “Conqueror of the lands of the Orient and the Occident with the help of Almighty God and his victorious army, possessor of the Kingdoms of the World.”37 In this milieu, Venetian ambassadors to the Porte understandably penned assessments to the homeland according to which the Turks “are the greatest fighters in the world,” utterly “invincible.” “Henceforth, all Christendom should fear incurring a great extermination.”38 The ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I conveyed a similar message of foreboding: When I compare the Turkish system with our own; one army must prevail and the other be destroyed . . . On their side are the resources of a mighty empire, strength unimpaired, experience and practice in fighting, a veteran soldiery, habituation to victory, endurance of toil, unity, order, discipline, frugality and watchfulness. On our side is public poverty, private luxury, impaired strength, broken spirit, lack of endurance and training; our soldiers are insubordinate, the officiers avaricious; there is a contempt for discipline; license, recklessness, drunkenness and debauchery are rife, and worst of all the enemy is accustomed to victory, we to defeat. Can we doubt what the result will be?”39

Things looked so dire that a French poet in 1555 exhorted Europeans to abandon their continent to the Turks and reestablish Europe in the New World.40 Five years later, compatriot Guillaume Postel published his widely read De la république des Turcs, in which he concluded that France could

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only defeat the Turk by emulating him.41 The view from England was no better: “The terror of their [Turks’] name doth even now make the kings and princes of the west, with the weak and dismembered relics of their kingdoms and estates, to tremble and quake through the fear of their victorious forces.”42 The Europeans had effectively accepted a border between Christianity and Islam in the very heart of Europe. The Turkish state had established itself as “the dominant military power in Europe and the Mediterranean.”43 In The generall historie of the Turkes published in 1610, Richard Knolles referred to the object of his study as “the terror of Europe.”44 The Ottomans remained a thorn in Europe’s side for at least the rest of the century. They raided as far north as Poland in 1620, then again in 1672. They took the Western Ukraine from the Poles in 1676, only to lose it to the Russians in 1681. Countless Europeans interpreted Halley’s Comet of 1682 as a divine signal of defeat at the hands of the Turks. The latter seemed to fulfill the prophecy the next year by laying final (but again failed) siege to Vienna. Viennese bakers created the delectable croissant (crescent) so that their compatriots might commemorate their heroic stand each time they consumed the infidels’ emblem. As late as the turn of the eighteenth century, Sir William Temple called the Ottoman Empire “the fiercest . . . in the world.”45 That said, there is no denying that 1683 marked the end of further significant Ottoman incursions into Europe and the beginning of the gradual degeneration of the Turk into the “sick man of Europe,” who had to submit to such disadvantageous settlements as the Capitulations or the Treaty of Ku˝çu˝k-Kainardji (1774). But keep in mind that the Muslim adversaries took Crete from the Venetians in 1715, converted countless Christians to Islam, and did not relinquish the “miniature continent” until 1898.46 The Ottomans also managed to repulse the Russians in 1711, and the Austrians in 1736–39 and again in 1787. The Balkans remained under Ottoman control until the nineteenth century. It was not without good cause that Metternich said of the road leading east out of Vienna, “Asia begins at the Landstrasse.”47 Widespread Türkenfurcht (fear of the Turks) led Europeans to scrutinize the enemy. What they saw (or thought they saw48) at the Porte impressed them. European kings could only envy the untrammeled power the sultan appeared to wield. In the first place, the Ottoman monarch ruled a remarkably vast empire, 30 kingdoms in all.49 European diplomats, who regularly referred to European realms as “kingdoms” but the Ottoman as “empire,” marveled that the sultan “rules in Asia, in Africa, and in Europe” in this “vastissimo impero dei Turchi.” Istanbul was widely held to be the world’s most splendid city, “the most beautiful thing in the world there is to see.”50

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Moreover, the sultan—in reality the grand vizier—controlled a gigantic administrative apparatus (some 80,00051) whose responsiveness and efficiency far outstripped the cruder bureaucracies of Europe. First contact came, of course, with the sultan’s diplomatic corps, through whom Italian diplomats, in particular, developed many of the mainstays of “modern” diplomacy, such as the permanent mission, extraterritoriality, reciprocity, and the gathering of intelligence.52 The sultan’s internal machinery of government also impressed European observers. The Turkish civil service cut a better figure than the European because recruitment was based on merit rather than birth. Superior government gave the sultan a tax base that dwarfed those of his European counterparts. Nothing attracted more attention in the reports of European diplomats than the stunning fact that the sultan’s revenues regularly exceeded expenses (in one report by 30 percent, in another by 47 percent).53 If that were not enough, the Ottoman sovereign had both the aristocracy and the clergy firmly under his thumb, which European princes could scarcely boast. “Obedience, considered by all to be the most solid foundation for any empire, maintains this one without a doubt,” noted Antonio Errizo in his 1557 report on the Porte. “Revenues, peoples, and obedience,” wrote Marco Minio in 1522, these were the sultan’s key “powers.”54 It speaks volumes that Europeans, not Turks, called Suleiman “the Magnificent” and the sultan generally “the Grand Signior.”55 Men of letters, including Paolo Giovio, Niccolò Machiavelli, Michel Montaigne, Pierre Charon, and Jean Bodin, lauded Suleiman for his wise, just, and orderly style of governing. Titian was the most famous but hardly the lone European to paint his portrait.56 But the greatest compliment that could possibly be paid to the Turkish emperor was to acknowledge him as the rightful heir to the Roman Empire. In Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1568) Bodin concluded: It would be far more just to regard the Osmanli sultan as the inheritor of the Roman Empire, for it was he who, after capturing the imperial city of Byzantium from the Christians, went on to conquer from the Persians that region of Babylonia which is spoken of in the Book of Daniel, adding to the ancient provinces of Rome all the land across the Danube until the banks of the Borysthenes . . . we must recognize that the prophecy of Daniel can be most appropriately interpreted as applying to the sultan of the Turks.57

Fifty-three years earlier, Machiavelli had counseled his prince that true greatness came only to those rulers “who command their expeditions in person as the Roman Emperors did in the beginning and as the sultan does at the present

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time.”58 If we look to the future instead of the past, we might say with Lucette Valensi that Europe’s relations with the Turks were not unlike those between much of the world and the United States in the period since the end of the Second World War. The political, economic, and military hegemony of this new power—this youthful imperialism— may be ill abided, but its achievements and its political regime dazzle and fascinate nonetheless. One might wish that it had less power, but no one thinks to challenge its legitimacy.59

As with America today, fashion followed wealth and power then. Norman Davies records a “craze for Turkish styles and artifacts” in sixteenth-century Europe.60 Europeans’ love affair with coffee—that exotic black brew imbibed by the Turks—stems from the end of the same century. Johann Sebastian Bach paid musical tribute to the popular drink in his Coffee Cantata, no. 211.61 On elaborate book bindings and gainly daggers could be found copied the “arabesque” decoration identified with the Ottomans.62 Certain Ottoman rugs became known as Lotto and Holbein carpets because their designs figured prominently in paintings by the two masters.63 Venetian artists’ families bequeathed similis—covetously collected copies of Islamic dress—to eagerly awaiting future generations.64 Through the eighteenth century, European aestheticians claimed that the loveliest people were to be found in the Ottoman Empire.65 Europe’s rulers continued well into the seventeenth century the practice of sending envoys to the Levant with instructions to bring back materials of academic importance. (The Turks sent no such envoys in the other direction.) Scholars the likes of Leibniz and Racine waited eagerly to study what the scouts retrieved.66 Many chairs of Arabic were created in European universities, beginning with Paris in 1529. Persian and Turkish studies followed. Even “diabolical” Islam eventually came in for guarded praise. In reformed Basil in 1543, Theodor Bibliander put out the first published edition of the Quran with the argument that Europeans needed to better understand the rival faith and not rely on medieval fairy tales about the infidels.67 Though Ketton’s earlier translation, as well as the commentaries by Montecroce, Cusa, and Luther that Bibliander appended, were unfortunately stippled with errors, the project signaled a more generous outlook. A similarly more openminded attitude toward Muslims found expression on Venetian canvases painted by Vittore Carpaccio or Gentile Bellini.68 Naturally, no proud Christian recognized the veracity of Muhammad’s message. But respect for the gravity of Muslim piety grew roots. In De orbis terrae concordia (1544) Postel underscored the similarities as opposed to the differences between

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Islam and Christianity. His controversial assertions gradually found backing, especially in the numerous travel accounts that poured into Europe during the seventeenth century.69 In one, the Levant Company chaplain, Thomas Smith, rejected Islam as a mumbo jumbo of “folly and imposture and gross absurdities,” but admitted that Muslims were “generally pious at prayer,” and that some of them were “hearty and sincere” in their devotions. Thomas Hyde, who received at Oxford a “Turkish liturgy” (eventually published after his death), denounced its “nonsense and folly” but added that “many of the Mahometans excel in the love of god . . . Moreover, many of them are shining examples for alms, justice, and other moral and theological virtues.” It seems Europeans had misunderstood and mischaracterized their religious adversaries. “In Christendom,” Jean de Thévenot wrote, “many think that the Turks are devils, barbarous and men of no faith and honesty, but such as know and have conversed with them, have a far different opinion . . . They are very devout and charitable; very zealous for their religion.”70 In 1691, Ludovico Marracci published a complete and faithful translation of the Quran, followed in 1698 by an unprejudiced commentary. Adrien Reland, professor of Oriental languages and ecclesiastical archeology at Utrecht, maintained that a “religion which hath largely spread itself over Asia, Africa, and even Europe, commends itself to men by a great appearance of truth.” A generation later, Henri de Boulainvilliers’ La Vie de Mahome (1730) appeared, in which the French freethinker argued that the strict monotheism of Islam testified to its prophet’s theological earnestness. In fact, something of a revival of the medieval interest in Arab learning occurred in the eighteenth century, finding expression, for instance, in Simon Ockley’s History of the Saracens and even Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.71 “I declare,” disparaged Ockley in 1708, “that if the West has added one iota to the accumulated wisdom of the East, my powers of perception have been strangely in abeyance.”72 Antoine Galland’s translation of the legendary Arabian Nights (1704–11) was, then, hardly the sole source of information on Muslims available in Europe. Far East It was Muslim control of the Mediterranean that in part forced the Portuguese and Spanish to take the wildly circuitous routes to India that carried them deep into the Indian and Atlantic oceans and the so-called Age of Discovery. In the Americas small bands of Europeans easily overthrew whole empires such as those of the Aztecs and Incas. The conquistadores went on to found and expand colonies and spread European language, culture, and religion among the Indians. This experience clearly enhanced the European

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self-image and even helped assuage some of the shame stemming from losses to the Turks.73 The experience in Asia differed markedly. When da Gama rounded the tip of Africa, he entered a sophisticated commercial zone in which he was an upstart and novice. Wherever the Portuguese docked they found the vessels of Muslim, Chinese, and other Asian competitors already moored there. Furthermore, Christian wares “were crude and unattractive in Eastern eyes.” The legendary explorer, for instance, had aboard his craft “a tawdry collection of junk” including hawk-bells, brass chamber pots, and bracelets. In other words, Orientals hardly saw in “tattered crews and crowded sea-stained ships” from the Occident their future imperialist overlords.74 When da Gama returned to Lisbon in April 1499 and showed his king what he had acquired, the monarch replied: “it would seem that it is not we who have discovered them, but they who have discovered us.”75 In fact, da Gama met in Calcutta an Oriental who spoke Spanish. In the port of Melaka 84 languages could be heard.76 European backwardness was to be expected. After all, the Europeans hailed from an impoverished economic area that paled in comparison to the prosperity, even opulence of Asia. They were the “Orient’s poor relations” whose “presence . . . was a compliment, not a threat, to the wealth of the host-cultures.”77 Fernão Mendes Pinto confirmed as much after his visit to the Orient between 1521 and 1558. There he walked the markets of Peking “as if in a daze” at the quantities of “silk, lace, canvas, clothes of cotton and linen, marten pearls, gold-dust and gold-bullion.” “All these things were to be had in such abundance that I feel as if there are not enough words in the dictionary to name them all.”78 More than a century later, the director of the British East India Company, Sir Josiah Child, stated the obvious when he noted that Indian “trade with all the Eastern nations . . . is ten times as much as ours and all the European nations put together.”79 As late as 1750, the rest of the world still out-produced Europe and North America by a ratio of nearly 4 to 1.80 China alone accounted for a third of the world’s industrial capacity in 1800, a fifth in 1860.81 In 1820, the Middle Kingdom ranked as the world’s largest economy with a gross domestic product (GDP) six times greater than Europe’s biggest economy (France), prompting some historians to label the global economy of the time “Sinocentric.”82 At that time, India’s GDP still tripled Britain’s.83 This vast economic advantage goes far in explaining why “from 1500–1800 relations between East and West were ordinarily conducted within a framework and on terms established by the Asian nations.”84 As Robert Temple puts it: It is no exaggeration to say that China was in the position of America and Western Europe today, and Europe was in the position of, say, Morocco

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[today]. There was simply no comparison between the primitive and hopeless agriculture of Europe before the eighteenth century and the . . . advanced agriculture of China after the fourth century BC.85

The geopolitical climate, then, was nothing like that of the Americas. In fact, the Europeans were too busy expressing their awe of majestic Oriental kingdoms such as the Ming and Mughal to imagine subduing them. The starry-eyed newcomers were lucky if the emperor even deigned to tolerate them within the realm. Such things contemporaries knew thanks to the virtual “flood tide” of literature about the Orient that washed over Europe from the sixteenth century on.86 European readers enjoyed marveling at descriptions of exotic places like the grand Mughal court at Agra or the lavish Burmese metropolis of Pegu with its ten thousand elephants.87 Geographies typically described Asia in glowing terms. “It was vast in size, rich in products, the seat of great monarchies and the cradle of the arts and the sciences.” Cicero’s remark that “Asia is truly so rich and fertile . . . [that] it easily surpasses all lands” was frequently quoted.88 India earned accolades such as “the best and goodliest land in the world” or “an earthly paradise.”89 An “Indian Craze” consumed western Europe from 1680 to 1720 in the field of textiles.90 Until the nineteenth century it was not uncommon for Britons stationed in India to adopt Mughal culture, even convert to Islam.91 Culturally, these Europeans were light years away from the arrogant Thomas Macaulay, who in the nineteenth century impudently proclaimed one shelf of English literature superior to all that had ever been scribbled in India.92 But no kingdom bewitched Europeans quite like China. Of course, Marco Polo’s travel tales—compiled in Il milione—had been a best-seller throughout Europe since the end of the thirteenth century. But Polo’s was hardly the lone book praising China to be found on European bookshelves. Commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII in 1583, Juan González de Mendoza’s Historia de las cosas mas notables, ritos y costumbres del gran Reyno de la China (1585) was translated into six languages and profoundly molded Europeans’ image of the Ming and Ch’ing dynasties.93 He divided “this mightie kingdome . . . into fifteen provinces, that every one of them is bigger than the greatest kingdome that we do understand to be in all Europe.”94 Giovio first noted that printing was invented in China rather than Europe.95 In the seventeenth century, Isaac Vossius typified European amazement with Chinese science: “If any man should make a collection of all the inventions and all the productions that every nation, which now is, or ever has been, upon the face of the globe, the whole would fall short, either as to number or quality, of what is to be met with in China.”96 English Sinophile Sir William Temple deemed it “endless to enumerate all the excellent orders of this state, which seem contrived by a

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reach of sense and wisdom, beyond what we meet with in any other government of the world.”97 After all, as Michael Adas points out, merchants and missionaries went out to China from a Europe ravaged by dynastic struggles, peasant rebellions, and religious wars. In east Asia they encountered an empire so vast that the largest of Europe’s nascent nationstates could be tucked into several of its provinces. They extolled the virtues of what they believed to be the absolute but paternal authority wielded by the Ming emperors and the training and dedication of the officials who ran the elaborate bureaucracy that made good the emperor’s decrees and collected his apparently limitless revenues.98

From the time of the first successful Jesuit mission in 1583 until the rebuke of Lord Macartney’s trade mission in 1793, China mesmerized the European mind. Hundreds of books by European visitors to Asia were published back home. Of this body of literature Donald Lach and Edwin Van Kley write: “Few literate Europeans could have been completely untouched by it.”99 Philosophers the likes of Quesnay, Fontenelle, Leibniz, Bayle, Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire idealized China as a veritable philosopher-kingship and used its example to heap scorn on benighted European ways.100 Philologists keen to reform vulgar European vernaculars praised Chinese as a “paragon of linguistic rationality.” Artists embraced Chinese styles as a refreshing break from hidebound European conventions.101 Chinoiserie became the preferred decorative style in homes.102 Sages sought to establish Chinese academies on European soil.103 It seems likely that Jesuit praise for the compendia of knowledge compiled by Chinese emperors inspired the European encyclopedia.104 Officials envied the mandarins’ uncontested authority. One of Louis XV’s ministers averred that what France sorely needed was “an injection of Chinese spirit.”105 Leibniz had counseled Louis’ grandfather: “everything exquisite and admirable comes from the East Indies . . . Learned people have remarked that in the whole world there is no commerce comparable to that of China.”106 Adam Smith concurred as late as 1776: “China is a much richer country than any part of Europe” (and he saw no change on the horizon).107 The aspiring bourgeoisie too held China up as a paragon of virtue.108 Adas insists that such fervent admiration for Asia in general and China in particular persisted well into the eighteenth century when the achievements of the Enlightenment finally afforded Europeans a genuine sense of superiority.109 Let us not forget, though, that Napoleon hoped to transfer his base of operations to the Orient because “Europe is a molehill. All great revolutions and empires have been in the Orient.”110

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For its first 250 years, European “imperialism” in Asia represented a completely different phenomenon than in the Americas. The experience in the Orient, far from boosting, actually battered European self-confidence.111 In particular, from the perspective of my argument, the Far Eastern encounter lacked the essential elements of vast territorial conquest and mass cultural conversion necessary to support subjective Eurocentrism. Not until the eighteenth century did European powers feel they had any chance of landward expansion into Asia.112 In China they were lucky to get even an audience with supercilious Chinese officials who scorned Europeans as uncouth. In the Mughal Empire they did secure footholds here and there through deal brokering, but this was always as vassal or ally and never as overlord. And even where Europeans managed to gain the upper hand as in the smaller principalities on the southern fringe of Asia, their possessions did not extend beyond European “forts and trading factories.” Only in southern India and the East Indian islands was European domination thorough.113 Furthermore, the Europeans won few souls in Asia despite zealous proselytizing. The checkered track record was well known in Europe at least since the publication in 1461 of Pius II’s controversial Epistola ad Mahometem. In the previous year, the Holy Father had sent a missive to sultan Mehmed II urging him to convert. It is a small thing, however, that can make you the greatest and most powerful and most famous man of your time. You ask what it is. It is not difficult to find. Nor have you far to seek. It is to be found all over the world—a little water with which you may be baptized, and turn to the Christian sacraments and believe the gospel. Do this, and there is no prince in the world who will exceed you in glory, or equal you in power. We will call you emperor of the Greeks and of the East.114

The plea failed, as did subsequent efforts by the pontiff ’s flock. Christian missionaries met peoples sure and confident in their faiths and skeptical of Christianity. Where conversions took place they were more likely to be to Islam (for instance, in Indonesia or India) than to Christianity.115 Europeans became painfully aware that the majority of mankind had done just fine without Christ’s revelation and would continue to do so.116 Even in the eighteenth century, the translator of the Ceremonies and Religious Customs of the Known World limned dim prospects for Christian proselytizing. He deemed the Muslims unconvertible. As for the “great and haughty kingdoms of the pagans in Asia,” “they have but very slender ideas of our power and learning; they are obstinately wedded to the institutions of their forefathers and wise men, under whom they have enjoyed great worldly happiness and grandeur; they are

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superlatively conceited of the brightness of their lights and understandings.”117 Europe may have won the race for Africa’s resources in the nineteenth century, but Islam won the competition for souls (despite vigorous Christian missionary efforts).118 As late as the twentieth century, Teilhard de Chardin would say of all the thousands of Asians he met, he knew not a single case of genuine conversion by a Muslim or “gentile.”119 In fact, Europeans could not even evangelize well at home. The Spanish tried with extraordinary means, such as mass Quran burnings, prohibition of Arabic dress, names, and speech, as well as forced baptisms, even torture, to convert the Moriscos after 1492.120 But the “little Moors” successfully resisted in such uprisings as those of 1568–70, which Don Juan of Austria subdued only after heavy military investment and brutal repression.121 Eventually, some 275,000 had to be deported,122 but not before mass branding, castration, and even drowning were seriously considered if not implemented.123 Indeed, there were many cases of Christian friars who set sail for North Africa, where they converted to Islam rather than observe celibacy.124 This is to say nothing of Christian apostasy in the Balkans, where it continued apace among Bulgarians, for instance, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.125 Division and Despair at Home The pervasive neoclassicism of early modern Europe was at once a nostalgic look back and a hopeful look forward. Neoclassicists sought in antiquity fresh and inspiring ideas and outlooks that would enliven a stagnant Europe and enable it to take center stage in the world.126 This was the underlying meaning of the terms “Dark Ages” and “Renaissance” coined at the time to signal rebirth out of a torpid medieval interregnum.127 Naturally, Europe needed to be unified itself if it had any chance of fulfilling its universal mission. However, the best prospect for European unification in the sixteenth century lay not with the progressive ideas of the Renaissance and Reformation (or even a nascent capitalism), but with the forces of conservatism, that is, with Charles V. When the great Catholic standard-bearer inherited the Habsburg throne from his grandfather Maximilian in 1519, his dominions stretched so far that he had good reason to believe that he could reunite Europe under one empire and one religion. Indeed, the cliché “the sun never sets on our lands” was applied to Charles’s, before Victoria’s, empire. His lands spanned 20 times more territory than the ancient Roman Empire.128 Charles does appear at least to have entertained the idea of fulfilling Dante’s dream of universal monarchy.129 He formally styled himself not only “King of the Romans,” but also “King of Spain, Sicily, Jerusalem, the Balearic

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Islands, Hungary, Dalmatia, Croatia and the Indies.” To the German electors who crowned Charles in 1519 Grand Chancellor Gattinara promised that his king would vanquish the Turks, recapture Jerusalem, and “restore sacrum Imperium.” As it turned out, the emperor persistently treated Gattinara’s visions of and schemes for universal dominion with skepticism, in stark contrast, by the way, to Suleiman, who earnestly believed his sycophants who told him that he was destined to rule the entire world. The grand chancellor was irksomely aware of the sultan’s greater confidence. Before the Castilian Cortez, Gattinara listed the Ottoman conquests in Asia and Europe and warned his audience that Suleiman was endeavoring to establish “la monarchia de tudo el mundo.”130 While the coruscant sultan ruled with verve and determination until his death during a Hungarian campaign in 1566, the frustrated and demoralized emperor abdicated in 1557, divided his empire between his brother Ferdinand and son Philip (who swiftly suffered his own ignominious defeat by the Turks on the Algerian coast and the islands of Minorca and Gerba in 1758–59), and retired to his beloved Spain a broken man. “Empire in Europe,” writes Jacques Barzun, “ended with Charles.” “The Europeans could no longer think of themselves as the progeny of the Christianized Roman Empire.”131 Charles encountered high hurdles. In the first place, he enjoyed little administrative control over his dominions. A hodgepodge of both hereditary and elective monarchies, oligarchic republics, and free city states, the empire lacked a precise chain of command. Though ordered to centralize authority, Gattinara proved unequal to the task.132 Division was further reflected in linguistic pluralism. The emperor could not address all his subjects in a single tongue, so many were the different languages that developed with the waning of Latin. Guillaume Bude, in his Education of a Prince (1518 or 1519), urged leaders to learn modern languages so they could escape the intermediary of the translator and win the hearts of their subjects through direct appeal.133 Nor did these different nations make good bedfellows. Charles ascended to the throne in a Europe accustomed to feuding. Erasmus, for example, wrote that “among such great and changing vicissitudes of human events, among so many treaties and agreements which are now entered into, now rescinded, who can lack a pretext . . . [for] going to war?” In 1516, the esteemed Catholic theologian gave renewed utterance to this observation in The Education of a Christian Prince, penned, as it turned out, for the future Charles V: “Every Angle hates the Gaul, and every Gaul the Angle, for no other reason than that he is an Angle. The Irishman, just because he is an Irishman, hates the Briton; the Italian hates the German; the Swabian, the Swiss; and so on throughout the list. District hates district and city hates city.” War was so endemic to Europe that some, like the French official

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Commines, thought it preordained: “thus to the kingdom of France He has allotted England as an opponent, to the English the Scots, to the Spanish kingdom, Portugal.” When the Venetian ambassador in 1516 bade Henry VIII aid against the infidel he got the following answer: “you are wise, and in your prudence will understand that no general expedition against the Turks will ever be effected so long as such treachery prevails among the Christian powers that their sole thought is to destroy one another.” Nor was such discord lost on the sultan. Bayezid II wrote to his viziers: “The Christians fight constantly among themselves . . . One says to another, ‘Brother, help thou me to-day against this prince, and tomorrow I will help thee against that one.’ Fear not, there is no concord amongst them. Everyone takes care of himself only; no one thinks of the common interest.”134 Small wonder, then, that Charles never could defeat his great Turkish rival. But nothing tested Charles’s mettle quite like Martin Luther. He would tear asunder forever the very Christendom Charles strained to unite. Constantine’s church had cleaved into eastern Orthodoxy and western Catholicism in the great schism of 1054. But the fall of Constantinople left some real hope that the mulish schismatics would return to the fold, if only out of desperation. When Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Chapel in Wittenberg on All Saints’ Eve in 1517 (as legend has it), he might as well have been hammering the final nail in the coffin of universal Christendom. The emperor and his excommunicated subject met in Worms in 1521 to try to reconcile their differences. Obstinacy won the day. Luther’s “Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders” (“Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise”) would make history (despite being added to the speech after the fact), but Charles’s words were no less stubborn. Many Europeans shared the famed protester’s abhorrence of Rome’s tolerance, even sponsorship, of simony, nepotism, promiscuity, opulence, and other sins; so it did not take long for the young firebrand’s professions to spark additional protests. Ulrich Zwingli began his reform in Switzerland in 1522. Henry VIII cut loose in 1534—though hardly out of unadulterated piety. John Calvin finally agreed to assume control of the church in Geneva in 1541. A particularly severe blow to unity struck in 1531 with the formation of the Protestant Schmalkaldic League. Never before had member states of the Holy Roman Empire openly defied the emperor and Diets. In the ensuing wars between Catholic and Protestant, a fleeting moment of optimism appeared when Charles defeated the League in 1547 (and made peace with the Turks, thus thwarting their alliance with the Protestants). Shortly thereafter, Mary Queen of Scots assumed the throne, giving Charles the possibility of adding England to his empire. But these opportunities fizzled. The only way to end the internecine wars was to

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negotiate peace at Augsburg in 1555. But this meant recognizing the right of Protestant princes to declare their own religions for their successors—a precursor of the formal institutionalization of cuius regio eius religio in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648—which amounted to a de facto surrender of the goal of a united Europe. This arrangement the Catholics never officially accepted. Instead, they stoutly set about establishing their own reformed church with the Council of Trent meetings between 1545 and 1563. The Council “marked the end of the old, universal, comprehensive Latin Church.”135 By refusing to make any concessions whatsoever to Protestantism, the postTridentine Church effectively turned itself into a Christian denomination— one among many. The papacy’s claim to be the rightful center of the world, though never formally abandoned, faded.136 The Reformation directly caused several fratricidal European conflagrations. The Wars of the Schmalkaldic League in Germany (1531–48), the French Wars of Religion (1562–98), the Swedish Civil War (1598–1604), and the Thirty Years War (1618–48) all ignited as a result of enmity between Catholic and Protestant. Pogroms of Christians against Christians—most notoriously the St. Bartholomew Massacre (1572)—became all too familiar. The reaction of Gregory XIII and Philip II to this slaughter of 2,000 Parisian Protestants testifies to the rancor of confessional division. The pope rejoiced; the king laughed.137 The Edict of Nantes (1598) tolerated Protestants in France but was ultimately revoked in 1685. By the end of the sixteenth century, “Christendom, more than ever, was divided against itself.” In fact, Protestants and Catholics could not even agree on dates. The former added a “chronological schism” to an already divided Europe by refusing to recognize (until 1700) the new Gregorian calendar of 1582.138 The Reformation sounded the death knell for European unity. Despair for Christian universalism abounded. “It is certain,” wrote French historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou in 1604, “that empires, like men, have their beginning, their growth, their decadence and their end; and that Providence has fixed certain bounds which neither force nor prudence can cross.”139 Grotius, in his De jure belli et pacis (1625), “beheld throughout Christendom an orgy of bloodshed of which even the barbarian races would have been ashamed.”140 Across the Channel William Shakespeare was having young Henry VI proclaim: Civil dissension is a viperous worm, That gnaws the bowels of the commonwealth.141

The greatest philosophers of the age, sages like Bodin and Montaigne, pondered inevitable, unbridgeable diversity and even flirted with relativism.142

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Efforts by idealistic scholars, most notably Leibniz, to unite Europeans were fated to fail.143 Likewise, practical designs to heal the schism between Protestant and Catholic institutionally, such as the assembly to that end convened in Hanover following the final Ottoman siege of Vienna, invariably aborted.144 Far more heard and believed were the countless millenarians (especially approaching the numerologically troubling year of 1666) who saw in their times the impending arrival of the Anti-Christ and the end of the world.145 Their pessimism was reinforced by a slumping economy, particularly severe from 1619 to 1622, that languished due to reduced international trade and slowed influx of silver from the Americas. Even the weather portended doom. Unusually high levels of carbon in the air produced the “Little Ice Age,” when the Thames actually froze over at London. The frigid weather hampered farming. Especially in peripheral areas, grain yields dropped off after 1615, causing entire villages to abandon their fields and crowd into the cities’ slums. If this were not bad enough, the plague recrudesced in the 1630s, 1640s, and 1660s.146 None too few discerned a connection between internal discord and external adversity. For instance, Humphrey Prideaux, who published a biography of Muhammad in 1697, insisted that Islam was “a scourge unto us Christians, who, having received so holy and so excellent a religion through His mercy to us in Jesus Christ our Lord, will not yet conform ourselves to live worthy of it.”147 A generation later, Charles-Louis Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721) would criticize the inconsistencies of his compatriots through the musings of a Persian visitor to Paris. He was neither the first nor the last leading European thinker to employ this form of self-critique. The likes of Erasmus, Bacon, and Bodin preceded him while Voltaire followed. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 delivered peace but hardly unity to Europe. Cuius regio eius religio formalized and fortified denominational division. The empire continued to tear thereafter, first along the Spanish-Austrian, then the Prussian-Austrian seam, until it lived up to Voltaire’s subsequent crack that it is was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire.148 Europe’s internal wars sickened the renowned Parisian wit. In his Le Siécle de Louis XIV, Voltaire described the scene from the Battle of Malplaquet in the War of Spanish Succession (1702–14): “One could hardly walk, save on piled-up corpses.”149 “It is certainly a very fine art that desolates the countryside, destroys dwellings, and brings death to 40,000–100,000 men in an average year,” he sardonically observed later in Philosophical Dictionary.150 Even Voltaire’s magnificent Sun King could not unify the splintering continent. The age of empire in Europe was giving way to the age of the nation-state,151 the age of the monopoly of power to the age of the balance of power (eventually formalized in the Congress of Vienna in 1815).152 The modern era would further divide Europe in such

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sanguineous strife as the Seven Years’ War in the eighteenth, Napoleonic Wars in the nineteenth, and World Wars in the twentieth century. By Otto von Bismarck’s time, the Iron Chancellor dismissed as futile all talk of uniting the continent: “Any one who speaks of Europe is wrong—it is nothing but a geographical expression.”153 Conclusion To be sure, out of that very three-century period of defeat abroad and division at home eventually sprang renewed striving for subjective Eurocentrism. The frustrations of the early modern era motivated Europeans to continue to doubt accepted worldviews and probe new ones.154 Interaction with superior non-European civilizations funneled new ideas to the open-minded. In the end, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment would give Europeans a sense of mastery over nature, of the perfectibility of man, and of imminent European hegemony.155 Industrialization would demonstrate the superiority of secular universalism. In Napoleon the engine of universal empire seemed set in motion again. He stroked these desires by styling himself emperor of an empire akin to Alexander’s but founded on new, modern ideals.156 Napoleon would founder, of course, and Europe return to its divided ways. Hitler would try a century later to fuse together the fissiparous continent, but to no avail. Jean Monnet’s successors in the European Union continue to work, albeit at glacial speed, toward continental unification. But what of the British Empire incorporating 13 million square miles and 370 million people at its zenith? “Rule, Britannia, Britannia rule the waves.” Surely, the mighty empire on which the sun never set boosted subjective Eurocentrism. Granted, the British would conquer the once indomitable East like no other western power since Caesar. Britain’s nemesis lay not to the east, but to the west in America. We take up that aspect of the storyline in Part III.

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PART III

Rival to the West

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CHAPTER 5

The Real American Revolution (1776–1820) [America was] founded on a rejection of Eurocentrism.1 James W. Ceaser

Introduction Europeans expressed keen interest in America well before, but especially following, independence. Some espied in the New World, with its vast, pristine, singular landscape, conditions friendlier to the realization of Europe’s noblest ideals than existed in the Old World. Not surprisingly, adventurous Europeans visited America; the less bold eagerly consumed news from across the Atlantic, while many of the sagest speculated on the larger significance for Europe and the world of what was unfurling in the western outreaches. The peoples of the Western Hemisphere thus became part of Europe’s relevant “Others.” However, for reasons Part III details, particularly the United States of America—more precisely its image in Europe—would undermine subjective Eurocentrism in ways analogous, but far from identical, to those treated in Part II with reference to the Orient. However, consideration of the European rivalry with America cannot directly parallel the story of the competition with Islam. In the first place, the North Americans shared the same Christian faith. Indeed, they stemmed from Europe. In the second place, they never vowed or tried to defeat, ruin, or occupy all of Europe, though they eventually amassed the military capacity to do so. Even so, American military and economic superiority emerged rather late in this nearly 400-year relationship. One need only think of the popular colloquialism “the West versus the Rest” to encounter paradigmatic Eurocentrism’s central tenet concerning the relationship between Europe and America.2 It teaches that imminent and actual American supremacy has, on

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the whole, buttressed what I am calling subjective Eurocentrism— unflinching confidence in Europe’s centrality in world affairs—because America has traditionally been viewed as a kindred extension of and trustworthy partner with Europe in the wider world. To be sure, it was not always easy for the European parent to cede leadership to the American offspring. But this was and is an intramural tension within a larger family whose dominant position remains intact. I contest this putative reading. I tell a story of expanding European diffidence regarding an America, begotten but increasingly unworthy of Europe, whose appeal and sway nevertheless appear ceaselessly to magnify around the world. This chapter explains that to many Europeans the colonists seemed poised to fashion North America into a better (New) Europe than (Old) Europe itself. Not long after winning independence, the upstart republicans began sculpting a radically democratic polity and people worrisomely different from what European intellectuals had envisaged. Meanwhile, this society not only of, but for, the masses was quickly becoming the darling of the world. Put differently, their image of America gave Europeans a glimpse into a likely future—one in which neither Europe nor its values would predominate.3 The oft heard prognosis, in a way, robbed Europeans of their own sense of preeminence in the very years when Europe was in fact re-centering the world around itself. Was translatio imperii, that is, the westward shift of empire, perhaps lurching too far west and bypassing Europe altogether? Europeans could, of course, take solace in their widening colonial domination outside the Western Hemisphere. But these colonies were won largely through unwanted and challenged military conquest of the colonized.4 Subjective Eurocentrism, however, demands more. The vanquished should prize their assumption into the European orbit—precisely what the Americans refused to do from 1776 onward.

The Colonies The first Europeans to presage translatio imperii were the emigrants who left their homelands for America. Anxious to reassure themselves as well as fellow pilgrims, the optimists waxed eloquent about founding on the opposite shores of the Atlantic a bold, new, singular society and civilization destined to surpass all those yet known to man. John Winthrop, for one, promised aboard the Arbella to erect a new “city on a hill.”5 In anticipation of resettling in Rhode Island, the Anglo-Irish philosopher and bishop George Berkeley

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predicted in 1726 the “westward course of empire” beyond Europe to America: The Muse, disgusted at an age and clime, Barren of every glorious theme, In distant lands now waits a better time, Producing subjects worthy fame.6

Subsequent émigrés trumpeted a similar theme. Thomas Paine, who arrived in Philadelphia in 1774, believed the Enlightenment, though of European origin, would bear its richest fruits in America. “Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the Globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.”7 Needless to say, Paine saw America as the asylum. “What Athens was in miniature,” he averred in the Rights of Man, “America will be in magnitude. The one was the wonder of the ancient world; the other is becoming the admiration, the model of the present.”8 Paine was so confident in his new homeland that he argued that the Ancients should admire the Americans, not the other way around.9 American panegyrics hardly struck a chord with all Europeans. Europe had its fair share of America naysayers. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, maintained an ongoing debate with the author of the multivolume Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (1749–1804), Comte de Buffon, who endlessly roiled the American by arguing that the species of the New World were inferior to those of the Old.10 The only savant to stir up more American animus was Cornelius de Pauw. In 1768, he published his three volumes of Rescherches philosophiques sur les Américains, in which he proffered the “degeneracy thesis,” namely, that all things from the Old World atrophy in the New. It is a great and terrible spectacle to see one half of the globe so disfavored by nature that everything found there is degenerate, or monstrous . . . In North America Europeans noticeably degenerate, and their physical constitution changes as the generations propagate . . . In all of America, from Cape Horn to the Hudson Bay, there has never appeared a philosopher, a scholar, an artist, or a thinker whose name merits being included in the history of science or who has served humanity.11

Written as an early tract in the budding science of anthropology, the study earned an air of scholarly legitimacy that swayed no few European men of letters.

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Doubtless, the first English settlers in America led crude lives by European standards. Life was so miserable in Jamestown colony, for example, that it dissolved in 1624 after only 17 years.12 But conditions promptly improved. Within a single generation, virtually every index of life and health surpassed European standards. For instance, life expectancy in America soared past Europe’s by 15 years (66 and 51).13 Americans ate better and eventually grew, on average, two inches taller than Britons. They tilled farms rarely less than 60 acres—huge by European standards. With time, many indentured servants and other unfree Europeans managed to buy their freedom, even prosper. By 1775, America registered fewer propertyless subjects than England. A mere 3–5 percent of middle-aged white males could expect to be poor. The economy boomed. In 1700, American production amounted to a paltry 5 percent of Britain’s output; by 1775, 40 percent. That translated into a rate of expansion of 500 percent (compared to 25 percent for Britain) during the first half of the eighteenth century, making America the fastest-growing part of His Majesty’s realm.14 Word of America’s prosperity spread through Europe like cheap bread. As early as 1605, in his comedy Eastward Ho, European playwright George Chapman said of Virginia: “I tell thee, gold is more plentiful there than copper is with us . . . Why, man, all their dripping pans are pure gold; and all their chains with which they chain up their streets are massy gold . . . and for rubies and diamonds they go forth on holidays and gather ‘em by the seashore to hang on their children’s coats.”15 Sir Thomas Lawrence, secretary of Maryland, reported back to London in 1697: “they feed their Hoggs with better than Duchesses Eat in Hyde Park.”16 Adam Smith claimed, “there are no colonies of which the progress has been more rapid than that of the English in North America.” He attributed the good fortune to plenty of food and liberty.17 Michel Guillaume Jean Crèvecoeur (better known by the pseudonym J. Hector Saint John) extolled America’s copious treasures in his immensely influential Letters from an American Farmer, first published in London in 1782 but then subsequently translated into several different European languages: There is room for every body in America: has he any particular talent, or industry? He exerts it in order to procure a livelihood, and it succeeds. Is he a merchant? The avenues of trade are infinite; is he eminent in any respect? He will be employed and respected. Does he love a country life? Pleasant farms present themselves; he may purchase what he wants, and thereby become an American farmer. Is he a labourer, sober and industrious? He need not go many miles, nor receive many informations before he is hired, well fed at the table of his employer, and paid four or five times more than he can get in Europe. Does he want uncultivated lands? Thousands of acres present themselves, which he may purchase cheap.18

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These tales of plenty reached Europe not only via returning visitors like the Frenchman, but also through advertisements promoting emigration as well as letters from immigrants.19 Typical of such correspondence was one penned by a German immigrant to her luckless family back home in which she explained that one could live “as well as a count or prince can in all of Germany.”20 And the homeward missives, in turn, spawned more immigration. In fact, between 1764 and 1776, 125,000 immigrated,21 causing officials in London to contemplate banning emigration in an effort to halt depopulation of vast areas.22 America also appeared to be freer. Although many of the colonists took their social and cultural cues from the more cultivated homeland that they greatly admired,23 Europeans envied the greater freedom Americans enjoyed from various societal conventions. Americans were, for example, less taxed; indeed, ten times less than the English by 1750.24 As a rule, about twice as many white male adults enjoyed the right to vote in the colonies than in England.25 Legislative bodies tended to be less under the thumb of royal (and baronial) authority—perhaps why James I berated America as “a seminary for a seditious parliament.”26 Due in large part to the unbuttoned denominationalism that characterized the colonies,27 Americans appeared to possess greater religious liberty. The incorrigible anticleric Voltaire in his Lettres philosophiques (1734), for instance, praised Pennsylvania as a place where priests enjoyed little power.28 Europeans also took note (though not always approvingly) of the relaxation of stringent orders of rank. British visitors to the colonies observed that “an idea of equality . . . seems generally to prevail, and the inferior order of people pay but little external respect to those who occupy superior stations.”29 The appearance of greater opportunity and promise signaled to many that the future belonged to America. Edmund Burke hardly endorsed the selfintoxicated praise for America that fell from Thomas Paine’s quill, but he did concede to his pen pal: “The Western world was the seat of freedom until another, more Western, was discovered; and that other will be probably its asylum when it is hunted down in every other part.”30 By 1760, according to English clergyman Andrew Burnaby, the idea that the axis of world history had moved from the Middle East to Europe and was headed west was widely held. “An idea strange as it is visionary, has entered into the minds of the generality of mankind, that empire is travelling westward; and every one is looking forward with eager and impatient expectation to that destined moment, when America is to give law to the rest of the world.”31 Voltaire seemed to concur when he wrote of “that golden age of which men talk so much and which probably has never existed anywhere except in Pennsylvania.”32 Writing in 1770, Guillaume-Thomas abbé de Raynal predicted the rise of America and simultaneous decline of Europe.33 Crèvecoeur contended that “Americans are the western pilgrims, who are carrying along with them that

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great mass of arts, sciences, vigour, and industry which began long since in the east; they will finish the great circle.”34 Horace Walpole voiced a similar view: “The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic.”35 Likewise, Adam Smith presaged across the ocean the emergence of “an extensive empire . . . which, indeed, seems very likely to become one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.”36 A Spanish diplomat discerned a coming “giant, even a colossus.”37 Though Gibbon did not intend it, many took the 1776 publication of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire—whose author bragged that it reached “every table . . . and almost every toilette”—to mean Britain’s glory days were numbered.38 Independence The American Revolution turned any remaining heads in Europe that had hitherto ignored or dismissed America. European visitors flooded into the United States as if into a zoo to see an exotic creature: democracy.39 Most of them sent epistles homeward and even published their observations—so many, that early in the nineteenth-century publications on America composed “a major share of the European publishing industry.”40 The American Revolution hardly usurped the monarch altogether—a reason why hidebound Europeans refuse to label it a “revolution.” The rebels did not emerge victorious until 1783 (and only then with the help of the French and Spaniards) and did not neutralize the British until the Treaty of Ghent in 1815. Economically the United States remained in a “classical imperial relationship” with Britain, exporting raw materials, most notably cotton, and importing manufactured goods.41 And, obviously, the young bastard republic never invaded Britain or any other inch of Europe until the twentieth century. But the defiant Americans did invade Europe’s psychic space. Britain lay poised after vanquishing the French in the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) to become the largest empire on the planet. Continental Europeans, including the jealous French, took to admiring and emulating mighty England, most famously in Voltaire’s aforementioned Lettres philosophiques.42 The Americans burst the British bubble. Though they greeted the rebellion with smug confidence of being able to crush it,43 the Redcoats, in “a staggering reversal of fortune,” were in the end forced to relinquish colonies they had fought so hard to subdue and protect.44 The success of the American Revolution meant that, in contrast to the fabled Roman Empire to which His Majesty’s was often compared, England’s institutions would not be uncontested, its cultural appeal not universal, its

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boundaries not unlimited, its armies not unstoppable. George III seemed to have sensed so much in 1781 when he remarked: “the dye is now cast whether this shall be a great Empire or the least dignified of European states.”45 It was generally acknowledged in Europe that American independence augured the demise of the entire European colonial system.46 The Monroe Doctrine in 1823 would figuratively do to all of Europe in the Western Hemisphere what Washington actually did to the British at Yorktown in 1781 and Jackson at New Orleans in 1815. Because America had no heroic past, like Europe, on which to fall back, the Americans had no choice but to challenge the Europeans and threaten to surpass them as a way of legitimizing the infant republic.47 By doing so, the Americans undermined the European monopoly on overseas expansion.48 As was argued in Chapter 2, it is just this type of political domination that is necessary to confirm subjective Eurocentrism. The ramifications of the War of Independence extended further. This triumph made it impossible for Europeans to confidently dismiss America’s caddish self-aggrandizement. In fact, the chorus of voices that praised America crescendoed. “From St. Petersburg to Lisbon” Europeans heard sung paeans to the maverick republic.49 From Switzerland: “I am tempted to believe that North America is the country where reason and humanity will develop more rapidly than anywhere else.”50 From Venice: “If only the union of Provinces is preserved, it is reasonable to expect that, with the favorable effects of time, and of European arts and sciences, it will become the most formidable power in the world.”51 From Norway: “God help America to fight its way to liberty that mankind may not perish in serfdom.”52 From Poland: “only Americans in the whole world have the right to celebrate [freedom];” Europeans “are crushed whether by chains at home or by foreign bonds; from the Tiber to the Volga people groan in fetters.”53 From Germany: “America, you are better off than our continent, the Old.”54 From England Burke conceded to Paine “that the people of America were more enlightened than those of England, or of any country in Europe.”55 Hume stated that he was American in his principles.56 The American example helped to inspire republican movements in Holland (1787) and Poland (1788).57 Even the philosophes, steeped in the teachings of de Pauw and Buffon, warmed to the Americans after 1776 and readily acknowledged that the infant republic signaled a libertarian spring for mankind. “Its message of liberty and equality, constitutionalism married to popular sovereignty, reverberated throughout much of Europe.”58 Nowhere did news of the American Revolution ricochet further than in France. Benjamin Franklin—hugely famous in Paris to the point that

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women wore their hair à la Franklin59—jotted in a letter from the French capital: All of Europe is on our side of the question, as far as applause and good wishes can carry them . . . Hence it is common observation here, that our cause is the cause of all mankind, and that we are fighting for their liberty in defending our own. It is a glorious task assigned us by Providence; which has, I trust, given us spirit and virtue equal to it, and will at last crown it with success.60

Franklin’s diplomatic counterparts from Britain, of all places, could not disguise their admiration for America. One of them, Daniel Hailes, reported to London that pre-Revolutionary France was coursing in the direction of Britain, but attributed the shift in the largest part to French enthusiasm with independent America.61 Countless Frenchmen did in fact rally behind the American rebels with declarations like that of Anne Robert Jacques Turgot in 1778: “They are the hope of the human race; they may well become its model.”62 Four years later Crèvecoeur labeled the United States “the most perfect society now existing in the world.”63 Five years thence the abbé Louis Genty lauded “the independence of the Anglo-Americans [as] exactly the right event to accelerate the revolution that must spread happiness on earth. In the bosom of this nascent republic lie the true treasures that will enrich the world.”64 The list of America admirers stretches far: Lafayette, Chastellux, Robin, Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Condorcet, Lameth, Dumas, Comte de Seguer, Vicomte de Noailles, Saint Simon, Du Pont, Mirabeau, Pierre Louis, Comte de Roederer, Adrien Duport, Abbé Sieyès, Guy Jean Target, Talleyrand.65 Needless to say, America had its detractors in France, but they composed the minority. The French gobbled up books exalting America while largely ignoring those that disparaged it.66 The celebrity of Lafayette—America’s most enthusiastic European cheerleader— was rivaled by none except perhaps that of Franklin (who boasted to his sister that the ubiquitous representations of him throughout Parisian society had made “my face . . . almost as well known as that of the moon”67). Ironically, it was none other than the ill-fated Louis XVI who promulgated democratic sentiments similar to those that would find their way into the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789). In 1783, his press printed Les Constitutions des Treize États de l’Amérique, which included the American Declaration of Independence. The monarch could hardly ban the constitutions of the land with which he had just allied against Britain.68 Abbé Raynal copied entire sections of Paine’s Common Sense into his 1780 edition of Historie Philosophique et Politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes.69 Once the French Revolution exploded,

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American (and English) models of government informed the debates in the National Assembly.70 Lafayette found America so inspiring that he sent the key to the Bastille to George Washington. Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison were made honorary citizens of the new French Republic. The Americans provided French and other European defenders of the Enlightenment with what they sorely lacked: a feasible way to translate abstract ideas into concrete reality. Philosophers, long alienated from the masses who could not comprehend their lofty abstractions, could now communicate with the people by pointing to America to show that cerebral ideals could in fact be realized.71 In this vein Condorcet remarked in 1790 that “men whom the reading of philosophic books had secretly converted to the love of liberty became enthusiastic over the liberty of a foreign people while they waited for the moment when they could recover their own.”72 “North America,” Friedrich Schlegel reflected later in 1828, “had been to France and the rest of Europe the real school and nursery of all these revolutionary principles.”73 Jefferson summarized the American impact on France: Though celebrated writers of this and other countries had already sketched good principles on the subject of government, yet the American war seems first to have awakened the thinking part of this nation in general from the sleep of despotism in which they were sunk. The officers too who had been to America were mostly young men, less shackled by habit and prejudice, and more ready to assent to the dictates of common sense and common right. They came back impressed with these. The press, notwithstanding its shackles, began to disseminate them; conversation, too, assumed new freedom; politics became the theme of all societies, male and female, and a very extensive and zealous party was formed, which may be called the Patriotic party, who, sensible of the abusive government under which they lived, longed for occasions of reforming it.74

If acclaim for “the first new nation” was lacking or soiled, there was always Jefferson or Franklin in Europe eager to laud the homeland. The Virginian told the tale of an evening he and the Pennsylvanian spent with Buffon disciple Raynal. The Frenchman “got on his favorite theory of the degeneracy of animals and even man, in America.” Franklin then asked the American and French guests to rise “to see on which side nature has degenerated.” The six Americans turned out to be of the “finest stature and form; while those on the other side were remarkably diminutive, and the Abbé himself, was a mere shrimp.”75 As mentioned, both Americans enjoyed great fame and admiration in Europe and were among the most popular guests European nabobs chose to fête. Comte de Seguer said of Franklin: “It was as though the simplicity of the classical world, the figure of a thinker of the time of Plato, or a republican of

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the age of Cato or Fabius, had suddenly been brought by magic into our effeminate and slavish age.”76 A British officer said of Jefferson: “If he was put besides any king in Europe, that king would appear to be his laquey.”77 The French Revolution The French Revolution drew hopeful attention back to Europe. After all, the American Revolution took place on the edge of the civilized world. By contrast, the historic struggle on behalf of Liberté, Égalité, and Fraternité transpired in highly civilized France. The momentous political event seemed poised to realize the “nervy”78 ideals of the Enlightenment and to usher in a new modern epoch with Europe in the vanguard. Mirabeau spoke to the National Assembly about the universal appeal of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen: Sooner or later the influence of a nation that . . . has reduced the art of living to the simple notions of liberty and equality—notions endowed with irresistible charm for the human heart, and propagated in all countries of the world—the influence of such a nation will undoubtedly conquer the whole of Europe for Truth, Moderation and Justice, not immediately perhaps, not in a single day.79

In the end, the French Revolution blighted more hopes than it inspired. It came to grief where the American Revolution succeeded, namely in the promotion of liberty and democracy, and stormed a path toward despotism, whether progressive or reactionary, that bastardized Europe’s experience with modernity. The facts are well known: Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789), abolition of monarchy and founding of the republic (1791), Robespierre’s “Reign of Terror” (1793–94), 18 Brumaire coup d’état of Napoleon Bonaparte (1799), establishment of Empire and Emperor (1804), the Bourbon Restoration (1814), and the Hundred Days and Waterloo (1815). In the meantime, the Napoleonic Wars ravaged the continent, as Europeans everywhere were forced to take sides for or against the Revolution. In all fairness, the French Revolution never stood much chance of triumphing. To the extent that the Revolution was driven by the Sans-Culottes’ desire to escape poverty, France simply did not enjoy the material abundance of America to fulfill this longing. Jefferson seemed to realize so much even before the Revolution ignited: “of twenty millions of people . . . there are nineteen millions more wretched, more accursed in every circumstance of human existence than the most conspicuously wretched individual of the whole United States.”80 Insofar as the Revolution sought to establish liberty and democracy, it had to overcome an inveterate tradition of absolutism

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stretching back to the Roman Empire. Indeed, as Hannah Arendt famously argued in On Revolution (1963), the revolutionaries themselves turned out to be absolutists. By declaring the Revolution and republic servant to the philosophically abstracted ideal of the “nation”81 (as opposed to a messy configuration of actual French citizens), the republican avant-garde in effect transferred the absolute power of the king to the republic. Proposals to root sovereignty in the National Assembly, splintered by vying societal interests, were advanced, brilliantly in fact by Sieyès. But they failed to carry the day.82 This meant that aspiring democrats wound up empowering the state rather than limiting its powers as the Americans did in their Constitution and Bill of Rights. French governors could never gain genuine legitimacy because, as fallible human beings, they naturally fell short of the ideal abstraction that alone was sovereign. Lacking genuine democratic legitimacy, leaders like Robespierre and Napoleon had to resort to dictatorial measures in order to maintain power.83 Just such “an ignoble oligarchy” did Burke predict in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).84 Three years later, Friedrich Schiller commented: “The attempt of the French people to install the holy Rights of Man . . . has brought to light its impotence and unworthiness . . . the result has been not just this unhappy people, but alongside it a considerable part of Europe and a whole century have been thrown back into barbarism and servitude.”85 Looking back, Hegel contended in Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) that the individual had been crushed under the weight of abstract universalism.86 In 1815, Benjamin Constant complained that “all the constitutions which have been given to France guaranteed the liberty of the individual, and yet under the rule of these constitutions, it has been constantly violated.”87 In what Arendt termed a “terror of virtue,”88 the dictators justified their despotism in the name of the abstracted “nation.” In this same vein, Heinrich Heine referred to Robespierre “as nothing other than the hand of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the bloody hand.”89 The dictator addressed this tragedy in his final speech: “We shall perish because, in the history of mankind, we missed the moment to found freedom.”90 Tocqueville echoed him: “of all ideas and sentiments which prepared the Revolution, the notion and the taste of public liberty strictly speaking have been the first ones to disappear.”91 The first French republic, then, was at best government for the people, but never of and by the people. It speaks volumes that the Constitution of 1791 was neither commissioned nor ratified by the French citizens.92 Because elevated hopes attended the Revolution, its mutation into tyranny occasioned lachrymose gloom. A shadow of disillusionment and despondency darkened the continent.93 Constant despaired in 1829: “It is in vain that we talk of enlightenment, liberty, philosophy: the abyss may open

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under our steps; savages may overpower us; impostors may rise among us; and, far more easily, our governments may become tyrannical.”94 Schiller, who had penned “Ode to Joy” in 1785, wrote in 1799: “This century in tempests had its end/the new one now begins with murder’s cry.”95 An anguished Klemens von Metternich mused: “The world is lost; Europe will burn up.”96 His aide, Friedrich von Gentz, lamented: “The door of hope seemed to me closed forever, to Germany and to Europe.” For “the men of the Revolution intended to unite all of the nations of the earth in one great cosmopolitan confederation, but they succeeded only in unleashing the cruelest world war that has ever shaken society and torn it apart.”97 A doleful William Wordsworth mourned “this melancholy waste of hopes o’erthrown,” while Chateaubriand felt “we are sailing along an unknown coast, in the midst of darkness and the storm.” Madame de Staël feared that Napoleon’s power grab “has become the illness of the whole Continent.” The Corsican’s tyrannical ways so perturbed Beethoven that he tore the dedication to the emperor from the score of the Eroica Symphony. In the words of Friedrich Schlegel, “what was once great and beautiful is so totally destroyed, that I do not know in what way one can now argue that Europe as a whole is still with us.”98 And that great advocate of incremental progress, Edmund Burke, concluded: “The glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.”99 This lugubrious Zeitgeist eventually fostered an entire intellectual movement, Romanticism, with its denunciation of modern and glorification of medieval life.100 Across Europe strivings toward democracy met a similar fate. In his survey, Charles Tilly noted, “all of Europe’s transitions into democratic territory before 1815 reversed significantly during the Napoleonic Wars.”101 Another study finds: “Europe in 1815 was in the control of kings, nobles, and priests as it had not been since the Age of Louis XIV.”102 We now know that aristocrats often cynically sponsored movements for political change, not out of any commitment to democracy, but as a means to diminish the absolute power of monarchs without jeopardizing class privilege. The rising bourgeoisie aspired more than anything else to be admitted to the ranks of the aristocracy. Together the two formed a fused transnational upper class that, with the “Great Fear of 1789” seared in its memory, thwarted genuine democratic change throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. To cite just a few examples, Greek independence from the Ottomans in the 1820s started out democratically but soon careened into authoritarianism.103 The Austrian army crushed movements for equality in Vienna in 1820, in Turin in 1821, and in Piedmont in 1823. The French quelled revolution in Spain in 1820 and 1821. At home French elites staved off a recurrence of 1789 by extending the franchise in 1831 and 1833, but only to the wealthiest bourgeois. British aristocrats sank the Chartist Movement with

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the same tactic in 1832. In France the measures left over 99 percent of the population without democratic representation; in Britain, 95 percent.104 In Europe, Peter Gay contends, “censors and undercover agents . . . inhibited all but the most tepid criticism of the state, its rulers, and its actions.”105 The resiliency of the upper class explains why European plebeians had to stage revolutions repeatedly throughout the nineteenth century. Tocqueville hit the mark when he observed: “In America men have the opinions and passions of democracy; in Europe we have still the passions and opinions of revolution.”106 Arendt adds: “It was not the fact of revolution but its disastrous course and the collapse of the French republic which eventually led to the severance of the strong spiritual and political ties between America and Europe that had prevailed all through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”107 In 1817, Friedrich List in his capacity as royal commissioner of Württemberg surveyed several hundred emigrants about why they wanted to move to America. To his surprise, he had to report that the lack of freedom in Europe motivated them as much as poverty.108 Even in “freer” Britain, just two years later, the heroes of Waterloo were loosed upon working-class activists in the Peterloo massacre.109 There even progressive reformers, such as Thomas Babbington Macaulay, feared the kind of unconstrained democracy known in America: “I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilisation, or both.”110 The Real Revolution in America Needless to say, the reality of the American Revolution did not square with the rhetoric of its champions on either side of the Atlantic. The revolution hardly gushed forth like a geyser from a spring of compressed democratic ethos in America. The chief revolutionaries never intended democracy. They sought to forge a “natural aristocracy” headed by men of genuine virtue and vision who placed the good of the commonwealth before all else. They aspired to a better, purer aristocracy pregnant in the dignified tradition of the Enlightenment but whose birth the Europeans had botched.111 Europeans had a similar vision in mind when they threw their support behind America. What ultimately most distinguished America from Europe was that the young republic and society slipped from the control of the gentry and fell into the hands of middling, vulgar Americans whose energies and powers were unleashed by the very measures their leaders envisaged would contain them. Unanticipated, pell-mell developments eventually incubated a highly individualistic, commercial, and egalitarian society of a kind both unforeseen and unwanted by European observers. In this novel society the common man

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was to be king. Government, economy, society, even religion existed to serve him. This was the real American revolution. It transpired during the maverick republic’s first 50 years and profoundly affected European perceptions of America. It did not take long for opposition to the American gentry to percolate. The Federalists, with their thrust for a stronger, more centralized national government, triggered widespread resistance to the power of the higher ranks. The Anti-Federalists could make strides due in large part to three rights broadened during and after the Revolution: (1) freedom of press, (2) freedom of association, and (3) the franchise. The revolutionary vanguard had proclaimed these rights universally, but only in theory. They never intended or expected ordinary men to exercise them in practice.112 But the common ruck did just that. From 1790 to 1810, the number of newspapers in the United States exploded from 90 to 370. The lion’s share of these proliferating rags favored the Anti-Federalist cause, often giving voice to ordinary citizens critical of the small, literate upper class.113 Contrast this situation with the dolefully long list of eminent European progressives censored, jailed, or exiled on account of the ideas they expressed: Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Helvétius, Locke, Hume, Kant, to name a few. These same years witnessed a frenzy of political assembling. Men convened to debate and legislate countless new local charters, state constitutions, and a national constitution. Each afforded Anti-Federalists a chance to agitate. In addition, large numbers of commonplace Americans—farmers, mechanics, shopkeepers—organized themselves into a plethora of voluntary organizations designed to protect their perceived interests from an overbearing state.114 Widespread exercise of freedom of assembly and association eventually spawned and fortified a nationally coordinated campaign against the Federalists in the form of the Democratic-Republican Party, which managed to unseat John Adams with Thomas Jefferson as president in 1800.115 Jeffersonians commanded the ballot box thanks to a significant widening of the franchise following independence. By 1820, de facto (white) male universal suffrage ruled the day. But what grew with the franchise, to the chagrin of classical republicans, was the idea that the people should not only enjoy the right to choose their judges, governors, presidential electors, and so forth, but that they should actually exercise it.116 Voter turnout in Massachusetts, for instance, reached only 12 percent at the time of the Revolution but spiraled upward, spurred on by the Federalist-Jeffersonian controversy, to over 50 percent in the 1790s and over 80 percent by 1808.117

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The unseemly masses elected their own kind. Benjamin Latrobe aptly described the political climate in a letter sent to his Italian friend Philip Mazzei in 1806: After the adoption of the federal constitution, the extension of the right of Suffrage in all the states to the majority of all adult male citizens, planted a germ which has gradually evolved, and has spread actual and practical democracy and political equality over the whole union . . . Our representatives to all our Legislative bodies, National, as well as of the States, are elected by the majority sui similes, that is, unlearned . . . Our state legislature does not contain one individual of superior talents. The fact is, that superior talents actually excite distrust, and the experience of the world perhaps does not encourage the people to trust men of genius.118

Tocqueville wrote of one candidate, the boorish Davy Crockett, that he “has had no education, can read with difficulty, has no property, no fixed residence, but passes his life hunting, selling his game to live, and dwelling continuously in the woods. His competitor, a man of wealth and talent, failed.”119 Contrast this with Britain, where Parliament convened during the London social season and adjourned in December for foxhunting and estate visiting so as not to upset the schedules of its predominantly patrician members.120 What stunned Europe’s elites was that in America run-of-the-mill citizens became not just voters, but rulers as well. The Anti-Federalists diluted the power of the state. Jefferson, once president, supervised the systematic dismantling of the federal structure assembled by his predecessors.121 He oversaw what C. A. Bayly has rightfully termed a “successful revolution against the domineering European state.”122 While visiting America, Michel Chevalier remarked, “there is no government here in the true sense of the word.”123 “The federal government,” Tocqueville reported, “is . . . a weak government.”124 Hegel characterized America as a “bourgeois society without a state.”125 He could have added “without an established church.” The First Amendment (1791) to the Constitution forbade any state religion. Naturally, the prohibition abetted an already flourishing denominationalism. So too did the Second Awakening, or “Great Revival,” which ignited in Kentucky in 1800 and spread like wildfire across the newly developed western regions, leaving charred in its path the sacerdotal edifice of conventional Protestantism. Evangelical sects of Methodists, Baptists, Disciples of Christ, even Mormons, who simplified their doctrines, hymns, and rituals to appeal to graceless rustics, proliferated.126 “Thirty-two religions and only one dish to eat,” Talleyrand complained.127 Revivalism gave the ordinary man a control

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over his spiritual life that average Europeans—the Reformation’s “priesthood of all believers” notwithstanding—neither enjoyed nor suffered. In Europe, excepting France, established churches predominated. Where religious dissent cropped up, as in British Methodism or German and Scandinavian Pietism, its ultimate impact was far less penetrating and disruptive than in America.128 From the 1790s onward, “privilege in all its forms came under attack” in America.129 (White, male) Americans steadfastly denied the superiority of any other (white, male) American in this climate of what Liah Greenfield calls “unreserved and unparalleled egalitarianism.”130 Haughty titles like “yeoman,” “husbandman,” and “Esquire” fell away and were replaced by the leveling “Mr.”131 Laymen gainsaid the power and privilege of so-called experts such as doctors and lawyers.132 Churls demanded and won adequate schooling for their children.133 The cherished leisure that had long defined the gentry became vilified as “idleness.”134 Duc de La Rochefoucauld, who fled to America to escape the Terror, indignantly observed that even backwoods wretches “consider themselves on an equal footing with the best educated people of the country, and upon the principle of equality they intrude themselves into every company.”135 In Europe, social hierarchies relaxed somewhat but only enough to allow social mobility for a tiny minority.136 In the end, nothing in America propelled equality forward as much as crass materialism. Above all else, Americans in the early republic scampered to make money. The abundance of land coupled with a booming economy, only briefly interrupted by the War of Independence, prompted countless Americans to preoccupy themselves with stuffing their purses.137 By 1820, America had blossomed into a profoundly commercialized society in which the ceaseless pecuniary pursuits of normal people predominated in a way unexampled elsewhere.138 Tocqueville would observe in the 1830s: Americans are constantly driven to engage in commerce and industry. Their origin, their social condition, their political institutions, and even the region they inhabit urge them irresistibly in this direction. Their present condition, then, is that of an almost exclusively manufacturing and commercial association, placed in the midst of a new and boundless continent, which their principle object is to explore for purposes of profit. This is the characteristic that most distinguishes the American people from all others at the present time.139

Indeed, unabashed money-grubbing became America’s hallmark in Europe.140 Numberless European observers sharpened their pens against the relentless worship of the American golden calf. Rochefoucauld deplored in

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his political safe haven “an immoderate love of money.”141 Compatriot Benjamin Saint-Victor wrote in his Letters from the United States of America (1835): “the main question here (and it’s the alpha and omega of life), is to gain money, and then to use this money to gain even more.”142 In The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), Henri Beyle Stendhal had the Duchess seek to dissuade Fabrizio from immigrating to America by depicting for him “the cult of the god dollar, and the respect that must be paid to merchants and artisans in the street, who by their vote determine everything.”143 In the eyes of La Mennais, America was “struck by the plague of commerce.”144 Like acid, unremitting mammonism corroded America’s class structure. Most notably, the lower class lost its defining characteristic (in Europe): acceptance of its station in life. America’s poor and propertyless refused to settle for the status quo. Though they did not always succeed, they remained optimistic that they could one day prosper. As a result, America transformed into a middle-class society rather than, as in Europe, a society with a middle class. The values emerging from the middle class were taken to be universal rather than class specific.145 “It happened nowhere else in the Western world quite like this.”146 No wonder, then, that his opponents, before ultimately opting for the guillotine, considered punishing Louis XVI by exiling him to Philadelphia, where he would have to live out the remainder of his life as a drab and dreary bourgeois.147 Conclusion It bears repeating that Europe’s rivalry with America differed from that with Islam. Demonstration that America thwarted subjective Eurocentrism by cutting a considerable figure as the imminent leader of the modern age need not entail a direct comparison of America’s might, size, and wealth with that of Europe, even if some Europeans were predicting the young republic’s “rapid rise to supremacy.”148 Our case need only show, first, that Europeans viewed their own experience with modernity as one of squandered potential (as with the French Revolution); second, that they took note of fundamentally different modern developments in America (such as independence and the subsequent democratization of society); and third, that they increasingly believed that America was becoming, for better or worse, a model to the world.149 As the United States of America approached the young age of 50, each of these three perceptions had taken root in Europe.150 The views of Hegel, arguably the spiritual leader of European modernity, and of Napoleon, arguably the political leader, aptly represent the impact of the American rivalry on European consciousness. Reflecting on Europe’s wasted potential, Hegel in 1819

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let spill from his quill these melancholy words: “I am just fifty years old, and have lived most of my life in these eternally restless times of fear and hope, and I have hoped that sometime these fears and hopes might cease. But now I must see that they will go on forever, indeed in moments of depression I think they will grow worse.”151 Four years earlier, Napoleon wrote from exile on St. Helena that he had tried “to bring everywhere unity of laws, of principles, of opinions, sentiments, views, and interests. Then perhaps it would have been possible to dream for the great European family the application of the American Congress or of the amphictyonies of Greece.”152 He presaged that Europe’s failure meant that the entire world was destined to become “the American Republic or the Russian universal monarchy.”153 Hegel dismissed Russia: “America is the country of the future . . . the land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical arsenal of old Europe.”154 Across the Atlantic, Americans brimmed with optimism. In 1824, a year after President Monroe issued his famous doctrine warning Europeans to steer clear of the Western Hemisphere,155 Congress deliberated whether or not to send aid to the Greeks fighting for independence from the Ottomans. The Senate of Calamata had beseeched the “fellow-citizens of Penn, of Washington, of Franklin” not to “imitate the culpable indifference” of the nations of Europe.156 Though the debate raged in Washington, in the end, the decision to send no physical aid carried the day. The mere “moral influence of its [America’s] example,” contended one of the winning lawmakers, should surely suffice to inspire the Greeks to victory.157

CHAPTER 6

America Ascendant (1820–1914) The American Revolution “is the first revolution in history to have reached the entire planet.” It created “World America.”1 Alfredo Valladao

Introduction By the time of the semicentennial, America differed from Europe in ways unimaginable given its European roots. Moreover, precisely its uniqueness made it immensely appealing. This chapter relates how Europeans witnessed and evaluated not only America’s rise to a major global power but, more importantly, the spread of its popularity throughout the world. Consumerism, over and above the industrialization already known in Europe, distilled America’s singular charm and extended the lead of the unbound Prometheus as the modern trendsetter. What made America different in the estimation of Europeans? Numerous factors, of course, garnered attention, from America’s prized Constitution and unique political institutions, to the open frontier and expanding boundaries, to the unprecedented ethnic diversity born of large-scale immigration. But three characteristics, in particular, surfaced time and time again in European commentaries about the western rival. First, America exalts the ordinary. In L’Aristocratie en Amérique of 1883, Frédéric Gaillardet argued that America had effectively ennobled the masses: “The United States’ political and social constitution has poeticized power and glorified the rabble.” He may have been thinking of Marx’s earlier remark that, “given its political and social organization, ordinary people of good will can accomplish feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world.”2 As the previous chapter revealed, the real revolution in America was this “revolution in choices”3 won by commoners demanding genuine self-determination in every walk of life. In America, for the first time ever, plain folks ruled,

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while in Europe gods, emperors, kings, lords, even ideas reigned supreme. Furthermore, this critical distinction between America and Europe would only begin to dissolve through widespread Americanization of the Old Continent. Second, America alienates man from history. “Nothing perishes which history sanctified,” professed Novalis.4 But for Henry Ford, “history is bunk.”5 Countless Europeans italicized America’s utter disregard for history. Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt bemoaned the “ahistorical” men of learning in America.6 As far as Yanks were concerned, remarked Tocqueville, “nothing either is or ought to be fixed forever.”7 Crèvecoeur wrote, “He is an American, who leav(es) behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners.”8 Not only did the founding fathers set out to craft a polity unexampled in human history (a “blank sheet to write upon” in Tom Paine’s eyes9), average, uncouth Americans also felt they could remake themselves anew. In historicist Europe, by contrast, one inherited an unalterable identity and destiny: once a Pole, always a Pole; once a Jew, always a Jew; once a peasant, always a peasant. Europeans tethered to unfavorable destinies emigrated by the millions to America. There, in (often far too much) time, they unshackled themselves from the essentialist characteristics and bleak opportunities assigned them from the past. Pole and Jew became American. Peasant became proprietor.10 Some European observers applauded such transformation: “In this great American asylum . . . new laws, a new mode of living, a new social system . . . regenerate . . . the poor of Europe . . . here they are become men; in Europe they were as many useless plants . . . and were mowed down by want, hunger and war.”11 Others regretted it: “the immigrant arrives with centuries of inherited experience, but America makes him young, almost childish.”12 In fact, mass emigration out of Europe coupled with mass assimilation in America during the nineteenth century helped to fortify American ahistoricism precisely when European historicism was gaining momentum. Third, America relaxes the heavy burden of self-criticism. Americans tend not to engage in serious reflection of any kind, especially self-reflection. They do not brood like Europeans. Many different reasons are given for this difference between Europe and America, but most agree it exists. Following Hannah Arendt’s line of argument discussed in the previous chapter, French savant Jean Baudrillard traces this peculiarity to the American Revolution. The revolutionaries, he explains, wasted little time philosophizing and instead jumped headlong into the act of creating a tangible new commonwealth. By contrast, philosophers got the upper hand in the French Revolution and established an ideology to govern actors. Europeans have ever since evaluated their actual polities against this ideal and come up, of course,

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lacking. Without such a standard Americans have taken thoughtless but soothing pride in their accomplishment.13 Perhaps nothing caught the attention of Europeans more than American mindlessness. As early as 1770, Raynal was disgusted by the fact “that America has not yet produced a good poet, a skillful mathematician, a man of genius in any art or science.”14 Stendhal likewise deplored “this nation of ignorant shopkeepers and narrow-minded industrialists, which, throughout a vast continent, cannot boast one single work of art.”15 “In no country in the civilized world,” Tocqueville observed, “is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States.”16 The “Yankees have no ideas,” asserted Ferdinand Lassalle.17 “Prolonged reflection,” Nietzsche complained, “almost gives people a bad conscience.”18 Indeed, observed Harold Laski, they “equate contemplation with laziness.”19 “These Americans are dead, stone-dead as far as intellectual life is concerned,” wrote Nikolaus Lenau to his brother.20 According to Bismarck, “God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America.”21 George Bernard Shaw declared “the hundred percent American to be ninety-nine percent idiot.”22 As this cursory overview reveals, not all European assessments deprecated America’s departures from European ways. However, as the young land’s appeal in the world widened and strengthened, negative evaluations grew louder and positive ones quieter. By the termination of the Great War, what had begun in the eighteenth century in Europe as a tentative prediction, whether approving or disapproving, of American global dominance transformed into a matter-of-fact acknowledgment, most often expressed with regret, of unstoppable Americanization. But let us not spring too far forward too fast. First, we must relate the story of how the democratizing processes begun in the first half century persisted and intensified as the United States oozed across the North American continent, further distinguishing America from Europe. The American Civil War momentarily stalled these developments but, oddly enough, failed to adulterate American self-confidence. Meanwhile, preindustrial commercialism paved the way, once the mass fratricide had run its course, for untrammeled industrialization and the begetting of a fully integrated mass market unparalleled the world over. Industrialization, in turn, fueled militarization and launched America on its trajectory to match unfriendly European powers by the beginning of the twentieth century and smite them by the middle of it. But America’s global influence traveled less aboard its gunboats, bombers, and tanks than through its endless products targeted at gawking consumers. In the late nineteenth century, unbridled consumerism went forth from America and drew the attention of the entire

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world, especially Europe, where it occasioned dread among the elites and delight among the masses. Democracy in Europe As America matured in the nineteenth century, its democratic credentials continued to outstrip Europe’s. Though it experienced salient victories, European democracy faced an uphill battle until World War I; and thereafter it was hardly all down hill. Charles Tilly discerned “no one-way path toward democracy to trace across Europe between 1815 and 2000. Almost every country that moved significantly toward broad, equal, protected consultation [representation] during one period or another veered back toward authoritarianism or petty tyranny during some subsequent periods.”23 In the fateful year of 1848, in particular, democratic revolutions washed across Europe and threatened to drown inequality once and for all. Mass uprisings led by liberals, socialists, and communists founded the Third Republic in France; scared heads of state in Naples, Tuscany, Piedmont, even the Vatican, into circumscribing their powers in constitutions; spurred Prussian and Austrian emperors into agreeing to constituent assemblies; brought home rule to Hungary; and reinvigorated Chartism in Britain.24 As with the French Revolution, however, European democracy was soon stunted. In France, Louis Napoleon trounced liberal opponents in the presidential election of 1849 and then used the office to purge the government and army of opponents, wheedled the National Assembly into disenfranchising three million voters most likely to oppose him in 1850, staged a coup de’état in 1851, and had himself declared emperor in 1852 after the model of his dictatorial uncle. A dejected Charles Augustin de Sainte-Beuve admitted, “since the government controls all the newspapers these days, it’s wiser to write for the government itself.”25 The seemingly insurmountable French emperor dispatched a regiment to Rome to crush the newly declared Italian republic and reinstall Pope Pius IX, who had sought refuge in Gaeta from democratic rumblings in 1848. The Austrian army had already choked the democratic forces of Piedmont, a victory that paved the way in Tuscany and Lombardy for the return to power of sovereigns who set about abrogating the constitutions of 1848. With the help of the tsar’s soldiers, the Habsburgs extinguished the fledgling Hungarian Republic (whose hero Louis Kossuth became a cause célèbre in America, where he sought refuge). Frederick William IV deployed troops to quell democratic agitation in Berlin in 1848 and in Saxony and Baden in 1849. It was this environment that moved French journalist Alphonse Karr to coin the famous expression Plus ça change plus c’est la meme chose.26 In Italy, Austria, and Germany, absolutist monarchy

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was again firmly ensconced within two years. In France, a modern police state had replaced democracy. Even in Britain, extension of the franchise would have to wait until 1867. Not without good cause did Burckhardt opine: “democrats and proletarians, even though they make most furious efforts, will have to yield to an increasingly violent despotism, for our charming century is made for anything rather than for real democracy.”27 Europe’s second great experiment in democracy had, like the first, foiled visions of a new modern democratic age ushering forth from the Old World. Modernity no doubt arrived in Europe in the nineteenth century, but it was a modernity scarred by the lingering sores of the ancien régime. The crown retained its axial position in European politics and society. In 1914, only the French, among major European states, had abolished monarchy. The Hohenzollern, Habsburg, and Romanov emperors governed absolutely. They possessed the formal power “to appoint and dismiss ministers; issue ordinances; convoke, adjourn, and dissolve elective bodies; promulgate and enact laws; grant pardons; command the armed forces; make treaties; and decree martial law.” These imposing powers made it easy to outmaneuver toothless parliaments that tried to defy tsar or kaiser. The Italian and British sovereigns encountered real constitutional limits to imperial power but hardly turned into effete figureheads. They dexterously took advantage of their prerogative to call elections as a means of swaying policies and personnel. Furthermore, every monarch reaped the benefits of overflowing symbolic power. Painstakingly orchestrated with limitless pomp and pageantry to magnify imperial legitimacy and authority, coronations, jubilees, and any other royal occasion—baptism, confirmation, wedding, funeral—dominated the social and political calendar. It speaks volumes that the largest single public gathering in British history before 1914—a stream of humanity seven miles long and six to eight abreast—assembled in London on May 18, 1910, not to protest but to mourn a king (Edward VII).28 The aristocracy met with adversity but not enough to sap its vitality. To be sure, during the nineteenth century blue bloods across Europe, in different degrees, moments, and places, witnessed with elegy the systematic nullification of their legal feudal privileges: serfdom, seigniorial justice, manorial taxation, venal state offices, and church titles. That said, grandees clenched three levers of influence that they continued to exploit to their advantage. In the first place, they could rely on the upper chambers of bicameral parliaments to block and brake bills anathema to patrician interests that were passed by popularly elected lower houses. Far less eviscerated in the nineteenth than twentieth century, upper houses determined members everywhere, except France, through the hereditary principle (and some royal appointments). Thus, in 1911, around 90 percent of the House of Lords were nobles; in 1913, 75 percent of the Prussian

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Herrenhaus.29 Second, aristocrats sedulously tapped their courtly connections to secure for their own the premiere offices in the public bureaucracy and military. For example, between 1871 and 1914, nearly 75 percent of Prussia’s state ministers stemmed from the nobility. In Britain, nobles controlled the key positions in the foreign service, diplomatic corps, armed forces, imperial service, and the judiciary.30 Small wonder that Friedrich Engels, near the end of the nineteenth century, judged “the landed aristocracy in almost exclusive possession of all the leading government offices.”31 Finally, landed aristocrats strategically managed and invested their praedial fortunes to transform themselves into influential leaders in the swelling industrial economy. By 1896, for instance, more than 25 percent of British peers held directorships in large corporations, often several at once.32 In France, noblemen made up a third of the directors of rail companies, a quarter of steel enterprises and banks.33 The interests of the landed estate and the industrial firm increasingly overlapped in what the Germans aptly called the union of “iron and rye.”34 The bourgeoisie enlarged with industrialization but did not always function as a force for democracy. Many bourgeois were liberals first and democrats second. That is, they prized above all the free market and private property. To the extent that businessmen feared the socialist and communist masses, the profit seekers did not hesitate to join the aristocrats in diluting or postponing universal suffrage.35 “From Macauley to Mises, from Spencer to Sumner,” claimed Karl Polanyi, “there was not a militant liberal who did not express his conviction that popular democracy was a danger to capitalism.”36 In many ways, the European middle class helped further to stratify rather than level society. Within its own ranks, it fastidiously demarcated among the grande, bonne, and petite bourgeoisie in France and Gross and Kleinbürgertum in Germany and Austria.37 Furthermore, the upper echelons of the bourgeoisie, with notable exceptions such as August Thyssen and Alfred Krupp, obsequiously sought admission to the nobility. Between 1871 and 1918, the German emperor ennobled 1,129 mainly rich businessmen; between 1800 and 1914, the Austrian emperor elevated 9,000. Half of Britain’s new peers between 1884 and 1914 hailed from commerce. If middling sycophants failed to ingratiate themselves with the king, they could always try their luck at marrying into the nobility. This strategy was particularly pronounced in kingless France, where grande bourgeois families matrimonially allied with titled clans such as the d’Uzès, de Mun, Poniatowsky, Polignac, Broglie, and Brissac. To their names parvenus gloatingly added the English “sir,” French “de,” or German “von” indicating nobility. Whether ennobled or not, “upstart financiers, entrepreneurs, and professionals imitated the tone-setting nobility’s accent, carriage, demeanor, etiquette, dress, and life-style.” Thus did dueling, of all things, become popular in the middle class where the

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injured proudly wore their scars like badges of honor. In any case, bourgeois obeisance vis-à-vis the aristocracy only served to cripple the march toward democracy.38 What the marchese Massimo D’Azeglio—painter, novelist, and prime minister of Piedmont—said of his native land in the 1850s was true of all of Europe: “the hierarchical instinct dominates the whole of society.”39 The masses were reduced to struggling for the most basic of democratic rights. Universal male suffrage reached Germany in 1871, France (after interruption) in 1875, Britain in 1884, Austria in 1907, and Italy in 1912. Still, tinkered electoral laws tended to minimize the masses’ voting power. Prussia’s three-class system was perhaps the most notorious. First-class voters were those who paid the top third of taxes; second-class the middle third; and third-class the lower third. Each category had the right to elect by absolute majority one third of the electors who, in turn, chose the members of the lower house of parliament. The inequality was glaring. In 1908, for instance, roughly 4 percent of the electorate voted in the first class, 14 percent in the second class, and 82 percent in the third class. In 2,200 of 29,000 districts the first class comprised a single voter. This meant that in Essen, Alfred Krupp alone determined one-third of the district’s electors. The aggregate translated into 16.6 percent of conservative voters capturing 48.2 percent of total representation in parliament, while 23.8 percent of socialist voters secured 1.4 percent. Such numbers help explain why Bismarck sardonically quipped that he would defeat parliamentarism by means of parliamentarism.40 The situation differed little in Austria, where 64 noblemen possessed the same electoral power as 10,760 peasants. Throughout Europe during and beyond the nineteenth century, property remained better represented than person.41 Flaccid democracy helps to explain why Europe’s sharpest students of society harmoniously predicted the inevitable failure of the political ideology and structure. Writing at the close or turn of the nineteenth century, Max Weber, Gaetona Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels—the virtual fathers of sociology—each subscribed to a variant of the latter’s “iron law of oligarchy.”42 Sandra Halperin is justified in emphasizing Europe’s undemocratic character through to the Great War: On the eve of World War I, the dominant social, economic, and political systems of Europe paralleled those that existed in other regions and that still exist in the contemporary third world. Its most effective elites were traditional and aristocratic and not bourgeois; landowning and rentreceiving, not capitalist or entrepreneurial; religious, not secular; oligarchic, not democratic. Industry was penetrated by feudal forms of organization and characterized by monopolism, protectionism, cartellization, and corporatism . . . Political institutions had not significantly

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affected the character of popular representation; the great majority of adults were excluded from political participation.43

Democracy in America The political climate in America differed markedly. Tocqueville opened Democracy in America (1835–40) with the following lines: Among the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people. I readily discovered the prodigious influence that this primary fact exercises on the whole course of society; it gives a peculiar direction to public opinion and a peculiar tenor to the laws; it imparts new maxims to the governing authorities and peculiar habits to the governed.44

In 1838, the German best-seller Die Europamüden (The Europe-Weary) by Ernst Willkomm portrayed, in fiction, a similar America to which Germans seeking genuine freedom and opportunity could immigrate. No politician leveled American politics more than Andrew Jackson. His name befittingly bestrides an era, spanning his inauguration and the Civil War, associated with extensive democratization. Old Hickory led presidential politics down a populist path from which it would never stray. He swamped a once highly exclusive electoral process with incondite voters clamoring to be heard. Normally hovering below 20 percent before 1828, voter turnout after 1828 soared to over 70 percent. The hoi polloi not only actively campaigned for Jackson (by erecting “hickory poles” in their town squares) but, more consequentially, demanded successfully that they have a direct voice in choosing presidential electors. From this point on, presidents (and the general parameters of national policy) became subject to the quadrennial ratification of a truly broad, mass electorate. This, in turn, spawned professional politicians and parties dedicated principally to blandishing voters either by paying them (the spoils system) or by making the candidate appear “one of them.”45 It was Jackson, in other words, who transformed the presidential election into the mass popularity contest it continues to be until this day. Jackson also advanced the dismantling of the federal government begun by Jefferson. He promised a “government of limited and specific, and not general, powers” “so simple and economical as scarcely to be felt.”46 Though his “war” with Nicholas Biddle to retire the National Bank garnered the most attention, the Hero of New Orleans supervised numerous other measures to curb the federal government. “The Federal government,” wrote Tocqueville,

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“is . . . naturally so weak that, more than any other, it requires the free consent of the governed to enable it to exist.”47 Jackson did far more than reduce the size of government; he also deflated its elitist mystique. Arguing that the tasks of government could be properly carried out by the average citizen, Jackson awarded governmental posts to hundreds of the vulgarians who supported him. He then employed the “rotation in office” principle to keep the federal ministries freshly stocked with common folk whom he thought instinctively right and moral.48 The Jacksonian Era, then, not only saw tangible inroads for democracy but paved the way for an intangible democratic ethos that came to dominate American politics and society.49 It was this environment, coupled with the failed revolution of 1848 back home, that led one German immigrant to refuse to return to “the miserable police state of Prussia.” “Here,” he reasoned to his father, “I have become all the more aware of what is lacking in Germany, have been reinforced in my opinions on freedom and right, which no one will take from me. But the disgrace which is burdened upon Germany through its government really only came to light for me here.”50 In Jacksonian America, irreverence capsized all kinds of social hierarchies. In contrast to Europeans, who were expected to kowtow at practically every turn,51 free Americans abided no superior. They obeyed laws, sacred and profane, but not other men.52 European Fanny Kemble complained that her American inferiors were “never servile, and but seldom civil.”53 British visitors found especially annoying Americans’ ubiquitous handshaking. I “go on shaking hands here, there, and everywhere, and with everybody,” grumped an officer of His Majesty’s Navy. At home one bowed to all but those whom one knew intimately.54 Fanny Trollope found America’s much touted equality disagreeable “when it presents itself in the shape of a hard, greasy paw, and is claimed in accents that breathe less of freedom than of onions and whiskey.”55 It was Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) that anathematized and immortalized the picture of America as a vast bog of vulgarity where the swinish habits of the mannerless asphyxiated the good tastes of the respectable. In 1851, Heinrich Heine echoed her ridicule of America’s equality: I have sometimes thought to sail To America the Free To that Freedom Stable where All the boors live equally. But I fear a land where men Chew tobacco in platoons, There’s no king among the pins, And they spit without spittoons.56

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Touring in 1842, Charles Dickens noted with disgust that the White House rugs were beslimed with spittle.57 Less disparagingly, Tocqueville claimed that “the whole society seems to have melted into a middle class.” Nowhere did he encounter “the elegant manners and refined courtesy of the high classes in Europe.”58 Just such lack of refinement had led Talleyrand to write to Madame de Staël, “if I stay here for a year, I will die.”59 Unalloyed materialism, as always, spurred these destratifying developments. An expanding market made it possible for more and more Americans to prosper. Roughly during the United States’ second 50 years, the market underwent a change from a focus on production for local sale (often through barter) to production for distant, eventually national sale (always for cash). This transformation further opened the door for the onslaught of consumerism beginning in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Amidst these changes the economy ballooned, its annual rate of growth doubling twice between 1812 and 1850 and reaching 3 percent soon thereafter.60 By the 1840s, New York City was the fastest-growing large industrial area in the world.61 America’s industrial system began to draw attention and acclaim. Francis Cabot Lowell had founded in 1813 the Boston Manufacturing Company and, with it, the first modern industrial factory in the world. But it was Samuel Colt who most impressed the Europeans with the “American system of manufacturing” featuring the mass machine production of industrial goods with interchangeable parts. His revolver took the 1851 Crystal Palace Industrial Exhibition in London by storm. Astounded visitors spoke of “an American system of manufacture, which could make more of anything, faster, and more uniformly than humanity had ever dreamed possible.” The British soon dispatched from their own “workshop of the world” a team to investigate the American system. The report concluded: “the Americans display an amount of ingenuity combined with undaunted energy, which as a nation we would do well to imitate, if we mean to hold our present position.”62 Meanwhile, commercial agriculture spread across the South and West. As Southerners and Westerners amassed cash, they began to fancy and purchase products manufactured in the Northeast. Consumer and seller alike in turn pushed to extend the national infrastructure and link the various regions during the second half of the century.63 Across the United States people replaced their homemade buckskins for store-bought cloth coats, their moccasins for shoes, and so on. English visitor Harriet Martineau noticed that many a farmer even mortgaged his land “in order that his wife and daughters may dress like the ladies of Boston.”64 Mammonism as America’s trademark magnified in European observations. Tocqueville had observed that Americans are “swayed by no impulse but the

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pursuit of wealth.” Trollope mocked that no conversation took place in America without mention of the word “dollar.” “Such unity of purpose . . . can, I believe, be found nowhere else except, perhaps, in an ants’ nest.” “Worldly pursuits,” averred Heine, “are their true religion, and money is their God, their only Almighty God.” Dickens recalled from his visit that “all their cares, hopes, joys, affections, and associations seemed to be melted down into dollars.” But it was left to English Captain Frederick Marryat to make the most preposterous observation, maintaining that “dollar worship” affected Americans’ physiology and caused them all to look alike: “this produced a certain contraction of the brow, knitting of the eyebrows, and compression of the lips.” Herbert Spencer later espoused a similar argument.65 But as America’s size, wealth, and influence expanded, Europeans grew wary. Anthony Trollope complained of Uncle Sam: “He has made maps of his empire, including all the continent, and has preached the Monroe Doctrine as though it had been decreed by the gods. He has told the world of his increasing millions . . . He has boasted aloud in his pride, and called on all men to look at his glory.”66 According to Charles Crosnier de Varigny, author of a book on imminent Yankee imperialism, Americans exploited the notion of “manifest destiny” to elevate the Monroe Doctrine “to the loftiness of a dogma.” He was but giving utterance to Gaillardet’s warning that America “now aspires to nothing less than drawing all of humanity into its orbit.”67 Perhaps Americans had cause to strut. After all, they achieved in a mere 72 years what Europe had striven for since the fall of the Roman Empire: a united continental polity. Emergence of Consumerism By the eve of the Civil War, the American economy had reached the “takeoff ” position for industrialization.68 The war’s massive destruction naturally acted, in the short run, as an obstacle to industrialization, but in the long run as a spur. The ever-resistant cottonocracy of the South lay vanquished and therefore open to the importation of the modern capitalist business practices of the Northeast.69 Total manufacturing capital soared from $5.7 billion in 1889 to $8.6 billion in 1900.70 Output per worker increased 60 percent from 1870 to 1900, another 69 percent by 1920.71 Gross national product (GNP) jumped from about $11 billion in the mid-1880s to $84 billion in 1919. Per capita GNP rose from $208 to $804 in the same period.72 These figures meant that America was growing economically nearly twice as fast as Europe.73 In terms of gross domestic product per capita, the American lead over Europe expanded from 25 percent in 1870 to 40 percent in 1913.74 Industrialization alone did not further distinguish America in the world. After all, Britain’s industrialization preceded and Germany’s and Japan’s

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coincided with America’s. But industrialization in America did complete the establishment of a truly integrated continental market. With virtually all 56 million Americans transformed into objects of mass marketing and distribution, the national market made an ideal breeding ground for consumerism.75 Consumerism has an objective and subjective dimension.76 The former entails the mass production of goods targeted at an extensive national and international market by means of aggressive marketing techniques (for instance, mail order, credit) made possible by new types of media (such as radio) and professionals (for example, advertising agents) who ultimately seek to influence all members of society. From the subjective perspective, consumerism equates happiness with the purchase and possession of material goods. It identifies good with goods. Consumerism is further characterized by insatiability. The seller can never sell enough, the buyer never buy enough. Finally, consumerism tends to turn desire into necessity. To be sure, most consumers fail to acquire all they desire, but such a shortfall is experienced as displeasure, even discomfort.77 Whatever its exact qualities, consumerism arose toward the end of the nineteenth century and permeated American life by the 1920s. Its influence stretched far outside economics into politics, religion, science, culture, and beyond. Consumerism did no less than remake America in its own image. As with the “revolution in choices” at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century examined in the previous chapter, the consumerist “revolution” a century later took place elsewhere, but nowhere on the same scale and with the same intensity as in America. And like the revolution in choices, the consumerist revolution set America apart from European civilization. More importantly, for our study, consumerism further propelled America past Europe as the perceived leader of modernity. Though industrialization surely deserves its place in the list of attributes of modernity, consumerism has proven more consequential.78 “The commodity became and has remained the one subject of mass culture, the centerpiece of everyday life, the focal point of all representation, the dead center of the modern world.”79 Consumption-based economies have in the long run prospered better than economies oriented around production. The best example is the economic victory of the West over the Soviet Bloc after World War II. Chinese “communism” survives and thrives today only because it has embraced consumerism. Consumerism generates a self-propelling dynamic that mere production lacks. Adam Smith may have discerned this as early as 1776 when he wrote in The Wealth of Nations: “consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production.”80 Certainly by the end of the nineteenth century, commentators like Thorstein Veblen, whose Theory of the Leisure Class was

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published in 1899, realized that the consumer was overtaking the producer as the most important economic actor in the modern world.81 By this time, even though consumerism, like democracy, had its roots in Europe, consensus abounded on both sides of the Atlantic that America represented the most advanced consumer society.82 America steered the juggernaut of consumerism not only because of its enormous market. After all, Britain, Germany, France, and Japan for that matter marketed products beyond their admittedly smaller national borders. America led because it democratized consumerism faster than competitors. Everywhere consumerism originated with the urban middle classes.83 In America, it spread quickly (though hardly immediately84) down the social hierarchy and out into the countryside, becoming a shared national way of life. In Europe, by contrast, entrenched forces—often the same ones that impeded democracy—slowed consumerism. Put differently, America’s modern political claim to fame, democracy, aided in the establishment of its modern economic claim to fame, consumerism. With time, the appeal of the latter even corroded the vitality of the former.85 In keeping with the consumerist ethos, Americans did in fact consume more during these years. Already by 1879, production of consumer durable goods was growing faster than producer goods.86 Increasingly Americans elected to spend their earnings on what were once considered luxuries. For instance, the years 1900–1929 saw a 161 percent boost in spending on clothing (largely a necessity) compared to 199 percent on personal care products (mostly luxuries); 168 percent on housing compared to 322 percent on transportation (mainly cars); 164 percent on medical care compared to 285 percent on recreation.87 Discretionary spending (beyond housing, clothing, and food) jumped from 20 percent to 35 percent during the same period.88 Sellers scurried after eager buyers. Shrewd merchants abandoned the classical Smithian idea that supply and demand alone determine price and resolved that they could create demand with catchy advertising and marketing.89 For instance, department store magnates like John Wanamaker, Marshall Field, and the Straus brothers (Macy’s) erected veritable palaces and draped their goods in sumptuous, almost magical trappings in order to dazzle patrons.90 If the customer could not get to the store, then the store went to the customer. F. W. Woolworth opened mini versions of department stores in 600 small towns across America by 1912,91 while Montgomery Ward92 and Richard Sears93 sent millions of mail-order catalogs to isolated shoppers. Retailers further hooked consumers with installment purchases and charge accounts. In fact, credit—to this day not as common in Europe—might have done as much or more than anything else to transform consumption from class based to mass based.94

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Consumerism respected nothing as sacred. It “rolled like a tsunami into every corner of American life.”95 The pious parishioners that filled churches mutated into the crazed fans that stampeded into theaters, stadiums, and parks.96 “Luxury” went from meaning something bad to something good.97 Religious and patriotic holidays were fully commercialized.98 Leisure gradually warped from a time dedicated to refinement into one committed to pleasure.99 “Consumer” eventually vied with “citizen” or “worker” as the commonest label for Americans.100 Consumerism in Europe Consumerism certainly reared its head outside America, particularly in Europe, but never on the same scale. Historians have traced the culture of consumption back to eighteenth-century Britain,101 seventeenth-century Holland,102 sixteenth-century Florence,103 even fourteenth-century Italy.104 As in America, consumerism spurted in Europe after 1850. Crystal Palace Industrial Exhibition in London’s Crystal palace in 1851 assembled and celebrated more commodities in one place than ever before.105 In 1867, Marx penned his brilliant analysis of commodity fetishism.106 Emile Zola’s bestselling Au bonheur des dames (The Ladies of Paradise) of 1882 depicted how department store windows could captivate passersby. Europe had the Bon Marché in Paris, Harrod’s in London, and Wertheim in Berlin to match Macy’s, Wanamaker’s, or Marshall Field’s.107 The difference was that the European cathedrals of consumption were limited to the large cities. As a result, department stores in Europe by World War I accounted for 5 percent of retail turnover, but 10 percent in America. Conversely, small independent shops earned 57 percent of sales in America compared to 79 percent in Germany and 91 percent in Italy. Two decades later, the American lead was even greater: variety chain stores controlled 23 percent of retail business in the United States compared to 7 percent in Britain and less than 2 percent in both Germany and France. Essentially, consumerism in Europe failed to penetrate the countryside as in America.108 And this is to say nothing of the eastern and southern periphery of the Old Continent where consumerism hardly made an appearance.109 The scale of consumerism in America by World War I would not reach Europe, and then scarcely all of it, until after World War II.110 In Europe, older sinewy institutions—state, church, nation, class, academy—placed a heavier drag on consumerism than in the United States. Although European traders were not in theory confined to their national markets, they nevertheless encountered language, tax, and currency obstacles in the continental market that Americans did not. The larger market, in turn,

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induced American sellers, spurred on by leaps in productivity, to pursue mass distribution and marketing with greater vigor and acumen. For example, though Joseph Swan invented the filament lamp concurrently with Thomas Edison (1878–79), the American fully overshadowed the European when it came to marketing the product.111 Similar stories can be told regarding other products first discovered in Europe, such as linoleum or Thermos, but popularized by Americans.112 Persistent class differences also impeded mass marketing in Europe. The working classes followed such widely divergent consumption patterns that many businesses ignored them and produced for and marketed to only the aristocracy and the grande bourgeoisie. Moreover, the rare, high-quality products that attracted these classes were not conducive to mass production.113 European governments surely aided business but nowhere with the unwavering dedication of a leader like President Calvin Coolidge (“The business of America is business”).114 During the 1920s, for instance, Berlin and Paris vied with New York as the “city of lights” but eventually lost out because both municipalities restricted the amount of lighted advertising.115 Similarly, the U.S. government promoted the export economy much more assiduously than European states.116 European businesses faced interventionist governments that shaped markets more than in America, where capitalists went largely unregulated.117 To cite just one example, bankruptcy laws were so lax in America that debtors could easily start up new businesses; in Europe failed businessmen were effectively banished from the marketplace forever.118 Anticonsumerist forces were too strong for European politicians to ignore. In virtually all European countries, the petite bourgeoisie organized itself in such groups as the Allgemeiner deutscher Handwerkerbund established 1882 in Germany, the Ligue syndicale de travail, de l’industrie et du commerce in France (1888), or the Association nationale de la petite bourgeoisie in Belgium (1900) with the express aim of protecting their small independent businesses from the devastating competition of chain and department stores.119 Their cause was notably trumpeted by Zola’s Au bonheur des dames, which told the tragic story of Le Vieil Elbeuf, the owner of a small drapery shop ruined through competition with a department store. Richard Wagner’s immensely influential Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876) denounced the merciless capitalism of Nibelheim. The great composer, of course, did nothing to counter the anti-Semitic stigma that consumerism was “Jewish” and therefore “unEuropean.” The Catholic Church—much more influential in Europe than in America—could be counted on to keep up a steady, virulent crusade against consumerism as one of the vilest aspects of “modernism.” At the same time as elite American institutions of higher learning like Harvard and Stanford were opening business schools, European universities steadily graduated secular intellectuals, from

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Thomas Carlyle and Karl Marx in the nineteenth to Martin Heidegger and R. H. Tawney in the twentieth century, who lashed out at consumerism from the political left and right.120 The failure of fascism and socialism—both with strong anticonsumerist undertones—to gain a foothold in America attests to the wider appeal of consumerism in the United States. In all fairness, American consumers enjoyed an edge; they had more money. Per capita income doubled in America between 1869 and 1899 and nearly did so again from 1909 to 1942.121 Thus, by the years 1925 to 1929, real wages in America exceeded those in Britain by 60 percent. American incomes had two and a half times the buying power of French.122 This explains why Urbain Gohier bemoaned America’s “fat, well-dressed, wellscrubbed, well-rested workers” who earn the “salary of professors at the Collège de France.”123 America also benefited from a steady stream of immigrants arriving with little more than the clothes on their backs who needed and wanted to consume in order to fit into the “American way of life.” Understandably, Americans bought more. By 1929, one in five Americans owned a car, one in 43 Britons, one in 335 Italians. Similar comparisons could be made for a range of household and personal products such as telephones or ready-to-wear fashions.124 No one was more aware of America’s leadership in consumerism than the Europeans. Henry Ford’s My Life and Work (1922), My Philosophy of Industry (1929), and Moving Forward (1930), which collectively narrated the fabulously and famously successful story of how the car producer doubled the pay of his workers so that they could afford to buy his Model Ts en masse, were translated into many languages and enjoyed a wide distribution in Europe.125 André Citroën quite self-consciously and publicly aped the American entrepreneur in becoming the first mass producer of automobiles in Europe.126 As certain American brand names—Frigidaire, Kodak, Coca-Cola, Camels— began frequently appearing on European billboards, movie screens, and leaflets, winning that much-coveted “brand recognition,” European advertisers increasingly looked to their American counterparts for inspiration. Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, who founded what would grow into France’s largest ad agency, Publicis, admitted that he traveled to “the States regularly to recharge my batteries and cultivate my rage to persuade.” Claude Hopkins’s My Life in Advertising found its way onto the bookshelves of virtually every ad house in Europe.127 Similarly, American business jargon such as “distribution,” “marketing,” or “self-service” first slowly seeped but eventually inexorably flowed into the European vernacular.128 Rotary Clubs—where countless American businessmen had learned the motto that “He profits most who serves best”— were formed across Europe. In Ostend, Belgium, in 1927, an audience of 15,000 assembled at the Eighteenth Congress of Rotary International listened

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to King Albert claim that Europe could benefit, particularly in “our material life [which] is outwardly changing slowly,” from an infusion of “the energy and elementary force of a young country like the U.S.A..”129 As might be expected, not all recognitions of America’s leadership in consumerism were laudatory. The single-minded obsession with buying and selling left a foul taste in many Europeans’ mouths. Spanish journalists keen to pour vitriol over America during the Spanish-American War denounced the enemy as a nation of “avaricious shopkeepers, without culture, without honor, without a soul.”130 A regular French visitor to America sensed such a change between 1901 and 1925 that he concluded, “the very basis of the American civilization is no longer the same.” “It is obvious that Americans have come to consider their standard of living as a somewhat sacred acquisition, which they will defend at any price. This means that they would be ready to make many an intellectual or even moral concession in order to maintain that standard.”131 It was roughly during these same years that European highbrows coined the term “Americanization” to stand for the increasing number of such concessions to consumerism that they witnessed at home. British journalist William T. Stead penned The Americanization of the World in 1901, which was followed in the ensuing years by scores of books with similar titles.132 The concept of “Americanization” fully confirms the advanced nature of consumerism in America. No one there was referring to the phenomenon as “Europeanization.” Europeans and Americans alike recognized the USA as the undisputed leader in this newest gestation of mass culture. Impact of Consumerism We should resist, however, the temptation to contrast too starkly America’s consumer society and culture with that which preceded it. For the great impact of the consumerist revolution lay in building off, as opposed to demolishing, existing developments, especially those three American trademarks that European observers stressed over and over: (1) the exaltation of the ordinary, (2) the alienation from history, and (3) the relaxation of selfcriticism. In 1884, Sir Lepel Griffin described an American culture in which “mediocrity is allowed to take the highest place.”133 Griffin foresaw, perhaps unwittingly, consumerism’s talismanic power of elevating the common man to king, emperor, or pharaoh. The market seemed able to provide vulgarians with the privileges only the most powerful had hitherto enjoyed. The grandest department stores deliberately designed their interiors to give customers a sense that they were strolling through lavish halls. Often giving themselves

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regal names like “Palace,” “Majestic,” and “Empire,” cinemas went for the same effect by permitting most (though not stigmatized) moviegoers to mill about wherever they wished instead of being confined to specific sections.134 Potentates had long been envied for escaping drudgery. Modern appliances were invariably marketed (especially to women) as substitutes for manual labor.135 Motion pictures enabled mesmerized audiences to vicariously savor places, feats, and emotions that were once the exclusive preserve of the wealthy and powerful. And practically all Americans could get a taste of being pampered by servants; they need only rush over to the nearest store and take advantage of that slavish customer service for which America was notorious in Europe. Consumerism blurred distinctions between the cultivated and the crass by lifting the latter rather than demeaning the former. No dream did consumerism better help to fulfill than the wish to escape the past. Advertising gave instructions to millions of immigrants on how to obscure their backgrounds and take on a genuine American appearance, often in no more than one generation’s time. James Bryce saw the power of assimilation as early as 1888: “the intellectual and moral atmosphere into which the settlers from Europe come has more power to assimilate them than their race qualities have power to change it.”136 Between 1840 and 1924, 35 million immigrants arrived on American soil. In time, most of them were assimilated.137 To be sure, consumerism hardly wiped out prejudice in America, but it did make it easier and likelier for many (not all) to overcome supposed destinies inherited from the past. Consumerism further dealt history a blow in the celebration of the cult of the new. Consumers were told they had to have the latest models and newest products. Older goods (and sadly even people) were downgraded as undesirable and dispensable. Disparagingly reflecting on the things without history pouring into his beloved Vaterland from America, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: Now there come crowding over from America empty, indifferent things, pseudo-things, DUMMY-LIFE . . . A house, in the American understanding, an American apple or vine, has NOTHING in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which the hope and meditation of our forefathers had entered . . . The animated, experienced things that SHARE OUR LIVES are coming to an end and cannot be replaced.138

Rilke was in effect mourning the erosion of historicism, the idea expressed by the likes of Hegel, Darwin, and Marx that the past inexorably determines the future. Historicist thinking—well represented by Friedrich von Schlegel’s remark that “history is the selfconsciousness of a nation”—dominated European culture throughout the nineteenth century. Thus, Gustave Flaubert

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declared, “we are above all in a historically minded century.”139 Nothing could have been further from the truth in America. Consumerism further invigorated America’s deeply rooted anti-intellectualism. In a milieu of what Tocqueville described as the “perpetual utterance of self-applause,”140 scrutinizing intellectuals who draw attention to the faults and shortcomings of society had never enjoyed as much sway as in self-critical Europe.141 But consumerism inundated Americans with optimistic, swellsounding, ingratiating, and ultimately intoxicating aggrandizement that made serious critics come across as pedantic killjoys.142 “Never did American culture,” in the eyes of eminent Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, “challenge the individual to pause and reflect, to find coherence and meaning, to consummate rather than merely to consume.”143 In 1922, Sinclair Lewis unforgettably portrayed this mindless middle-class existence through the character of George Babbitt: “these standard advertised wares—toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters—were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom.”144 European sophisticates warmed to Babbitt and conferred on its author the first Nobel Prize for Literature ever awarded an American. Finally, a Yankee had grasped and represented what Europeans had realized for years, namely, American shallowness. Well before consumerism came of age, A. D’Alembert in the 1850s had devoted an entire chapter of his encyclopedia to “Les BeauxArts en Amerique.” He sardonically left the pages blank.145 Along the same lines, Pierre Proudhon claimed, “America is a land of producers, but apart from agriculture and industry they produce nothing.”146 Decades later, fellow Frenchman Georges Clemenceau pilloried American history as a “progression from barbarism to decadence without a detour through culture.” Wilhelm von Pelenz contended that the “Americanization of culture means trivialization, mechanization, stupification.”147 Mathew Arnold insisted that “America . . . is without general intelligence”—a “fool’s paradise.”148 Oscar Wilde blamed America’s lack of sophistication on George Washington. “The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination . . . are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie.”149 As usual, no one’s tongue was sharper than that of George Bernard Shaw, who sneered at the so-called Hundredpercent American. He was a bombinating sort of man, if I may coin the expression. He was monumental; but he was so void of anything new or different that we in Europe staggered when we contemplated his immensity and its utter

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insignificance. We said, what is the secret of this tremendous man, who talks so splendidly and has nothing to say? This man whose mind, although it is evidently an intensely live mind, might just as well be an intense absence of mind, because he doesn’t seem to know anything of any particular consequence. He is always in a state of vociferous excitement about entirely trivial things. He quotes the poets thunderously to give point to piffle.150

Freud’s visit to America made him sick to his stomach. “America is a mistake,” he bellowed, “a gigantic mistake, it is true, but none the less a mistake.”151 Spread of American Civilization Of course, not all European intellectuals loathed America. But as the nineteenth century progressed, virtually all came to agree that the future belonged to America—for better or worse. J. Fröbel intended his Amerika, Europa und die politische Gesichtspunkte der Gegenwart (1859) to warn against Europe’s impending eclipse behind the long shadow cast by America. J. S. Mill deemed Tocqueville’s Democracy in America “all the more worthy of study in that it harbors within its depths the future of the world.”152 In 1871, French assemblyman Édouard-René Lefèbvre de Laboulaye, in La République constitutionnelle, counseled his readers to mold their new republic after the tested American model.153 Because of its capitalist potential, Marx called the United States “the youngest and yet most powerful representative of the West.” “The Americans may reasonably look forward to a time,” Herbert Spencer predicted in 1882, “when they will have produced a civilization grander than any the world has known.” A few years later, James Bryce maintained, “America has . . . anticipated European nations. She is walking before them along a path which they may probably follow.”154 John Robinson Whitley featured America in his manufacturing exhibition at Earl’s Court in 1887 because Europe “already looks to the United States as the vanguard in the march of both material and moral progress.”155 Steadily, though often reluctantly, Europeans realized that America was not just a former colony, not just one more nation-state, but the epicenter and generator of a dawning global civilization.156 American economic precociousness stood out. America’s reputation as the land of plenty, which had originated in colonial times, ballooned. “Happy is the country,” wrote Harriet Martineau in the 1830s, “where the factory-girls carry parasols, and pig-drivers wear spectacles.” American laborers, according to Francis Grund, enjoyed “comforts which would hardly enter the imagination of similar orders in Europe.” Abundance figured prominently among

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Bryce’s reasons for concluding, “life in America is in most ways pleasanter, easier, simpler than in Europe.”157 Ludwig Max Goldberger’s popular book of 1903 on America, Land der unbregrenzten Möglichkeiten (Land of Infinite Possibilities), told a similar tale to Germans. Even Europe’s privileged classes gawked at American wealth. It became common in the second half of the nineteenth century for blue bloods to go fishing in America’s nouveau riches waters for a bride who could support their luxurious habits.158 “It is her fortune, not her face,” quipped the British rag Punch in 1905, “that captivates the British peer.”159 Higher productivity also contributed to America’s economic progress. Englishman Richard Cobden, as far back as 1835, deemed American management so superior that “our only chance of national prosperity lies in the timely remodelling of our system, so as to put it as nearly as possible upon an equality with the improved management of the Americans.”160 Michel Chevalier observed, “the American mechanic is a better workman . . . than the European.”161 A Prussian official visiting America in 1853 learned for the first time just “what mankind is capable of achieving.”162 Americans, so it seemed, simply worked harder. “The rough, broad difference between the American and the European business man,” declared Arnold Bennet, “is that the latter is anxious to leave his work, while the former is anxious to get to it.” Similarly, G. K. Chesterton noticed that “the American talks about his work the Englishman his holidays.”163 On a visit to America in 1876, T. H. Huxley discerned the stronger work ethic in the cities’ skylines: “In the Old World the first things you see as you approach a great city are steeples; here you see, first, centers of intelligence” (meaning office buildings).164 European socialists from Engels to Liebnecht to Lenin marveled at American productivity. The latter, once in power, decreed that “we must organize in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system, and systematically try to adapt it to our purposes.”165 Non-Marxist students of capitalism, like Werner Sombart and Max Weber, too viewed America as more efficient and productive.166 Objective indicators confirmed such observations. By 1870, America’s GNP equaled and by 1913 tripled Britain’s.167 By the 1890s, America led the world in manufacturing as well as in coal, iron, and steel production. Particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century, America vied neck and neck with England (later Germany too) for most registered patents.168 In the first two decades of the twentieth century, America surged ahead.169 By 1919, the United States cultivated and manufactured more than the rest of the world combined. New York replaced London as the world’s financial center.170 Though they ostensibly had nothing to do with economic competition, the revived Olympic Games of 1896 held great symbolic meaning. The United States took home 9 of the 14 gold medals awarded.171

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Premonitions of American economic dominance surfaced frequently. In 1878, William Gladstone noted: “While we have been advancing with portentous rapidity, America is passing us as if in a canter. There can hardly be a doubt, as between America and England, of the belief that the daughter at no very distant time will, whether fairer or less fair, be unquestionably yet stronger than the mother.”172 A decade later, Henri de Beaumont forecast that “the business center will . . . be established in New York or Washington, which will become the capital of the civilized world.”173 With widely read and quoted books such as Andrew Williamson’s British Industries and Foreign Competition (1894), Octave Noël’s Le Péril américain (1899), or Fred McKenzie’s American Invaders (1902), the warning turned to mantra. In 1902, Brooks Adams, in American Economic Supremacy, declared the American triumph a fait accompli.174 Nothing attested to American economic appeal like immigration. An additional 23 million sailed to American shores between 1890 and 1920. The vast majority flooded into America from Europe, and the lion’s share of European emigrants chose the United States over all other destinations. In comparison, the stream headed in the opposite direction (America to Europe) amounted to a mere trickle (mainly malcontented American intellectuals disgusted with America’s philistine culture).175 The love affair with America was not limited to immigrants. During our period, America’s appeal expanded across the globe, including Europe. Roughly speaking, American political institutions earned widespread admiration during the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, only to be greatly overshadowed by American popular (that is, consumer) culture from the 1870s onward. The rebels of Tiananmen Square were hardly the first to invoke America. People around the world challenging despotism looked to America for inspiration and emulation. South and Central Americans fortified themselves with the success of the American War of Independence when throwing off the Spanish yoke in the 1820s. Though less successful, the organizers of the Decembrist Revolt of 1825 in Russia against controversially installed Nicholas I saw themselves as following in America’s footsteps. The Australian dubbed the USA in 1831 “a model for all new countries.”176 Virtually all of the revolutions that rocked Europe in 1848 had palpable American overtones.177 Seven editions of the American Constitution were published between April and September of 1848 in France alone.178 One Bohemian rebel expressed the reigning enthusiasm: “Their political doctrines have become the religion and confession of all countries, like the truths of Christianity [and are] destined to become the universal faith of mankind.”179 Even the uppish British had to admit the popularity of the infant terrible. Gladstone hailed the American Constitution “the most wonderful work ever

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struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.”180 Chauvinist Sir Charles Duke conceded in Greater Britain (1866) that the wisdom of English political institutions reached the wider world only indirectly through the American example. “Through America, England is speaking to the world.”181 The duke may have been influenced by Charles Darwin’s take on the Americans from 1859: There is apparently much truth in the belief that the wonderful progress of the United States, as well as the character of the people, are the results of natural selection; the more energetic, restless, and courageous men from all parts of Europe having emigrated during the last ten or twelve generations to that great country, and having there succeeded best . . . All other series of events—as that which resulted in the culture of mind in Greece . . . and the empire of Rome—only appear to have purpose and value when viewed in connection with, or rather as subsidiary to . . . the great stream of Anglo-Saxon emigration to the West.182

Two years later, Cambridge dons voted down a proposal to endow a chair in American history with the argument that “the American self-conceit” needed no further urging.183 Such antics did not, however, stop a compatriot from penning one of the most renowned celebrations of American political institutions: James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth (1888). The institutions of the United States are deemed by inhabitants and admitted by strangers to be a matter of more general interest than those of the not less famous nations of the Old World . . . They represent an experiment in the rule of the multitude, tried on a scale unprecedentedly vast, and the results of which everyone is concerned to watch. And yet they are something more than an experiment, for they are believed to disclose and display the type of institutions towards which, as by a law of fate, the rest of civilized mankind are forced to move, some with swifter, others with slower, but all with unresting feet.184

By Bryce’s time, however, American popular culture was already upstaging American political institutions as the world’s newest craze. From Buffalo Bill through Mary Pickford and Mickey Mouse, the American entertainment industry won loyal fans in Europe and beyond. Despite the fact that Europe produced more films than America at the turn of the nineteenth century, by the termination of the Great War, American motion pictures accounted for 85 percent of world distribution.185 French poet Philippe Soupault remembered the first American films to reach Paris during the war: “We rushed into the cinemas and realized immediately that everything had changed . . . [it was]

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the beginning of a new world.”186 Hollywood’s allure grew even stronger in Europe after the war, prompting an irascible Shaw to chide the American movie-making capital for “corrupting the world.”187 In his Man and the Masses in America of 1918, Huizinga shrugged: “When we accept the art of cinema as the daily spiritual bread of our time, we acknowledge the enslavement by the machine into which we have fallen.”188 The French ambassador to Washington was more generous: Your movies and talkies have soaked the French mind in American life, methods and manners . . . The place in French life and culture formerly held by Spain and Italy, in the nineteenth century by England, now belongs to America. More and more we follow the Americans.189

Germany’s leading film producer, Erich Pommer, conceded that “the mentality of the American film . . . apparently comes closest to the taste of the international movie audience, despite all criticisms to the contrary.”190 Famed British film critic Iris Barry discerned in Hollywood’s triumph the harbinger of global Americanization.191 Hollywood was not alone in appealing to Europeans. The above discussion of European awareness of American leadership in consumerism made mention of various Yankee wares and ways that became commonplace in Europe. There were countless others. Five-and-dime stores—prix uniques in French, Einheitpreisgeschäfte in German—proliferated across Europe between the wars.192 Woolworth, the American champion of the fixed-price store, opened 400 stores in Europe between 1909 and 1930.193 American fashions, from shirtwaists to short skirts to pointed-toe shoes, came into vogue in Europe. Jazz took the Continent by storm.194 Foreshadowing later linguistic developments, Europeans started using American colloquialisms like “gee.”195 Needless to say, European goods and tastes reached and influenced Americans. The major American department stores often copied the grand window displays and floor layouts found in, say, Au Printemps or Bon Marché. And vente de blanc or choisissez inevitably sounded more stylish than “white sale” or “Buy now.” That said, the balance of influence clearly tipped in America’s direction.196 It is interesting to note that it was immediately following a visit to the United States that Max Weber wrote: “With almost lightning speed everything that stands in the way of capitalistic culture is being crushed.”197 America’s appeal, though, spanned far beyond mere products and personalities. It included attitudes, a certain approach to life that we have been calling “the exaltation of the ordinary.” The rabble outside America began contracting the American contagion of thinking society should exist to meet their needs and wishes—what José Ortega y Gasset would call The Revolt of

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the Masses (1929). More important still was that they—mere vulgarians— should define those needs and wishes, no matter how insipid, insolent, or insidious they may appear to reputed sages. It should come as no surprise, then, that intellectuals dug in their heels against Americanization. The exact origins of the notion “Americanization” elude us, but by the turn of the twentieth century, it was uttered everywhere (in Europe at least). Baudelaire was surely among the first coiners of the term when in 1855 he referred to his century as “Americanized by its zoocratic industrial philosophers.” He vented his spleen against an epoch in which “Americanomania has virtually become a socially acceptable fad.”198 Later his countrymen Edmond and Jules de Goncourt lamented the Paris World’s Fair of 1867 as “the last blow in what is the Americanization of France.”199 In 1883, rabid anti-American Frédéric Gaillardet bristled because “Europe is being Americanized with every passing day.” A decade later, his compatriot Émile Barbier echoed: “America is invading old Europe; it is flooding it and will soon submerge it.” At roughly the same time the French public was reading in the immensely popular dime novel, La Conspiration des milliardaires, that “the enslavement of the Old World by the New” was but “a matter of months, perhaps days.”200 Across the Rhine, Fritz Stern relates, “from the 1870s on, conservative writers in imperial Germany expressed fear that the German soul would be destroyed by ‘Americanization,’ that is by mammonism, materialism, mechanization and mass society.”201 Nietzsche, for instance, in the Gay Science (1881), maintained that America “is already beginning ferociously to infect old Europe and is spreading a spiritual emptiness over the continent.” “The faith of the Americans today is more and more becoming the faith of the European as well.” Six years later, fellow German Emil Dubois Reymond castigated Americanization as the “overrunning of European culture with realism and the growing preponderance of technology.” He deemed it unstoppable because the American way of life struck a natural chord with the European masses and awakened the common man’s desire for economic, political, and cultural democratization.202 Rudyard Kipling, who married a Yankee, predicted that America “will sway the world with one foot as a man tilts a seesaw plank.”203 Pope Leo XIII felt compelled to fulminate against “Americanism” in his apostolic letter of 1899.204 So entrenched was the notion of Americanization that fin de siècle psychiatric literature created a “nosological” category called “Americanization”—an illness of modern life.205 The idea that Americanization, as contemptuous as it may be, could not be stopped, even in Europe, seized European intellectuals. Otto Landendorf ’s Historical Subject Catalogue of 1906 claimed, “the American, lacking ideals . . . will become the person of the future even in Old Europe.”206 In 1913, Elijah Brown anticipated that Americanization “seems

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destined to swallow up Europe.”207 Even before America entered the Great War, Max Weber declared: “The Rise of the United States to world dominance was as unavoidable as that of ancient Rome.”208 “We have absolutely no choice any more,” moaned Theodor Lüddecke a few years later. “The American way of life is simply forced on us.”209 Stead’s The Americanization of the World (1901) warned Britons that their country faced “ultimate reduction to the status of an English-speaking Belgium.”210 Across the Channel, Edmond Demolins discerned in Americans a “race that seems to want to follow the Roman Empire in governing the world.”211 A German Cassandra cried out: “America represents a dreadful danger to all of humanity.”212 Americanophobic jeremiads had become nearly as common as the examples of Americanization themselves. Conclusion By the end of the nineteenth century, a virtual pall of gloom draped over Europe. Indeed, the expression “fin de siècle” connotes a widespread mood of despondency plaguing European elites regarding their civilization’s decadent present and dismal future. Nietzsche discerned the “malaise of modern European civilization.”213 Gustave Le Bon’s influential study, La psychologie des foules (1895), predicted that everything grand and noble would be trampled by the unstoppable, stampeding “crowd.” Freud was gestating his theory of the sublimated neurosis of “civilized” man.214 Émile Durkheim theorized that modern societies caused widespread alienation and “anomie.”215 Max Weber glimpsed an inevitable future characterized by smothering bureaucratization and rationalization that would one day fully disenchant life.216 Wilhelm Dilthey discerned the greatest “disturbance of human society and all its ideas since the days of the decline of the Greco-roman world.”217 Paul Valéry was contemplating a likely global war that would engulf Europe.218 In 1905, August Bebel similarly premonished that Europe would be “consumed by a vast military campaign involving 16 to 18 million men . . . equipped with the latest murder weapons for this mutual slaughter.” A grosse Kladderadatsch, or general breakdown, would follow in the war’s wake.219 Similar prophecies of impending doom and destruction turned up in the work of prominent artists like Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Oskar Kokoschka as well as writers such as Alfred Kubin, George Heym, G. B. Shaw, and H. G. Wells.220 When the Great War finally ground to a halt, it had devastated Europe, not only physically but spiritually. John Maynard Keynes lamented in 1920: “An age is over . . . the earth heaves . . . it is . . . the fearful convulsions of a dying civilization.”221 A year earlier, Valéry’s essay “The Crisis of the Mind” announced Europe’s eclipse by America. Oswald Spengler predicted

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The Decline of the West (1918–22). The Anglicized T. S. Elliot could see nothing but a vast Wasteland (1922). Pierre Drieu La Rochelle depicted the hopelessness of Europe’s youth in such novels as Le Feu follet (The Fire Within, 1931). In perhaps the most compelling description of a decaying civilization, Thomas Mann published his masterpiece, Zauberberg (Magic Mountain), in 1924. Across the Atlantic, the temper was cheerier. America was clearly on the rise, its geopolitical power finally beginning to match its cultural sway. Still, its total geopolitical supremacy would have to wait until after World War II. I remind, however, that we excluded American geopolitical parity as a necessary condition for troubling Europeans in the way hypothesized at the outset of the chapter. In order for America to undermine subjective Eurocentrism (to confirm fears of translatio imperii bypassing Europe for America), its geopolitical puissance only needed to grow steadily. And that it did. During the nineteenth century, all of Europe’s major powers came eventually to dismiss the idea of invading U.S. territory, so great were calculated the costs of meeting swords with the Americans. In North America, the United States relentlessly expanded its borders, running roughshod over Mexico while keeping the British at bay in Canada. From the Monroe Doctrine through the Roosevelt Corollary, American control over Latin America grew rather than shrank. With the defeat of Spain and capture of Puerto Rico and the Philippines in 1898, America emerged from that “splendid little war” as a bona fide great power.222 According to Georg Kamphausen, the “shocking experience” of witnessing America’s rise to prominence in world affairs awakened an entire generation of European intellectuals “to the fact that Europe was no longer the focal point of world history.”223 And nothing solidified the message more than when it became necessary for America to rescue the Entente Powers in World War I. The victory parade in Paris at the end of the “War to End All Wars” already foreshadowed the dominating position America would assume during and after World War II. The Allied detachments marched proudly under the Arc de Triomphe in alphabetical order according to the name of their respective nations. One exception was made. General John Pershing’s Sammies marched as “America” rather than the “United States” and, therefore, at the head of the parade.224

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CHAPTER 7

World America (1918–Present) America is everywhere. All you need is to have eyes to see it.1 Ignazio Silone

Introduction In 1931, José Ortega y Gasset lamented a world no longer dominated by Europe: The world today is suffering from a grave demoralization which, amongst other symptoms, manifests itself by an extraordinary rebellion of the masses, and has its origin in the demoralization of Europe. The causes of this latter are multiple. One of the main is the displacement of the power formerly exercised by our Continent over the rest of the world and over itself.2

In vowing to make Berlin into “the capital of the world” and commissioning Albert Speer to design a new Rome,3 Hitler consciously generated political capital out of the mood of despair commonly expressed by conservative intellectuals.4 The Führer once resentfully remarked that “the European, often without being conscious of it, applies American conditions as a standard of his own.”5 The relationship between anti-Americanism and fascism is complex, and I do not mean to imply that the former caused the latter.6 In the first place, neither disparaging America nor bemoaning Europe’s waning influence represented the exclusive domain of the Right (as the two previous chapters made abundantly clear). In the second place, myriad factors intricately combined to gestate fascism.7 But the Europe-wide movement did plainly aim to restore and re-energize the Continent’s axial position in global affairs. Because it culminated in ignoble failure, the fascist renaissance is not typically associated with earlier, more celebrated movements of reform such as the

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Renaissance, the Reformation, or the Enlightenment. But like the similarly fated Crusades discussed above, fascism was a piece with the more successful campaigns of self-improvement as far as striving for subjective Eurocentrism is concerned. America (with the aid of its allies) foiled fascist ambition. The story of America’s rise to global superpower status after World War II is too well known to retell here.8 Suffice it to say that a bumptious John F. Kennedy could in 1961 make the confident pledge (threat) to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to ensure the survival and success of liberty.”9 Although an uncharacteristic diffidence— what Jimmy Carter called a “malaise”—hampered America from the time of JFK’s assassination until the election of Ronald Reagan,10 the Great Communicator restored American self-confidence with brio. “It is time for us to realize that we’re too great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams . . . We have every right to dream heroic dreams.”11 America did not ultimately brandish overpowering weapons to vanquish its Communist rival, though Reagan’s limitless defense spending contributed to the victory. The vitality of America’s economy surely played a role, though we must not lose sight of the fact that the western superpower endured its share of economic woes during the 1970s. In the end, America triumphed with what Joseph Nye termed “Soft Power,” that is, with the appeal of its culture, the so-called American way of life.12 Mikhail Gorbachev conceded as much when he spoke in 1987 of a “threat [that] emanates from an onslaught of ‘mass culture’ from across the Atlantic.”13 Expressed differently, people behind the Iron Curtain (and Great Wall) grew weary of their governments’ hidebound diatribes against America and Americanization. Their counterparts in Western Europe led better lives, so it seemed, precisely because their governments had befriended America and welcomed Americanization. Naturally, we should not underestimate the role of raw military and economic power in the establishment of Uncle Sam’s postwar “empire.”14 But neither should we downplay the allure of American culture that many analysts have tried to capture in such epithets as “empire lite,”15 “empire by invitation,”16 “empire of consumption”17 or “irresistible empire.”18 Already in 1961, Arthur Koestler stressed just this point in regard to America’s “conquest” of Western Europe: “The United States do not rule Europe as the British ruled India; they waged no Opium War against us to force their revolting ‘coke’ down our throats. Europe bought the whole package because it wanted it. The Americans did not Americanize us—they were merely one step ahead.”19 Two years earlier, François Mauriac had written: “America has done much more than visit us, it has transformed us. The rhythm of our lives has been attuned to its own. Its music accompanies our days on millions of

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records. Thousands of films . . . impose on us its way of thinking in every area of life.”20 The charm of American culture steadily waxed after the World War II in part because America again reinvented itself. It experienced a further social and cultural revolution akin to the democratic and consumerist revolutions featured in Chapters 5 and 6 respectively. Like those, the newest revolution both built off and invigorated those same three outstanding characteristics that European commentators were wont to underline: (1) the exaltation of the ordinary, (2) the alienation from history, and (3) the relaxation of selfcriticism. At the heart of this revolution lay the talismanic achievement of turning fiction into fact. America’s unexampled global dominance since the World Wars confirmed Europe’s worst nightmares. Europe’s leaders, who had long hoped that modernity would prove to be a truly European age, had to grant that the period wound up becoming an American epoch. New York and Washington—not Paris, Rome, London, or Berlin—are to the modern (and postmodern) world what Jerusalem and Athens were to the ancient world. Like their Roman ancestors, modern Europeans, in their own estimation, do figure prominently in the dominant civilization but not as its rightful authors. Modern secondarity, however, is a much bitterer pill for Europeans to swallow than the premodern variety limned by Rémi Brague and discussed in Chapter 2. After all, in the eyes of Europe’s elites, Athens and Jerusalem formed the core of a truly noble, universal civilization guided by and dedicated to absolute Truth and Goodness. Playing second chair in this masterful orchestra had been a privilege and honor. By contrast, American civilization comes forth as ignoble and malignant. Worse yet, Europe must shoulder some of the blame for having played midwife to the monster. A millennium of lofty subjective Eurocentric aspirations notwithstanding, Europe finds itself teetering again on the brink of barbarism. To prevent disastrous decline, Europe must, according to many of its intellectuals, immediately resist and ultimately rise above brutish America.21 The Virtual Revolution Both the democratic and consumerist revolutions amplified after the World War II and eventually went global. America continued to blaze the trail in the spread of these two crucial ingredients of modern universalism. Western Europe democratized immediately following the war, more often than not using American democracy as its model.22 After 1989, the Soviet satellite countries followed suit, while much of the rest of the world still struggles to

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install democracy.23 Likewise, American-style consumerism grew deep roots initially in Western Europe and later in the former Soviet bloc,24 and today it penetrates the farthest reaches of the planet.25 Meanwhile, Americans were busy fashioning a peerless virtual revolution that catapulted their nation into the vanguard of postmodernity. What is meant by the term “virtual revolution”? “America is a gigantic hologram,” wrote Jean Baudrillard in 1986.26 A few years earlier, Umberto Eco had titled his tour of America Travels in Hyperreality.27 The two postmodernists discern a phantasmagoric America gradually but relentlessly substituting fiction for fact. The image, simulacrum, icon—in a word, virtual reality—has become so ubiquitous, tantalizing, and credible that it has unfolded into a serious, indeed necessary, alternative to mundane reality. In this America, “the absolute fake” becomes a “substitute for reality, as something even more real.”28 “Illusions . . . present themselves as truth” and obtain an “autonomy of the virtual, henceforth liberated from the real.”29 We are dealing with nothing less than “the murder of reality.”30 The precise origins of the disappearance of the real elude us. Consensus exists, though, that they lie in America’s legendary entertainment industry and its kindred profession of advertising. Already in 1925, for instance, F. Scott Fitzgerald had Daisy Buchanan say to Jay Gatsby, “You resemble the advertisement of the man.”31 Hollywood churned out films about its own power to mold society as early as 1937 (A Star Is Born) and 1941 (Citizen Kane). Andy Warhol and the Pop Art Movement of the 1950s and 1960s underscored the power and ubiquity of the icon. But the 1980s stand out as the period when this virtual revolution truly came of age. Needless to say, it helped to inaugurate the decade by putting a B-movie star in the White House. Not only did the “Gipper” often confound real and celluloid life, he and his handlers proved especially skilled at image management. They spun Reagan’s message so adroitly that he became known as the “Teflon president,” to whom no criticism stuck. Not to be outdone, Reagan’s successor waged the first made-for-TV war. George Herbert Walker Bush’s generals produced for the airwaves an antiseptic, palatable, nigh winsome version of the Gulf War in 1991. Americans, including the soldiers, experienced this video war as the “real McCoy” rather than the actual confrontation experienced by the Iraqis. In 1998, with Wag the Dog, Hollywood poked fun at Bill Clinton by bringing to the screen a verisimilitudinous military conflict magicked by the president’s henchmen and movie producers in order to avert attention from a sex scandal (just months before “Slick Willy” launched air strikes against Iraq on the day he was to be impeached regarding the Lewinsky affair). Later, an advisor to George W. Bush gloated that “when we act, we create our own

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reality.”32 Indeed, in 2003, the White House managed to convince a majority of credulous Americans that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda.33 The line between real and hyperreal politics has blurred beyond recognition. In 2001, the California State Assembly adjourned early to commemorate the president’s secretary, Mrs. Landingham, who had perished in a car accident the night before (in the TV series The West Wing).34 A year later, the same series aired a special edition in which scenes of virtual President Bartlett’s White House were shown to corroborate memories expressed by actual presidents Ford, Carter, Bush, and Clinton. In 1998, the people of Minnesota elected “Big Time Wrestler” Jesse Ventura governor. California followed suit in 2003 with its own action hero, Arnold Schwarzenegger. In “this confusion between reality and fame,” politicians feel “they must pretend to be people who pretend to be real.”35 From the sacred to the profane, Americans appear to prefer the artificial over the actual. Christians have established their own Disney-like replica of the Holy Land in Florida so that pious families can more easily visit Biblical sites.36 Playboy has featured nude pictures of video game heroines.37 Army recruiting advertisements promise prospective warriors that their service will be “just like in the movies.” Anyone can now, with a click of the mouse (and a pecuniary investment), lead a “second life—a 3D online digital world imagined, created and owned by its residents.”38 America is rearing an entire generation of youth who ignore serious news and choose to tune in to entertainment alone. The median age of viewers of broadcast news is 60.39 Even conventional newscasts have been transformed through “tabloidization” into sheer spectacle.40 Nike’s ubiquitous slogan, “Image is everything,” understandably strikes a chord in such an atmosphere. In this cinematic America, the phony looks “realer than reality.”41 “Illusion is not the opposite of reality,” asserts Baudrillard, “it is a more subtle reality.” Reality winds up appearing like a cheap imitation of itself when pitted against the fabricated image. Additionally, the artificial wins converts by being a “consoling illusion of truth.”42 In other words, the bowdlerized reality almost always appears more appealing, interesting, and soothing to cuddle than actual reality. The fake newscaster Stephen Colbert cleverly terms this phenomenon “truthiness—what we want the truth to feel like.”43 Furthermore, in this “coup de théâtre,” the image makers have perfected the art of disguising their guileful techniques.44 “The cinematographic illusion faded as the technical prowess increased.” “We live in a world where the highest function of the sign is to make reality disappear and, at the same time, to mask that disappearance.”45

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Exaltation of Ordinary If America had long offered ordinary man a comfortable home, this new hallucinatory America represented a funhouse at a carnival. Reality—the monotonous humdrum of everyday life—has always been the bane of ordinary man’s existence. While extraordinary man danced through a life filled with exhilarating, spectacular turns, ordinary man had to slosh through the endless bog of tedium and drudgery. Not so, once “the US is utopia achieved.” For in an America where the “screen take[s] precedence over reality,” middling folk can at will tune out drab reality and click on the anodyne of mesmerizing virtual reality. Moreover, in this “true fiction” the conventional rules of reality—always stacked against ordinary man—no longer apply.46 Paradoxes somehow make sense. Poverty turns into plenty, indolence into industry, folly into prudence, mediocrity into excellence, banality into profundity. “All . . . dreams come true.”47 Reality’s age-old demons—always pricklier for ordinary man—are exorcised. Age is overcome through cosmetic surgery, disease through wonder drugs, mortality through cloning. Even enemies fade, at least as conventionally experienced, namely, as genuine adversaries. In “America as fiction,”48 one deals not with a foe’s actual attributes; rather, one picks and paints an enemy of one’s choosing (“Evil Empire,” “Butcher of Baghdad,” “Axis of Evil,” “Islamofascism”).49

Alienation from History The virtual revolution added a new twist to America’s inveterate disregard for history. On the one hand, it further eroded the presence and power of the past. Like no other, the virtual world lives off rootless, fleeting images that disappear without a trace as soon as they surface. It happily digests trends and fads that apotheosize the new and anathematize the old. Baudrillard likens all of American life to a giant screen replete with ceaselessly changing images but behind which there lies nothing—no depth, no substance, no time.50 “A nation without essence or fixed being,” claims compatriot Bernard-Henri Lévy.51 This perfected, omnipresent superficiality further liberates America from history in a way that an old Europe shackled by the past cannot copy. “America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present. Having seen no slow, centuries-long accumulation of truth, it lives in perpetual simulation, in a perpetual present of signs.”52 Ironically, though, America has revived interest in (virtual) history. In museums, theme parks, and movie houses Americans encounter a past so

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bamboozlingly recreated that viewers mistake the representation for reality.53 At tourist attractions in cities like Philadelphia or San Antonio, queues to see the movie rendition of historical events far exceed those waiting to tour the actual Independence Hall or Alamo. Baudrillard has gone so far as to predict that the reenactments of the French Revolution in Los Angeles in 1989 will prove so convincing that “a century from now you will not be able to tell the difference. It will be as if the Revolution had taken place here.”54 Relaxation of Self-Criticism The virtual revolution also spelled doom for an already torpid critical culture. The cinematic society speeds the pace of life to such an extent that even those given to reflection have little time to stop and think. If the intellectually curious take the time, whatever riddle they ponder is, once they solve it, so irrelevant, outdated, or obscured that serious reflection is pointless. In any case, it will be lost on Americans, who are “the sort of people, who want yes or no for an answer. No nuances.”55 Traditional savants are more inconsequential now in America than at anytime in their pathetic history.56 In a climate of lame intellectual caretakers, Baudrillard points out, banality goes unchallenged and infects all like a “mental form of AIDS.” “The power of unculture” takes hold and creates a vast “anti-utopia of unreason” in which ignorance is a virtue and intelligence a vice. Lacking any “need for metaphysics,” philistine Americans ignore altogether Europe’s “unhappy intellectualism” and “moribund critical culture” and delight in the mindless conviction of their own superiority.57 Universal (American) Culture Needless to say, the likes of Baudrillard and Eco exaggerate the extent of the virtual revolution. Like the America they pillory, the postmodernists opportunistically take flight from reality in their musings. All the same, would it not be equally disdainful of reality to gainsay altogether their insights? In truth, we inhabit the interstices between modernity and postmodernity. The latter has plainly begun, yet the former has hardly flittered away. Here we need not determine the precise moribundity of the one and exact imminence of the other. We need only note that in the competition between Europe and America the younger rival has, in the view of Europeans, led the journey through both eras. Just as with key features of modernity, examples of virtual reality and its ravaging consequences abound outside America.58 But this is largely the case because much of the world has embraced American culture. “America,”

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writes Timothy Garton Ash, “is part of everyone’s imaginative life, through movies, music, television and the Web, whether you grow up in Bilbao, Beijing or Bombay.”59 Seized along with Saddam Hussein, of all people, was an ample supply of Bounty candy bars, 7 Up, and hot dogs. In 1993, erstwhile Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi released a CD of karaoke renditions of Elvis songs.60 Starbucks’ most successful franchise is not in Seattle, but in Tokyo. The soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army dined at KFC while waiting for the order to crush the uprising in Tiananmen Square in 1989.61 J. Lo (Jennifer Lopez) is popular in Iran,62 Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in India,63 Christmas in (Islamic) Turkey.64 People everywhere daily switch on CNN. “To Google” something is now a recognized verb in most languages. McDonald’s has over 30,000 arches in 119 countries, including a franchise in Mecca.65 The Japanese relate a joke about a family on holiday in the USA whose youngest daughter says to her mother: “Look mom, they have McDonald’s here too.” She might have said the same about Disney World, for Tokyo Disney sells $1.5 billion in trinkets annually. Orlando’s Disney World receives more visitors per annum than the whole of Britain.66 And Disney Hong Kong opened in 2005. American movies, of course, reach every corner of the globe. Hollywood’s advertisements scarcely lie when they say, “Opens everywhere Friday!” Globalization experts corroborate these anecdotal observations. “Never before in modern history has a country dominated the earth so totally as the United States does today.”67 “Globalisation . . . bears the strong imprint of American political and economic power.”68 “McWorld’s template is American.”69 No other power, past or present, comes “close to having either the quantity or the quality of American hegemony.”70 The growing antiAmericanism in the world reported by such polling institutions as the Pew Research Center71 has, according to one recent study, had no significant impact on America’s strength.72 In this same vein, Margaret Thatcher has averred that America “enjoys a level of superiority over its actual or potential rivals unmatched by any other nation in modern times . . . as long as America works to maintain its technological lead, there is no reason why any challenge to American dominance should succeed.”73 Books with titles like America Unrivaled, American Empire, The American Era, and The TwentyFirst Century Will Be American concur.74 Curiously, the hegemony of the USA may no longer constitute a necessary condition for American empire. If the locus of global power were to shift, say, to China in the distant future, the Chinese would most likely govern a still profoundly Americanized world in terms of values and institutions, just as the ancient Romans oversaw a deeply Hellenized empire.75 This means that Americanization need no longer be facilely conceptualized as a process in which

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more and more people simply ape American ways. Surely, non-Americans often adapt popular American habits and ideas to fit and serve their own local interests.76 They may even greatly improve originally American styles and ideas to the point that the amended versions become popular in America itself.77 The crucial point is that it is with American ways that people around the world must come to terms. Europe’s cultural elite leads the beleaguered fight against the Americanization of the planet. British novelist Margaret Drabble reveals that “my anti-Americanism has become almost incontrollable. It has possessed me like a disease.”78 One hears a similar sentiment from Spain: “Americanized Europe is not Europe but an alienated Europe . . . If Europe, in body and soul, wants to reach its unity, it must ‘de-Americanize’ on every level.”79 “Count me in,” exclaims German director Peter Zadek. “I deeply detest America.”80 A best-selling German author has derided his fatherland as a “pseudo––United States” resulting from “self-Americanization.” To combat the disease, Matthias Politycki advocates strict adherence to “European aesthetics.”81 The situation is equally dismal in France. “Our people have never found themselves in such a critical situation since the Hundred Years War. For the first time in our history, our language faces the threat of extinction. America has become the last horizon for our youth.”82 In an effort to stave off the Americanization of the film and TV industry, in 1993 more than 4,000 European intellectuals, artists, and producers published in six major newspapers a petition for “cultural works” to be excluded from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). In its paradoxically titled “Television without Frontiers” directive of 1989, the European Commission set quotas for required European content.83 Culture Minister Jack Lang had been preparing the ground since his speech at the UNESCO conference in Mexico in 1982 when he called for “real cultural resistance, a real crusade against—let’s call things by their name—this financial and intellectual imperialism which no longer grabs territory, or rarely, but grabs consciousness, ways of thinking, ways of living.”84 In 2005, all the European countries voted for the UNESCO convention condemning cultural homogenization (read Americanization).85 In a truly bizarre twist of anti-Americanism, French intellectuals, including President Chirac, lionized José Bové for attacking a McDo with a bulldozer.86 Despite assiduously promoting a distinct European civilization as an alternative to America,87 Europe’s savants have failed to inoculate their continent from the American epidemic. French intellectual superstar Pierre Bourdieu regretfully admitted that his continent was “dominated by America.”88 In his 1998 novel Les Particulares élémentaires, Michel Houellebecq blamed the revolting homogenization of France on Americanization. A British journalist

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bemoaned the fact that “we are enslaved by our interest in America and Americana. We try not to be, pretend not to be, but we can’t disengage.”89 His Spanish colleague is “frightened for the simple reason that we cannot deny that every day cultures and societies look more like the American style, and its way of thinking is being imposed indiscriminately on everybody.”90 Next door, the Portuguese “face the same external threat—namely the cultural products of the United States—which they are left to confront disarmed and alone.”91 “We know the American Midwest,” complained a German pundit, “not only up to the last corner of its living room furniture but also down to the bottom of its bowls of popcorn, while the living room of, let’s say, a Finnish peasant is as foreign to us as the interior core of the individual popcorn.”92 The Americanization of European languages steadily intensifies. The German government has felt compelled, despite protests by indignant literati like Nobel laureate Günther Grass, to adopt English words such as “lady” into the “official” German language, which according to the German Language Association has mutated into despicable “Denglisch.”93 Étiemble, of course, had been complaining of the contamination of French by English since the publication of his widely read Parlez-vous franglais? in 1964. And across the Channel, “the Americanisation of English continues at a hectic pace.”94 The world of cuisine does not look much different. Despite Carl Petrini’s cleverly conceived Slow Food movement targeted at fast food,95 Europe plays home to more McDonald’s restaurants than does the United States.96 “McDomination” is thorough.97 Likewise, “Coca-colonization,” in spite of the French government’s short-lived proscription of the beverage, is a fait accompli.98 Entertainment and sport have been Americanized as well. Hollywood productions make up 81 percent of the movies shown in Europe, 75 percent of TV programs.99 French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier laments: “with their bomb-proof distribution system, Americans impose their films on us.”100 Certainly before but increasingly since the decision on the part of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association to let America host the World Cup in 1994, Americanization has stripped European sport of its unique (read more civilized) attributes.101 Americanization appears to be ubiquitous in Europe. Reports, usually complaints, have surfaced of the Americanization of higher education (“Bubblegum University”),102 the Americanization (read commercialization) of museums,103 the Americanization (“cretinisation”) of press/journalism,104 the Americanization of politics (for instance, televised debates),105 the Americanization of holidays (for example, Halloween),106 the Americanization

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of the body (curiously, through both excessive healthiness and obesity),107 the Americanization of crime (including prisons),108 the Americanization of the Holocaust (via cinema),109 even the Americanization of European squirrels.110 “First it was burgers and movies. Now Uncle Sam has his finger in everything.”111 America “used to be a world power; it has now become a model (business, the market, free enterprise, performance)—and a universal one.”112 We inhabit today nothing less than world America. “The Americans realized long ago,” observes German filmmaker Wim Wenders, “what moves people most and what gets them dreaming. And they radically implemented that knowledge. The whole ‘American Dream’ is really an invention of cinema, and it is now being dreamed by the whole world.”113 In a similar vein, famed British sociologist Stuart Hall characterizes postmodernity as an era in which “the world dreams itself to be ‘American.’ ”114 European intellectuals will “remain nostalgic utopians, agonizing over our ideals, but baulking, ultimately, at their realization, professing that everything is possible, but never that everything has been achieved. Yet that is what America asserts.”115 America, then, appears to have achieved the universally embraced civilization that the European savants have long wished for themselves. Modern Secondarity We are now in a position to revisit Brague’s intriguing reading of European identity as one of an eccentric or secondary civilization. The French scholar highlights Europe’s sense of inferiority retrospectively, that is, as a result of its derivative relationship to the core of the ancient world—Athens and Jerusalem. I have worked prospectively, stressing Europe’s craving since the First Crusade in 1095 to overcome its secondarity by establishing itself as the heart and soul of a re-centered modern world. That subjective Eurocentric project ultimately miscarried, not because the world’s central axis of power and influence remained in the Mediterranean zone, but rather because (in the European mind) it slid past Europe to the western shores of the Atlantic zone. The sense of European inferiority, then, has been longer and more complex in the making than Brague suggests. Europe’s fragile ego is built off a double experience of secondarity—one premodern, the other modern. The two experiences differed in meaningful ways. The earlier secondarity was felt in relation to a perceived high civilization, the later to a low civilization. The first came in response to inalterable events of the past, the second to alterable developments of the present and expected future. The one seemed to inspire Europe upward, while the other threatened to drag Europe down.

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Modern secondarity did not have wholly inauspicious origins. To be sure, it bruised the psyche of Enlightenment Europeans to have to anticipate that Europe’s greatest modern achievements would bear their ripest fruit in America. But Europeans of that epoch could assuage their disappointment, in the first place, by gloating over their improvement of ancient ideas. In theory at least, the Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment, though inspired by Greek learning, in the end were thought to have surpassed the esteemed Athenian philosophical tradition. Likewise, the Reformation, singularly true to the message of Jerusalem, had supposedly rescued and restored the pristine Judeo-Christian creed from its profane counterfeiting at the hands of unreformed Christians and Jews. In the second place, ascendant America was the undeniable birth child of Europe and seemed consciously to endeavor, in admittedly more favorable conditions, to realize its parent’s greatest expectations. Thus, the declarations we heard from prophets and preceptors of progress like Diderot or Kant to the effect that Europe had perfected ancient standards went hand in hand with contentions of those like Lafayette or Goethe that America was putting into practice those same principles faster and better than a Europe burdened by its weighty past. The feeling of secondarity began to alter, however, once Europeans recognized what we called the real revolution transpiring in America during the republic’s first half century. Democracy, widely understood as the abolition of unwarranted privilege, mutated there from an inerrant philosophy judiciously crafted by the virtuous and cultivated few on behalf of the benighted many into a misbegotten right of the unworthy, untamed masses to run roughshod over their rightful stewards. Tocqueville, after celebrating democracy in America, for instance, predicted the wave of a suffocating mass conformity. We heard too from Heine, who mocked a land of freedom where “all the boors live equally.” And who can forget the demophobic Fanny Trollope’s illustrious tirade against the corrosive impact of unbuttoned democracy on social manners? In these years, there was cautious hope that America’s corruption of modern European ideals might consign the maverick land to a destiny of self-incurred global irrelevance. That happy eventuality had to be placed into the rubbish in the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, when America matched Europe’s industrial dynamism and gestated what we termed the consumer revolution. To begin with, America could no longer be written off as an essentially feudal economy centered on the production and sale of cotton and other cash crops. Moreover, consumerism seemed to lend a kind of vitality to the American economy that Europe could only envy. As discussed, Marx, Gladstone, and Beaumont, to name a few, each predicted America would overtake Europe as an economic power. Widely

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circulated books by other authors with titles such as Le Péril américain or American Economic Supremacy projected the same thing. By the end of the nineteenth century, there was no gainsaying that America had concocted the recipe, however befouled, for world domination. Kipling, Weber, Demolins, we saw, all concurred in one way or the other with Stead’s widely read The Americanization of the World (1901). Anticipated American omnipotence and omnipresence meant that the bastard child would return home to besmirch its parent’s treasured home and haven. For all their cultivation and dedication, Europe’s elites could not immunize their cherished civilization against the plague of American philistinism. At every opportunity, the Old World masses reveled in the very American lifestyle their self-appointed caretakers deprecated as infantile, insipid, and insidious. We listened to Cassandras like Nietzsche, Shaw, and Le Bon, among others, from whose lips spilled hackneyed warnings against the dehumanization of Europe resulting from the infatuation with America. Since the Great War, European savants have served up a steady diet of remorseful resignation regarding the triumph of a new, modern variant of barbarism emanating from American “anti-civilization.”116 Emmanuel Mounier warned in 1930: “A barbarity threatens all human civilization—all in the name of the society of the future—this is Americanism.”117 About the same time, Henri Massis averred: “We must be equally opposed to the intellectual and technological barbarity of the United States—equal to our opposition of the cruel ideological barbarity of the Soviet Union.” “Production becomes a means of reversing the needs of the spirit. Thus, in the end, we become barbarians searching for justification for our barbarity.”118 The “mechanization” of society and man, obsessively pursued and touted in “an America of Machine people,”119 sadly revealed its ugliest potential on European soil in the peerless moral and physical devastation of the World War I.120 Or so skeptics thought until the Nazis devised their death factories in the 1940s. In his famous lecture of 1949 on “The Question concerning Technology,” Martin Heidegger italicized the direct connection between mechanization and mass murder: “Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockade and starvation of nations, the same as the production of hydrogen bombs.”121 From the vantage point of Europe, the erstwhile Nazi harbored fragile hope that the severe ills caused by technology would wake Europeans to its dangers as well as to the dawn of a healthier relationship between man and nature. His French disciple, Simone de Beauvoir, upon visiting America after World War II, could register nothing but despair. “Heidegger says that ‘the world appears on the horizon of broken machinery,’ and here the machinery never breaks down.”122

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Sixty years later, the same theme turns up in Fernando Savater’s antiAmerican insistence that “ ‘civilization’ must be understood as something more than the mere ‘modernization’ of markets and technology.”123 The reckless embrace of the machine was not the only “sickness”124 afflicting modern man. Additional cultural infirmities contagiously spread out from the American “disease.”125 There were the predictable diatribes against mammonism: “Americans understand nothing but the pursuit of riches.”126 “The dollar is all.”127 The American penchant for simplicity and expediency at any cost came under fire. “The Babbitt idealism of the American method terrifies us by its monotony.”128 As a result of “bargain-basement pragmatism,” “purely pretty things . . . pretty without being useful or trying to be, are the rarest thing in America.”129 Standardization wiped out idiosyncrasy and serendipity. “Fordization,” America’s “theology of productivity,”130 “demands that the standardized type hold, and the culture it produces must meet no resistance.”131 Standardization composed just part of an overarching mass conformity that turned America into a giant “antheap”132 and Americans into “one-dimensional” “automatons.”133 Asininely, “they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them.”134 The “American fascism of Babbitts”135 meant that Americans were no freer in reality than citizens living under totalitarian regimes. Rampant materialism ensured that conformity centered on senseless superficiality—a new “culture” of cliché and kitsch asphyxiating the European one of refinement and beauty. An indignant Koestler sneered regarding America’s spiritual vapidity: “I loathe processed bread in cellophane, processed towns of cement and glass, the Bible processed as a comic strip; I loathe crooners and swooners, quizzes and fizzes, neon and subtopia, the Organization man and the Reader’s Digest.” Graham Greene complained of “the eternal adolescence of the American mind.”136 “In America,” reported de Beauvoir, “no one needs to read because no one thinks.”137 Her compatriots agreed that this “dictatorship of illiterate, contemptuous potentates”138 amounted to a “spiritual cancer,”139 a nation of “imbeciles”140 who “approach things energetically but analyze nothing.”141 Even the pronounced religiosity of American society was dismissed as insipid. “But this religion is really little more than another sign of social status.”142 Still today, Gianni Vattimo acknowledges the greater religiosity in American society but dismisses it as simple-minded Manichaeism that self-servingly pronounces America’s superiority.143 American foreign policy also manifested growing barbarism. In the decades following World War II, Europeans widely believed that their continent transformed into a postimperial, postnational, pacifist Europe. By contrast, they saw America becoming increasingly imperial, jingoistic, and militaristic.144 This began immediately after the war when European moralists argued that

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American tactics used to win the war were as morally depraved as those of the enemy. Mounier wrote in 1947: “The calculations at Auschwitz spin with six figures. Whereas the bomb, across the Atlantic, glowing full of American optimism . . . has, for us, already outdistanced those previous horrors.”145 Because of its contemptible record in foreign policy, Günther Grass later (at the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) declared that “the United States was disqualified from making moral judgements about anything.”146 In the wake of the bombings of September 11, 2001, Baudrillard warned that America was leading the world toward “a global police state, total control and the reign of a security terrorism.”147 Italian Nobel laureate Dario Fo claimed that America deserved to be attacked: “The great speculators wallow in an economy that every year kills tens of millions of people with poverty—so what is 20,000 dead in New York? Regardless of who carried out the massacre, this violence is the legitimate daughter of the culture of violence, hunger and inhumane exploitation.”148 While touring interwar America, Dutch historian Johan Huizinga aptly summed up the sentiment of European Ameriphobes of his own generation as well as of those that followed: “We all have something that you lack; we admire your strength but do not envy you. Your instrument of civilization and progress, your big cities and your perfect organization, only make us nostalgic for what is old and quiet, and sometimes your life seems hardly to be worth living, not to speak of your future.”149 Today, similar voices can still be heard. “What have the Americans given the world apart from industrial hamburgers and miserable television soap operas?”150 Throughout the twentieth century, anti-Americanism functioned like a giant pot into which disgruntled European elites on the Left and Right tossed anything and everything they disdained in their societies.151 In his study Why Europe Dislikes America, Andrei Markovits perspicaciously notes: “America is resented for everything and its opposite: It is at once too prurient and too puritanical; too elitist, yet also too egalitarian; too chaotic, but also too rigid; too secular and too religious; too radical and too conservative . . . damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”152 America forced modern Europeans, who yearned to be securely civilized, to revisit their susceptibility to barbarism.153 They were as aware that Europe was prone to Americanization as that America was creating a unique civilization— one simultaneously modern and barbaric. America represented “the Barbarians’ hope and their model,” averred André Suarés in 1928.154 Nineteen years later, Georges Bernanos contended that “no barbarism has been more barbaric or gone farther in destruction.” Americanization had wreaked more havoc than the “invasions of Genghis Khan or Tamburlaine.”155 “We are fatally descending into the last stages of a dark age.”156 In the 1980s, Jacques Thibau likened the

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American scourge to “ethnocide, whereby the personality, existence and vigour of nations, groups and peoples are engulfed, and then replaced by universal manipulation.”157 Twenty years later, Nicole Schley and Sabine Busse charged America with being a chronically “aggressive nation.”158 Their chancellor, in a speech commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II, suggested that only Europe, not America, could assume the moral responsibility for denouncing barbarism in the twenty-first century.159 The German leader was reiterating the widely discussed essay published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2003 in which philosophical superstars Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas contended that Europe represented the world’s best chance for peace. America had disqualified itself as a peacemaker. Sadly, though, Europe has not been able to dodge partial responsibility for what Kadmi-Cohen called L’ ’Abomination américaine (1930). Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu expressed just this point in their Le cancer américain (1931): “The Yankee spirit is in fact nothing other than the systematic exploration, on a gigantic scale, of the most lamentable error Europe ever committed, the rationalist error.” The gravamen had been, since the Enlightenment, to make reason man’s supreme and unchecked sovereign in all matters. “Modern barbarism is reason in its American form.”160 Antonio Gramsci balked at accepting these conservatives’ wholesale pessimism but he nonetheless agreed with their diagnosis that Europe played a generating role in what America had become. The cousin across the Atlantic, he insisted, did not represent a “new type of civilization,” but “an organic extension and an intensification of European civilization, which has simply acquired a new coating in the American climate.”161 Two generations thence, Régis Debray repeated the familiar interpretation of America’s origins and its relationship to Europe. Europeans must be “aware that this bogeyman [Homo americanus] sleeps within each of us.”162 The danger this American “conspiracy against intelligence” posed to Europe, whatever the exact nature of its genesis, figured prominently in the European mind.163 Jean-Paul Sartre so loathed America that he declared an embargo on all relations with this “cradle of a new Fascism.”164 “Watch out! America is a mad dog. Let’s cut every tie that binds us to her lest she bite us and we go mad too.”165 The French foreign minister Hubert Védrine, in his book Les cartes de la France al’heure de la mondialisation (2000), did not go as far as the existentialist guru, but he did summarize America’s ills in his call to oppose the hyperpuissance: “ultraliberal market economy, rejection of the state, nonrepublican individualism, unthinking strengthening of the universal and ‘indispensable’ role of the U.S.A.”166 In the end, Europe did not heed either Frenchman’s counsel. Though some sages hold out hope that Europe can resuscitate while simultaneously shielding itself against Americanization,167 most of Sartre’s earnest successors

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(read serious intellectuals brave enough to meet their existence head on) acknowledge, however painfully, that their beloved land now plays lackey to a barbaric, yet universal, civilization whose dominance and appeal know no foreseeable end.168 Modern Europe, then, has unwittingly begotten a global (but quintessentially American) civilization that has detoured the Old Continent’s path away from the once bona fide “civilized” world of which it was a proud if only secondary part. Worse, America has dragged Europe into the very barbarism from which high-minded Europeans have long and assiduously sought to steer clear. Conclusion: Eurocentrism Reconsidered It would take no Herculean effort to flay the interpretation of frustrated subjective Eurocentrism woven thus far in this study. Naysayers could easily build piles of evidence of European dominance vis-à-vis rivals that cultured Europeans had to know—certainly since 1492 and even before it. Likewise, doubters could selectively quote countless Europeans, often the same ones I invoke, whose remarks convey seemingly indefatigable confidence in European supremacy. Well aware of this, I underscored in the introduction that the present study does not aspire to refute definitively either objective or paradigmatic Eurocentrism. Rather, I have labored to mount a plausible case for unfulfilled subjective Eurocentrism. If my interpretation is credible, however, I believe it should recast the way we think about Eurocentrism in its various guises. The definitions of each type of Eurocentrism delineated in the opening chapter bear repeating. Objective Eurocentrism we defined as real European centrality in world affairs. By paradigmatic Eurocentrism we understood the theory that Europe, or more precisely European civilization, represents the globe’s central axis in terms of geopolitical power and cultural influence. Subjective Eurocentrism we took to mean Europeans’ own confidence that the world pivots around Europe, though we argued that such confidence rarely materialized. Europe’s place in the world is most fully comprehended by exploring the interplay between actual, professed, and doubted Eurocentrism. The coincidence of the three may seem odd, even contradictory, but precisely that peculiar quality makes their relationship to one another worth probing. I have space remaining only to adumbrate the intriguing perspectives such a probe can generate. Rigorous pursuit of them must await future investigation by me or others so moved. Has objective Eurocentrism ever come into being? Paradigmatic Eurocentrism teaches that it has. But why then did the theory, allegedly corroborated by unambiguous evidence, not succeed in begetting firm

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subjective Eurocentrism? Subjectivity may indeed be more difficult to grasp and corral into precise models. But who can seriously gainsay its relevance? Should we not compel ourselves as scholars to integrate so-called hard and soft evidence into our analyses of a subject matter as obviously multifaceted as Eurocentrism? Quentin Skinner has stressed that to grasp the full meaning of what historical actors did we need first to understand what they intended to do.169 It is precisely this dimension that the analysis of subjective Eurocentrism offered here seeks to provide in terms of Europe’s relations with the wider world. The unfulfilled longing to be recognized as the leader of that world profoundly shaped how Europeans acted in it. Once we grant subjectivity its due weight in our assessments, paradigmatic Eurocentrism carries less conviction. As mentioned, the paradigm has gone largely uncontested in scholarly and popular publications, not to mention lecture halls, for over two centuries.170 Only in the last 25 years have anti-Eurocentrists mounted an audible challenge to the reigning theory— and then with mostly objective counterevidence.171 If the argument of this study hits the mark, however, unfulfilled subjective Eurocentrism has overtly accompanied the paradigm, albeit presumably as an unwanted escort, throughout paradigmatic Eurocentrism’s centuries-long march to fame. Even if we abide the understandable reluctance of paradigm defenders to acknowledge aberrations (as Thomas Kuhn has famously shown172), chronic neglect of unsuccessful subjective Eurocentrism bears scrutiny. It is certainly conceivable that the case for objective Eurocentrism was so compelling that it simply overwhelmed flimsy subjective Eurocentrism. It is equally plausible that paradigmatic Eurocentrists deliberately bracketed out “soft” evidence on methodological grounds. I for one, however, can also entertain a scenario in which European intellectuals suppressed indications of failed subjective Eurocentrism for opportunistic reasons. On my reading, paradigmatic Eurocentrism looks like wishful thinking at best and political propaganda at worst. Consider the experience that Europe’s superintendents and producers of knowledge likely encountered if frustrated subjective Eurocentrism was as pronounced as this study contends. They emerged from the Dark Ages with a solid, albeit parochially generated, conviction of possessing timeless truth. In the twilight centuries of the Middle Ages, developments on the ground seemed to augur the union of absolute knowledge and power with Europe as their font. Through intensified contact with Islam, however, Europe’s elites learned of a foe with plainly superior temporal power and more sophisticated knowledge. Once they finally exorcised the specter to the east, they butted up against a new rival to the west apparently destined to outshine Europe in terms of political and cultural sway. That destiny then manifested itself in due time. Curiously, precious few

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European savants embraced either Islamic or American civilization. Instead, the lion’s share stalwartly persisted in professing Europe’s superiority. The rivals’ adherents were ultimately dismissed, with sporadic and qualified praise, as bewitched infidels or ignorant boors who imprudently overlooked Europe’s importance. But this posture left unanswered the question of what Europe’s leaders had done wrong in proselytizing on behalf of their civilization that more successful competitors had done right. Because an obstinate coveting of subjective Eurocentrism precluded conceding authentic greatness to non-Europeans, Europe’s leaders must have inferred that rivals advanced their interests with brute power and manipulative propaganda. Indeed, we frequently came across just such innuendo in the foregoing chapters. It seems only natural that in such a context, Europeans would rationalize employment of similar tactics to invigorate the appeal of European civilization. That Europeans may have themselves been conniving, power-hungry hypocrites should shock none but the most naïve among us. I seek to underscore that the theories of paradigmatic Eurocentrism, on the one hand, and of frustrated subjective Eurocentrism, on the other, suggest profoundly differing motivations for the hypocrisy. From the angle of the former, Europeans sought to maintain power and influence that they already possessed; from the latter, to gain power and influence perceived to be wanting. From the perspective of the former, Europeans considered themselves superior to rivals; from the latter, inferior (at least in terms of the achievement of global dominance). From the outlook of the former, Europeans condescended to the non-European out of a lack of appreciation of his best qualities; from the latter, they did so despite full appreciation of these qualities. From the view of the former, the “ugly” European was someone smugly contented with his own civilization; from the latter, someone uneasily fearful of rival civilizations. These diverging interpretations harbor far-reaching consequences for how we choose to understand Europe’s experience with the wider world. We cannot attend to all of them here. But, as an example, let us train the eye on the European conception and construction of Otherness. Paradigmatic Eurocentrism views putative European arrogance vis-à-vis non-Europeans by and large as understandable, if not ultimately justifiable. Indubitably acting as history’s protagonists, Europe’s elites naturally, if unconscionably, developed supercilious attitudes toward those for whom they paved the path of progress. Moreover, the shimmering luminosity of their own stupendous accomplishments blinded Europeans to the noble characteristics and achievements of other civilizations. From the angle of frustrated subjective Eurocentrism, European elites recognized, even envied, the exploits of non-Europeans. Their arrogance, then, was feigned in an effort to cloak their shameful diffidence. Pretentiously and spitefully they exaggerated the shortcomings of their foes in

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order to distract attention from their own faults. Vindictively they belittled other peoples in an effort to undermine their strength and make them less imposing rivals. They were deliberately mendacious and justified their mendacity to themselves as a necessary evil in a struggle for global dominance that Europe was more often than not losing. In this light, it is interesting to recall that Nietzsche read the history of European thought as a litany of mendacities crafted to advance the interests of the mediocre over those of the outstanding.173 I in no way mean to suggest that the self-declared Anti-Christ shared the view put forth in these pages. In point of fact, however, he did bemoan his civilization’s weakness and describe Europe as standing before its potential greatness rather than aloft it. As quoted in Chapter 2, he optimistically asserted: From now on there will be more favorable preconditions for more comprehensive forms of dominion, whose like has never yet existed. And even this is not the most important thing; the possibility has been established for the production of international racial unions whose task will be to rear a master race, the future “masters of the earth”; a new, tremendous aristocracy, based on the severest self-legislation, in which the will of philosophical men of power and artist tyrants will be made to endure for millennia—a higher kind of man who, thanks to their superiority in will, knowledge, riches, and influence, employ democratic Europe as their most pliant and supple instrument for getting hold of the destinies of the earth, so as to work as artists upon “man” himself.174

Nietzsche sired what we today call postmodernism. In his version, as well as in those of many of his progeny ranging from Heidegger to Derrida, postmodernism has been heralded not only as a categorical detection and correction of hitherto philosophical error and folly. It has also been professed as a singular Weltanschauung that harbors the potential to catapult humankind to a yet unachieved level of perspicacity and greatness. This, for example, is what Heidegger had in mind when he taught that deep “questioning builds a way” out of the limitations imposed by everyday consciousness into the fullness of a wider awareness.175 Despite postmodernism’s claim to singularity, it is, in at least one respect, of a piece with numerous preceding European ideologies that claimed to be harbingers of advancement. Normative theories emanating from the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Industrialization all celebrated themselves, even while they sometimes paid homage to the past, as engines of progress fated to surmount erstwhile obstacles and inaugurate brave new eras. Paradigmatic Eurocentrism views these prophets of progress as members of a vanguard confidently leading

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humankind forward; the perspective of failed subjective Eurocentrism, as wistful seers longing to be part of such a vanguard. Progress in the former represents the product of demonstrated success; in the latter, the outgrowth of perceived failure. From the one angle, postmodernism seems to be yet another set of pioneering ideas emanating from the most advanced civilization; from the other angle, further self-criticism coupled with longing for greatness on the part of European intellectuals frustrated with Europe’s place in the world. To the extent that postmodernism represents Europe’s ticket to newfound greatness, it has served Europe in its quest for subjective Eurocentrism no better than previous forward-looking ideas. As the twenty-first century unfolds, both America and, arguably, Islam have exploited Europe’s freshest philosophy to their advantage while Europe watches its two great historic rivals saunter past it. Postmodernism comprises many teachings, but one holds that we should be bound by no moral strictures because they possess no absolute, transcendental authority. We should, to quote Nietzsche, dare to venture “beyond good and evil.”176 America, surely since September 11 but well before, has advanced its neo-imperial interests by any means necessary against indignant outcries of Europeans committed to maintaining a moral compass based on universally recognized human rights. At least since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, but also earlier if less successfully and conspicuously, Islam—more precisely, some of its apologists—has spat in the face of European human rights declarations and waged its struggle against global Westernization (read Americanization) with terror in various guises. Both America and Islam appear to throw their touted core principles to the wind when it serves their interests to do so. Europe, ironically the original source of postmodern “relativism,” meanwhile cautiously clings to Enlightenment principles in a quixotic attempt to anchor itself (and humanity) in the choppy moral waters of a postmodern world. Sensationalist headlines from America and the Middle East dominate the airwaves, while European news garners little notice, unless it happens to be linked, as in the case of opposition to the Iraq War or the 2006 Danish cartoon debate, to Europe’s rivals. Does Europe teeter on the precipice of postmodern secondarity? Has it yet again put forth a potentially civilizing message that barbarian civilizations distort and abuse to push Europe to the margins? And is Europe again complicit in this mounting barbarism by failing to impose its superior ways on the postmodern barbarians? These profoundly unsettling questions and worries, long in the making according to this study, form Europe’s present fragile ego. This solicitude, I submit, lies just below the surface of the raging debate over how Europe is to position and conduct itself in a world that appears to be increasingly preoccupied with the supposed clash between American and Islamic civilization.

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Notes

1

Introduction

1. Quoted in New York Times (March 1, 2002). 2. Christian Meier, From Athens to Auschwitz, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 1. 3. L’Express (February 7, 2002). 4. Umberto Eco, “An Uncertain Europe Between Rebirth and Decline,” in Daniel Levy, Max Pensky, and John Torpey (eds.), Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations after the Iraq War (London: Verso, 2005), p. 20. 5. Quoted in Max Berley, “Le Modest Proposal” Foreign Policy (January–February 2003): 80. Bush remark quoted in William Odom and Robert Dujaric, America’s Inadvertent Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 51. 6. Stehpen Haseler, The Super-Rich (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), p. 169. 7. Deutsche Welle (June 23, 2005). 8. Quoted in New York Times (May 2, 2004). 9. Quoted in The Economist (May 31, 2003). 10. Deutsche Welle (June 15, 2005). 11. Laurent Cohen-Tanugi, “The End of Europe?” Foreign Affairs (November/December 2005): 58. 12. Claus Leggewie, Amerikas Welt: Die USA in unseren Köpfen (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 2000), p. 29. 13. Quoted in ibid., p. 26. 14. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). 15. Agnes Heller, “Europe: An Epilogue?” in Brian Nelson, David Roberts, and Walter Veit (eds.), The Idea of Europe: Problems of National and Transnational Identity (New York: Berg, 1992), p. 22. 16. Walter Laqueur, The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent (New York: St. Martin’s, 2007). 17. The Economist (March 17–23, 2007). 18. Ibid (June 4–10, 2005). 19. Ray Hudson and Allan Williams (eds.), Divided Europe (London: Sage, 1998); John Newhouse, Europe Adrift (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997); Ronald Tiersky (ed.), Euro-Skepticism: A Reader (Lanham: Roman & Littlefield, 2001); John Redwood,

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20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

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Superpower Struggles: Mighty America, Faltering Europe, Rising Asia (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Claire Berlinski, Menace in Europe: Why the Continent’s Crisis Is America’s, Too (New York: Random House, 2007); Laqueur, Last. Chirac and Prodi both quoted in The Economist (April 26, 2003). Quoted in Foreign Policy (September–October 2004): 16. Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, “Unsere Erneuerung. Nach dem Krieg: Die Wiedergeburt Europas” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (March 31, 2003). The other letters are reprinted in Levy, et al., Old. See, for instance, K.N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); John Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); R. Bin Wong, China Transformed (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995); and André Gunder Frank, ReOrient (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Joseph Nye, “Soft Power” Foreign Policy 80 (Fall 1990): 153–71. Victor Lieberman, “Introduction” to Lieberman (ed.), Beyond Binary Histories: Re-Imagining Eurasia to c. 1830 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 5. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). See the endnote 23 above for other anti-Eurocentrists. See, for instance, Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006). See Mathew Melko, “Mainstream Civilizations” Comparative Civilizations Review 44 (Spring 2001): 55–71. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 43. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); or Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 24–77. Max Weber, “ ‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” in Edward Shils and Henry Finch (eds.), The Methodology of the Social Sciences (Glencoe: Free Press, 1949), pp. 72–111; Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996); Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garret Barden and John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1975); and Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1971). Weber, “ ‘Objectivity,’ ” pp. 72–111. See, for example, Said, Orientalism. See Peter Burke’s thoughtful conceptualization of Europe, which my own understanding parallels, in “Did Europe Exist before 1700?” History of European Ideas 1 (1980): 21–29. Anthony Pagden, Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East and West (New York: Random House, 2008), pp. 5–6, argues that a sense of Europeanness has existed since the fifth entury BCE.

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36. Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Knopf, 2007) stresses the strong ties binding America and Britain. Though I recognize that Britain’s affinities to America are greater than the Continent’s, I point up salient differences that connect the United Kingdom to Europe more than America. 37. See, for example, Richard Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 38. Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, trans. John Ciardi (New York: Mentor, 1982), vol. 4, pp. 145–47. 39. Robert Solomon, History and Human Nature: A Philosophical Review of European Philosophy and Culture, 1750–1850 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. xvii. 40. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), vol. 8, pp. 728–29. 41. Montesquieu and Voltaire quoted on p. 65, Rousseau on p. 82 of Derek Heater, The Idea of European Unity (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992); Gibbon on p. 353 of Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium. 42. Edmund Burke, “First Letter on a Regicide Peace,” R.B. McDowell (ed.), in Paul Langford (ed.), The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), vol. 9, p. 250. 43. Quoted in Biancamaria Fontana, “The Napoleonic Empire and the Europe of Nations,” in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 127. 44. Quoted in Stefan Elbe, Europe: A Nietzschean Perspective (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 12. 45. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London: Macmillan, 1920), p. 3. 46. Lucien Febvre, L’Europe. Genèse d’une civilization (Paris: Perrin, 1999), p. 44. 47. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Diversity of Europe: Inheritance and Future,” in Hans-Georg Gadamer (ed.), Education, Poetry and History: Applied Hermeneutics, trans. Lawrence Schmidt and Monica Reuss (New York: SUNY Press, 1992), p. 224. 48. Derrida, Heading, pp. 82–83. 49. Umberto Eco makes the same point in “Uncertain,” p. 15. 50. See George Holmes, Europe: Hierarchy and Revolt 1320–1450 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 2. 51. See Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters 1680–1750 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 3. 52. Peter Gay, Schnitzler’s Century (New York: Norton, 2002), p. 5.

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1. Rémi Brague, Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization, trans. Samuel Lester (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2000), pp. 133–34. Etienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. James

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

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Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 219 also stresses Europe’s unprecedented interest in other cultures. Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss, Essays and Lectures by Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 72–73. Brague, Eccentric, p. 25. Matthew Arnold labeled them “Hebraism” and “Hellenism.” To this day, Greeks say they are “going to Europe” when they travel to Italy, France, etc. See ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 54. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., p. 55. Ibid., p. 128. Ibid., pp. 35, 43, and 35. Ibid., p. 128–31. Ibid., p. 130. Ibid., p. 99. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 114–16. Ibid., p. 147. Ibid., p. 144. Ibid., pp. 133–34. Ibid., pp. 130–33. See Peter J. Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 431–59. Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity AD 200–1000 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 301 and 60. Quoted in ibid., p. 56. Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 114–50. Brown, Rise, p. 133. Ibid., p. 219. Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Europe, trans. Janet Lloyd (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 22. Brown, Rise, pp. 255–58. Peter Rietbergen, Europe: A Cultural History (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 98–100; and Brown, Rise, pp. 276–98. Le Goff, Birth, pp. 32–33. Brown, Rise, p. 282. John France, The Crusades and the Expansion of Catholic Christendom, 1000–1714 (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 15. See Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). R.I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

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34. See Dominique Barthélemy, et al., “Debate: The Feudal Revolution” P&P 152 (1996), 155 (1997). 35. See Franco Cardini, Europe and Islam, trans. Caroline Beamish (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 49–50. 36. As one contemporary quoted in France, Crusades, p. 3 called it. 37. R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), p. 13. 38. Le Goff, Birth, p. 150. 39. Charles Homer Haskins, Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927). 40. J.C. Russell, “Population in Europe, 500–1500,” in Carlo M. Cipolla (ed.), The Fontana Economic History of Europe: Volume I, The Middle Ages (London: Collins, 1972), pp. 37–41. 41. Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 292. 42. Moore, First, pp. 180–88. 43. P. Stafford, Unification and Conquest: A Political and Social History of England in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (London: Edward Arnold, 1989). 44. G. Loud, The Age of Robert Guiscard: Southern Italy and the Norman Conquest (London: Longman, 2000). 45. D. Lomax, The Reconquest of Spain (London: Longman, 1978). 46. Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (London: Penguin, 1977). 47. Bartlett, Making, p. 107; also see pp. 51–59. 48. Moore, First, p. 31. 49. Bartlett, Making, p. 293. 50. Karl Leyser, Communications and Power in Medieval Europe: The Gregorian Revolution and Beyond (London: Hambledon & London, 2003). 51. Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 52. Moore, First, p. 11. 53. France, Crusades, pp. 35–36. 54. Rietbergen, Europe, pp. 152–53. 55. Bartlett, Making, p. 250. 56. Ibid., pp. 5–18. 57. Ibid., pp. 255–58. 58. Ibid., pp. 288–91. 59. France, Crusades, p. 3. 60. Rietbergen, Europe, pp. 118–20. 61. Le Goff, Birth, p. 81. 62. Moore, First, p. 172. 63. Ibid., p. 181. It is interesting to note that the word “Europe” begins to appear more frequently in medieval texts in the thirteenth century. See Peter Burke, “Did Europe Exist before 1700?” The History of European Ideas 1(1980): 23. 64. France, Crusades, p. 6.

166 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

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Moore, First, p. 291. Bartlett, Making, p. 254. Le Goff, Birth, p. 4. Quoted in Rietbergen, Europe, p. 103. Quoted in Moore, First, pp. 4–5. Quoted in Le Goff, Birth, p. 109. Ibid., p. 150. Moore, First, p. 2. Le Goff, Birth, p. 80. Quoted in Jacques Le Goff, Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993), p. 12. Ibid., p. 199. Charles R. Mack, Looking at the Renaissance: Essays toward a Contextual Appreciation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), p. 22. Quoted in Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity, trans. Michael Barber (New York: Continuum, 1995), p. 24. Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 21 and 23. Quoted in Richard Rorty, “Romantics, Sophists, and Systematic Philosophers,” paper presented at the David Hall Memorial Conference, Trinity University, San Antonio, May 23, 2003, p. 4. Quoted in ibid., p. 3. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1929), p. 63. Plato, “Timaeus,” in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett (New York: Random House, 1937), pp. 31b, 30a, and 48a. David Hall and Roger Ames, Anticipating China: Thinking through the Narratives of Chinese and Western Culture (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), p. 12. David Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View (New York: Harmony Books, 1991), pp. 55–68. Hall and Ames, Anticipating China, p. 80. Cicero. De Republica, De Legibus, trans. Clinton Walker Keyes. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), vol. 26, p. 329 (De Legibus, I,x,28–30). Quoted in Joseph Thompson, “Cultural Relativism or Covert Universalism? The Metaethics of Multiculturalism” Comparative Civilizations Review 53 (Fall 2005): 34. Quoted in Rietbergen, Europe, p. 50. See Edwin Hatch, The Influence of Greek Ideas on Christianity (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957). Jerome Murphy-O’Conner, Paul His Story (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 1–6. Tarnas, Passion, p. 103. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), p. 3. St. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Modern Library, 1950), pp. 247 and 254.

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94. Hall and Ames, Anticipating China, p. 86. 95. Tarnas, Passion, p. 108. 96. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, trans. English Dominican Fathers (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1924), Book I, ch. 7. 97. Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What Is Enlightenment?, trans. Lewis Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976), p. 85. 98. Quoted in Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 323. 99. Ibid., p. 331. 100. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Reason in History, trans. Robert Hartman (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), p. 13. 101. Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology, trans. William Sayers (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 36–39. 102. Quoted in Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963), p. 31. 103. David Hume, The Philosophical Works of David Hume, T.H. Green and T.H. Grose (eds.) (London: Longman, Green, 1882), vol. 3, p. 271. 104. Quoted in Peter Gay, The Enlightenment, an Interpretation: The Science of Freedom (New York: Norton, 1969), p. 250. 105. Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau (New York: Modern Library, 1945), vol. 1, pp. 416 and 431. 106. Quoted in Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 122. 107. Quoted in Robert Solomon, History and Human Nature: A Philosophical Review of European Philosophy and Culture, 1750–1850 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 269. 108. David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Nature, L.A. Selby-Bigge (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), Book I, sect. viii. 109. Quoted in Solomon, History, p. 27. 110. Taylor, Sources, p. 330. On Perpetual Peace is the title of a tract Kant penned in 1795. 111. Quoted in Taylor, Sources, p. 353. 112. Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 359. 113. Solomon, History, p. xii. 114. Quoted in Taylor, Sources, p. 371. 115. Quoted in Solomon, History, p. 299. 116. Quoted in Barzun, Dawn, p. 478. 117. Quoted in Solomon, History, p. 268. 118. This point is developed at length in Leon Chai, Romantic Theory: Forms of Reflexivity in the Revolutionary Era (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 119. Quoted in Taylor, Sources, p. 379. 120. Quoted in ibid., p. 378.

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121. Quoted in Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 7. 122. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J.B. Baillie (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 81–82. 123. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 117. Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) too resisted universalism. 124. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 181. 125. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 126. See Nietzsche, Beyond, pp. 48 and 201–39 127. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. R.J. Hollingdale and Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), 504. 128. Ibid, p. 226; see p. 397 in particular for praise of Alexander (and Caesar). 129. Nietzsche, Will, p. 512. 130. Berlin, Romanticism, p. 3. 131. Dubuisson, Western Construction, p. 104. 132. Harold James, “Foreign Policy Turned Inside Out,” in Daniel Levy, Max Pensky, and John Torpey (eds.), Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations after the Iraq War (London: Verso, 2005), p. 60. 133. Paul Cartledge, Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past (New York: Overlook, 2004). 134. See Anthony Pagden, Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East and West (New York: Random House, 2008), pp. 61–68. For a more thorough definition of universal empire in antiquity, see Fowden, Empire, p. 7. 135. Quoted in Anthony Pagden, Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, from Greece to the Present (New York: Modern Library, 2001), p. 13. 136. These are the words of Livy, quoted in Pagden, Worlds, p. 103. 137. Dante Alighieri, Monarchy and Three Political Letters, trans. David Nicholl (New York: Garland, 1972), I, 16. 138. Quoted in Pagden, Worlds, p. 96. 139. Ibid., p. 137. 140. Quoted in ibid., p. 118. 141. Walter Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1965), pp. 2–86. 142. Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), p. 27. 143. R.W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (New York: Penguin, 1981), p. 24. 144. Southern, Western Society, pp. 30–31. 145. See Rietbergen, Europe, p. 151. 146. France, Crusades, p. 59. 147. See Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume One: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 7–16.

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148. Qouted in Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment (London: Penguin, 1984), p. 71. 149. Delanty, Inventing, p. 71. 150. Quoted in Anthony Pagden, “Introduction,” in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 16. 151. See Denis de Rougemont, The Idea of Europe, trans. Norbert Guterman (New York: Macmillan, 1966). Passages from Condorcet, Bentham, and Hugo can be found respectively on p. 168, 185, and 266. Hegel’s remark comes from Hegel, Reason, p. 24. 152. Pagden, Peoples, p. xii. 153. V.G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind, European Attitudes towards the Outside World in the Imperial Age (London: Trinity Press, 1969), p. 3. 154. See Pagden, Peoples, pp. 82–98. 155. Quoted in ibid., p. 134. 156. Quoted in Solomon, History, p. 219. 157. Quoted in Barzun, Dawn, p. 483. 158. Quoted in Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 179. Also see pp. 99–103. 159. For details see Sandra Halperin, War and Social Change in Modern Europe: The Great Transformation Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 61–64. 160. Quoted in Hans Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), p. 81. 161. Derek Heater, The Idea of European Unity (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), p. 2. 162. Delanty, Inventing, pp. 111–12. 163. Reported in “Weekend Edition,” National Public Radio (May 1, 2004). 164. Rietbergen, Europe, p. 480. 165. Timothy Garton Ash, “Europe’s Endangered Liberal Order,” in A New Europe? (New York: Foreign Affairs, 1998), p. 67.

3

The Discovery of Islamic Superiority (1095–1453)

1. R.W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1962), pp. 3–4. 2. Christopher Tyerman, God’s War: A New History of the Crusades (Cambridge: Belknap, 2006), pp. 912–14. 3. John France, The Crusades and the Expansion of Catholic Christendom, 1000–1714 (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 21–25 and 39; Tyerman, God’s War, pp. 62–78 makes a similar argument about Urban II’s grandiose ambitions. 4. Thomas Goldstein, Dawn of Modern Science: From the Arabs to Leonardo da Vinci (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), pp. 113–14. 5. Bertold Spuler, The Mongol Period, trans. F.R.C. Bagley (Princeton: Marcus Wiener, 1994).

170

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6. K.N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 7. Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 8. William McNeill, for instance, speaks of an “equilibrium among civilizations” during the period: A World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. vii. 9. Elizabeth Fowden, “Sharing Holy Places” Common Knowledge 8 (2002): 124–46. 10. Jane Hathaway, “Introduction” to Bertold Spuler, The Age of the Caliphs, trans. F.R.C. Bagley (Princeton: Marcus Wiener, 1995), p. xvi. 11. Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity AD 200–1000 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 184. 12. Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 6 and 10. 13. Quoted in Andrew Wheatcroft, Infidels: A History of the Conflict between Christendom and Islam (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 161. 14. See J.A. Brundage, The Crusades: Motives and Achievements (Boston: Heath, 1964). 15. Quoted in Tyerman, God’s War, p. xiv. 16. See ibid., pp. 124–64. Raymond’s quotation comes from p. 31. The cannibalism is reported in Wheatcroft, Infidels, p. 171. 17. Jonathan Phillips, The Second Crusade: Extending the Frontiers of Christendom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 18. Quoted in Tyerman, God’s War, p. 336. 19. See M.C. Lyons and D.E.P. Jackson, Saladin: The Politics of Holy War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 20. Tyerman, God’s War, p. 374. 21. France, Crusades, p. 161. 22. Tyerman, God’s War, pp. 350–54. 23. See Donald Queller and Thomas Madden, The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople 1201–4 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). 24. Carol Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 26. 25. Sir Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951–54), vol. 3. 26. Hathaway, “Introduction,” p. xix. 27. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years (New York: Scribner, 1995), p. 103. 28. Franco Cardini, Europe and Islam, trans. Caroline Beamish (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 105. 29. Kate Fleet, European and Islamic Trade in the Early Ottoman State: The Merchants of Genoa and Turkey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 12. 30. France, Crusades, pp. 226–27. 31. Cardini, Europe, p. 77. 32. Quoted in Tyerman, God’s War, p. xiv. 33. France, Crusades, p. 195. 34. See James Chambers, The Devil’s Horsemen: The Mongol Invasion of Europe (London: Phoenix Press, 2001).

Notes 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66.

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Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Civilizations (New York: Free Press, 2001), p. 112. France, Crusades, pp. 239–40. See C. Dawson, The Mongol Mission (London: Sheed & Ward, 1955). John Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 223. Peter Rietbergen, Europe: A Cultural History (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 137. Ibid., pp. 108–10. Quoted in Southern, Islam, p. 68. Dorothy Vaughan, Europe and the Turk: A Pattern of Alliances 1350–1700 (Liverpool: University Press Liverpool, 1954), p. 18. Dennis Hupchick, The Balkans: From Constantinople to Communism (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 108. Ibid., p. 104. Vaughan, Europe and Turk, pp. 21–22. Tyerman, God’s War, p. 857. Wheatcroft, Infidels, p. 192. See N. Housley, The Later Crusades: From Lyons to the Alcazar 1274–1580 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Fleet, Trade, pp. 7–8. Quoted in Cardini, Europe, p. 128 Quoted in Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Europe, trans. Janet Lloyd (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 188. Quoted in Palmira Brummett, Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery (New York: SUNY Press, 1994), p. 26. Quoted in George Holmes, Europe: Hierarchy and Revolt 1320–1450 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 180. Vaughan, Europe and Turk, p. 79. Latin translation is “shield and defense of all Christians.” J.H. Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance: Discovery, Exploration, and Settlement 1450 to 1650 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 24. Hupchick, Balkans, p. 170. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe, p. 102. Robert Schwoebel, The Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turk (1453–1517) (New York: St. Martin’s, 1969), pp. 3–18. Hupchick, Balkans, p. 106. Ibid., p. 129. Roderick Conway Morris, “Caliph of All” Times Literary Supplement 5365 (January 27, 2006): 9. Vaughan, Europe and Turk, p. 26. Hupchick, Balkans, p. 105. Abu-Lughod, European Hegemony, pp. 12, 4, and ix. See Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 101–08. Tyerman, God’s War, pp. 2–3.

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67. See also Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World, Vol. III of Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, trans. Sian Reynolds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 93. 68. Abu-Lughod, European Hegemony, p. 12. 69. Parry, Reconnaissance, p. 41. 70. David Abulafia, “The Role of Trade in Muslim-Christian Contact During the Middle Ages,” in Dionisius Agius and Richard Hitchcock (eds.), The Arab Influence in Medieval Europe (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 1994), p. 1. 71. Robert Kern, The Regions of Spain (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995), p. 21. 72. Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 80. 73. Abulafia, “Role of Trade,” p. 1. 74. John Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 103. 75. Rietbergen, Europe, p. 136. 76. See J.H. Kramers, “Geography and Commerce,” in Sir Thomas Arnold and Alfred Guillaume (eds.), The Legacy of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934). 77. Hobson, Eastern, p. 119. 78. Parry, Reconnaissance, p. 44. 79. Hobson, Eastern, p. 42. 80. Quoted in Tolan, Saracens, p. 86. 81. See Maria Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), pp. 39–41. 82. Tyerman, God’s War, p. 847. 83. John Gilcrest, The Church and Economic Activity in the Middle Ages (London: Macmillan, 1969), p. 83. 84. Charles Burnett, “An Islamic Divinatory Technique in Medieval Spain,” in Agius and Hitchcock (eds.), Arab Influence, p. 106. 85. Eva Lapiedra Guitierrez, Como los Musulmanes llamaban a los Cristianos Hispanicos (Alicante, Spain: Institut de Culture “Juan Gil-Albert,” 1997), pp. 189–247. 86. Parry, Reconnaissance, pp. 26–27. 87. Quoted in Tolan, Saracens, p. 86. 88. Ibid., p. 97. 89. Quoted in ibid., p. 160. 90. Ibid., p. 190. 91. Quoted in Linda Darling, “Rethinking Europe and the Islamic World in the Age of Exploration” Journal of Early Modern History 2/3 (1998): 229. 92. Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 206–10. 93. Quoted in Vaughan, Europe and Turk, p. 52. La Broquière story related on p. 51. 94. Hupchick, Balkans, pp. 152–53. 95. Ibid., p. 151.

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96. Cardini, Europe, p. 167. 97. The capture of Saragossa by the Aragonese in 1118 was also important. 98. Josep Fontana, The Distorted Past: A Reinterpretation of Europe, trans. Colin Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 39. 99. Southern, Islam, pp. 8–9. 100. Quoted in Jacques Le Goff, Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 19. 101. See Menocal, Arabic Role, pp. 61 and 116–22. 102. Cardini, Europe, p. 88. 103. R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), p. 188. 104. Montgomery Watt, A History of Islamic Spain (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1965), p. 172. 105. R.I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 148. 106. M.M. Sharif (ed.), A History of Muslim Philosophy (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1966), p. 1367. 107. S.M. Ghazanfar, “Scholastic Economics and Arab Scholars” Diogenes 39/154 (April–June 1991): 128. 108. Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 61. 109. Lynn White, Jr., “Medieval Borrowings from Further Asia” in O.B. Hardison (ed.), Medieval and Renaissance Studies 5 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), p. 4. 110. Ibid., p. 66. 111. See Catherine Wilson, “Modern Western Philosophy,” in Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Oliver Leaman (eds.), History of Islamic Philosophy Part II (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 1013–15. 112. Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 11. 113. Quoted in Le Goff, Intellectuals, p. 19. 114. Cardini, Europe, pp. 102–03. 115. Rietbergen, Europe, p. 162. 116. Toby Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 1995), p. 208. 117. Ernest Moody, “Galileo and Avempace: Dynamics of the Leaning Tower Experiments,” in Philip Wiener and A. Nolands (eds.), Roots of Scientific Thought: A Cultural Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1957), pp. 176–206. 118. Ibid., pp. 209–10. 119. Goldstein, Dawn, p. 116. 120. Huff, Rise, p. 243. 121. Eugene Weber, “The Western Tradition,” Program 16 (Santa Barbara, CA: Annenberg/CPB Project, 1989). 122. Goldstein, Dawn, p. 100. 123. Huff, Rise, p. 211. 124. Ibid., pp. 176–77.

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125. James Spedding, Robert Ellis, and Douglas Heath (eds.), The Works of Francis Bacon, (St. Clair Shores, MI: Scholarly Press, 1976), vol. XI, p. 312. Paracelsus did turn out in the end to be superior to Galen. 126. Huff, Rise, p. 344. 127. Donald Hill, “Arabic Fine Technology and its Influence on European Mechanical Engineering,” in Agius and Hitchcock (eds.), Arab Influence, pp. 29–37. Also see in the same volume Jim Allan, “The Influence of the Metalwork of the Arab Mediterranean on that of Medieval Europe,” pp. 44–62. Keep in mind that I have not even mentioned the enormous Chinese scientific transmission, including such things as paper, gunpowder, and compass, that reached Europe along the Mongol routes. See Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954). 128. Huff, Rise, p. 187. 129. George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981). 130. Huff, Rise, p. 237. 131. Cardini, Europe, p. 101. 132. Ibid., p. 40. 133. Menocal, Arabic Role, pp. xi-xv, 32–33, 63, and 88. 134. Philip Kennedy, “The Muslim Sources of Dante?” in Agius and Hitchcock (eds.), Arab Influence, pp. 76–77. 135. Metlitzki, Matter of Araby, pp. 98–99. 136. The first presentation of this highly controversial thesis came from Miguel Asín Palacios, Islam and the Divine Comedy, trans. Harold Sunderland (London: J. Murray, 1926). 137. Frances Wood, Did Marco Polo Go to China? (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996). 138. Huff, Rise, p. 99. 139. Cardini, Europe, p. 101. 140. John Tolan, Petrus Alfonsi and the Medieval Reader (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), p. xiii. 141. Quoted in Metlitzki, Matter of Araby, p. 13. 142. Quoted in Southern, Islam, p. 59. 143. Quoted in Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1948), p. 487. 144. Kennedy, “Muslim Sources,” p. 73. 145. See Southern, Islam, p. 55. 146. See Hichem Djait, Europe and Islam, trans. Peter Heinegg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 107–30. 147. Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927). 148. For analysis of other factors see Huff, Rise, and Alister McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). 149. Menocal, Arabic Role, p. 147. 150. R.W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (New York: Penguin, 1981), p. 22.

Notes 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168.

169. 170.

171.

172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181.

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McGrath, Intellectual Origins, pp. 119–23 and 168. Tolan, Saracens, p. 125. For details, see Southern, Islam, pp. 14–33. Tolan, Petrus, pp. xiii–xv. Southern, Islam, pp. 68–73. Quoted in Tolan, Saracens, pp. 225–27. Cardini, Europe, p. 99. Russell, History, pp. 486–87. Quoted in Southern, Islam, p. 62. Cardini, Europe, p. 100. Quoted in Keith Thomson, Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 1. Quoted in Le Goff, Intellectuals, p. 19. Quoted in Tolan, Petrus, p. 44. Quoted in Tina Stiefel, The Intellectual Revolution in Twelfth-Century Europe (London: Croom Helm, 1985), pp. 78 and 80. Menocal, Arabic Role, p. 43. Quoted in M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 12. Quoted in Tina Stiefel, “Science, Reason and Faith in the Twelfth Century: The Cosmologists’ Attack on Tradition” Journal of European Studies 6 (1976): 7. Raymond Klibansky, “The School of Chartres,” in Marshall Clagett, Gaines Post, and Robert Reynolds (eds.), Twelfth-Century Europe and the Foundations of Modern Science (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1980), p. 8. Le Goff, Intellectuals, pp. 66–71. Oliver Leaman, “Averroës and the West,” in Mourad Wahba and Mona Abousenna (eds.), Averroës and the Enlightenment (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1996), p. 65. Edward Grant, “Science and Theology in the Middle Ages,” in David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers (eds.), God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 52. Quoted in Le Goff, Intellectuals, p. 42. Huff, Rise, pp. 190–91. Quoted in Grant, “Science,” pp. 54–55. Huff, Rise, p. 192. Menocal, Arabic Role, p. 130. Quoted in John Randall, The Making of the Modern Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940), p. 96. Eugene Myers, Arabic Thought and the Western World in the Golden Age of Islam (New York: Ungar, 1964), p. 16. Menocal, Arabic Role, p. 36. Will Durant, The Story of Civilisation: The Age of Faith (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1950), p. 954. Goldstein, Dawn, p. 125.

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182. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, trans. English Dominican Fathers (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1924), Book I, ch. 7. 183. Stiefel, Revolution, pp. 104–05. 184. Tolan, Saracens, pp. 239–45. 185. David Burr, “Anti-Christ and Islam in Medieval Franciscan Exegesis,” in John Tolan (ed.), Medieval Perceptions of Islam (New York: Garland, 1996), p. 147. 186. Quoted in Tolan, Saracens, p. 215. 187. Quoted in ibid., p. xiii. 188. Quoted in ibid., p. 249. See pp. 245–49 for a summary of the Five Letters. 189. See Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakli, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). 190. See Menocal, Arabic Role, pp. 4–5. 191. Quoted in John R. Hale, Renaissance Europe 1480–1520 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 227. 192. Quoted in Giorgio de Santillana (ed.), The Age of Adventure: The Renaissance Philosophers (New York: Mentor Books, 1956), p. 17.

4

Lingering Asian Superiority (1453–1776)

1. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years (New York: Scribner, 1995), p. 13. 2. Also see David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York: Norton, 1999), p. 31. 3. William McNeill, The Rise of the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). 4. Angus Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1–2030 AD (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 69. 5. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974). 6. E.L. Jones, The European Miracle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 7. John Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 137–40. 8. K.N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 99. 9. R. Bin Wong, China Transformed (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). 10. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 11. André Gunder Frank, ReOrient (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), strikes a prudent balance between the vying schools.

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177

12. See, for instance, William H. McNeill, “The Rise of the West after Twenty-Five Years” Journal of World History 1 (1990): 1–21; or Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 87–310. 13. See Charles King, The Black Sea: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 11–34. 14. See Palmira Brummett, Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery (New York: SUNY Press, 1994). 15. G.R. Elton. Reformation Europe 1517–1559 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 112–13. 16. Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern World Society 1815–1830 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 287. 17. Andrew Wheatcroft, Infidels: A History of the Conflict between Christendom and Islam (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 20. 18. Ibid., pp. 32–35. 19. Johnson, Birth, p. 140. 20. For details, see Wheatcroft, Infidels, pp. 29–31. 21. Molly Greene, “The Ottomans in the Mediterranean,” in Virginia Aksan and Daniel Goffman (eds.), The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 110–11. 22. Quoted in J.H. Elliot, Europe Divided 1559–1598 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 31; Khevenhu˝ller mentioned on p. 128. 23. Ibid., pp. 30–35. 24. Quoted in Lucette Valensi, The Birth of the Despot: Venice and the Sublime Porte, trans. Arthur Denner (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 28. 25. Ibid., pp. 29, 51, and 14–15. 26. John R. Hale, Renaissance Europe 1480–1520 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 72 27. Quoted in Franco Cardini, Europe and Islam, trans. Caroline Beamish (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 144. 28. Hale, Renaissance, p. 62 29. Brummett, Seapower, p. 10. 30. Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), p. 37. 31. Cardini, Europe, p. 154. 32. Valensi, Birth, pp. 49–50. 33. See R. Murphy, Ottoman Warfare 1500–1700 (London: UCL Press, 1999). 34. John France, The Crusades and the Expansion of Catholic Christendom 1000–1714 (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 306. 35. Elton, Reformation, pp. 51, 89, 92, and 119. 36. Elliot, Europe Divided, p. 118. 37. Anthony Pagden, Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East and West (New York: Random House, 2008), p. 279. 38. Quoted in ibid., pp. 28–29. 39. Quoted in Pagden, Worlds, p. 280. 40. Delanty, Europe, p. 37.

178 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

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Notes

Valensi, Birth, pp. 50–51. Quoted in Pagden, Worlds, p. 275. France, Crusades, p. 324. Christine Woodhead, “ ‘The Present Terrour of the World’? Contemporary Views of the Ottoman Empire c. 1600” History 72 (1987): 20. Quoted in P.J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 16. Molly Greene, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 40. “Miniature continent” is Fernand Braudel’s expression. Quoted in A.J.P. Taylor, The Hapsburg Empire 1815–1918 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1942), p. 9. Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 230. Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World, Vol. III of Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, trans. Sian Reynolds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), ch. 5. Quoted in Valensi, Birth, p. 52; also see pp. 24–25. Elton, Reformation, p. 99. Daniel Goffman, “Negotiating with the Renaissance State: The Ottoman Empire and the New Diplomacy,” in Aksan and Goffman, Ottomans, pp. 61–74. Valensi, Birth, p. 26. Quoted in ibid., pp. 36 and 26. V.G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind, European Attitudes towards the Outside World in the Imperial Age (London: Trinity Press, 1969), p. 12. Cardini, Europe, p. 157. Quoted in Valensi, Birth, p. 64. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses (New York: Modern Library, 1950), p. 192 (Discourses, I, 30). Valensi, Birth, pp. 55–56. Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 560. Cardini, Europe, pp. 190–91. Peter Burke, The European Renaissance: Centers and Peripheries (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 4. Islamische Sammlung des Pergamon Museums zu Berlin. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Venice and the Islamic World 828–1797 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 12. John Stoye, Europe Unfolding: 1648–1688 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 242 and 296. Victor Segesvary, L’Islam et la Reforme: Etude sur l’Attitude des Reformatueurs Zurichois Envers l’Islam 1510–1550 (San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1998), p. 287.

Notes 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

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Burke, Renaissance, p. 215. Cardini, Europe, pp. 168–72. All quoted in Marshall and Williams, Great Map, p. 14. Marracci quoted in Cardini, Europe, p. 172; Reland, p. 101; Boulainvilliers, pp. 116–17; Ockley, p. 15; and Gibbon, pp. 71–72. Quoted in Paul Hazard, The European Mind, 1680–1715 (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1967), p. 17. Kiernan, Lords, p. 10. J.H. Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance: Discovery, Exploration, and Settlement 1450 to 1650 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 115 and 141–43. Quoted in Anthony Pagden, Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, from Greece to the Present (New York: Modern Library, 2001), p. 51. Also see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Improvising Empire: Portuguese Trade and Settlement in the Bay of Bengal, 1500–1700 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990). Josep Fontana, The Distorted Past: A Reinterpretation of Europe, trans. Colin Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 135. Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium, p. 315. Quoted in ibid., p. 367. Quoted in Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), p. 494. André Gunder Frank, “The Modern World System Revisited,” in Stephen K. Sanderson (ed.), Civilizations and World Systems: Studying World-Historical Change (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 1995), p. 172. Sidney Pollard, “The Europeanization of the International Economy 1800–1870,” in Derek Aldcroft and Anthony Sutcliffe (eds.), Europe in the International Economy 1500 to 2000 (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1999), p. 86. For details see Hobson, Eastern, p. 61. Howard Lentner, International Politics (Minneapolis: West, 1993), p. 158. Donald Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), vol. I, p. xii. Robert Temple, The Genius of China (London: Prion Books, 1999), p. 186. Marshall and Williams, Great Map, p. 45. Parry, Reconnaissance, p. 194. Marshall and Williams, Great Map, pp. 24–25. Quoted in ibid., p. 185. Stoye, Europe Unfolding, p. 253. William Dalrymple, “The Truth about Muslims” New York Review of Books 51/17 (November 4, 2004), p. 34. James Winders, European Culture since 1848 (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 33. Burke, Renaissance, pp. 211–12. Quoted in Donald Lach, China in the Eyes of Europe: The Sixteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 755. T.C. Price Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of the Sixteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 120–21.

180

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Notes

96. Quoted in Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 17. 97. Quoted in Marshall and Williams, Great Map, p. 23. 98. Adas, Machines, p. 43. 99. Donald Lach and Edwin Van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), vol. III, p. 1890. 100. Adas, Machines, pp. 79–81. Also see Lionel Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 8. 101. David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 6. 102. Hobson, Eastern, p. 195. 103. Manfred Osten, “Dialogue with Others” Deutschland (October-November 2003): 61. 104. Peter Rietbergen, Europe: A Cultural History (New York: Routledge, 2006, p. 309). 105. Quoted in Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium, p. 315. 106. Quoted in Frank, ReOrient, p. 11. 107. Quoted in ibid., p. 13. 108. Louis Dermigny, La Chine et l’Occident: Le commerce a Canton au xviiie Siecle (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1964). 109. Adas, Machines, 23. Frank, ReOrient, p. 11, contends the view did not change until the nineteenth century. 110. Quoted in Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium, p. 315. 111. Lach, Asia in the Making, p. xv. 112. Adas, Machines, p. 47. 113. Parry, Reconnaissance, p. 323. 114. Quoted in R.W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 100. Southern offers a lengthy description of the letter on pp. 98–103. 115. Parry, Reconnaissance, pp. 244–55. 116. Marshall and Williams, Great Map, p. 98. 117. Quoted in ibid., p. 121. 118. Bayly, Birth, p. 345. 119. Marshall and William, Great Map, p. 121. 120. Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 49–50. 121. L.P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain 1500 to 1614 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 217–37. 122. Geoffrey Parker, Europe in Crisis 1598–1648 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 150. The reviewer of Harvey, Muslims, points out that some Muslims did voluntarily convert to Christianity. See Trevor Dadson, “Moors of La Mancha,” Times Literary Supplement (February 10, 2006). 123. Wheatcroft, Infidels, p. 144. 124. Hale, Renaissance, p. 172.

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125. Dennis Hupchick, The Balkans: From Constantinople to Communism (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 156. 126. Anthony Grafton, Bring Out Your Dead, The Past as Revelation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 12. 127. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume One: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 110–11. 128. Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 93. 129. France, Crusades, p. 317. 130. On the ambitions of Charles V and Suleiman (and their aides) see Gábor Ágoston, “Information, Ideology, and Limits of Imperial Policy: Ottoman Grand Strategy in the Context of Ottoman-Hapsburg Rivalry,” in Aksan and Goffman, Ottomans, pp, 97–100. 131. Barzun, Dawn, pp. 98 and 125. 132. Elton, Reformation, pp. 13–27. 133. Hale, Renaissance, p. 82. 134. Erasmus quoted in Hale, Renaissance, pp. 64 and 72; Commines, p. 64; Henry VIII, p. 73; and Bayezid, p. 72. 135. Elton, Reformation, p. 136. 136. France, Crusades, p. 326. 137. Davies, Europe, pp. 502–06. 138. Elliot, Europe Divided, p. 253. 139. Quoted in ibid., p. 248. 140. Quoted in Hazard, European Mind, p. 270. 141. Quoted in Elliot, Europe Dvided, p. 263. 142. Ibid., pp. 265–67. 143. Hazard, European Mind, pp. 217–38. 144. Stoye, Europe Unfolding, pp. 277–78. 145. Parker, Crisis, p. 293. 146. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis (New York: Free Press, 1990), pp. 18–19. 147. Quoted in Marshall and Williams, Great Map, p. 13. 148. See Olwen Hufton, Europe: Privilege and Protest: 1730–1789 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 107–13 for details. 149. Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV, trans. M.P. Pollock (London: Dent, 1926), p. 231. 150. Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, trans. T. Besterman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), pp. 231–2. 151. Barzun, Dawn, p. 108. 152. Harald Kleinschmidt, The Nemesis of Power: A History of International Relations Theories (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), p. 89. 153. Quoted in Parker, Crisis, p. 14. 154. See Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Oxford: Berg, 1988). 155. Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind (New York: Harmony Books, 1991), p. 284. 156. Delanty, Europe, p. 73.

182

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Notes

5

The Real American Revolution (1776–1820)

1. James W. Ceaser, Reconstructing America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 2. See Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72 (Summer 1993): 39. 3. “Over and over, America was called [by Europeans] the Land of the Future, more often than not with a shudder.” C. Vann Woodward, The Old World’s New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. viii. 4. An indignant Johann Gottfried Herder underscored this very point. See Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London: Chatto & Windus, 1976), p. 161. Also consult Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 5. Quoted in Daniel Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 59. 6. Quoted in Daniel Bell, The Winding Passage (Cambridge, MA: ABT Books, 1980), p. 248. 7. Howard Fast (ed.), The Selected Work of Tom Pain & Citizen Tom Paine (New York: Modern Library, 1946), p. 31. 8. Fast, Tom Paine, p. 206. 9. Philip Foner (ed.), The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (New York: Citadel Press, 1945), I, p. 123. 10. Peter Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), p. 5. 11. Quoted in Ceaser, Reconstructing America, pp. 24–26. 12. Patrice Higonnet, Sister Republics: The Origins of French and American Republicanism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 13. 13. John Demos, “Introduction,” in John Demos (ed.), Remarkable Providences 1600–1760 (New York: George Braziller, 1972), p. 10. 14. Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), pp. 94–95. Propertyless comparison in Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), p. 11. 15. Quoted in David Potter, People of Plenty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), p. 78. 16. Quoted in David Jordan (ed.), “Maryland Hoggs and Hyde Park Duchesses: A Brief Account of Maryland in 1697” Maryland Historical Magazine 73 (1978): 90. 17. Quoted in Donald White, The American Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 5. 18. Quoted in Potter, Plenty, pp. 78–79. 19. Foner, America Freedom, pp. 10 and 48. 20. Quoted in A. Gregg Roeber, “‘Through a Glass Darkly’: Changing German Ideas of American Freedom, 1776–1806,” in David Barclay and Elisabeth GlaserSchmidt (eds.), Transatlantic Images and Perceptions: Germany and America since 1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 25.

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21. Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992), p. 125. 22. Higonnet, Sister Republics, p. 171. 23. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire, p. 5; also see Jack Greene, “Political Mimesis” American Historical Review 75 (1969): 337–60. 24. Higonnet, Sister Republics, p. 99. 25. Morton Keller, America’s Three Regimes: A New Political History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 20. 26. Quoted in Johnson, History, p. 173; see pp. 105–06 regarding the greater autonomy achieved by state legislatures. Higonnet, Sister Republics, p. 117 makes a similar claim. 27. Catherine Albanese, America: Religions and Religion (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1981), pp. 256–57. 28. Duran Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 17–18. 29. Quoted in Wood, Radicalism, p. 171. 30. Quoted in Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963), p. 113. 31. Quoted in Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 80. 32. Quoted in Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1967), p. 84. 33. Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Historie Philosophique et Politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, (Amsterdam: s.n.,1770), vol. 6, p. 426. 34. Quoted in Peter Rietbergen, Europe: A Cultural History (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 397. 35. Quoted in Woodward, Old World’s, p. 7. 36. Quoted in Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006), p. 38. 37. Quoted in ibid., p. 4. 38. Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York: Free Press, 1997), p. 27. Gibbon quoted in Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom (New York: Norton, 1996), p. 369. 39. Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 265. 40. Woodward, Old World’s, p. xvi. 41. Robert Wiebe, The Opening of American Society: From the Adoption of the Constitution to the Eve of Disunion (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 191. 42. Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character 1650–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 3. 43. See Stanley Weintraub, Iron Tears: America’s Battle for Freedom, Britain’s Quagmire: 1775–1783 (New York: Free Press, 2005). 44. P.J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America ca. 1750–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 353. 45. Quoted in W.R. Brock, “The Effect of the Loss of the American Colonies upon British Policy,” in Esmond Wright (ed.), Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966), p. 306.

184

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Notes

46. Echeverria, Mirage, p. viii. 47. Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, The Nationalist Ferment, trans. Lillian Parrott (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), p. xiv. 48. George Raudzens, Empires: Europe and Globalization 1492–1788 (Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1999), p. 137. 49. Sigmund Skard, The American Myth and the European Mind (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961), p. 17. 50. Quoted in R.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), p. 242. 51. Quoted in ibid., p. 239. 52. Quoted in Skard, American Myth, p. 17. 53. Quoted in Woodward, Old World’s, pp. 17–18. 54. Though this line was written by Goethe in 1827, the same idea was hinted at much earlier in Wilhelm Meister (1796). See Palmer, Age, p. 257. 55. Quoted in Fast, Tom Paine, p. 201. 56. Donald W. Livingstone, “Hume, English Barbarism and American Independence,” in Richard B. Sher and Jeffrey R. Smitten (eds.), Scotland and America in the Age of Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), pp. 133–47. 57. For details, see Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 690–92. 58. John Murrin, “Benificiaries of Catastrophe: The English Colonies in America,” in Eric Foner (ed.), The New American History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), p. 4. 59. Gordon Wood, “Review of A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America by Stacey Schiff ” The New York Review of Books (July 14, 2005): 35. 60. Quoted in Denis de Rougemont, The Idea of Europe, trans. Norbert Guterman (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 173. 61. Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 183. 62. Quoted in Woodward, Old World’s, p. 16. 63. Quoted in ibid., p. 17. 64. Quoted in Baker, Inventing, p. 215. 65. See Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 232–40; or Louis Gottschalk, “The Place of the American Revolution in the Causal Pattern of the French Revolution,” in Wright, Causes, p. 300. 66. Gottschalk, “American Revolution,” pp. 300–01. 67. Quoted in Wood, “Review,” p. 35. 68. Gottschalk, “American Revolution,” p. 300. 69. Raynal, Historie.

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70. Appleby, Liberalism, p. 235. 71. Palmer, Age, p. 239; and Gay, Enlightenment: Science, p. 555. America was the most prominent but hardly the lone concrete inspiration. The Corsican republic of Pascal Paoli (1755–69) was much discussed and celebrated. See John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (New York: Vintage, 1992), pp. 54–61. 72. Quoted in Gay, Enlightenment: Science, p. 558. 73. Friedrich von Schlegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. James Burton Robertson (London: Henry Bohn, 1859), p. 453. 74. Quoted in Gottschalk, “American Revolution,” pp. 303–04. 75. Quoted in Ceaser, Reconstructing America, p. 28. 76. Quoted in Johnson, History, p. 163. 77. Quoted in ibid., p. 145. 78. Peter Gay describes the Enlightenment as “the recovery of nerve” in Enlightenment: Science, p. 6. 79. Quoted in Davies, Europe, 675. 80. Quoted in Arendt, Revolution, p. 62. 81. Article Three of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen claims “all sovereignty rests essentially in the nation.” 82. Baker, Inventing, p. 251. 83. Arendt, Revolution. pp. 252–305. On the differences between France and America also see Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 20–44. 84. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 313. 85. Fritz Jonas (ed.), Schillers Briefe (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1892–96), vol. 1, p. 333. 86. Georg W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 357–58. 87. Quoted in Biancamaria Fontana, Benjamin Constant and the Post-Revolutionary Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 90. 88. Arendt, Revolution, p. 74. 89. Quoted in J.L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker & Warburg, 1955), p. 16. 90. Quoted in Arendt, Revolution, p. 55. 91. Quoted in ibid., p. 62. 92. See ibid., pp. 68–69 and 121. 93. Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 24. 94. Quoted in Fontana, Benjamin, p. 90. 95. Quoted in Herman, Decline, 39. 96. Quoted in Fritzsche, Stranded, p. 29. 97. First sentence quoted in ibid., p. 30; the second in Rougemont, Idea, p. 195.

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98. Wordsworth quoted in Fritzsche, Stranded, p. 88; Chateaubriand, p. 58; de Staël, p. 30; Schlegel, p. 112. 99. Burke, Reflections. 100. Arendt, Revolution, p. 198. 101. Charles Tilly, Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 212. 102. Frederick B. Artz, Reaction and Revolution, 1814–1832 (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1974), p. 10. 103. Ibid., p. 215. 104. Sandra Halperin, War and Social Change in Modern Europe: The Great Transformation Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 176–77. 105. Peter Gay, Schnitzler’s Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture 1815–1914 (New York: Norton, 2002), p. 16. 106. Quoted in Arendt, Revolution, p. 224. 107. Ibid., p. 217. 108. Hans-J¬rgen Grabbe, “Weary of Germany—Weary of America: Perceptions of the United States in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” in Barclay and GlaserSchmidt, Transatlantic, p. 25. 109. C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 143. 110. Thomas Pinney (ed.), The Letters of Thomas Babbington Macaulay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), vol. 6, p. 94. 111. See Appleby, Inheriting, p. 262; or Wood, Radicalism, pp. 180–82. 112. Edmund S. Morgan, “The Great Political Fiction” New York Review of Books 25 (March 9, 1978): 13–18. 113. Appleby, Inheriting, p. 6. 114. Wood, Radicalism, p. 329. 115. Jefferson is an immensely complicated figure with strains of both elitism and egalitarianism in his thought and action. 116. Wiebe, Opening, p. 155. 117. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 37. 118. Quoted in Wood, Radicalism, p. 295. 119. Quoted in August Nimitz, Jr., Marx, Tocqueville, and Race in America (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2003), p. 16. 120. Keller, Three, p. 70. 121. Sellers, Market Revolution, p. 37. 122. Bayly, Birth, p. 6. 123. Quoted in Wood, Radicalism, p. 251. 124. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Delba Winthrop and Harvey Mansfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 352–53. 125. Quoted in Dan Diner, “Between Sovereignty and Human Rights: Juxtaposing American and European Tradition,” in Daniel Levy, Max Pensky, and John

Notes

126. 127.

128. 129. 130. 131. 132.

133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140.

141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148.

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187

Torpey (eds.), Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations after the Iraq War (London: Verso, 2005), p. 92. Wood, Radicalism, p. 332. Also see Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). Quoted in Philippe Roger, The American Enemy: A Story of French AntiAmericanism, trans. Sharon Bowman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 40. Bayly, Birth, pp. 102–03. Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984), p. 69. Liah Greenfield, The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 365. Wood, Radicalism, p. 233. On the campaigns against doctors by the likes of Samuel Thomason, see Wiebe, Opening, p. 162; on crusades against lawyers by the likes of Benjamin Austin, Jr., see Richard Ellis, The Jeffersonian Crisis: Courts and Politics in the Young Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). See Peter Lindert, Growing Public, Volume I: Social Spending and Economic Growth since the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Wood, Radicalism, p. 276. Quoted in Woodward, Old World’s, p. 110. Gay, Enlightenment: Science, pp. 31–36 and 47. Greenfield, Spirit, p. 384; also Sellers, Market Revolution, pp. 23–28. Appleby, Inheriting, p. 253. Quoted in Maury Klein, The Genesis of Industrial America, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 5. Historians have more recently discovered commercial culture in Europe as far back as the eighteenth century: Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europa Publications, 1982), and even the sixteenth century: Chandra Mukerji, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). But these revisions do not change the fact that America reigned in the European psyche of that time as the most commercialized society and culture. Quoted in Woodward, Old World’s, p. 19. Benjamin Saint-Victor, Lettres sur les États-Unis d’Amérique (Paris: Perisse Frères, 1835), pp. 26–27. Quoted in Roger, American Enemy, p. 52. Quoted in René Rémond, Les États-Unis devant l’opinion française, 1815–1852 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1962), pp. 763–64. Appleby, Inheriting, p. 22. Wood, Radicalism, p. 347. Ceaser, Reconstructing America, p. 72. Writer in the Edinburgh Review of June 1818 quoted in Kagan, Dangerous, p. 180. He was not alone. At roughly the same time, the foreign secretaries of

188

149.

150.

151. 152.

153. 154. 155.

156. 157.

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Notes

Austria, France, and Britain, Klemens von Metternich, François Chateaubriand, and George Canning respectively, each warned their governments of the geopolitical threat America would likely pose, especially if in the vanguard of a league of republics in the Western Hemisphere. (See Kagan, Dangerous, pp. 174–79.) Their American counterpart, John Quincy Adams, wrote from Europe: “The universal feeling of Europe in witnessing the gigantic growth of our population and power is that we shall, if united, become a very dangerous member of the society of nations.”(Quoted in Kagan, Dangerous, p. 159.) It is perhaps important to reiterate that this book deals with how Europeans viewed America. I do not claim that America was, in fact, the leader of the modern world. For that argument see, Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788–1800 (New York: HaperCollins, 2007); or Joseph J. Ellis, American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic (New York: Knopf, 2007). See Aurellian Craiutu and Jeremy Jennings, “The Third Democracy: Tocqueville’s Views of America after 1840” American Political Science Review 98/3 (August 2004): 393–96. Quoted in Fritzsche, Stranded, p. 45. Quoted in Anthony Pagden, Peoples and Empires; A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, from Greece to the Present (New York: Modern Library, 2001), p. 133. Quoted in Rougemont, Idea, p. 294. Quoted in Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 21. “American continents, by the free and independent position which they have assumed and maintained, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by European powers.” (Quoted in Sellers, Market Revolution, p. 184.) Metternich reacted to the declaration by complaining that the Americans had “suddenly left a sphere too narrow for their ambition and have astonished Europe by a new act of revolt, more unprovoked, fully as audacious, and no less dangerous than the former.” (Quoted in Kagan, Dangerous, p. 174.) Quoted in Kagan, Dangerous, p. 170. See Appleby, Inheriting, p. 265.

6

America Ascendant (1820–1914)

1. Alfredo Valladao, The Twenty-First Century Will Be American, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1996), pp. xv–xvi. 2. Quoted in Philippe Roger, The American Enemy: A Story of French AntiAmericanism, trans. Sharon Bowman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 118 and 231. 3. Robert Wiebe, The Opening of American Society (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 146. 4. Novalis, “Christendom or Europe,” in Hymns to the Night and Other Selected Writings, trans. Charles E. Passage (New York: Liberal Press, 1960), p. 48.

Notes

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189

5. Quoted in Catherine Albanese, America: Religions and Religion (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1981), p. 258. 6. Quoted in Andrei Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 57. 7. Quoted in Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Times and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 86. 8. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (New York: Penguin, 1981), pp. 69–70. 9. Quoted in Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992), p. 190. 10. Harold Laski, The American Democracy (New York: Viking, 1948), p. 35. 11. Crèvecoeur quoted in Rietbergen, Europe: A Cultural History (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 397. 12. André Siegfried, America Comes of Age: A French Analysis, trans. H.H. Hemming and Doris Hemming (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927), p. 18. 13. See Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 75–105. 14. Quoted in Roger, American Enemy, p. 23. 15. Quoted in Jean-François Revel, Anti-Americanism, trans. Diarmid Cammell (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), p. 146. 16. Quoted in Richard Wolin, The Terms of Cultural Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. xvi. 17. Quoted in August Nimitz, Jr., Marx, Tocqueville, and Race in America (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2003), p. 7. 18. Quoted in James Ceaser, Reconstructing America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 173. 19. Laski, American, p. 15. 20. Hans-J¬rgen Grabbe, “Weary of Germany—Weary of America: Perceptions of the United States in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” in David Barclay and Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt (eds.), Transatlantic Images and Perceptions: Germany and America since 1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 71–72. 21. Quoted in Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York: Knopf, 2001), p. vii. 22. Quoted in Dan Diner, America in the Eyes of the Germans, trans. Allison Brown (Princeton: Markus Reiner, 1996), p. 23. 23. Charles Tilly, Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 217. 24. Sandra Halperin, War and Social Change in Modern Europe: The Great Transformation Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 178. 25. Quoted in Roger, American Enemy, p. 71. 26. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Alphonse Karr, Les guêpes (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1891), vol. 6, p. 305. 27. Quoted in Rietbergen, Europe, p. 382. 28. Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York: Pantheon, 1981), pp. 135–53; quotation from p. 146.

190

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Notes

29. Ibid., pp. 152–63. 30. Ibid., pp. 176–87. 31. Quoted in Peter Gay, Schnitzler’s Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture, 1815–1914 (New York: Norton, 1992), p. 21. 32. L. Montagu, More Equal Than Others: The Changing Fortunes of the British and European Aristocracies (London: Michael Joseph, 1970), p. 170. 33. M.S. Anderson, The Ascendancy of Europe 1815–1914 (London: Longman, 1985), p. 187. 34. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire, 1871–1918, trans. Kim Traynor (Leamington Spa, UK: Berg, 1985). See Halperin, War, p. 179 for details on Europe beyond Germany. 35. Halperin, War, p. 199. 36. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944), p. 226. 37. Gay, Schnitzler’s, p. 6. 38. Mayer, Persistence, pp. 82–127; quotation from p. 86. 39. Quoted in Gay, Schnitzler’s, p. 4. 40. Mayer, Persistence, pp. 157–76; Bismarck’s remark from Gay, Schnitzler’s, p. 17. 41. Robert Tombs, “Politics,” in T.C.W. Blanning (ed.), The Nineteenth Century: Europe 1789–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 18 and 31. 42. Mayer, Persistence, p. 296; and Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1991), pp. 51–60. 43. Halperin, War, p. 20. 44. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1 (New York: Knopf, 1945), p. 3. Needless to say, inequalities hardly disappeared completely. See Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 45. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 200–01. Also see Morton Keller, America’s Three Regimes: A New Political History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 78–87. 46. Quoted in Sellers, Market Revolution, pp. 312 and 331. 47. Quoted in Wiebe, Opening, p. 251. 48. Keller, Three, p. 91. 49. David Grimsted, “Introduction,” to David Grimsted (ed.), The Notions of the Americans 1820–1860 (New York: George Braziller, 1970), pp. 14–15. 50. Quoted in Walter Kamphoefner, “ ‘Auch unser Deutschland muss einmal frei werden’: The Immigrant Civil War Experience as a Mirror on Political Conditions in Germany,” in Barclay and Glaser-Schmidt, Transatlantic, p. 90. 51. See, for instance, Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 52. Wiebe, Opening, p. 293. 53. Quoted in C. Vann Woodward, The Old World’s New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 110.

Notes

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191

54. Quoted in Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815–1830 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 3. 55. Quoted in Sellers, Market Revolution, p. 281. 56. Quoted in Diner, America in the Eyes, p. 38. 57. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years (New York: Scribner’s, 1995), p. 359. 58. Quoted in Wood, Radicalism, p. 348. 59. Quoted in Roger, American Enemy, p. 35. 60. Sellers, Market Revolution, p. 20. 61. Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 107. 62. Quoted in Liah Greenfield, The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 426; Lowell is treated on pp. 405–10. 63. Sellers, Market Revolution, pp. 20–21; Wiebe, Opening, summarizes his own similar argument on p. xiv. 64. Quoted in Sellers, Market Revolution, p. 156. 65. The quotations from Tocqueville, Trollope, Dickens, and Marryat can be found in Woodward, Old World’s, pp. 44, 40, 41, and 43, respectively; Heine’s remark stems from Diner, America in the Eyes, p. 39. 66. Quoted in Woodward, Old World’s, p. 77. 67. Quoted in Roger, American Enemy, pp. 136 and 109. 68. Sean Wilentz, “Society, Politics, and the Market Revolution, 1815–1848,” in Eric Foner (ed.), The New American History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), p. 62. 69. Maury Klein, The Genesis of Industrial America, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 13–15. 70. Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States 1877–1919 (New York: Norton, 1987), p. xvii. 71. Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 21. 72. Painter, Armageddon, p. xix; figures reckoned in 1987 prices. 73. 6.1 percent for the USA compared to 3.7 percent for Europe (between 1890 and 1913). On Europe see Anderson, Ascendancy, p. 129. 74. Barry Eichengreen, The European Economy Since 1945: Coordinated Capitalism and Beyond (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 23. 75. Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), p. 47. 76. R.H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 3. 77. Fuller descriptions of consumerism appear in Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984); T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920

192

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(New York: Pantheon, 1981); and William Leach, Land of Desire (New York: Pantheon, 1993). 78. See Daniel Miller, “Consumption as the Vanguard of History,” in Daniel Miller (ed.), Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 1–57. 79. Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 1. 80. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), vol. 2, book 4, ch. 8, p. 179. 81. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Viking, 1912), p. xiii. 82. See Greenfield, Spirit, pp. 363–65. 83. Gareth Shaw, “The European Scene: Britain and Germany,” in John Benson and Gareth Shaw (eds.), The Evolution of Retail Systems c. 1800–1914 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992), p. 29. 84. See Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 85. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963), p. 136. 86. Lendol Calder, Financing the American Dream (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 168. 87. Leach, Desire, p. 16. 88. Cross, All-Consuming, p. 17. 89. Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press), 1989. 90. Leach, Desire, pp. 114–15. 91. Cross, All-Consuming, p. 28. 92. Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. 41. 93. Cross, All-Consuming, p. 28. 94. Leach, Desire, p. 300. 95. Klein, Genesis, p. 195. 96. Daniel Horowitz, The Morality of Spending: Attitudes toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875–1940 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. xxvii. 97. Leach, Desire, pp. 294–95. 98. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying & Selling of American Holidays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 99. Horowitz, Morality, p. xxvii. 100. Leach, Desire, pp. 294–95. 101. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and John Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialisation of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 102. Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Knopf, 1987). 103. See, for example, Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University

Notes

104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

115. 116. 117. 118. 119.

120.

121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128.

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193

Press, 1999); or Chandra Mukerji, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Susan Mosher Stuard, Gilding the Market: Luxury and Fashion in FourteenthCentury Italy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Richards, Commodity, p. 3. Karl Marx, Capital, vol., sec. 4 I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 42–50. See especially Daniel Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). Numbers gathered from Victoria de Grazia, “Changing Consumption Regimes in Europe, 1930–1970,” in Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt (eds.), Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 69; and Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through TwentiethCentury Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 170. Anderson, Ascendancy, p. 193. de Grazia, “Changing,” p. 59. Niall Ferguson, “The European Economy, 1815–1914,” in Blanning, Nineteenth, p. 93. de Grazia, Irresistible, p. 209. de Grazia, “Changing,” pp. 65–69. See Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), pp. 230–31; and Leach, Desire, pp. 358–72. Leach, Desire, p. 343. de Grazia, Irresistible, p. 213. See Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). Klein, Genesis, p. 24. Geoffrey Crossick and Heinz Gerhard-Haupt, The Petite Bourgeoisie in Europe, 1780–1914: Enterprise, Family and Independence (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 155–65. John Brewer and Roy Porter, “Introduction,” in John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 3–20; also see Walter Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). de Grazia, Irresistible, p. 106. Cross, All-Consuming, pp. 17–26. Quoted in Roger, American Enemy, p. 241. Cross, All-Consuming, pp. 17–26. The point about immigration comes from de Grazia, “Changing,” p. 68. de Grazia, Irresistible, p. 95. Ibid., p. 249. Ibid., pp. 184–283; quotation from p. 243. Ibid., pp. 150–51.

194 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142.

143.

144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151.

152. 153. 154.

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Notes

Ibid., pp. 36–75; quotation from p. 37. Quoted in Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006), p. 413. Quoted in Leach, Desire, p. 266. See Sigmund Skard, The American Myth and the European Mind (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961), p. 36. Quoted in Woodward, Old World’s, p. 50. Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 177. Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), p. 161. James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, vol. 1 (New York: Putnam Capicorn Books, 1959), p. viii. Michael Barone, The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work Again (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2001), p. 4. Quoted in Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), p. 398. Schlegel, quoted in Anderson, Ascendancy, p. 212; Flaubert, p. 333. Also see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 217–21. Quoted in Tony Judt, “Europe vs. America” New York Review of Books (February 10, 2005):41. See Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1962). Indeed, an entire cadre of consumerist intellectuals dedicated to the effective marketing of all kinds of products eventually emerged to shoulder the older genteel intelligentsia even further onto the margins. See, for instance, Klein, Genesis, pp. 19–27; Lears, Fables, pp. 230–319; Leach, Desire, pp. 48–52. Quoted in Robert Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869–1922 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 156. Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (New York: New American Library, 1961), p. 81. Woodward, Old World’s, p. 48. Quoted in Seth D. Armus, French Anti-Americanism (1930–1948): Critical Moments in a Complex History (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), p. 35. Quoted in Diner, America in the Eyes, p. 23 and p. 49. Quoted in Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill, pp. 151–52. Quoted in Lears, Fables, p. 271. George Bernard Shaw, The Political Madhouse in America and Nearer Home (London: Constable & Co., 1933), p. 14. Quoted in James Kloppenberg, “The Reciprocal Vision of German and American Perceptions of Imperial Germany, 1870–1914,” in Barclay and Glaser-Schmidt, Transatlantic, p. 156. Quoted in Woodward, Old World’s, pp. 77–78. Roger, American Enemy, p. 100. Quotations of Spencer and Bryce are in Woodward, Old World’s, pp. 77–79; Marx is quoted in Diner, America in the Eyes, p. 46.

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195

155. Quoted in Richard Heindel, The American Impact on Great Britain 1898–1914 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940), p. 182. 156. Skard, American Myth, p. 37. 157. Quoted in Woodward, Old World’s, p. 108 and p. 58. 158. Philip Jenkins, A History of the United States (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), p. 174. 159. Quoted in Heindel, American Impact, p. 346. 160. Quoted in Richard Heindel, American Impact, p. 153. 161. Quoted in Woodward, Old World’s, p. 41. 162. Quoted in Rolf Engelsing, “Deutschland und die Vereinigten Staaten im 19. Jahrhundert” Die Welt als Geschichte 2/3 (1958): 147. 163. Bennet and Chesterton quotations in Walter LaFeber and Richard Polenberg, The American Century: A History of the United States since the 1890s (New York: Knopf, 1979), pp. 45–46. 164. Quoted in Johnson, History, p. 576. 165. Quoted in Martin Walker, America Reborn (New York: Knopf, 2000), p. 56. On Engels and Liebnecht see Woodward, Old World’s, p. 32. 166. Engelsing, “Deutschland,” p. 155. 167. Alfred Chandler, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 52. 168. Heindel, American Impact, p. 180. 169. May, Screening, p. 23. 170. Painter, Armageddon, pp. xvii–xviii. 171. LaFeber and Polenberg, American Century, p. 19. 172. Quoted in Greenfield, Spirit, pp. 428–29. 173. Quoted in Roger, American Enemy, p. 279. 174. Heindel, American Impact, pp. 139–40 and 170. 175. LaFeber and Polenberg, American Century, p. 41. Sizable numbers of European immigrants did return home; see Edward J. Davies II, The United States in World History (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 101. 176. Quoted in Michael Kammen, In the Past Lane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 171. 177. See Skard, American Myth, pp. 23–28. 178. Woodward, Old World’s, p. 27. 179. Quoted in ibid., p. 225. 180. Quoted in Arendt, On Revolution, p. 143. 181. Quoted in Heindel, American Impact, p. 127. 182. Quoted in Donald White, The American Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 3. 183. Quoted in Skard, American Myth, p. 40. 184. Bryce, American, p. 1. 185. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 46. 186. Philippe Soupault, The American Influence in France, trans. Babette and Glenn Hughes (Seattle: University of Washington Book Store, 1930), p. 13. 187. Shaw, Madhouse, p. 21.

196

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Notes

188. Quoted in Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill, p. 156. 189. Quoted in Geir Lundestad, The United States and Western Europe since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 24–25. 190. Quoted in de Grazia, Irresistible, p. 313. 191. Peter Decherney, Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 7–10. 192. Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain, “The World of the Department Store: Distribution, Culture and Social Change,” in Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain (eds.), Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p. 15. 193. de Grazia, Irresistible, p. 166. 194. See Soupault, American, p. 19. 195. Sklar, Movie-Made, p. 227. 196. de Grazia, Irresistible, pp. 157–58. 197. Quoted in Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill, p. 154. 198. Quoted in Pascal Ory, “From Baudelaire to Duhamel: An Unlikely Antipathy,” in Denis Lacorne, Jacques Rupnik, and Marie-France Toinet (eds.), The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism: A Century of French Perception, trans. Gerry Turner (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986), p. 42. “Americanomania” remark was made in 1875. 199. Quoted in Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill, p. 149. 200. Quoted in Roger, American Enemy, pp. 127, 137, and 132. 201. Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), p. 241. 202. Nietzsche quoted in Ceaser, Reconstructing America, p. 173; Reymond, p. 163. 203. Quoted in Woodward, Old World’s, p. 77. 204. de Grazia, Irresistible, p. 65. 205. Sander Gilman, “Introduction” to Diner, America in the Eyes, p. xiv. 206. Quoted in Diner, America in the Eyes, p. 20. 207. Quoted in Woodward, Old World’s, p. 81. 208. Quoted in Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill, p. 154. 209. Quoted in Peter Berg, Deutschland und Amerika 1918–1929 (L¬beck: Matthiesen Verlag, 1963), p. 133. 210. W.T. Stead, The Americanization of the World; or, The Trend of the Twentieth Century (New York: Horace Markley, 1901), p. 1. 211. Quoted in Roger, American Enemy, p. 174. 212. Quoted in Diner, America in the Eyes, p. 44. 213. Quoted in Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), p. 110. 214. Though he did not publish Civilization and its Discontents (New York: Norton, 1961) until 1930. 215. Émile Durkheim, Suicide (Glencoe: Free Press, 1951), originally published in 1897. 216. See Max Weber, Economy and Society (much of which he penned before World War I, though first published in 1920) reprinted in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946).

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197

217. Quoted in Georg Kamphausen, Die Erfindung Amerikas in der Kulturkritik der Generation von 1890 (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2002), p. 48. 218. Roger, American Enemy, p. 284. 219. Quoted in Mayer, Persistence, p. 316. 220. Ibid., p. 317. 221. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1988), p. 4. 222. For details on America’s growing geopolitical power in the nineteenth century, see Kagan, Dangerous, pp. 131–41 and 224–416. 223. Kamphausen, Erfindung, p. 22. 224. Skard, American Myth, p. 59.

7

World America (1918–Present)

1. Ignazio Silone, Fontamara, trans. Eric Mosbacher (London: Dent, 1985), p. 35. 2. José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: Norton, 1932), p. 181. 3. Quoted in Joachim Fest, Speer: The Final Verdict, trans. Ewald Osers and Alexandra Dring (New York: Hartcourt, 1999), p. 76. 4. See Peter O’Brien, Beyond the Swastika (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 23–26. 5. Quoted in Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 75. 6. See the treatment of the wide-ranging discussion about the relationship between anti-Americanism and fascism in Seth D. Armus, French Anti-Americanism (1930–1948): Critical Moments in a Complex History (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007). 7. See Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (eds.), The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 8. See Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 143–284. 9. Quoted in Martin Walker, America Reborn (New York: Knopf, 2000), p. 104. 10. See, for instance, Richard Rosecrance, America as an Ordinary Power: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Future (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976). 11. Quoted in Michael Nelson (ed.), The Evolving Presidency (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1999), pp. 222–23. 12. Joseph Nye, “Soft Power” Foreign Policy 80 (Fall 1990): 153–71. 13. Quoted in Robert Isaac, Managing World Economic Change (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000), p. 240. 14. See David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 38 and 73. 15. Ibid., p. 6. 16. Geir Lundestad, The United States and Western Europe since 1945: From “Empire” by Invitation to Transatlantic Drift (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 17. Maier, Empires, p. 238. 18. de Grazia, Irresistible.

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19. Quoted in Paul Hollander, Anti-Americanism: Critiques at Home and Abroad 1965–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 407. 20. Quoted in Michel Winock, “The Cold War,” in Denis Lacorne, Jacques Rupnik, and Marie-France Toinet (eds.), The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism: A Century of French Perception (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 74. 21. For instance, Emmanuel Todd, Après l’Empire: Essai sur la decomposition du systeme americain (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). Also see the study of Andrei Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Markovits contends that anti-Americanism appeals beyond purely intellectual circles and represents “a key mobilizing agent” (p. 201) for the architects of the EU as well. 22. See the immensely influential study by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963). 23. See Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 24. de Grazia, Irresistible, pp. 336–479. 25. Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995). 26. Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1988), p. 29. 27. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983). 28. Ibid., p. 8. 29. Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1996), pp. 92 and 97. 30. Ibid., p. i. 31. Quoted in Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers (New York: William Morrow, 1984), p. 79. 32. Quoted in Anthony Grafton, “The Ways of Genius” New York Review of Books (December 2, 2004), p. 40. 33. Douglas Kellner, Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy: Terrorism, War, and Election Battles (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), p. 219. 34. Reported in the New York Times (May 11, 2001). 35. John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (New York: Vintage, 1993), pp. 528 and 532. 36. All Things Considered, National Public Radio (June 22, 2005). 37. Playboy (September, 2004). 38. http://secondlife.com. 39. David Mindich, Tuned Out: Why Americans under 40 Don’t Follow the News (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 3. 40. Kellner, Media, p. 229. 41. Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards, p. 428. 42. Baudrillard, Crime, pp. 85 and 27. 43. Interview on 60 Minutes (August 13, 2006). 44. Baudrillard, America, p. 75. 45. Baudrillard, Crime, pp. 30 and 5. See Eco, Hyperreality, pp. 36–46 for a similar argument regarding the power of illusion.

Notes 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74.

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Baudrillard, America, pp. 77, 55, and 95. Ibid., pp. 77–79. Ibid., p. 29. Baudrillard, Crime, pp. 109–10. Baudrillard, America, p. 55. Bernard-Henri Lévy, American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville (New York: Random House, 2006), p. 252. Baudrillard, America, p. 76. Eco, Hyperreality, pp. 7–19. Baudrillard, America, p. 57. Isaiah Berlin, “A Letter on Human Nature,” republished in New York Review of Books (September 23, 2004): 26–27. Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason (New York: Pantheon, 2008) updates the classic of Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1962). Baudrillard, America, pp. 103, 78, 97, 87, and 123. See Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards, pp. 499–535. Timothy Garton Ash, “The Peril of Too Much Power” New York Times (April 9, 2002). Robert Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869–1922 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 2. Edward D. Davies II, The United States in World History (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 152–54. New York Times (October 5, 2000). Ibid (August 30, 2000). Ibid (January 19, 1999). www.mcdonalds.com. Davies, United States, p. 146. Nancy Snow, Propaganda Inc.: Selling America’s Culture to the World (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998), p. 27. Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalization Is Reshaping Our Lives (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 22. Barber, McWorld, p. 17. William Odom and Robert Dujaric, America’s Inadvertent Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 3. Pew Global Attitudes Project, American Character Gets Mixed Reviews: U.S. Image Up Slightly, but Still Negative (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2005). Peter J. Katzenstein and Robert O. Keohane (eds.), Anti-Americanisms in World Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007). Quoted in New York Times (February 1, 2002). John Ikenberry (ed.), America Unrivaled: The Future of the Balance of Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002); Andrew Bacevish, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); Robert Lieber, The American Era (Cambridge:

200

75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

99. 100.

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Cambridge University Press, 2005); Alfredo Valladao, The Twenty-First Century Will Be American, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1996). Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). See, for instance, Ronald Inglehart and Wayne E. Baker, “Modernization’s Challenge to Traditional Values: Who’s Afraid of Ronald McDonald” The Futurist 35 (2001): 16–21. See de Grazia, Irresistible, p. 476. Quoted in Markovits, Uncouth, p. 25. Eliseo Álvarez-Arenas, “La Europa Americana,” El Pais (March 3, 1992). Quoted in Der Spiegel (July 14, 2003). Matthias Politycki, “The American Dead End of German Literature,” in Agnes Mueller (ed.), German Pop Culture: How “American” Is It? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), pp. 133–40. Jean-Pierre Chevènement, “Pour l’indépendance nationale,” Le Monde (May 11, 1983). Mel van Elteren, “GATT and Beyond: World Trade, the Arts and American Popular Culture in Western Europe” Journal of American Culture 19 (Fall 1996): 59–60. Quoted in Hollander, Anti-Americanism, p. 385. New York Times (October 21, 2005). Ibid (October 12, 1999). See the collection of editorials led by J¬rgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida in Daniel Levy, Max Pensky, and John Torpey (eds.), Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations After the Iraq War (London: Verso, 2005). See Paula Izquierdo, “Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Europa está dominada por Estados Unidos’ ” El Mundo (July 4, 2000). Brian Viner, “Cowardice, Promiscuity and American Presidents” Independent (March 2, 2004). Valenti Puig, “ ‘Americanización:’ entrada y salida del Guiñol” ABC (July 14, 2003). Quoted in Markovits, Uncouth, p. 83. Carlos Lage, “Cultura, cidadania e União Europeia” Journal de Noticias (July 17, 1996). Quoted in Markovits, Uncouth, p. 88. Politycki, “American,” p. 135. On Grass see The Week in Germany (August 5, 2005); on the Verein Deutsche Sprache e.V. see Markovits, Uncouth, p. 92. Financial Times (August 21, 2003). de Grazia, Irresistible, pp. 467–68. Davies, United States, p. 145. New York Times (October 12, 1999). Reinhold Wagenleitner, Coca-colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War, trans. Diana Wolf (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). Davies, United States, p. 147. Quoted in Jean-François Revel, Anti-Americanism, trans. Diarmid Cammell (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), p. 110.

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201

101. The extraordinary uproar over this decision and its allegedly earth-shattering consequences are treated in Markovits, Uncouth, pp. 96–104. 102. Quoted in Markovits, Uncouth, p. 112. 103. Weekend Edition Sunday, National Public Radio (February 4, 2007). 104. Quoted in Markovits, Uncouth, p. 95. 105. On Germany see Deutsche Welle (August 26, 2002); on France New York Times (April 10, 2002); on Britain New York Times (June 18, 1998). 106. On the campaign against Halloween see New York Times (November 1, 2000); against Santa Claus All Things Considered, National Public Radio (December 18, 2002). 107. Markovits, Uncouth, p. 116. 108. Sunday Mercury (December 15, 2002); on prisons see Markovits, Uncouth, p. 122. 109. David Barthick, “Cinematic Americanization of the Holocaust in Germany,” in Alexander Stephan (ed.), Americanization and Anti-Americanism: The German Encounter with American Culture after 1945 (New York: Berghahn, 2005), pp. 129–47. 110. Markovits, Uncouth, p. 126. 111. Observer (January 23, 2000). 112. Baudrillard, America, p. 116. 113. Wim Wenders, “Giving Europe a Soul?” at http://www.signandsight.com/ features/1098.html. 114. Stuart Hall, “On Postmodernism and Articulation” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10/2 (1986): 46. 115. Baudrillard, America, pp. 78–79. 116. Georges Bernanos, “France before the World of Tomorrow,” in The Last Essays of Bernanos, trans. Joan and Barry Ulanov (Chicago: Regnery, 1955), p. 44. 117. Quoted in Armus, French, p. 61. 118. Quoted in ibid., p. 46. 119. Adolf Halfeld, Amerika und der Amerikanismus: Kritische Betrachtungen eines Deutschen und Europäers (Jena: E. Diederichs, 1927), p. 37. 120. See, for instance, Johan Huizinga’s work originally published in 1926 translated as America: A Dutch Historian’s Vision from Afar and Near, trans. Herbert Rowman (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 89–118; or Georges Duhamel, “Entretien sur l’espirit européen” Cahiers libres (1928): 50. 121. The scandalized remark is excised from published versions of the lecture. The original statement is quoted in Tom Rockmore, Heidegger and French Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 150. 122. Quoted in Philippe Roger, The American Enemy: A Story of French AntiAmericanism, trans. Sharon Bowman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 376. 123. Fernando Savater, “Europe, both Needed and in Need,” in Levy, Pensky, and Torpey, Old Europe, p. 43. 124. Bernanos, “France,” p. 44.

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125. Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu, Décadence de la nation française (Paris: Rieder, 1931), p. 208. 126. Éveline Garnier in 1933 quoted in Armus, French, p. 67. 127. Pierre Seghers, “Chewing Gum” Esprit (November 1946): 732–33. 128. André Siegfried in 1935 quoted in de Grazia, Irresistible, p. 15. 129. André Breton from 1949 quoted in Roger, American Enemy, p. 408. 130. René Magniez quoted in Armus, French, p. 34. 131. Lucien Romier quoted in Armus, French, p. 26. 132. Georges Duhamel, America the Menace: Scenes from the Life of the Future, trans. Charles Miner Thompson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), p. 214. 133. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964); and Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Avon Books, 1965, original 1941), p. 282. 134. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 133. Originally published in 1944. 135. Emmanuel Mournier writing in Esprit (November 1946): 740. 136. Quoted in Hollander, Anti-Americanism, pp. 407 and 376. 137. Simone de Beauvoir, America Day by Day, trans. Carol Cosman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, original 1948), p. 171. 138. Jacques Duclos quoted in Roger, American Enemy, p. 408. 139. Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu, Le Cancer américain (Paris: Rieder, 1931), p. 235. 140. Georges Bernanos quoted in Armus, French, p. 146. 141. Etienne Gilson, “Une aristocratie de l’homme moyen” Esprit (November 1946): 655–56; quoted in Armus, French, p. 78. 142. Michel Grinberg-Vinavart in “La manière américaine” Esprit (November 1946): 624–25. Quoted in Armus, French, p. 77. 143. Gianni Vattimo, “The European Union Faces the Major Points of Its Development,” in Levy, Pensky, and Torpey, Old Europe, p. 32. 144. See Mary Nolan, “Anti-Americanization in Germany,” in Andrew and Kristin Ross (eds.), Anti-Americanism (New York: New York University Press, 2004), p. 128. 145. Quoted in Armus, French, p. 81. This theme continues today. Jörg Friedrich, in his massively popular book, Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg, 1940–1945 (Munich: Propylaen Verlag, 2002) depicts the American firebombing of Dresden at the close of World War II as a wanton act of barbarism on par with the Holocaust itself. 146. Quoted in Hollander, Anti-Americanism, p. 381. 147. Le Monde (November 3, 2001). 148. Quoted in Markovits, Uncouth, p. 130. Fo made the comment shortly after the attacks when the number of casualties was feared to be as high as 20,000. 149. Huizinga, America, p. 312. 150. José Bové quoted in Armus, French, pp. 159–60. 151. Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, trans. Terence Kilmartin (New York: Norton, 1962), pp. 224–25.

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152. Markovits, Uncouth. The quotation comes from an essay by the author based on the book, “Western Europe’s America Problem.” The Chronicle Review (January 19, 2007): B9. 153. This is not to deny that some insightful Europeans, like Rousseau for instance, discerned lurking barbarism without the aid of the American example. See Pierre Saint-Amand, The Laws of Hostility: Politics, Violence, and the Enlightenment, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 5. Saint-Amand’s main argument, though, is that the philosophes in general blinded themselves to the barbaric potential in their own civilization. 154. Quoted in Roger, American Enemy, p. 290. 155. Bernanos quoted in Roger, American Enemy, p. 374. 156. Louis Pauwels in Esprit (1946); quoted in Armus, French, p. 80. 157. Jacques Thibau, La France colonisée (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), p. 267. 158. Nicole Schley and Sabine Busse, Die Kriege der USA: Chronik einer aggressiven Nation (Kreulingen: Hugendubel Verlag, 2003). 159. See Richard Herzinger, “German Self-Definition against the US” Internationale Politik Transatlantic Edition (Fall 2005): 39–42. 160. Quoted in Roger, American Enemy, pp. 296 and 297. 161. Quoted in Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill, p. 157. 162. Quoted in Roger, American Enemy, p. 452. 163. This quotation stemmed from the Communist journal La Nouvelle Critique of 1951 and is treated in Roger, American Enemy, p. 432. 164. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Les Animaux maladies de la Rage” Libération (June 22, 1953). 165. Quoted in Winock, “Cold War,” p. 70. 166. Quoted in Markovits, Uncouth, p. 24. 167. I refer to the same optimists I mentioned in the first chapter: Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004); and Jeremy Rifkin, The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream (New York: Penguin, 2004). 168. Buadrillard’s America is a good example. Also see Lévy, American Vertigo, pp. 245–46. 169. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought Volume One: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. xi–xiv. 170. Victor Lieberman, “Introduction” to Lieberman (ed.), Beyond Binary Histories: Re-Imagining Eurasia to c. 1830 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 5. 171. For instance, Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years (New York: Scribner’s, 1995); John Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); K.N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Andre´ Gunder Frank, ReOrient (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 172. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

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173. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 10. 174. Quoted in Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 99. 175. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper Perennial, 1982), p. 3. 176. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966).

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Index

Abbasids, the 48, 49 Abd al-Rahman 56 Abélard, Peter 65 Abravanel, Isaac 74 Absolute, the (as perceived by Europeans) 21, 23, 30–8, 59, 63, 66, 141, 156 Abu-Lughod, Janet 47, 55 Acre 50, 64 Adams, Brooks 132 Adams, John 106 Adas, Michael 82 Adelard of Bath 60, 62, 65 Adrianople 52, 75 Aeneas 50 Afghanistan 153 Africa 49, 51, 84 Africans 22 Age of Discovery 47, 79 Agra 81 Aix-la-Chapelle 24 Alamo, the 145 Al-Andalus 63 Alaric the Visigoth 23 Albania 54, 58 Albert I 127 Albert the Great, Saint 62 Albumasar (Abu Ma’shar) 60 Alcazarquivir 73 Aleppo 50 Alexander the Great 7, 39, 40, 43 Alexandria 43 al-Farabi 60 Alfonsi, Petrus 62, 63 Alfonso VI 59 Alfonso X (the Wise) 57, 61, 62 al-Ghazzali 60 Algiers 73 “alienation from history,” the 112, 127–8, 141, 144–5 Ali Pasha 73 al-Khwa–rizmı– Musa 60

Allégre, Claude 3 Allgemeiner deutscher Handwerkerbund 125 al Ma’mun 59 al Qaeda 143 al-Tusi, Nasir al-Din 61 Alvarus, Paul 57 Ambroise 50 American Civil War, the 113 American Constitution, the 103, 107 Americanization in Europe 112, 127, 130–6, 140, 141–2, 147 opposition to (in Europe) 135–6, 147, 150–5 in the world 113, 129, 134, 140, 141–2, 145–7, 159 American military power 113, 137, 140 American Revolution, the 99, 102, 106, 111, 112 American War of Independence 99, 132 Ames, Roger 31, 33 Anatolia 52 ancien régime 115 Andalusia 57 Anglo-Saxons 25 Ankara 53 anti-Americanism 139, 146, 147, 150–5 Anti-Federalists, the 106 Antioch 49 Antiquity 5, 7, 49 Greek 19 Judiac 19 pagan 19 Roman 19 Aquinas, Thomas 34, 62, 66, 67 Aquitaine 24 Arabian Peninsula 48 Arabophilia 59, 65–6, 79 Arabs 13, 56, 57, 60, 61, 62, 65 Arbella, the 94 Arc de Triomphe 137

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Arendt, Hannah 103, 105, 112 Aristotle 32, 34, 39, 60, 61, 66, 67 Armenians 12 Arnold, Mathew 129 Aron, Robert 154 Ash, Timothy Garton 43, 146 assimilation in America 112, 128 Association nationale de la petite bourgeoisie 125 atheism 35 Athens ancient 13, 19, 20, 21, 22, 33, 36, 48, 95, 141, 149, 150 modern 54 Atlantic civilization 71 Augsburg, Peace of (1555) 87 Augustine, (of Hippo) 23, 33, 63, 65 Augustus, Caesar 40 Au Printemps 134 Aurelius, Marcus 32 Auschwitz 153 Austria 104, 114, 116, 117 authoritarianism in Europe 114, 115 Auvergne, Piere d’ 62 Avars, the 24 Averoës (Ibn Rushd) 60, 62, 65, 66, 67 Averoism, Latin 65 Aversa 27 Avicenna (Ibn Sina) 60, 61, 62, 65 Avicennism, Latin 65 “Axis of Evil” 144 Aztecs, the 79 Babylonian-Assyrian Empire 74 Bach, Johann Sebastian 78 Bacon, Francis 39, 61, 68, 88 Bacon, Roger 60, 61, 62, 64, 65 Baden 114 Baghdad 48, 51, 55 Balat, battle of (1119) 50 Balkans 7, 52, 53, 54, 58, 76, 84 Baptists 107 barbarity (as perceived by Europeans) 21–2, 23, 103, 129, 141, 151, 153–5, 159 Barbarossa, Frederick 50, 73 Barbier, Émile 135 Barroso, José Manuel Durão 4, 5 Barry, Iris 134 Bartlett, Robert 28 Barzun, Jacques 37, 85 Basil 78 Bastille, the 101 Baudelaire, Charles 135 Baudrillard, Jean 112, 142, 143, 144, 145, 153

Bayezid I 53 Bayezid II 86 Bayle, Pierre 82 Bayly, C.A. 107 Beaumont, Henri de 132, 150 Beauvoir, Simone de 151, 152 Bebel, August 136 Beethoven, Ludwig von 104 Beijing 146 Bektas¸i (Sufi orders) 58 Belgium 125, 126 Belgrade 75 Bellini, Gentile 78 Benedictine (monks and monasteries) 27 Bennet, Arnold 131 Bentham, Jeremy 42 Berkeley, George 94 Berlin 114, 124, 125 Berlin, Isaiah 31, 39 Bernanos, Georges 153 Bernard of Chartes 29 Bible, the 20, 33, 34, 41, 49, 57, 59, 63, 64, 65, 66 Bibliander, Theodor 78 Biddle, Nicholas 118 Bilbao 146 Bismarck, Otto von 89, 113, 117 Biyuds, the 49 Blair, Tony 4 Blake, Robert 37 Bleustein-Blanchet, Marcel 126 Boccaccio, Giovanni 69 Bodin, Jean 77, 87, 88 Bohemia 26 Bologna, University of 28, 65 Bombay 146 Bon Marché 124, 134 Borneil, Guiraut de 62 Bosnia 52, 58 Boston 120 Boulainvillers, Henri de 79 Bourdieu, Pierre 147 Bové, José 147 Brague, Rémi 19, 141, 149 Brendano 74 Britain 80, 96, 99, 105, 107, 114, 115, 116, 117, 121, 123, 124, 126, 131, 132, 140, 146 British Empire, the 8, 84, 89, 95–9 British Isles 25 Brown, Elijah 135 Brown, Peter 23, 25 Bruni 69 Bryce, James 128, 130, 131, 133

Index Buda 75 Buddhism 52 Bude, Guillaume 85 Buffalo Bill 133 Buffon, Comte de 95, 99, 101 Bulgaria 52, 84 Bulghars, the 49 Burckhardt, Jacob 112, 115 Burke, Edmund 15, 97, 103, 104 Burnaby, Andrew 97 Bursa 52 Bush, George Herbert Walker 142 Bush, George W. 3, 17, 142, 143 Busse, Sabine 154 “Butcher of Baghdad” 144 Byzantine, Empire 19, 21, 22, 25, 28, 29, 48, 49, 58, 69 Cable News Network (CNN) 146 Cairo 48, 55 Calcutta 80 Calvin, John 86 Cambridge University 133 Canada 137 Cape of Good Hope 71 Carlyle, Thomas 126 Carolingian Empire 20, 25, 26, 41 Carpaccio, Vittore 78 Carter, Jimmy 140, 143 Castile 57 Catherine the Great 40 Catholic League, the 73 Ceaser, James W. 93 Celts 21 Cernomen, battle of (1371) 52 Cervantes, Miguel de 73 Chapman, George 96 Chardin, Teilhard de 84 Charlemagne 12, 20, 24–5, 26, 41, 43 Charles V 39, 84–6 Charon, Pierre 77 Chartist Movement, the 104, 114 Chastellux, François Jean 100 Chateaubriand, François-Rene 104 Chaudhuri, K.N. 47, 72 Chesterton, G.K. 131 Chevalier, Michel 107, 131 Child, Josiah 80 China 3, 8, 13, 22, 48, 49, 51, 55, 62, 72, 80–3, 122, 140, 146 Ch’ing 80–3 Ming 13, 80–3 Chinoiserie 82 Chirac, Jacques 4, 5, 147

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Christendom 12, 23, 28, 41, 47, 48, 49, 52, 54, 63, 64, 65, 68, 69, 72, 74, 75, 79, 86, 87 Christian conversions to Islam 57–9, 76, 81, 83, 84 Christianity 19, 21, 22, 23, 28, 34, 41, 66, 76, 79, 83 Christianization 23, 26 Christina of Lorraine 64 Cicero 32, 41, 81 Cistercian (monks and monasteries) 27 Citroën, André 126 “city on a hill” 94 civilization, definition of 11 Clemenceau, Georges 129 Clement III (pope) 50 Clement IV (pope) 64 Clement V (pope) 40 Clement VII (pope) 74 Clinton, Bill 142, 143 Cluniac (monks and monasteries) 27–8, 59, 64 Cobden, Richard 131 “Coca-colonization” 148 Colbert, Stephen 143 Cold War, the 140 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 38 Cologne 55 colonial America 94–8 Colt, Samuel 120 Columbus, Christopher 47, 52, 71 commercialism in America 113, 127–30 Commines 86 communism 116 Comte, Auguste 42 Condorcet, Marquis de 36, 42, 100, 101 Confucianism 13 Constant, Benjamin 15, 103 Constantine 7, 22, 24, 28, 41, 54 Constantinople 7, 23, 29, 41, 50, 52, 54, 55, 86 “New Jerusalem” 53 consumerism in America 111, 113, 120, 121–4, 141, 150 in Europe 124–7 Coolidge, Calvin 125 Copernicus, Nicolaus 61, 68 Copts 12 Córdoba 48, 55 Corinth, Gulf of 73 cottonocracy 121 Council of Trent 87 Council of Vienna 60 Covenant, the 19 Crete 76

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Index

Crévecoeur, Michel Guillaume Jean 96, 97, 100, 112 Crockett, Davy 107 Crusades, the 7, 44, 47, 49–51, 53, 140 First 5, 7, 41, 47, 49, 149 Second 50 Third 50 Fourth 29, 50 Crystal Palace Industrial Exhibition, the 120, 124 Ctesiphon 48 cuius region eius religio 87–8 Cyprus 73 D’Alembert, A. 129 Damascus 33, 48, 50, 56 Dandieu, Arnaud 154 Daniel, Arnaut 62 Daniel of Morley 59, 60, 65 Dante 13, 39, 40, 50, 53, 62, 66, 84 Danube, the 24 “Dark Ages” the 22–3, 47, 55, 71, 86, 156 Darwin, Charles 128, 133 David, Jacques-Louis 5 Davies, Norman 78 d’Azeglio, Massimo 117 Debray, Régis 3, 154 Decembrist Revolt 132 Declaration of Independence 100 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen 102 degeneracy thesis, the 95 deism 35 Delacroix, Eugéne 37 Delanty, Gerard 41 Democratic-Republican Party, the 106 democratization in America 105–9, 111, 113, 118–21, 141, 150 in Europe 104–5, 114–18 Demolins, Edmond 136, 151 denier, the 24 denominationalism (in America) 97, 107 Derrida, Jacques 4, 5, 16, 154, 158 Descartes, Réne 68 devs¸irme 54 Dickens, Charles 120, 121 Diderot, Denis 35, 36, 37, 40, 82, 106, 150 Dilthey, Wilhelm 136 Diocletian 24 Disciples of Christ 107 Disney World Hong Kong 146 Orlando 146 Tokyo 146

Dome of the Rock 49 Dominican (monks and monasteries) 28, 67 Dominic de Guzmán 67 Donation of Constantine, the 41 Don Juan of Austria 73, 84 Drabble, Margaret 147 Dubuisson, Daniel 39 Dumas, Alexandre 100 Duport, Adrien 100 Durant, Will 67 Durkheim, émile 136 Economist (magazine) 4, 5 Eco, Umberto 5, 142, 145 Edessa 49, 50 Edict of Nantes, the 87 Edison, Thomas 125 Edward VII 115 Egypt 74 Elliot, T.S. 137 empire, definition of 11 enfranchisement in America 97 in Europe 97 Engels, Friedrich 116, 131 England 26, 28, 53, 60, 76, 86, 95, 97, 99, 134 English Exchequer 60 Enlightenment, the (European) 9, 12, 21, 29, 35, 37, 38, 82, 89, 95, 101, 102, 105, 140, 150, 158, 159 Entente Powers, the 137 Erasmus, Desiderius 39, 69, 85, 88 Errizo, Antonio 77 Essen 117 étiemble 148 Euclid 60, 65 Eugenius III (pope) 50 Eulogius of Córdoba 56 Eurocentrism 6, 17, 19, 20, 22, 71, 93, 155–9 anti 10, 16, 72, 156 objective 6, 155–9 paradigmatic 6, 8, 10, 14, 20, 47, 71–2, 93–4, 155–9 reformed 72 subjective 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 19, 20, 30–44, 48, 54, 69, 83, 89, 93–4, 99, 109, 137, 140, 141, 149, 155–9 European Union 4, 5, 6, 16, 41, 43, 44, 89 Euroskepticism 3–5 “Evil Empire” 144 “exaltation of the ordinary” the 112, 127–8, 134, 141, 144

Index fascism in America 154 in Europe 9, 43, 126, 139–40 Fatimids, the 49 Febvre, Lucien 16 Federalists, the 106 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) 148 Ferdinand I 75, 85 Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe 71 “First European Revolution” the (of twelfth and thirteenth century, CE) 25–30 Firzgerald, F. Scott 142 Flanders 27 Flaubert, Gustave 128 Florence 55, 124 Fo, Dario 153 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de 82 Ford, Gerald R. 143 Ford, Henry, 112 126 Foucault, Michel 11 founding fathers, the American 112 Fourth Lateran Council (1215) 27 Fowden, Garth 49 fragile ego (Europe’s) 6, 10, 149, 159 France 20, 26, 28, 29, 53, 60, 75, 80, 82, 86, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 114, 116, 117, 123, 124, 126, 132, 135, 147 France, John 28 Francis of Assisi 67 Franciscan (monks and monasteries) 27–8, 67 Frank, André Gunder 72 Franklin, Benjamin 99, 100, 101, 110 Frederick II 59, 62 Frederick the Great 40 Frederick William IV 114 Freising, Otto von 28 French Revolution, the 9, 100, 102–4, 109, 112, 114 French Wars of Religion (1562–1598) 87 Freud, Sigmund 130, 136 Fröbel, J. 130 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 11, 16 Gaeta 114 Gaillardet, Frédéric 111, 121, 135 Galileo, Galilei 61, 64, 68 Gallaecia 23 Galland, Antione 79 Gallipoli 52 Gama, Vasco da 8, 13, 71, 80 Garzoni, Constantino 74 Gattinara, Mercurino 85 Gaul 23 Gay, Peter 16, 105

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General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 147 Geneva 86 Genoese, the 51 Genty, Louis 100 Gentz, Friedrich von 104 George III 99 Gerba 85 German Language Association 148 Germany 20, 25, 26, 28, 53, 99, 116, 117, 119, 121, 123, 124, 131, 134, 135 Ghent, Treaty of 98 Gibbon, Edward 15, 79, 98 Gibraltar, Straits of 24 Giovio, Paulo 77, 81 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry 3 Gladstone, William 132, 150 globalization 146 Godfrey of Bouillon 49 Goethe, Wolfgang von 37, 42, 150 Gohier, Urbain 126 Goldberger, Ludwig Max 131 Goncourt, Edmond de 135 Goncourt, Jules de 135 Gorbachev, Mikhail 140 Gordian knot 40 Goths, the 23 Gramsci, Antonio 154 Granada 26 grand vizier 77 Grant, Edward 65 Grass, Günther 148, 153 Greco-Arab philosophy 64, 66 Greece ancient 12, 29, 49, 69, 71, 74, 133, 136 modern 104, 110 Greek Orthodoxy 28, 54 Greene, Graham 152 Greenfield, Liah 108 Gregorian calendar 87 “Gregorian Revolution” the 27 Gregory VII (pope) 27 Gregory XIII (pope) 87 Griffin, Sir Lepel 127 Grosseteste, Robert 61 Grotius, Hugo 87 Grund, Francis 130 Gulf War (1991), the 142 Habermas, Jürgen 5, 154 Habsburg Empire 75, 84–6, 114, 115 Hailes, Daniel 100 Hall, David 31, 33 Halley’s Comet (1682) 76 Hall, Stuart 149

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Halperin, Sandra 117 Hamburg 27 Hamilton, Alexander 101 Hanseatic League 26 Harrod’s 124 Harvard University 125 Harvengt, Philippe de 29 Haseler, Stephen 4 Hector 50 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 30, 35, 38, 42, 43, 103, 107, 109, 110, 128 Heidegger, Martin 11, 31, 126, 151, 158 Heine, Heinrich 42, 103, 119, 121, 150 Hellenism 19, 20, 21 Heller, Agnes 4 Hellinization 40 Héloïse 65 Helvétius, Claude Adrien 106 Henry VII 40 Henry VIII 86 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 37 Herrenhaus, the Prussian 116 Herzegovina 54 Heym, George 136 historicism 112, 128 Hitler, Adolf 43, 89, 139 Hobbes, Thomas 41 Hohenzollern Empire 115 Holbach, Paul-Henri Dietrich 36 Holbein carpets 78 Holland 99, 124 Hollywood 4, 134, 142 Holocaust, the 9, 149 Holy Roman Empire, the 12, 20, 26, 28, 41, 59, 86 Homer 36 Hopkins, Claude 126 Houellebecq, Michel 147 House of Lords, the 115 Hugo, Victor 42 Huizinja, Johan 129, 134, 153 humanism 35–8 Hume, David 36, 42, 51, 99, 106 Hundred Years War 53 Hungary 26, 75, 85, 114 Huns, the 23 Huntington, Samuel 11 Hupchick, Dennis 52, 54 Hus, Jan 68 Hussein, Saddam 143, 146 Huxley, T.H. 131 Hydatius (bishop of Chaves) 23 Hyde, Thomas 79

Iberian Peninsula 7, 24, 25, 26, 48, 49, 64, 71, 73 Ibn al-Haytham 61 Ibn al-Quff 61 Ibn al-Shatir 61 Ibn Bajja 61 Ibn Ma-jid, Shiha-b al-Din Ahmad 71 immigration (to America from Europe) 97, 111, 126, 128, 132, 133 imperialism (European) 63, 79, 84, 94, 99 Incas, the 79 Independence (American) 5, 8, 93, 94, 98–102, 109 Independence Hall 145 India 8, 49, 79, 80, 83 Mughal 13, 80–1, 83 industrialization in America 111, 113, 121 in Europe 116, 121 Industrial Revolution, the 12, 29, 89, 122, 158 Ingres, Dominique 36 Innocent IV (pope) 52 intelligentsia, European 14 Iran 146 “iron law of oligarchy” the 117 “Islamofascism” 144 Israel, ancient 12, 13, 20 Istanbul 74, 76 Italy 20, 25, 26, 28, 43, 60, 71, 74, 114, 115, 117, 124, 134 Ivan III 71 Iznik 49 Jackson, Andrew 99, 118–19 Jaffa 50 James I 97 James, Harold 39 Jamestown 96 Janissaries 54–5, 58, 73 Japan 121, 123 Jazz 134 Jefferson, Thomas 8, 95, 101, 102, 106, 118 Jerusalem 7, 20, 49, 73, 85 ancient 19, 21, 22, 29, 33, 48, 141, 149, 150 British occupation of (1917) 7 Christian capture of (1099) 49 Muslim conquest of (638) 49 Muslim repossession of (1187) 50 Jesuits, the, 73 82 Jews 64 jihad 52 Jingiz Khan 51

Index John XII (pope) 41 John, J. Hector Saint 96 Julius Caesar 40, 50, 89 Kadmi-Cohen, Isaac 154 Kamphausen, Georg 137 Kandinsky, Wassily 136 Kant, Immanuel 35, 42, 106, 150 Karr, Alphonse 114 Kemble, Fanny 119 Kennedy, John F. 140 Kentucky 107 Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) 146 Kepler, Johannes 61, 68 Keynes, John Maynard 15, 136 Khazars, the 49 Kheven huller, hans 73 Kipling, Rudyard 135, 151 Klee, Paul 136 Knights Templar 51 Knolles, Richard 76 Koestler, Arthur 140, 152 koine 40 Koizumi, Junichiro 146 Kokoschka, Oskar 136 Kosovo, battle of (1389) 52, 53 Kossuth, Louis 114 Krupp, Alfred 116, 117 Kubin, Alfred 136 kufic 61 Kuhn, Thomas 156 Laboulaye, Édouard-René Lefébvre de 130 La Broquiére 58 Lach, Donald 82 Lafayette, Marie-Joseph 100, 101, 150 La Mennais, Jean-Marie-Robert de 109 Lameth, Alexandre-Théodore-Victor 100 Landendorf, Otto 135 Lang, Jack 147 Laqueur, Walter 4 La Rochelle, Pierre Drieu 137 Laski, Harold 113 Lassale, Ferdinand 113 Latin Americans 22 Latrobe, Benjamin 107 Lawrence, Sir Thomas 96 Le Bon, Gustave 136, 151 Leggewie, Claus 4 Le Goff, Jacques 23, 29 Leibniz, Wilhelm Gottfried 42, 78, 82, 88 Lenau, Nikolaus 113 Lenin, Vladimir 131 Leo I (pope) 41

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Leo II (pope) 24 Leo XIII (pope) 135 León 57 Lepanto 73, 74 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 36 Lévy, Bernard-Henri 144 Lewinsky affair, the 142 Lewis, Bernard 60 Lewis, Sinclair 129 Lexington 8 Liebnecht, Karl 131 Liége 64 Ligue syndicale de travail, de l’industrie et du commerce 125 Lisbon 80, 99 List, Friedrich 105 Lithuania 75 Livy 40 Locke, John 106 Lombard, Peter 63 Lombards, the 23, 24 Lombardy 114 London 36, 99, 100, 115, 120, 124, 131, 141 Lopez, Jennifer 146 Los Angeles 145 Lotto carpets 78 Louis, Pierre 100 Louis IX 52 Louis XIV 88, 104 Louis XV 82 Louis XVI 100, 109 Lowell, Francis Cabot 120 Loyola 73 Lüddecke, Theodor 136 Luke 33 Lull, Ramón 52, 60, 62, 64 Luther, Martin 42, 68, 74, 78, 86 Macartney, Lord 82 Macaulay, Thomas 81, 105, 116 McDonald’s 146, 147, 148 Macedonia 52 Machiavelli, Niccoló 36, 39, 74, 77 McKenzie, Fred 132 “McWorld” 146 Macy’s 123, 124 Madison, James 101 Magellan, Fernando de 71 Maghreb, the 23 Magnus, Albertus 62, 66 Maimonides 60 Malplaquet, Battle of 88 Mamluks, the 50 “manifest destiny” 121

226

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Index

Mann, Thomas 42, 137 Manuel (Byzantine Emperor) 53 Manzikert, Battle of (1071) 49 Marâgha observatory 61 Marcabru 62 Marcartney, Lord George 82 Markovits, Andrei 153 Marlowe, Christopher 51 Marracci, Ludovo 79 Marryat, Frederick 121 Marselio of Padua 68 Marshall Field’s 124 Martel, Charles 24 Martí, Ramon 67 Martineau, Harriet 120, 130 Marx, Karl 111, 124, 126, 128, 130, 150 Mary Queen of Scots 86 Massis, Henri 151 materialism (in America) 108–9, 120–1, 135, 152 Mauriac, François 140 Maximilian I 84 Maximilian II 75 Mazzei, Philip 107 Mecca 146 Medici, Cosimo de 53 Medici, Lorenzo de 39 Mehmed II, the Conqueror 54, 83 Meier, Christian 3 Meister Eckhart 68 Melaka 80 Mendelssohn, Moses 36 Mendoza, Juan González de 81 Methodism in America 107 in Britain 108 Metlitzki, Dorothee 60 Metternich, Klemens von 104 Mexico 137, 147 Michels, Robert 117 Mickey Mouse 133 Mill, John Stuart 130 Milvian Bridge 22 Minio, Marco 77 Minorca 85 Mirabeau, Honoré 100, 102 miraj literature 62, 66 Mises, Ludwig von 116 modern trendsetter (America), the 111, 122, 123, 133 Mohacs 75 Möngke Khan 52 Mongols 13, 51–2, 57 Monnet, Jean 89

monotheism 13, 35, 60, 64, 79 Monroe Doctrine 99, 110, 121, 137 Monroe, James 110 Montaigne, Michel de 77, 87 Montecroce, Riccoldo da 67–8, 78 Montesquieu, Charles Louis 15, 42, 88 Moody, Ernest 61 Moore, R.I. 25, 28 Moors, the 12, 26, 57 More, Sir Thomas 39 Morea, the 54 Moriscos, the 84 Mormons 107 Morocco 73, 80 Mosca, Gaetona 117 Mosul 56 Mounier, Emmanuel 151, 153 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 73 Muhammad 48, 52, 62, 68, 78, 88 Murad I 52–3 Muslim immigrants in postwar Europe 16, 17 Mussolini, Benito 43 Myers, Eugene 66 Naples 114 Napoleon, (I) Bonaparte 42, 43, 82, 89, 102, 103, 109, 110 “civilizing mission” 43 Napoleon (III), Louis 114 Napoleonic Wars, the 89, 102, 104 National Assembly, the 101, 102, 103, 114 National Bank, the 118 nationalism (European) 37, 43, 72, 88 Nazis 151 Negroponte 54 neoclassicism 84 Nestorians, the 51 New Orleans 99 New Rome Aachen 24 Berlin 139 Constantinople 22, 41 New Testament, the 20 Newton, Isaac 35, 68 New World, the 71, 75, 79, 93, 95, 135 New York City 120, 125, 131, 132, 141, 153 Nicholas I 132 Nicholas of Cusa 53, 78 Nicopolis 51, 53 Nietzsche, Friedrich 15, 33, 38–9, 42, 43, 113, 135, 136, 151, 158 Nike 143 Noailles, Vicomte de 100 Noël, Octave 132

Index Normans, the 26 Norman Vikings 25 Norway 99 Novalis 37, 42, 112 Nur al-Din 50 Nye, Joseph 140 Ockley, Simon 79 Odacer 23 Old World, the 95, 111, 131, 133, 135 Olympic Games Athens (1896) 131 Berlin (1936) 43 Orange, Raimbaut d’ 62 Oresme, Nicholas 68 Orhan 52 Orientalism 10 Ortega y Gasset, José 42, 134, 139 Osman 52 Ostend 126 Other, the 11, 93, 157 Otranto 54, 74 Otto the Great 41 Ottoman conquest of (1453) 53–4, 86 Ottoman Empire 52–6, 72–9, 110 toleration of Jews and Christians 58–9 Ottoman siege of Vienna (1529) 75 (1683) 5, 8, 72, 76, 88 Oxford University 65 paganism 66 Paglia, Camille 4 Paine, Thomas 95, 97, 100, 112 Palestine 50 papacy, the 12, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 41, 49, 53, 54, 57, 58, 63, 67, 68, 114 Pareto, Vilfredo 117 Paris 29, 36, 99, 124, 125, 133, 141 Paris, University of 28, 65, 66, 78 Paul (of Tarsus) 33 Pauw, Cornelius de 95, 99 Pax Mongolica 55 Pecham 61 Pegu 81 Pelenz, Wilhelm von 129 Pennsylvania 97 Penn, William 42, 110 “Peoples of the Books” (zimmis) 58 Pershing, John 137 Persian Empire (ancient) 74 Persians, the 13, 74 Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny 57, 59, 62, 64

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Peterloo, massacre 105 Petrarch, Francesco 69 Petrini, Carl 148 Pew Research Center 146 Philadelphia 95, 109, 145 Philip II 85, 87 Philippines, the 137 Phillip II 50 Philoctetes 36 Piccolomini, Enea Silvio (Pius II) 53–4 Pickford, Mary 133 Piedmont 104, 114 Pietism 108 Pinto, Fernão Mendes 80 Pippin III 24 Pius II (pope) 53 Pius IX (pope) 114 plague, the bubonic 88 Plassey, Battle of (1757) 72 Plato 31–2, 33, 39, 60 Platonism 13, 33, 34 Plutarch 40 Poitiers 24 Poland 26, 39, 76, 99 Polanyi, Karl 116 Polo, Marco 62, 81 polytheism 13 Pomeranz, Kenneth 72 Pommer, Erich 134 Portugal 74, 86, 148 Postel, Guilaume 75, 78 postmodernism 9, 10, 142, 145, 149, 158–9 Prague 27 Prester John 51 Prideaux, Humphrey 88 Prodi, Romano 4, 5 Prophesy of Daniel 73, 77 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 42, 129 Prussia 26, 114, 117, 119 Ptolemaic astronomy 61 Puerto Rico 137 quadrivium 60 Quesnay, François 82 Quran, the 58, 64, 68, 78, 79, 84 Racine 78 Raymond of Aguilers 49 Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas abbé de 97, 100, 101, 113 Reagan, Ronald 140, 142 “real revolution in America” the 105–9, 111, 122, 150

227

228

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Index

Reformation, the (Protestant) 3, 5, 7, 12, 21, 41, 68, 69, 72, 84, 86–8, 108, 140, 150, 158 “Reformation of the Twelfth Century” the 27 Reland, Adrien 79 “relaxation of self-criticism” the 112, 127, 129–30, 141, 145, 152 Renaissance Italian 3, 5, 7, 12, 21, 35, 48, 63, 69, 71, 84, 140, 150, 158 of the Twelfth Century 7, 55, 63 revivalism 107 Reymond, Emil Dubois 135 Rhine, the 24 Rhode Island 94 Rhodes 73 Richard I (the Lionhearted) 50 Rilke, Rainer Maria 128 “Rise of the West” the 71 Robert of Ketton 64 Robespierre, Maximilien 102, 103 Rochefoucauld, Duc de la 100, 108 Roederer, Comte de 100 Roger of Antioch 50 Roman Catholic Church 5, 12, 20, 23, 27, 41, 58, 63, 65, 66, 67, 69, 86, 87, 125 Roman Empire, the 7, 12, 16, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 29, 36, 40, 41, 48, 60, 74, 77, 84, 98, 103, 121, 133, 136, 146 Romanov Empire, the 115 Romans, Humbert de 64 Romanticism 37–8, 104 Rome ancient 22, 23, 29, 36, 41, 49, 69, 71, 136, 141 modern 43, 54, 55, 73, 114, 141 Romulus Augustulus 23 Roosevelt Corollary 137 Rorty, Richard 31 Rossini, Gioachino 42, 73 Rotary Club 126 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 15, 36, 39, 42, 82, 103, 106 Russia 7, 72, 76, 110, 131, 132 Said, Edward 10 Saint Bartholomew Massacre (1572) 87 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin de 114 Saint Peter’s Basilica (Rome) 24, 53 St. Petersburg 99 Saint Simon, Henri 42, 100 Saint-Victor, Benjamin 108 Saladin 7, 50 Saladin Tithe 50

Salerno 61 San Antonio 145 Sartre, Jean-Paul 9, 154 Sasanian Empire 48 Savater, Fermando 5, 152 Saxons, the 24, 25 Saxony 114 Scandinavia 25, 26 Scandinavians, the 21 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 42 Schiller, Friedrich 36, 103, 104 schism (between Greek and Latin Church in 1054) 28, 86 Schlegel, Friedrich 101, 104, 128 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 38 Schley, Nicole 154 Schmalkaldic League 86, 87 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 143 Scientific Revolution, the 7, 12, 35, 63, 68, 69, 89, 150, 158 scientism 37 Sears, Richard 123 Seattle 146 Sebastian, Dom 74 secondarity (European) modern 149–55 postmodern 159 pre-modern 19–22, 69, 141, 149–55 Second Awarkening, the 107 Seguer, Comte de 100, 101 Selim I 74 Selim II 75 Seljuks, the 49 Senate of Calamata, the 110 September, 11, 2001 153, 159 Serbia 52, 54 Serbs, the 52 Seven Years’ War 8, 89, 98 Shakespeare, William 87 Shaw, George Bernard 113, 129, 134, 136, 151 Shelley, Percy 38 Sicily 25 “sick man of Europe” (Ottoman Empire) 76 Sieyes, Emmanuel Joseph 100, 103 Sieyés, Emmanuel Joseph 103 Sigismund (Hungarian King) 53 Silk Road, the 55 Silone, Ignazio 139 Skinner, Quentin 156 Slavs, the 51 Slow Food movement, the 148 Smith, Adam 82, 96, 98, 122, 123 Smith, Thomas 79

Index socialism 116, 117, 126 Socrates 33 Sofia 52 “Soft Power” 140 Solomon, Robert 14, 37 Sombart, Werner 131 Sophocles 36 Soupault, Philippe 133 Southern, Sir Richard 26, 47, 59 Soviet Bloc 122, 140, 141, 142 Soviet Union, the 151, 153 Spain 60, 61, 62, 73, 84, 86, 104, 134, 137, 147 Spanish-American War, the 127, 137 Spanish Reconquest of Iberian Peninsula from the Arabs (complete in 1492) 73 Speer, Albert 139 Spencer, Herbert 116, 121, 130 Spengler, Oswald 136 Spuler, Bertold 47 Staël, Madame de 42, 104, 120 Stanford University 125 Starbucks’ 146 Stead, William T. 127, 136, 151 Stendhal, Henri Beyle 43, 109, 113 Stephen II (pope) 24 Stern, Fritz 135 Straus Brothers (Macy’s), the 123 Strauss, Leo 19 Strauss, Richard 42 Suarés, André 153 Sublime Porte 54, 73, 76 Sufism 58 Suleiman I, the Magnificent 75, 77, 85 Sumner, William Graham 116 Swan, Joseph 125 Swedish Civil War (1598–1604) 87 Switzerland 86, 99 Syria 74 Tafur, Pero 58 Talleyrand, Charles de 100, 107, 120 Tamburlaine the Great (Tamerlane) 51, 53 Target, Guy Jean 100 Tarnas, David 34 Tartars, the 52, 71 Tavernier, Bertrand 148 Tawney, R.H. 126 Tempier, Etienne 66 Temple, Robert 80 Temple, Sir William 76, 81 Thatcher, Margaret 146 Theodoric of Freiburg 61 Thessalonica, region of 56

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Thessaloniki 53 Thévenot, Jean de 79 Thibau, Jacque 153 Thierry of Chartres 65 Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) 8, 87 Thomism 67 Thou, Jacques-Auguste de 87 Thuringia 24 Thyssen, August 116 Tiananmen Square 132 Tilly, Charles 104, 114 Timur (Tamerlane) 51, 53 Titian 74, 77 Tocqueville, Alexis de 10, 103, 105, 107, 108, 112, 113, 118, 120, 129, 130, 150 Tokyo 146 Toledo 26, 27, 59, 60, 64 Tours 24 Toynbee, Arnold 15 translatio imperii 28, 94–5, 137 Treaty of Küçük Kainardji (1774) 76 Tripoli 50, 73 trivium 60 Trollope, Anthony 121 Trollope, Fanny 119, 121, 150 Troyes, Chrétien de 29 Tunis 73 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques 100 Turin 104 Türkenfurcht 76 Turkey 16, 146 Turks 12, 13, 52–6, 58, 72–80, 85, 86 Tuscany 114 Ukraine 75, 76 Umayyads, the 48 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 147 universal empire (European understanding) 40, 48, 51, 69, 74, 77, 84–5, 89 universalism (as construed by Europeans) political 30, 38–44, 69–70, 89, 141, 149, 156 spiritual 30–8, 59, 63, 67, 69–70, 87, 141, 149, 156 Urban II (pope) 7, 8, 41, 47, 49 Urban III (pope) 50 Utrecht 79 Valensi, Lucette 77 Valéry, Paul 136 Valladao, Alfredo 111 Vandals, the 23 Van Kley, Edwin 82

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Varigny, Charles Crosnier de 121 Vattimo, Gianni 5, 152 Veblen, Thorstein 122 Védrine, Hubert 154 Venice 55, 73, 74, 76, 99 Ventura, Jesse 143 Vico, Giambattista 42 Victoria, Queen 84 Vidal, Piere 62 Vienna 2, 5, 8, 75, 76, 104 Congress of (1815) 88 Vinci, Leonardo da 61 Virginia 96 “virtual revolution” the 142, 145 Vitry, Jacques de 67 Voltaire 15, 40, 42, 51, 82, 88, 97, 98, 106 Vossius, Isaac 81 Wagner, Richard 125 Walpole, Horace 98 Wanamaker, John 123 Wanamaker’s 124 Ward, Montgomery 123 Warhol, Andy 142 War of Spanish Succession (1702–1714) 88 Washington, DC 132, 141 Washington, George 99, 101, 110, 129 Waterloo 43, 102 Watt, Montgomery 60 Weber, Max 11, 117, 131, 134, 136, 151 Wells, H.G. 136 Wenders, Wim 149 Wertheim 124

Westphalia, Peace of (1648) 87, 88 Whitehead, Alfred North 31 White House, the 120, 142, 143 White, Lynn 60 white man’s burden 42 Whitley, John Robinson 130 Wilde, Oscar 129 William of Aquitaine 62 William of Conches 65 William the Conqueror 26 Williamson, Andrew 132 William of Tripoli 64 Willkomm, Ernst 118 Winthrop, John 94 Wittenberg 86 Wong, R. Bin 72 Woolworth, F.W. 123, 134 Wordsworth, William 104 “World America” 111, 139, 149 World’s Fair (Paris, 1867), the 135 World War I 12, 136, 137, 151 II 12, 151 Worms 86 Württemberg 105 Wycliffe, John 68 Yorktown

99

Zadek, Peter 147 Zapolyai, John 75 Zengi 50 Zola, Emile 124, 125 Zwingli, Ulrich 86