143. Painter, White People, pp. 384–86.
144. Ibid., pp. 390–91, 395–96.
145. Malik, Man, Beast and Zombie, pp. 17–18.
146. Painter, White People, p. 392; S. J. Gould, “Honorable Men and Women,” Natural History 97 (1988): 16–20; Gould, Mismeasure of Man, p. 399.
SIX: CIVILIZATION
1. D. Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty and His Expectations, Part the Second (London, 1749), p. 355.
2. R. Williams, Keywords (London, 1976), p. 48; emphasis in Boswell’s original.
3. L. Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1994), pp. 12–13; L. Febvre, “Civilisation: Evolution of a Word and a Group of Ideas,” in P. Burke, ed., A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre (New York, 1973), pp. 219–57; F. Braudel, On History (Chicago, 1980), p. 180.
4. B. Bowden, “The Ideal of Civilisation: Its Origins and Socio-Political Character,” Critical Review of International and Political Philosophy 7 (2004): 28–34, 36–41; N. Elias, The Civilising Process (Oxford, 2000 ed.), pp. 10, 24–27.
5. T. Todorov, The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations (Chicago, 2010), pp. 14–28.
6. W. R. Jones, “The Image of the Barbarian in Medieval Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 13 (1971): 376–407; A. Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, 1986 ed.), pp. 15–26; Pagden, Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West (Oxford, 2008), pp. 32–34, 61–62.
7. Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, pp. 4–5.
8. M. de Montaigne, Essays (Harmondsworth, 1991 ed.), pp. 231, 1114–15; C. Geertz, Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (Princeton, 2000), p. 45.
9. F. Furet, “Civilization and Barbarism in Gibbon’s History,” in G. W. Bowersock, J. Clive, and S. R. Grubard, eds., Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), pp. 159–66; J. W. Burrow, Gibbon (Oxford, 1985), pp. 39–40, 80, 84.
10. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 4, Barbarians, Savages and Empires (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 2, 158–61; R. Porter, Gibbon (London, 1988), p. 5.
11. Burrow, Gibbon, pp. 39–40, 67–69, 81; Porter, Gibbon, pp. 136, 138–40.
12. Porter, Gibbon, pp. 143–45.
13. Burrow, Gibbon, pp. 42–51, 86–87.
14. Porter, Gibbon, p. 81; Pocock, Barbarians, Savages and Empires, p. 92.
15. Porter, Gibbon, pp. 145, 152–53.
16. S. Runciman, “Gibbon and Byzantium,” in Bowersock et al., Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, pp. 53–60.
17. Burrow, Gibbon, p. 76; Pocock, Barbarians, Savages and Empires, pp. 11–22, 96, 133.
18. Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, pp. 13, 357.
19. For brief recent accounts, see J. Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (London, 1998), pp. 56–61; K. Teltscher, The High Road to China: George Bogle, the Panchen Lama, and the First British Expedition to Tibet (New York, 2006), pp. 247–50; J. Lovell, The Great Wall: China Against the World, 1000 BC–AD 2000 (London, 2006), pp. 2–12; H. G. Gelber, The Dragon and the Foreign Devils: China and the World, 1100 BC to the Present (London, 2007), pp. 160–65. For earlier, anniversary accounts, see A. Singer, The Lion and the Dragon: The Story of the First British Embassy to the Court of the Emperor Qianlong in Peking, 1792–1794 (London, 1992); A. Peyrefitte, The Collision of Two Civilisations: The British Expedition to China, 1792–94 (London, 1993, trans. J. Rothschild). The Chinese word “yi,” often translated as the pejorative “barbarian,” is thought by some scholars, in certain circumstances, to be more inclusive than confrontational, and that it should be translated descriptively and nonpejoratively as “the foreign peoples,” or “outsiders,” or “strangers”: see J. L. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Quuing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham, N.C., 1995), pp. 120–21. I am grateful to Professor Susan Naquin for this reference.
20. J. S. Mill, Essays on Politics and Culture (London, 1962 ed.), pp. 51–52; Bowden, “Ideal of Civilisation,” p. 34; P. Mandler, History and National Life (London, 2002), p. 42.
21. J. P. Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity, and Europe, 1830–1886 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 20–22, 187, 248; J. Osterhammel, Europe, the “West” and the Civilizing Mission (London, 2006).
22. N. Elias, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, 2 vols. (Basel, 1939).
23. J. G. Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of History (London, 1800), p. 421.
24. T. Newark, introduction to T. Hodgkin, Huns, Vandals and the Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1996 ed.), pp. xxii–xxiv; T. S. Brown, “Gibbon, Hodgkin and the Invaders of Italy,” in R. McKitterick and R. Quinault, eds., Edward Gibbon and Empire (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 148–54.
25. Braudel, On History, pp. 181–82; Bowden, “Ideal of Civilisation,” pp. 39–40.
26. Bowden, “Ideal of Civilisation,” pp. 40–41.
27. P. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975), pp. 75, 79, 82.
28. A. J. Toynbee, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the Contact of Civilisations (London, 1922), p. 328; Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, p. 366. For Spanish versions of these characterizations of the Central and Entente powers during the First World War, see R. Carr, Modern Spain, 1875–1980 (Oxford, 1980), pp. 81–82.
29. Bowden, “Ideal of Civilisation,” p. 40; A. Kuper, Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), p. 8; W. A. Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton, 1950), pp. 87, 316–17, 339, 362.
30. C. Bell, Civilization: An Essay (New York, 1928), pp. 3, 15, 17.
31. R. Quinault, “Winston Churchill and Gibbon,” in McKitterick and Quinault, Edward Gibbon and Empire, pp. 317–32; W. Churchill, “Civilisation,” in R. S. Churchill, ed., Into Battle: Speeches by the Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill CH, MP (London 1941), pp. 35–36.
32. R. A. Butler, The Art of the Possible (London, 1971), p. 85.
33. Quoted in F. Fernández-Armesto, Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature (New York, 2001), p. 20.
34. Newark, introduction to Huns, Vandals, p. xxiv; H. Rauschning, Hitler Speaks (London, 1939), p. 87.
35. Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, pp. 369–70.
36. A. Piganiol, L’Empire chrétien (325–395) (Paris, 1947), p. 422; P. Courcelle, Histoire littéraire des grandes invasions germaniques (Paris, 1948), passim. Nor were such views confined to French scholars, for British historians writing in the aftermath of the Second World War also saw the fall of the Roman Empire through the lens of their perceptions of 1939–45. In 1952, J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, who had interrogated high-ranking German prisoners, published a book entitled The Barbarian West, 400–1000, which began with a chapter sketching out the “civilization” that was “threatened” by the “barbarians.” Having surveyed the secure achievements of the Roman Empire, the author ended, apocalyptically (and autobiographically), “upon such a world, the Huns fell”: J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Barbarian West, 400–1000 (3rd ed., London, 1967), pp. 9, 20.
37. S. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York, 1961 ed.), pp. 66–71; Todorov, Fear of Barbarians, pp. 24–25. Another proponent of this view was the historian George Macaulay Trevelyan, who, like his near contemporary Winston Churchill, had also read Gibbon as a young man. But his conclusion at the end of the Second World War was more somber, for while he rejoiced in the eventual Allied victory, he was convinced that the long and devastating war had “cooked the goose of civilization” and that humanity was now living in “an age steadily lapsing and finally rushing into barbarism.” See D. Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (London, 1992), pp. 168, 175.
38. E. J. Hobsbawm, “Barbarism: A User’s Guide,” New Left Review 206 (1994): 45, 49.
39. W. Benjamin, Illuminations (Londo
n, 1970 ed.), p. 258; B. Wasserstein, Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time (Oxford, 2007), pp. 1, 793.
40. Here is one recent example, its title full of sub-Gibbonian vocabulary: B.-H. Lévy, Life in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism (New York, 2008). In fact, Lévy was criticizing the anti-Americanism that he believed characterizes much of the contemporary European left, and it was to this group that he gave the title “new barbarians.” See also M. B. Salter, Barbarians and Civilization in International Relations (London, 2002).
41. W. Goffart, Barbarians and Romans, AD 48–54: The Techniques of Accommodation (Princeton, 1980), esp. pp. 3–39; Goffart, “Rome, Constantinople and the Barbarians,” American Historical Review 86 (1981): pp. 275–306; Goffart, “The Theme of ‘the Barbarian Invasions,’ ” in E. Chrysos and A. Schwartz, eds., Das Reich und die Barbaren (Veroffentlichungen des Instituts fur österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 29; Vienna, 1989), pp. 87–107; both reprinted in Goffart, Rome’s Fall and After (London, 1989).
42. P. Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, AD 150–750 (London, 1971), pp. 122–23; H. Wolfram, History of the Goths (Berkeley, 1988), esp. pp. 158–59; P. Amory, People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy, 489–554 (Cambridge, 1997), pp. xi, 1–6, 13–14; J. M. H. Smith, “Did Women Have a Transformation of the Roman World?” Gender and History 12 (2000): 553–54; Smith, Europe After Rome: A New Cultural History, 500–1000 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 7–9, 253–67; P. S. Wells, Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered (New York, 2008), pp. xi–xv.
43. B. Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford, 2005); P. Heather, “The Huns and the End of the Roman Empire in Western Europe,” English Historical Review 110 (1995): 4–41; Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 2005).
44. Ward-Perkins, Fall of Rome, p. 181; P. Brown, G. Bowersock, and A. Cameron, “The World of Late Antiquity Revisited,” Symbolae osloenses 72 (1997): 5–90; G. Bowersock, “The Vanishing Paradigm of the Fall of Rome,” in Bowersock, Selected Papers on Late Antiquity (Bari, 2000), pp. 187–97. For recent attempts to synthesize these opposing views, see G. Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376–568 (Cambridge, 2007), esp. pp. 19–22; C. Wickham, After Rome (London, 2009), ch. 4. For a broader view of these recent disagreements, see N. Etherington, “Barbarians Ancient and Modern,” American Historical Review 116 (2011): 31–57.
45. E. Durkheim and M. Mauss, “Note on the Notion of Civilization,” Social Research 38 (1971), p. 812; the article was originally published in L’Année sociologique 12 (1913): 46–50.
46. Fernández-Armesto, Civilizations, p. 18. For some of the interwar writing on civilization, see E. Huntington, Civilization and Climate (New Haven, 1922); A. Schweitzer, The Decay and Restoration of Civilization (London, 1932); V. G. Childe, Man Makes Himself (London, 1936).
47. F. J. Teggart, The Processes of History (New Haven, 1918), pp. 4, 6.
48. Ibid., pp. 13–14, 37, 112, 119, 151; W. H. McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life (Oxford, 1989), pp. 100–101.
49. H. Stuart Hughes, Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate, rev. ed. (New York, 1962), pp. 36–64.
50. O. Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2 vols. (London, 1934), vol. 1, p. 107; Hughes, Spengler, p. 11.
51. Spengler, Decline of the West, vol. 1, pp. 31, 106, 355; Hughes, Spengler, p. 72; Braudel, On History, pp. 182, 188; Fernández-Armesto, Civilizations, p. 18.
52. Spengler, Decline of the West, vol. 1, Tables i–iii. In vol. 2, Spengler added three more culture-civilizations: the Babylonian, the Mexican, and the Russian.
53. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 32, 36.
54. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 151.
55. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 38–39, 167; Hughes, Spengler, p. 7.
56. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 159–73.
57. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 55–83, 171.
58. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 38–42, 162–63, 332; McNeill, Toynbee, p. 101.
59. For one cogent contemporary critique of Spengler, see R. G. Collingwood, “Oswald Spengler and the Theory of Historical Cycles,” Antiquity 1 (1927): 311–25, 435–46; for a contemporary popularization, see E. H. Goddard and P. A. Gibbons, Civilisation or Civilisations: An Essay in the Spenglerian Philosophy of History (London, 1926).
60. McNeill, Toynbee, pp. 98–109.
61. Toynbee, Western Question, pp. 22, 36, 362–63.
62. Ibid., p. 334; A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History, 2 vol. abridgment by D. C. Somervell (London, 1947–57), vol. 1, p. 35; McNeill, Toynbee, pp. 102, 110; A. J. Toynbee, Civilization on Trial (Oxford, 1948), pp. 9–10.
63. Toynbee, Western Question, pp. 12, 327–46.
64. McNeill, Toynbee, pp. 99–100, 110–12.
65. For Toynbee’s criticism of Spengler on this score, see Toynbee, Study of History, vol. 1, pp. 210–11, 248–51.
66. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 275–76.
67. A. J. Toynbee, Experiences (New York, 1969), pp. 10, 200–203. For Toynbee’s disagreements with Gibbon, see W. H. Walsh, “The End of a Great Work,” in A. Montagu, ed., Toynbee and History: Critical Essays and Reviews (Boston, 1956), pp. 125–26.
68. Toynbee explicitly criticizes Gibbon along these lines in Study of History, vol. 1, pp. 260–62; vol. 2, pp. 19, 77–79; Toynbee, Civilization on Trial, pp. 226–31. For “vultures” (and “maggots”), see Toynbee, Study of History, vol. 1, p. 14. See also McNeill, Toynbee, p. 177; Editorial, “Vicisti, Galilaee,” Times Literary Supplement, August 19, 1939, p. 491.
69. McNeill, Toynbee, pp. 164–65, 254–61. For contemporary anthologies of criticisms of Toynbee, see P. Geyl, A. J. Toynbee, and P. A. Sorokin, The Pattern of the Past: Can We Determine It? (Boston, 1949); Montagu, Toynbee and History; E. T. Gargan, ed., The Intent of Toynbee’s History (Chicago, 1961). For other critiques, see also Braudel, On History, pp. 189–97; R. Davenport-Hines, ed., Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson (London, 2006), pp. 234–37, 243.
70. Toynbee, Civilization on Trial, p. 55.
71. McNeill, Toynbee, p. 166; W. Kaufmann, “Toynbee and Super-History,” in Montagu, Toynbee and History, pp. 306–10.
72. Toynbee, Study of History, vol. 2, pp. 87–93, 109–13; Toynbee, Civilization on Trial, pp. 213–52. See also E. Voegelin, “Toynbee’s History as a Search for Truth,” in Gargan, Intent of Toynbee’s History, pp. 183–98; P. Geyl, “Toynbee as Prophet,” in Montagu, Toynbee and History, pp. 360–77.
73. Toynbee, Study of History, vol. 1, pp. 551–54; Toynbee, Civilization on Trial, p. 41.
74. McNeill, Toynbee, pp. 205–61.
75. D. A. Segal, “ ‘Western Civ’ and the Staging of History in American Higher Education,” American Historical Review 105 (2000): 779–83, 785–88; G. Allardyce, “The Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course,” American Historical Review 87 (1982): 695–96, 703–16.
76. McNeill, Toynbee, pp. 213–19.
77. Ibid., pp. 94, 161, 213; Toynbee, Experiences, pp. 233–39, 261–67.
78. Toynbee, Study of History, vol. 2, pp. 302–31; Toynbee, Civilization on Trial, p. 56. Pieter Geyl regarded the final volumes of A Study of History as “a blasphemy against Western Civilization” because Toynbee “will have it that Western Civilization is doomed, and indeed why should he care? Western Civilization means nothing to him.” See Geyl, “Toynbee as Prophet,” pp. 363–64, 377.
79. See, for example, P. Bagby, Culture and History: Prolegomena to the Comparative Study of Civilizations (London, 1958); C. Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis (New York, 1961); M. Melko, The Nature of Civilizations (Boston, 1969); C. H. Brough, The Cycle of Civilization: A Scientific, Determinist Analysis of Civilization, Its Social Basis, Patterns and Projected Future (Detroit, 1965).
80. B. Mathews, Young Islam on Trek: A Study in the Clash of Civilizations (New York, 1926), pp. 41, 196, 216–18; R. W. Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (New York, 2004), pp. 1–4.
81. B. Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” Atlantic Mont
hly, September 1990, pp. 56, 60. Lewis had first used the phrase much earlier, in 1957; see R. Bonney, False Prophets: The “Clash of Civilizations” and the Global War on Terror (Oxford, 2008), p. 54.
82. S. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72 (1993): 22–49; Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London, 1997).
83. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, pp. 12–13, 40.
84. Ibid., pp. 21, 26–27, 29, 44–47.
85. Ibid., pp. 55, 47.
86. Ibid., pp. 13, 321.
87. Ibid., pp. 71–72, 301–11.
88. Ibid., pp. 20–21, 34, 183.
89. Ibid., p. 312.
90. A. Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (London, 2005), pp. 136–37.
91. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, p. 29.
92. Ibid., pp. 46–47, 56; Fernández-Armesto, Civilizations, p. 23.
93. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, p. 135.
94. Ibid., pp. 137–38.
95. Sen, Argumentative Indian, pp. 54, 302, 308. Sen himself always takes (wholly justified) exception to being categorized as a “Hindu economist.”
96. Sen, Argumentative Indian, pp. 76, 284–87.
97. F. Halliday, Islam and the Myth of Confrontation: Religion and Politics in the Middle East (London, 2003 ed.), p. xii.
98. Sen, Argumentative Indian, pp. 55–56. For a fuller discussion of these matters by the same author, see A. Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York, 2006), esp. pp. 1–17, 40–58.
99. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, pp. 43, 66–67; D. W. Wengrow, What Makes Civilization? The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West (Oxford, 2010), pp. xvii–xviii, 12–13.
100. W. H. McNeill, “Decline of the West?” New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997, pp. 18–22; K. A. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York, 2006).
101. For useful surveys of the responses to Huntington, and subsequent writings, see J. O’Hagan, “Beyond the Clash of Civilizations?” Australian Journal of International Affairs 59 (2005): 383–400; B. Bhutto, Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West (London, 2008), pp. 233–73; Bonney, False Prophets, pp. 48–51; Todorov, Fear of Barbarians, pp. 86–99.
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