Description
Book SynopsisThe idea of long-term European dominance is characteristic of most evolutionary theories of human culture and society in the 19th century. Today there are many who still believe that this progression was part of a European miracle that underlay the rise to global supremacy of the West. This book dismantles this Eurocentric view of the world.
Trade Review"In this brief but rich essay, continuing and amplifying the argument he has presented in The Theft of History and elsewhere, Jack Goody drives one more nail into the coffin of Western ethnocentrism."
Peter Burke, University of Cambridge "The author is a venerable national treasure. In this essay, he demonstrates undiminished powers - revisiting the folly of Eurocentrism, which has been the major theme of his work, and proposing a new way of understanding it."
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, University of Notre Dame
Table of Contents1 Alternation or supremacy? 1
2 Why European and not Eurasian? 4
3 Domestic aspects of the ‘miracle’ 20
4 Eurasia and the Bronze Age 41
5 Merchants and their role in alternation 57
6 Merchant wealth and puritanical asceticism 66
7 Towards a knowledge society 79
8 The temporary advantage in alternation of the post-Renaissance west 94
9 Alternation in Eurasia 106
Appendix 1 Arguments of the Europeanists 115
Appendix 2 Water in east and west 127
Notes 131
References 139
Index 151
