[.ca] Eight Eurocentric Historians (ISBN 1572305916)

Must read.:
Having read a number of the works that Blaut criticizes, I find Blauts criticisms spot on. Having the guts to challenge some of the most prominent scholars is no doubt going to make people criticize him, but his criticism seems consistent with a number of authors and third world scholars (as well as other scholars from the first world).

Failure of a genre:
Despite the problems with Jim Blaut's own methodology, his critical expose of the genre of 'rise of the modern' theory is actually indispensable reading for anyone exploring the field, and for theorists in this area, who probably wouldn't condescend to bother with him. One needs to figure out the secret of Blaut's success behind his own questionable alternative thesis which isn't actually the reason for the acute insights of his eight successful critiques, one after another. It seems to me that Blaut succeeds for a reason evident in his other book, on the 'European Miracle', where he skewers Eric Jones, but with a cryptic sense that he is dealing with a problem in evolutionary discontinuity. That insight, and not only the exploitation thesis of World System theory, is what leads him so remarkably to spot the flaws in so many 'sophisticated' tracts from different scholarly viewpoints. This statement would require more elaboration than is possible here, but the issue is to consider the rightness of Blaut's criticisms without necessarily agreeing to all the other premises of his perspective. This is, for the 'pros' in this field, a 'no kidding' mongoose in action. Blaut's mentor, A. Frank, hit on another aspect of the problem, in his book on world history and systems theory applied to the last five thousand years. Minus the economic materialism, we can see that the 'rise of the West' requires a radically altered viewpoint, that of universal history. But that's another story, and Blaut's book is a significant, if also flawed, way station on the way to some new way of thinking about history.

Excellent critique of mainstream history:
Don't believe the hype about "revisionist" historians; anyone who criticizes the essential goodness of European civilization will undoubtedly be marginalized (e.g., put in the same category as Holocaust deniers). By critically evaluating eight influential historians, Blaut outlines the main historical models of Europe's rise in world history: racial, cultural, and climatological/geographical. The main shortcoming is that this book is polemical, primarily serving to expose the hidden assumptions and methodological flaws of the eurocentric historians; Blaut died before he had time to finish his third book on a Marxist interpretation of the rise of the West. That being said, this book is an great way to develop a critical view of contemporary views on history.

But it Makes a Good Shopping List:
I found this small political tract helpful in identifying several pre-revisionist, non-propagandist historians. For one, David Landes turns out to be very good, and I had never heard of him even. I had always understood that Max Weber is to be considered a master among writers of history, but the fact that he was the primary target of this tract makes me appreciate that fact all the more. I have yet to read Weber, but he has now been bumped up a few spaces on my list. Also, I had always liked Jered Diamond, but after reading the treatment of him by this author, I have a new appreciation of him. There is always the danger, when reading history, that your author will have a revisionist, political agenda. Sometimes this agenda becomes apparent, seeping through unexpectedly, perhaps in the form of a single politically-charged word. Sometimes, as with Howard Zinn, the author is honest enough to come out right away and tell you what he is up to. Since most authors are not so honest, it is difficult to know which authors are attempting to be objective, and which have a political agenda they want to push on you. Insofar as history is supposed to be the objective presentation of facts, good history is objective history. This small book is good to pick up and glance through--or even just look on the back cover and jot down the names of the 8 historians targeted, if you're in a hurry--in order to get turned on to some good historians. But no need to buy the book. Buying the book would just encourage Mr. Blaut to write more of the same, and that would be very naughty.

Bad Reviews of Good Historians:
This is the second book in Blaut's trilogy of revisionist world history (the first is 'The Colonizer's Model', the third as yet unpublished). 'Eight Eurocentric Historians' is a highly flawed book, attacking the mainstream tradition of Western World History by criticizing its greatest scholars, from Max Weber to David Landes. Blaut's attacks are spurious and largely ad hominem. I am not entirely unsympathtic to his cause (giving credit to non-western achievements, presenting an accurate and balanced view of world history) but he does it more harm than good by writing books like these. If you want to get an alternative view of world history, you are better off reading the 'Chicago School' of World History, especially Marshall Hodgson and William McNeill's later works (McNeill started as a 'Rise of the West' triumphalist, later moving towards a more nuanced view, taking proper account of of China's precocious achievements in particular). The British anthropologist Jack Goody also wrote a very good book, incidently highly critical of Max Weber and Lynn White (two of Blaut's targets), *The East in the West*. By reading the authors that Blaut demonizes, as well as their critics listed above, you will get a much clearer view of world history than by reading Blaut himself.