High School history - still inadequate
Jan. 1st, 2008 12:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vcmwY'know, I did pretty well in high school history class. So why is it that the first time I can recall even HEARING the name of the British East India Company is while reading romance novels in college?
Even while I'm reading my big ol' general history books of Europe (the older kind from pre 1980 that I pick up for a buck at used bookstores) the narrative reads as if slavery, international economic exploitation et al basically never happened. When discussing the rise of the bourgeoisie in France and England my cheap history books usually say something about "merchants and traders" with "increasing fortunes" "challenging the social order of the aristocracy" and then get on to some parliamentary discussion or some artistic/technical advance.
So as I'm reading my nice African history book I get to see where all the history that was left out of the European narratives happened. It happened in other countries! And everyone knows that what happens in other countries doesn't count. It's like visiting Las Vegas: "What happens in Africa, South America, Asia, and the Atlantic and Pacific Islands stays in Africa, South America, Asia, and the Atlantic and Pacific Islands!"
The most frustrating part is that, from contemporary plays and poetry of the 1600s and 1700s, you get the sense that this cultural amnesia was not a contemporary problem. The Restoration playwrights wrote about race a lot (I can't speak to how well they did it, because I haven't read the plays yet. But I know that Dryden and Behn wrote about stuff like this from my handy books of Restoration drama crit.). I suspect, because I'm a mean and uncharitable person, that the cultural amnesia started right about the time that any given country declared "slavery" illegal. And I say "slavery" in quotes because I am one of those people who considers colonial exploitation to be, (in a bastardization of is it Clausewitz's famous phrase?) an extension of slavery by other means. In my personal scorecard, slavery ended less than 40 years ago in most parts of the world, and still continues in others. Any country where most major industrial and natural resources are still controlled by foreign companies which were built and developed using the extortionary forces of slavery and colonial rule is a country that is still enslaved, in my book. By this demanding rubric very little of the world is free.
The sense I get is that people spoke pretty openly about slavery as long as slavery was officially considered value-neutral in their society. Once the society declared slavery value-negative, they began to obfuscate their past dealings. Because most of us don't deal well psychologically with examining our own shortcomings. But the result for the modern audience is a sense of deep confusion about economic and political development in our world and the costs of same. If I understand my traditional European textbooks properly, then the 1500s and 1600s were the big rise of centralized statehood. This same time period marked the big rise in European economic exploitation of other parts of the world, and the money gained from that exploitation provided a big part of the resources that fed the coffers of centralized governments and allowed them to extend their power without having to work through the then-still-existing parliamentary and aristocratic checks on various kinds of power (like taxation of citizens).
Also: that Guns, Germs, and Steel book is a useful lens in reading other history. As the two-sentence pause in my current book where I learn that the Khoisan people were (what's the inverse of decimated?) 9 out of 10 died of smallpox during one particular period. Scorecard: Germs 1, Indigenous Peoples, 0.
Even while I'm reading my big ol' general history books of Europe (the older kind from pre 1980 that I pick up for a buck at used bookstores) the narrative reads as if slavery, international economic exploitation et al basically never happened. When discussing the rise of the bourgeoisie in France and England my cheap history books usually say something about "merchants and traders" with "increasing fortunes" "challenging the social order of the aristocracy" and then get on to some parliamentary discussion or some artistic/technical advance.
So as I'm reading my nice African history book I get to see where all the history that was left out of the European narratives happened. It happened in other countries! And everyone knows that what happens in other countries doesn't count. It's like visiting Las Vegas: "What happens in Africa, South America, Asia, and the Atlantic and Pacific Islands stays in Africa, South America, Asia, and the Atlantic and Pacific Islands!"
The most frustrating part is that, from contemporary plays and poetry of the 1600s and 1700s, you get the sense that this cultural amnesia was not a contemporary problem. The Restoration playwrights wrote about race a lot (I can't speak to how well they did it, because I haven't read the plays yet. But I know that Dryden and Behn wrote about stuff like this from my handy books of Restoration drama crit.). I suspect, because I'm a mean and uncharitable person, that the cultural amnesia started right about the time that any given country declared "slavery" illegal. And I say "slavery" in quotes because I am one of those people who considers colonial exploitation to be, (in a bastardization of is it Clausewitz's famous phrase?) an extension of slavery by other means. In my personal scorecard, slavery ended less than 40 years ago in most parts of the world, and still continues in others. Any country where most major industrial and natural resources are still controlled by foreign companies which were built and developed using the extortionary forces of slavery and colonial rule is a country that is still enslaved, in my book. By this demanding rubric very little of the world is free.
The sense I get is that people spoke pretty openly about slavery as long as slavery was officially considered value-neutral in their society. Once the society declared slavery value-negative, they began to obfuscate their past dealings. Because most of us don't deal well psychologically with examining our own shortcomings. But the result for the modern audience is a sense of deep confusion about economic and political development in our world and the costs of same. If I understand my traditional European textbooks properly, then the 1500s and 1600s were the big rise of centralized statehood. This same time period marked the big rise in European economic exploitation of other parts of the world, and the money gained from that exploitation provided a big part of the resources that fed the coffers of centralized governments and allowed them to extend their power without having to work through the then-still-existing parliamentary and aristocratic checks on various kinds of power (like taxation of citizens).
Also: that Guns, Germs, and Steel book is a useful lens in reading other history. As the two-sentence pause in my current book where I learn that the Khoisan people were (what's the inverse of decimated?) 9 out of 10 died of smallpox during one particular period. Scorecard: Germs 1, Indigenous Peoples, 0.
