4 • Chapter One: Thinking Globally About History and Culture

Europe and the People Without History

Eric R. Wolf

Introduction
The central assertion of this book is that the world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality
of interconnected processes, and inquiries that disassemble this totality into bits and then fail to
reassemble it falsify reality. Concepts like “nation,” “society,” and “culture” name bits and threaten
to turn names into things. Only by understanding these names as bundles of relationships, and by
placing them back into the field from which they were abstracted, can we hope to avoid misleading
inferences and increase our share of understanding.
On one level it has become a commonplace to say that we all inhabit “one world.” There
are ecological connections: New York suffers from the Hong Kong flu; the grapevines of Europe
are destroyed by American plant lice. There are demographic connections: Jamaicans migrate to
London; Chinese migrate to Singapore. There are economic connections: a shutdown of oil wells on
the Persian Gulf halts generating plants in Ohio; a balance of payments unfavorable to the United
States drains American dollars into bank accounts in Frankfurt or Yokohama; Italians produce Fiat
automobiles in the Soviet Union; Japanese build a hydroelectric system in Ceylon. There are political
connections: wars begun in Europe unleash reverberations around the globe; American troops
intervene on the rim of Asia; Finns guard the border between Israel and Egypt.
This holds true not only of the present but also of the past. Diseases from Eurasia devastated
the native population of America and Oceania. Syphilis moved from the New World to the Old.
Europeans and their plants and animals invaded the Americas; the American potato, maize plant,
and manioc spread throughout the Old World. Large numbers of Africans were transported forcibly
to the New World; Chinese and Indian indentured laborers were shipped to Southeast Asia and the
West Indies. Portugal created a Portuguese settlement in Macao off the coast of China. Dutchmen,
using labor obtained in Bengal, constructed Batavia. Irish children were sold into servitude in the
West Indies. Fugitive African slaves found sanctuary in the hills of Surinam. Europe learned to
copy Indian textiles and Chinese porcelain, to drink native American chocolate, to smoke native
American tobacco, to use Arabic numerals.
These are familiar facts. They indicate contact and connections, linkages and interrelationships.
Yet the scholars to whom we turn in order to understand what we see largely persist in ignoring
them. Historians, economists, and political scientists take separate nations as their basic framework
of inquiry. Sociology continues to divide the world into separate societies. Even anthropology, once

Europe and the People Without History, Eric R. Wolf, © University of California Press. Permission conveyed
through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
 Chapter One: Thinking Globally About History and Culture • 5

greatly concerned with how culture traits diffused around the world, divides its subject matter
into distinctive cases: each society with its characteristic culture, conceived as an integrated and
bounded system, set off against other equally bounded systems.
If social and cultural distinctiveness and mutual separation were a hallmark of humankind,
one would expect to find it most easily among the so-called primitives, people “without history,”
supposedly isolated from the external world and from one another. On this presupposition, what
would we make of the archaeological findings that European trade goods appear in sites on the
Niagara frontier as early as early as 1570, and that by 1670 sites of the Onondaga subgroup of
the Iroquois reveal almost no items of native manufacture except pipes? On the other side of the
Atlantic, the organization and orientations of large African populations were transformed in major
ways by the trade in slaves. Since the European slavers only moved the slaves from the African coast
to their destination in the Americas, the supply side of the trade was entirely in African hands. This
was the “African foundation” upon which was built, in the words of the British mercantilist Malachy
Postlethwayt, “the magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power.” From
Senegambia in West Africa to Angola, population after population was drawn into this trade, which
ramified far inland and affected people who had never even seen a European trader on the coast. Any
account of Kru, Fanti, Asante, Ijaw, Igbo, Kongo, Luba, Lunda, or Ngola that treats each group as
a “tribe” sufficient unto itself thus misreads the African past and the African present. Furthermore,
trade with Iroquois and West Africa affected Europe in turn. Between 1670 and 1760 the Iroquois
demanded dyed scarlet and blue cloth made in the Stroudwater Valley of Gloucestershire. This was
also one of the first areas in which English weavers lost their autonomy and became hired factory
hands. Perhaps there was an interconnection between the American trade and the onset of the
industrial revolution in the valley of the Stroud. Conversely, the more than 5,500 muskets supplied
to the Gold Coast in only three years (1658–1661) enriched the gunsmiths of Birmingham, where
they were made (Jennings 1977: 99–100; Daaku 1970: 150–151).
If there are connections everywhere, why do we persist in turning dynamic, interconnected
phenomena into static, disconnected things? Some of this is owing, perhaps, to the way we have
learned our own history. We have been taught, inside the classroom and outside of it, that there
exists an entity called the West, and that one can think of this West as a society and civilization
independent of and in opposition to other societies and civilizations. Many of us even grew up
believing that this West has a genealogy, according to which ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat
Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the
Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution. Industry, crossed with democracy,
in turn yielded the United States, embodying the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Such a developmental scheme is misleading. It is misleading, first, because it turns history into
a moral success story, a race in time in which each runner of the race passes on the torch of liberty
to the next relay. History is thus converted into a tale about the furtherance of virtue, about how the
virtuous win out over the bad guys. Frequently, this turns into a story of how the winners prove that
they are virtuous and good by winning. If history is the working out of a moral purpose in time, then
those who lay claim to that purpose are by that fact the predilect agents of history.
The scheme misleads in a second sense as well. If history is but a tale of unfolding moral
purpose, then each link in the genealogy, each runner in the race, is only a precursor of the final
6 • Chapter One: Thinking Globally About History and Culture

apotheosis and not a manifold of social and cultural processes at work in their own time and place.
Yet what would we learn of ancient Greece, for example, if we interpreted it only as a prehistoric Miss
Liberty, holding aloft the torch of moral purpose in the barbarian night? We would gain little sense
of the class conflicts racking the Greek cities, or of the relation between freemen and their slaves.
We would have no reason to ask why there were more Greeks fighting in the ranks of the Persian
kings than in the ranks of the Hellenic Alliance against the Persians. It would be of no interest to
us to know that more Greeks lived- in southern Italy and Sicily, then called Magna Graecia, than in
Greece proper. Nor would we have any reason to ask why there were soon more Greek mercenaries
in foreign armies than in the military bodies of their home cities. Greek settlers outside of Greece,
Greek mercenaries in foreign armies, and slaves from Thrace, Phrygia, or Paphalagonia in Greek
households all imply Hellenic relations with Greeks and non-Greeks outside of Greece. Yet our
guiding scheme would not invite us to ask questions about these relationships.
Nowhere is this myth-making scheme more apparent than in schoolbook versions of the history
of the United States. There, a complex orchestration of antagonistic forces is celebrated instead
as the unfolding of a timeless essence. In this perspective, the ever-changing boundaries of the
United States and the repeated involvements of the polity in internal and external wars, declared
and undeclared, are telescoped together by the teleological understanding that thirteen colonies
dinging to the eastern rim of the continent would, in less than a century, plant the American flag
on the shores of the Pacific. Yet this final result was itself only the contested outcome of many
contradictory relationships. The colonies declared their independence, even though a majority of
their population—European settlers, native Americans, and African slaves—favored the Tories. The
new republic nearly foundered on the issue of slavery, dealing with it, in a series of problematic
compromises, by creating two federated countries, each with its own zone of expansion. There
was surely land for the taking on the new continent, but it had to be taken first from the native
Americans who inhabited it, and then converted into flamboyant real estate. Jefferson bought the
Louisiana territory cheaply, but only after the revolt of the Haitian slaves against their French slave
masters robbed the area of its importance in the French scheme of things as a source of food supply
for the Caribbean plantations. The occupation of Florida closed off one of the main escape hatches
from southern slavery. The war with Mexico made the Southwest safe for slavery and cotton. The
Hispanic landowners who stood in the way of the American drive to the Pacific became “bandits”
when they defended their own against the Anglophone newcomers. Then North and South—one
country importing its working force from Europe, the other form Africa—fought one of the bloodiest
wars in history. For a time the defeated South became a colony of the victorious North. Later, the
alignment between regions changed, the “sunbelt” rising to predominance as the influence of the
industrial Northeast declined. Clearly the republic was neither indivisible nor endowed with God-
given boundaries.
It is conceivable that things might have been different. There could have arisen a polyglot
Floridian Republic, a Francophone Mississippian America, a Hispanic New Biscay, a Republic of
the Great Lakes, a Columbia—comprising the present Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia.
Only if we assume a God-given drive toward geopolitical unity on the North American continent
would this retrojection be meaningless. Instead, it invites us to account in material terms for what
happened at each juncture, to account for how some relationships gained ascendancy over others.
 Chapter One: Thinking Globally About History and Culture • 7

Thus neither ancient Greece, Rome, Christian Europe, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the
industrial revolution, democracy, nor even the United States was ever a thing propelled toward its
unfolding goal by some immanent driving spring, but rather a temporally and spatially changing
and changeable set of relationships, or relationships among sets of relationships.
The point is more than academic. By turning names into things we create false models of
reality. By endowing nations, societies, or cultures with the qualities of internally homogeneous
and externally distinctive and bounded objects, we create a model of the world as a global pool
hall in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls. Thus it
becomes easy to sort the world into differently colored balls, to declare that “East is East, and
West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” In this way a quintessential West is counterposed
to an equally quintessential East, where life was cheap and slavish multitudes groveled under a
variety of despotisms. Later, as peoples in other climes began to assert their political and economic
independence from both West and East, we assigned these new applicants for historical status to a
Third World of underdevelopment—a residual category of conceptual billiard balls—as contrasted
with the developed West and the developing East. Inevitably, perhaps, these reified categories
became intellectual instruments in the prosecution of the Cold War. There was the “modern” world
of the West. There was the world of the East, which had fallen prey to communism, a “disease of
modernization” (Rostow 1960). There was, finally, the Third World, still bound up in “tradition”
and strangled in its efforts toward modernization. If the West could only find ways of breaking that
grip, it could perhaps save the victim from the infection incubated and spread by the East, and
set that Third World upon the road to modernization—the road to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness of the West. The ghastly offspring of this way of thinking about the world was the theory
of “forced draft urbanization” (Huntington 1968: 655), which held that the Vietnamese could be
propelled toward modenization by driving them into the cities through aerial bombardment and
defoliation of the countryside. Names thus become things, and things marked with an X can become
targets of war.