Preface to the new edition

Summary

Each Generation of scholarly historians has not a universal but at least a common and characteristic way of looking at the past – a paradigm, if you will, but that is too ponderous a word for me. Let's call it a scenario.

The scenario a century ago of historians, nearly all of them Europeans or Euro-Americans, about modern imperialism and the industrial revolution was simple. The Europeans had conquered or at least cowed nearly everyone else in the world because the Europeans were the best people in the world. This phenomenon was especially clear in what I call the Neo-Europes – the United States, Argentina, Australia, and the like – where historians were sure there had never been many indigenous humans and the few survivors were obviously obsolescent.

The industrial revolution had happened first in Europe because everything important started there, as it always had since – oh – Aristotle. White people were better at machines., administration, and business than other people.

It is easy – even fun – to criticize the historians of the Victorian era., but they did nothing more contemptible than to draw their conclusions from the evidence they had at hand. Native American populations from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego, along with those of Australian Aborigines and New Zealand Maori, seemed to be plunging to extinction, while European and Neo-European populations were exploding. Their factories were smoking away in Manchester, the Ruhr, and Pittsburgh. Their railroads spanned North America, there were plans for Trans-Siberian and Cape-to-Cairo equivalents, and the sun couldn't set on the British empire no matter how hard it tried.

Then came the world wars, Gandhi, Lenin and Mao and the Marxist evangelists, innumerable colonial uprisings – and the need for a new historical scenario. That scenario rocketed to notoriety in the trying times of the 1960s and soon achieved the status of “political correctness.” Its theme was that European imperialism had succeeded because of European brutality, superior military technology, and capitalist encroachments. And, oh yes, the industrial revolution was a capitalist scam and an ecological disaster.

We have, guided by this scenario, learned a great deal about our pasts that we had never known or at least consciously acknowledged. I learned that, as one of my T-shirts from Chicago's Field Museum proclaims, “Columbus didn't discover America; He invaded it.”