The Anticolonial Past

We found a large number of these books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which there was not to be seen superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree and which caused them great affliction.

—Diego de Landa, Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (1566)

A product of modern European civilization, studying any problem of universal history, is bound to ask himself to what combination of circumstance the fact should be attributed that in Western civilization and Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of development having universal significance and value.

—Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1900)

Arrogante y desgraciada, la modernidad se desarrolla neuroticamente entre opciones imposibles y encrucijadas fatales [Arrogant and wretched, modernity unfolds neurotically between impossible options and fatal intersections].

—Ticio Escobar, Las vanguardias furtivas (1992)

Well before the time Weber was writing the passage quoted above, the narrative of the rise of the West could be assumed as a fact, its most glorious and unique creation being a set of universal values and principles capable of unifying and equalizing all humanity. Human progress, or in Kantian terms the upward unfolding of the human spirit, was the story of the diffusion of this unique European-driven project and these European-derived principles across the planet. Yet the last clause of Weber's statement contains a pregnant parenthesis. The story is something "we like to think," and possibly no more than that. And who is that "we" whose interests might not be those of all of humanity, but uniquely its own? This subject is "bound" to ask for explanations of his historical privilege as the agent of the universal, but apparently he suspects that there may be answers he will not like—which of course is what binds him to ask.

So on the fulcrum of the turning century, Weber's prose seesaws between the certainty of fact and the unreliability of desire. For many theorists of modernity, this narcissistic oscillation between self-affirmation and self-examination is the hallmark of the modern subject Weber refers to. Modernity by 1900 had become a European identity discourse that performed itself in that modality.¹ As the twentieth century progressed, the story of the rise of the West would unfold in some quarters into a tale of decline even as the account of universalizing "lines of development" retained its power to program, interpret, and absorb developments all over the planet and to expel from history processes that did not fit the paradigm.

Weber's modern subject is "bound to ask himself" about the causes of the rise of the West. In this scene of knowing, there is no one else to ask. It is not just that he, the product of modern European civilization, has unique access to the higher knowledge with which to answer that question. Only he knows that the question exists; only he knows that the things of universal significance and value are his. Anyone not a product of modern European civilization, if asked, might readily assert their own universal principles and values, unaware that they are not entitled to do this. Who, then, is the "they" implied by the "we" of the pregnant parenthesis? Who could tell the story otherwise? What is the unnamed subject position, the unnamed body, who could particularize the European's self-invention as the monopolist of the universal?

The essay that follows presents some answers that modern anticolonial thought has offered to the questions Weber's subject is posing himself. It explores how anticolonial writing, from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as from Europe and the United States, has told the story of Europe's embarking on a "line of development having universal significance and value." In particular, I highlight anticolonial accounts of diffusionism, the often unarticulated assumption that universal civilization naturally but...