In his review of efforts to place European history in a global perspective, an influential British anthropologist argues that Europeans have stolen time from the rest of the world by universalizing the Christian calendar and have stolen space by imposing the Mercator projection map of the globe. More important, Europeans have treated their experience as normative and superior by adopting “ancient,” “medieval,” and “modern” periodization and depicting Europe as the homeland of democracy, individualism, capitalism, and love.

As befits a senior scholar addressing a general readership, Jack Goody analyzes the deficiencies of leading observers, whose interpretations still influence mainstream scholarship and public opinion despite a mountain of contrary evidence. More surprisingly, the author focuses on what he calls the post–Bronze Age cultures of Eurasia, playing down the significance of African “oral cultures” and setting aside the experience of the New World.

Moses Finley (Democracy Ancient and Modern [London, 1985]) depicted “classical” Greece as a major departure from the archaic age and a stark alternative to the Persian Empire in “developing” the epic, art, logic, and democracy. Building on Martin Bernal (Black Athena [London, 1987]), Goody instead emphasizes the Phoenician alphabet, the Hebrew Bible, and Egyptian sculpture, as well as contemporary achievements in Chinese moral philosophy and African and Asian responsible government. To those who say “classical Greece created the modern world,” Goody responds: “The modern world ‘created Greece’” (37).

Perry Anderson (Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism [London, 1974]) followed Karl Marx in holding that the collapse of Greco-Roman antiquity cleared the way for medieval feudalism and allowed the growth of trade and manufacturing. But Goody points out that feudalism appeared only after the lengthy Dark Ages and that the major inventions of the Middle Ages—the spur, the horseshoe, and the water mill—all originated in the East. Muslim Arabs preserved translations of Greco-Roman texts that permitted the recovery of the classical heritage in the European Renaissance.

Goody shares Carlo Cipolla's recognition of European superiority in sails and guns as keys to empire, merely noting John Hobson's more recent suggestion of Asian parity in these technologies (Cipolla, Guns, Sails and Empires [New York, 1965]; Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation [Cambridge, 2004]). But, contrary to Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong? (London, 2002) and Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York, 1989), which consider the Ottomans technologically inferior and religiously conservative, Goody argues that the Turks adopted guns, developed a navy, and traded effectively in silk, paper, and spices from further east. He follows Eric Wolf (Europe and the People without History [Berkeley, 1982]) in seeing a proliferation of “tributary states” across Eurasia and finds no basis for “Oriental despotism,” a European notion reinvented to delegitimize Asian polities.

Joseph Needham believed that “modern science,” mathematized hypotheses about nature tested through rigorous experimentation, appeared only with capitalism in post-Renaissance Europe (“General Conclusions and Reflections,” in Science and Civilization in China, ed. Joseph Needham, pt. 2, vol. 7 [Cambridge, 2004]). Goody instead follows Mark Elvin (“Ave atque vale,” in the Needham volume) and Timothy Brook (with Gregory Blue, eds., China and Historical Capitalism [Cambridge, 1999]): all literate societies have had renascences, all cities have had bourgeoisies, and China invented the paper and printing that contributed to the European Renaissance and scientific revolution. He leaves open whether the impact of printing would have been greater in China if Chinese script had been alphabetical, but he insists that Europe had a scientific revolution because Christianity necessitated it while Confucianism did not.

Norbert Elias, who, like Immanuel Kant, defined civilization as “social propriety and decency,” found it only in Europe, where it became the “self-consciousness of the West” (The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott [1939; Oxford, 1994]). Achieved externally through the absolutist state and internally by control of the superego, civility entailed concealment of bodily functions, refinement of culinary etiquette, pacification of politics, and interdependence among states. Goody points out that some practices (such as consideration for others) can be found in stateless societies, others (such as class-differentiated behavior) were not novel but recurrent, and still others (such as constraints on sex and violence) were easily reversed. Contrary to Thomas Malthus, Goody points out that Asian constraints on fertility were as effective as European ones (James Lee and Wang Feng, One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities, 1700–2000 [Cambridge, 1999]). Goody advises: “Stick to Europe if you will, but not if you are making more general claims” (173).

Fernand Braudel argued that “real” or “finance” capitalism arose in Europe only after the sixteenth century (Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 3 [London, 1981]). Braudel's sources were largely European, and he thought Europe “discovered” coffee, tea, and chocolate, which actually originated in Ethiopia, China, and Mexico; he also arbitrarily privileged meat over vegetables, and animal power over human. Goody agrees with André Gunder Frank (ReOrient [Berkeley, 1998]) that “the east knew what it wanted [silver] and how to get it by peaceful means, namely, by trade” (190) and cites Kenneth Pomeranz (The Great Divergence [Princeton, NJ, 2000]) to the effect that China and India in the eighteenth century had all the economic institutions necessary for sustained growth.

Unlike Max Weber (Economy and Society, trans. and ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich [New York, 1968]), Goody holds that Eastern towns were “real” and highly continuous, that all written religions have maintained partial independence from their polities, and that all governments have some form of consultation and often representation. He cites George Makdisi (The Rise of Colleges [Edinburgh, 1981]) that “there were significant parallels between the system of education in Islam and that of the Christian West” (228).

Contrary to Samuel Huntington (The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order [New York, 1996]), who distinguished “Western values” from “Eastern” ones (even ignoring the Abrahamic nature of Islam), Goody finds secular humanism in Confucianism and in Islam prior to “external interference” (244), the rule of law and human rights in many times and places before their violation by the United States and Israel in their quests for natural resources and national security, and concern for individuality, equality, and freedom in many different “human societies” (260). Goody finds even romantic love in many eras and locations outside of medieval Europe and contemporary Hollywood: “It [love] really does rule the world, not only the continent of Europe” (285).

Goody's “anthropo-archaeological approach to modern history” (287) offers a valuable alternative to unilinear stages based on European experience. It is more sensible than much “comparative literature” and “cultural studies” that have only limited temporal and spatial relevance.

The volume has a few unfortunate lacunae that may limit its impact. It frequently cites but oddly downplays the author's own work on the LoDagaa people of northern Ghana as well as African civilizations in general, characterized as “simpler” and “pre-historical” (The Myth of the Bagre [Oxford, 1972], 13, 27). It thus takes a step back from Lewis Mumford's Technics and Human Development (the first volume of his The Myth of the Machine [New York, 1934]) and Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's Civilizations (New York, 2001), which offered more capacious concepts of “civilization.” It ignores the work of Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel [New York, 1999]) and fails to explain how Mesopotamia gave rise to the first putatively “higher” civilizations. Despite its critique of European notions of “progress,” it accepts the language of “development” and affiliated notions of being “ahead” or “behind” in a global horse race (to what end?).

Goody tends to equate “capitalism” with “modernity,” mentioning socialism only in passing. Although implicitly recognizing various forms of each, he uses these terms as if they are largely unproblematic before finally enclosing them in quotation marks and questioning their usefulness. The study thus fails to build on Frank's ReOrient, which had already abandoned evolutionary social stages in favor of shifting places in world systems. The volume takes the concept of “centrality” seriously and suggests a succession of centers in world history: from Mesopotamia, to China, to Europe. Goody calls for “grids” rather than dichotomies, but he does not chart the kinds of centers and their various relationships with their peripheries. He rightly concludes by excoriating the contemporary world center, the United States, but offers no clear guidance as to how that hegemonic empire might learn from earlier centers to cooperate in fashioning a more just and sustainable global order.