Geoffrey Hawthorn writes:

Jack Goody, however, is not satisfied. The deformations of a Eurocentric whiggism, he believes, are with us still. Historians who were writing around the middle of the last century – Moses Finley on the ancient world, Joseph Needham on ‘science and civilisation’ in China and the West, Fernand Braudel on Europe’s economy, Norbert Elias on the emergence of civilised manners – have, in the very breadth of the comparisons they make, served to strengthen the prejudice that Europe was predestined to be superior in its economy, towns, institutions and learning, in its values of ‘humanism, democracy and individualism’, and in its expressions of feeling. Finley in this way reinforced the cult of Greece as ancestor, Needham the assumption of Europe’s eventual superiority in science and technology, Braudel the case for the decisive effects of European ‘finance capitalism’, Elias the claim that it was in Europe that personal habits had become uniquely polite.

(LRB 20 November 2008)

Cambridge University Press | Paperback 352 pp. |ISBN: 9780521691055