ABSTRACT
Scholars of all disciplines regularly accept as common knowledge that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries represent the apex of “European” hegemony.2 Fascinated by the scope and pervasiveness of such an accomplishment, readers are reminded that we can measure this European power not only by the number of “subalterns” killed, exploited, and denigrated. The world’s commercial networks, claimed to be diligently regulated by a codifi ed standard of law, a pervasive standard of high and low culture, or the predominance of certain kinds of governmental institutions and practices, also are mobilized prodigiously in the historiography to suggest a dramatic caesura in human history that emanates from “Europe.”3 The point is often made more poignant by the plethora of detailed statistics that highlight Europe’s material ascendancy and its subsequent, increasingly ambiguous, legacy on colonized cultures. Not merely descriptive, these documented “facts” of both genocide and humanism are also used to instil the impression that Europe physically and epistemologically dominated the world, in effect creating the world in which we are all now living as either hapless benefi ciaries or victims.4
