About the Book
How should we understand Europe's special role in world history, and the enduring impact it made on the rest of the globe? Jerrold Seigel traces both the positive and negative sides of the continent's special role to its absence of effective central authority, the division and competition between its states and peoples, and its propensity for developing autonomous spheres of activity. Remaking the World analyzes how these features fostered Europe's characteristic preoccupation with a politics of liberty, its evolution of an aesthetic sphere animated by values specific to itself, its singular capacity to revolutionize scientific understanding, and its ability to prepare and carry out the first transition to a modern industrial economy. Extended and substantive comparisons with Africa, India, China, and the lands that came under the rule of the Ottomans demonstrate the absence of similar phenomena elsewhere, whereas in Europe they also helped generate the malign force of imperial expansion.
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction; Part I. Liberty and Liberties: 2. A preoccupation with liberty; 3. From liberties to liberty; 4. Liberties elsewhere; Part II. Autonomy and Teleocracy: 5. Spheres of autonomy: the church, universities, and the bounds of reason; 6. Classical humanism and aesthetics; 7. Science as a sphere of autonomy; 8. Teleocratic sciences; Part III. Openness and Domination: 9. Other peoples, other places; 10. Empire: material expansion, moral contraction, and internal criticism; 11. Courage and weakness: anti-imperialism and its limits in the nineteenth century; Part IV. Transformations: 12. Autonomy and transformation: Britain; 13. Transformation and autonomy: France and Germany; 14. Ready or not? China and India; 15. Conclusion.
About the Author :
Jerrold Seigel is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of History Emeritus at New York University. His work ranges from intellectual and cultural history to the evolution of society and politics. Previous publications include The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century (2005), and Modernity and Bourgeois Life: Society, Politics and Culture in England, France, and Germany since 1750 (2012), which won the 2014 Laura Shannon Prize.
Review :
'A work of breathtaking scope and erudition, this is macrohistory at its best, an original answer to the classic question of why Europe came to dominate the world. Europe's advantages, Seigel convincingly shows, emerged from no inherent superiority but from the autonomous spaces for innovation that the continent's political and religious disunity opened up.' Edward Berenson, New York University
'Jerrold Seigel's new book is an intriguing intervention in the long-running and often heated debate about the place of Europe in the history of the world.' Jonathan Sperber, University of Missouri
'Seminal, groundbreaking, exceptionally informative, impressively organized and presented history.' James A. Cox, Midwest Book Review
'Recommended.' J. Wigelsworth, CHOICE
'… tells the story of the West's outsize role across the last five centuries as the chief agent in unifying the globe, fostering complex networks of connection, and making originally European ways of interaction into points of reference for the rest of the world. This European impact was multidimensional: in economics, it brought the Industrial Revolution; in politics, it produced a distinctive preoccupation with the sources and meaning of freedom and equality; and in society and culture, it led to a reconceptualization of the cosmos and the modern imagination. In explaining why this grand transformation happened in Europe and not in the other great civilizations, Seigel points to the West's distinctive trajectory within the larger global system: after the fall of Rome, no aspiring hegemon succeeded in remaking Europe into a continent-sized empire, whereas its civilizational peers - China, Mughal India, and the Islamic dynasties - remained imperial in form. This fragmented and competitive early modern European landscape, Seigel argues, generated unique incentives for a dynamic process of “creative destruction,” laying the foundation of the great nineteenth-century explosion in wealth, power, and global imperial domination.' G. John Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs
'… tells the story of the West's outsize role across the last five centuries as the chief agent in unifying the globe, fostering complex networks of connection, and making originally European ways of interaction into points of reference for the rest of the world. This European impact was multidimensional: in economics, it brought the Industrial Revolution; in politics, it produced a distinctive preoccupation with the sources and meaning of freedom and equality; and in society and culture, it led to a reconceptualization of the cosmos and the modern imagination. In explaining why this grand transformation happened in Europe and not in the other great civilizations, Seigel points to the West's distinctive trajectory within the larger global system: after the fall of Rome, no aspiring hegemon succeeded in remaking Europe into a continent-sized empire, whereas its civilizational peers - China, Mughal India, and the Islamic dynasties - remained imperial in form. This fragmented and competitive early modern European landscape, Seigel argues, generated unique incentives for a dynamic process of “creative destruction,” laying the foundation of the great nineteenth-century explosion in wealth, power, and global imperial domination.' G. John Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs
