Tarihsel

(İng. historic,historical)

Göndermeler

Diğer

An important aspect of Hodgson's reevaluation of modernity is his insistence that in historical time it is the discontinuities and not the continuities of Western history which are most striking. He notes that the ascending curve which runs from ancient Greece, to the Renaissance, to modern times is an optical illusion. In fact, he argues, for most of history Europe was an insignificant outlier of mainland Asia. Furthermore, he notes, the Renaissance did not inaugurate modernity. Instead, it brought Europe up to the cultural level of the other major civilizations of the Oikoumene. It did so in some measure by assimilating the advances of the other Asian civilizations. The list of inventions which developed elsewhere and diffused subsequently to Europe is a long one. It includes gunpowder firearms, the compass, the sternpost rudder, decimal notation, and the university, among others. Seen in this light, the European experience looks much less original. This is not to deny that there were original European developments. But in the context of three millennia of agrarianate citied life in the Afro-Eurasian Oikoumene, there was a tendency for civilizations to achieve a rough parity with one another as cultural innovations diffused throughout the Oikoumene.

A particularly contentious subject is the appropriateness of using terms such as ‘colony’ and ‘colonisation’. In the English language the term ‘colony’, derived from the Latin noun colonia, was originally used to denote an overseas settlement that had been founded on the directive of a state or empire and so remained subject to its rule. However, the term has become historically associated with European expansions into overseas territories during the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries CE (e.g. the British colonisation of Africa and India during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) and so has acquired imperial connotations.