Each age, history tells us, has its centre of civilisation. It also shows that the centre of civilisation keeps changing. How such a change occurs has been the preoccupation of serious historians and thinkers. Some major historians and thinkers like Ibn Khaldun, Hegel and Marx, in different words, have tried to understand and analyse the movement of history and what comes out of its belly.

Ibn Khaldun presented a cyclical theory of history that deals with the rise and fall of monarchies, empires, dynasties, states and civilisations. He emphasised the role of social, economic, political and natural factors, which determine the health of a society or civilisation. Hegel came up with his famous theory of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, which underpinned the movement of history. The contradiction between a thesis and its antithesis is resolved at a higher level in the form of a synthesis. Marx built on this Hegelian dialectics and highlighted the significance of contradictions that shaped the nature of the process of history. He went a step further and located the presence of contradictions in real life; human labour is what forms the materialist basis of society and society is divided into antagonistic groups and inherent contradictions between them in form the vital aspects of dynamics of history. That’s why the famous Communist Manifesto declares: “The history of all hitherto society is the history of class struggles”.

It is generally agreed that interplay of contradictory forces is what causes changes and transformations in the process of human development. Changes happen all the time, invisibly, imperceptibly but we do not realise their absence like presence unless the changes are qualitative. Qualitative changes not only impact a particular society, they determine the course of history in the sense that declining societies start crumbling under their own dead weight and show unmistakable signs of lagging behind while new social forces mount the stage. Consequently, rising societies with their new-found vigour move ahead and start leading the previous leaders. Thus there occurs a shift in the centre of civilisation or a new centre of civilisation emerges.

Samir Amin, an Egyptian thinker and social scientist, has a theory that can help us understand such a phenomenon. Talking about capitalism, the dominant system in this age, he says that it is an integrated global system comprising developed and underdeveloped societies. The former forms the centre and the latter the peripheries. The state is well-established at the centre and has all the coercive power to meet any challenge to the system. If rebellion against it takes place, it can be crushed with a mighty force it has acquired. Against it, the state in the peripheries is less organised and has less coercive power. So it is comparatively easier for the forces of resistance to raise their head, chip away at the power of the state and succeed in wriggling free from the tentacles of the system.

Remember Delhi fell victim to the colonial onslaught much later after the fall of the peripheries? It is in such a historical process that roles are reversed; the centre becomes the peripheries and peripheries the centre. It is nothing unusual for the leader to become the led and vice versa. Take the history of the last one thousand years or so for example. You would see a completely different picture from the current one. The centre of civilisation was the East and had been so since ancient times. Prominent among those included in the East were the Middle East, India, China and Japan. The Americas too had advanced civilisation though it seemed to have little interaction with Europe and Asia. It’s only during the last five hundred years that the West became prominent on the globe and subsequently the centre of civilisation. Amin argues that we would make a mistake if we take Europe as a permanent historical centre of the world. Only in the capitalist era has Europe become dominant in almost all spheres of life.

One can assert that Europe’s peripheral existence and its struggle for survival proved its redeeming feature. Its poverty and misery exacerbated by harsh weather conditions became a blessing in disguise as it triggered a process of change that would change not only the Europeans but the whole world. Going through the history of the Crusades one is baffled how the Europeans suffered from the lack of culture and civilised way of life. It would be an understatement to describe them as an uncouth lot that had no sense of hygiene. Their medical practices were primitive; cutting of injured leg or arm with an axe was what they called surgery. Medical practitioners and surgeons of the Middle East were horrified at such crude and barbaric methods of treatment. The Arabs and Iranians highly advanced in fields of knowledge such as medical science, political science, algebra, chemistry, astronomy, astrology and history writing. India, in those times, was fabulously rich and resourceful. It had advanced medical science, especially the herbal one. It was far ahead of other societies in mathematics, astronomy and astrology. Its agricultural production was huge and livestock beyond count. India possessed more than twenty five percent of world’s wealth which made it a target of relentless foreign invasions. Similarly, China and Japan were much more developed than Europe.

So the centre of civilization was the East. The flipside was that it was content with what it had created and achieved and resisted change that led it to a state of stagnation. Europe, on the other hand, struggled to come out of its Dark Ages (5th to 14th centuries), which resulted in Renaissance in 15th and 16th centuries. It paved the way for Europe to enter the modern era, which involved a transition from the darkness of superstition to the light of reason. Once discovered, the force of reason proved irresistible and unstoppable that eventually led to the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the 18th century. It introduced more efficient manufacturing processes with its reliance on machines. This epochal advance unleashed massive productive and social forces and extended the boundaries of human potential beyond measure. It was the time the West started climbing the steps of history’s centre stage. It was the time that made the splendour of the East look like waste and the glory of the Eastern despots and monarchs’ glitzy impotence. It was the beginning of Western colonialism. — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, August 7th, 2023