Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven writes:

With the publication of Orientalism in 1978, Edward Said would become one of the most influential scholars of our era. The book transformed the study of the history of the modern world, as it offered insights into how racist discourses created and maintained European empires. As much for his political activities, Said and his work attracted a number of Right-wing critics, most notably perhaps Bernard Lewis. Less well known in the West is Samir Amin, the Egyptian economist who coined the term ‘Eurocentrism’. The term comes from Amin’s book Eurocentrism (1988), which criticised Said’s view of empire from the Left and offered an alternative view, one based not on culture or discourse, but on a materialist understanding of capitalism and imperialism.

Said spent most of his career in the Global North, in New York City, while Amin spent his mostly in Africa, attempting to build African academic and political institutions to challenge the dependencies created through imperialism. When I met Amin for an interview back in 2016, he was 85 and still vigorously involved in building alternative institutions and challenging Eurocentric social theory. Although he died in 2018, his legacy remains acutely relevant.

In Eurocentrism, Amin exposed claims of how capitalism developed in Europe as flawed. He argued that this story of capitalism emerging from endogenous European characteristics of rationality and triumph – which continues to dominate social theory – is distorting. It disguises the true nature of the capitalist system, including the role of imperialism and racism in its history. Rather than representing an objective scientific explanation, Amin saw Eurocentric ideology. For him, assuming that capitalism can develop in the periphery in the way that it allegedly did in Europe is a logical impossibility. Amin also points out that the foundation of European cultural unity is racist, given that it creates a false opposition between languages and false historical dichotomies (eg, Greece is considered ‘European’ and not connected to the Orient; Christianity, too, is considered European). As such, Amin was an early and sophisticated critic of culturalist explanations in the social sciences. [Continue reading…]