history, but they also span the globe. This scope is routine in historical geography. Note that the Western model is non-Marxist. A Marxist model of the classical or European type—something of an intermediate case—will be examined briefly at a later point. The Western model will be given rather cursory discussion in any event, since it is a collection of all-too-familiar truisms. It will in fact be treated very shabbily, and used mainly as a foil for the Third-World model, toward which I admit a favorable bias. It should be said at this point that my use of the term “model” in this discussion is intended to not only emphasize the fact that we are simplifying process to a bare structure for analytic purposes, but also to emphasize a property of models which is vital to this kind of discourse. Models are not reality. They can be as improbable and outlandish as one may desire, so long as the model world and real world remain separated. Some of the historical statements in the Third-World model are so thoroughly contradictory to the truisms of Western history that they may not even seem plausible. My task is to clothe them with just [such] supporting evidence as conveys their plausibility. Historians must carry the burden from there. “European civilization arose and flowered, until in the end it covered the face of the earth.”6 These words by Marc Bloch sum up the Western model quite nicely. They convey the root belief in an ineffable European spirit, a sui generis cause of European evolution and expansion. A small number of such beliefs are the basic truisms of imperialism, generating those arguments which justified imperialism during its evolution and those which (I claim) disguise it today. The following truisms seem to be crucial:
1 Europe is a spatio-temporal individual, clearly demarcated and internally coherent—a “civiliza- tion.” It has been such since the Middle Ages or before, although the boundaries have extended to Anglo-America and beyond. This conception gives the model a simple domocentric form,7 with a distinctive geometry: an inner space, closed and undifferentiated (all portions have the property “European”); an outer space, also closed on the spherical surface; and a boundary between them which has finite width and important internal properties. 2 The rise of European civilization throughout this period has been generated mainly by inner processes. Non-European peoples and areas