A question on theory for the third world

[axis_of_evil]

I don't know if this is the proper forum to ask my question/s but I'll ask anyway.

I'm writing in the field of "third world history". I'm attempting to find sources which are able to guide me in the study of locales outside of the "west" which are normally given scant attention in dominant scholarship, and even leftist scholarship.

My general problem is a lack of sources to credibly deal with how we write "third world history" and how we may consider people in the "third world" as agents of change, moving them from the margins of history to the center. They are at the center of history anyway but the field of history like everything else reflects bourgeois interest.

I'll be more specific. I deal with North Africa and the Middle East. The scholarship on these regions, even when offered throuh the lense of leftist scholarship tends to offer a predominate role to the "west" or the coming of the "west" as a watershed moment in their collective history. The coming of the "west" is seen as bringing progress, and modernity, etc. I want to break from this tradition.

I've read Edward Said's Orientalism, and followed closely the work of Immanuel Wallerstein and his world systems approach. Though Wallerstein is far more acceptable than Orientalist scholarship ala Bernard Lewis etc, I still find that Wallerstein gives a dominant role to the "west" as making history while everyone else sits on the side line.

A side note: Marx's AMP doesn't work in my field of study. I need to get beyond the idea of of an oriental despot. We know from the social history that began in the 70's that Oriental Despotism is a flawed concept.


The problem however as I see it is a question of 'how we write history', who is included, who is not, what is ignored? I need sources, theory, which speakS to this. I need books on history and theory, and or historiography.

Does anyone have suggestions

Thanks in advance

[rouchambeau]

Mohanty might have something of value for you.

[gilhyle]

It may be a matter of brevity or wording....but it seems to me wrong to take an anti-eurocentric view.....as wrong as it would be to take a euro-centric view. For there is no doubt that the intervention of West European capitalism in, for example, North Africa transformed the history of that region.

to take a different example.... if one were writing the history of the East coast of England the the Norse/Viking invasions would be relevant, but the question which would arise would be whether their influence was as a catalyst of change or whether they changed the mode of production - as for example the Normans did some centuries later. Without changing the fundamental direction an external invader can come in and push the process of development along in a direction it was already going in. ALternatively an external invader can transform the historical process.

One thing that happens in the latter case is that processes of change do not only get moved in a direction which was already within the range of likely possibilities, but the range of possibilities get transformed and existing processes of change get eliminated. Thus a history does get wipped out.

You an see Marx in his Ethnographic Notebooks identifying processes of development, for example in pre-Norman Irish society, in which social relations of slavery are dissolved and those of Feudalism are beginning to develop. What that shows is that it is possible to write the history of the pre-imperialist world as a process of change and continuity even when that process is much slower than and quite different from what is to come.

In fact what is to come, in setting the agenda for the writing of history, acts as an obstacle to the writing of accurate history of the pre-imperialist period. The agents of anti-imperialist change will often want to romanticise the pre-imperialist world and consequently to under-state the processes of exploitation and struggle which existed in that society.