Imperialism is plagiarism
Some notes on a few centuries of stolen knowledge
Plagiarism is when you take credit for someone else’s work. Powerful individuals do it all the time. The powerless, when caught, are usually punished for it. Like bullying, there is a social norm against it and a stigma attached. But also like bullying, it is hard to teach that it is bad when it is one of the structures that underlie the international order. Around here, imperialism is fundamentally about the drain of wealth from poor countries to rich countries and from Indigenous peoples to colonizers. But imperialism is about more than just wealth: knowledge is stolen too. When imperialists steal knowledge without attribution, it’s not just plagiarism: it’s imperialist plagiarism.
And like I said, it is so pervasive as to be almost invisible. So much so that it appears in books about completely unrelated topics. Imagine my surprise when I was just trying to relax and read a nice book about how to survive the apocalypse, namely Lewis Dartnell’s 2014 book The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm, when I came across this passage (on pg. 11 if you’re looking):
“One of the major catalysts for the Renaissance in the 15th and 16th centuries was the trickle of ancient learning back into Western Europe. Much of this knowledge, lost with the fall of the Roman Empire, was preserved and propagated by Arab scholars carefully translating and copying texts; other manuscripts were rediscovered by European scholars.”
What’s wrong with this, you ask?
There seems to be a model of global knowledge distribution that looks something like this:
A few questions arise.
1. Did the West’s ancient learning come from Greece & Rome?
2. Was the role of Islamic civilizations to copy & translate texts?
3. Did Asia have any learning worth talking about?
4. Did Indigenous civilizations?
Let’s take each one in turn.
When it comes to Ancient Greece and Rome and where they got their knowledge, there are a number of readings that are of interest, and some striking points that are made by, for example, George G.M. James in his 1954 book Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy was the Offspring of the Egyptian Mystery System.
When it comes to Ancient Greece, the fount of knowledge is Aristotle, who wrote 400-1000 books on every topic from physics to medicine to poetics and biology. These books were written in a remarkable period of productivity that Aristotle experienced very shortly after Alexander the Great conquered and looted the great library at the city he then named Alexandria. Did Aristotle really write FOUR HUNDRED books on EVERY TOPIC then known to humanity? George James: “Throughout the intellectual advancement of man, the world has witnessed many a genius; but those have always been specialists in particular fields, not specialists in every branch of science.”
Maybe Aristotle just copied the Egyptian library? In which case Ancient Greek knowledge, which was the fountain of Ancient Roman knowledge, came from Africa (and we haven’t even talked about all the knowledge Greece acquired from its long interactions with Persia and points east of there…). Others who have made this case include Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization, Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, and of course Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization.
Next, we have the idea that the Islamic scholars’ role was to copy and translate texts! Is that what they did?
In his 2015 book, Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane, Frederick Starr talks about the original and extraordinary contributions to knowledge from medieval Islamic scholars like Al Biruni (973-1050) who separated astronomy from astrology; discovered elliptical orbits and earth’s rotation; calculated the radius of the earth and hypothesized that the American continent existed. Al Khwarazmi (780-850) solved the quadratic equation, treated algebra as an independent discipline, added sine and cosine tables and the first table of tangents. It goes a little bit beyond the copying and translating of texts!
Let’s go a bit farther east, shall we? Because luckily for the advancement of science, these Muslim scientists were not merely reading Greek and Roman texts. They were reading Hindu mathematicians like Aryabhata (476-550) from Nalanda University, who got us the zero, approximated pi, solved the summation of series of squares and cubes, and Varahamihira (505-587) whose astronomical work was used by al-Biruni. Among other discoveries, Varahamihira found that reflection is caused by the back-scattering of particles.
I haven’t even mentioned China, which would require, rather than a newsletter, an immense multivolume over years — how do I know it would require this? Because that is what Joseph Needham produced…
Some of the advancements made in China that are now adopted everywhere are outlined in John M. Hobson’s 2004 book, the Eastern Origins of Western Civilization. Here’s a partial list.
Education – exams – economic analysis – paper money – markets – urbanization – publishing industry – block printing
Manufacturing of: metals, tea, paper, silk, porcelain, dyes, glass, steel (cast iron, coke, steam power), petrol and natural gas for fuel
Agriculture: mouldboard plough, rotary winnowing machine, seed drill, crop rotation
Sailing: compass, square hull, sternpost rudder, fore and aft sails, watertight compartments, gunpowder, cannons, muskets
Our survey is now nearly complete, in that we have shown the origins of human knowledge in both Africa and Asia. But as vast as those knowledges are, humanity in 2023 would be suffering incredible ignorance without the contributions of the Indigenous civilizations of the Americas (and of Oceania).
Some surveys of the contributions of Indigenous civilizations include Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.
Some concepts that come from Indigenous civilizations: Democracy, deliberation, political debate, freedom, diplomacy, and ecological sustainability. Graeber and Wengrow write the following summary:
“Let’s pause for a moment to take stock. In the years between 1703 and 1751, as we’ve seen, the indigenous American critique of European society had an enormous impact on European thought. What began as widespread expressions of outrage and distaste by Americans (when first exposed to European mores) eventually evolved, through a thousand conversations, conducted in dozens of languages from Portuguese to Russian, into an argument about the nature of authority, decency, social responsibility and, above all, freedom. As it became clear to French observers that most indigenous Americans saw individual autonomy and freedom of action as consummate values – organizing their own lives in such a way as to minimize any possibility of one human being becoming subordinated to the will of another, and hence viewing French society as essentially one of fractious slaves – they reacted in a variety of different ways.
“Some, like the Jesuits, condemned the principle of freedom outright. Others – settlers, intellectuals and members of the reading public back home – came to see it as a provocative and appealing social proposition.”
There are books - libraries - filled with knowledge that was built on these plagiarized foundations. In many cases, the knowledge was taken out of its context and alienated from its source. Not just plagiarized, but corrupted as well. There is a lot more material out there about this (JM Blaut, Gunder Frank, Bagchi…) and in fact I would love to hear if you know of other sources along these lines.
My point in this little survey has been to refute the pillar of racist ideology that knowledge comes from the West and is diffused to the world through semi benign colonial processes. In fact, the West has no special claim to have developed knowledge. Some things came from the West: most things did not. Much that is claimed as Western knowledge comes from elsewhere.
Now here we are, and humanity has the stock of knowledge that it has. We have to make the most of it and maybe it doesn’t matter all that much where it came from, but that everybody gets it and what we can do with it.
But I still don’t think Aristotle wrote all those books…
[I first presented these readings at a conference at York U on May 16, 2023]
I haven’t researched it at all, but off the top of my head, food knowledge feels like one of those things that we don’t appreciate enough. There’s the obvious, which is that European settlers were kept alive for hundreds of years by Indigenous Americans who collaborated with them so they didn’t starve. And then the less obvious, like how some of the most iconic “European” foods are combinations of other cuisines, like pasta and tomato sauce (pasta is just noodles, from China, and tomatoes are indigenous to the Americas). Peppercorn, used in almost all Western cuisines, is from India and Southeast Asia. Tea, a bedrock of English culture and cuisine, is from China. I’m sure there are hundreds of other examples.
Skyhawk wrote a piece called "The Red Roots of White Feminism." I can look up the reference if you can't find it. If I remember right, it would be from the 1970s or 80s.