“No issue in world history looms larger than coming to terms with the roles Europe has played in it.”
The historian Jerrold Seigel makes this claim in his sweeping new book. It may be debatable, but the assertion has particular resonance today, with Volodymyr Zelensky’s refusal to surrender to either Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump. As the leaders of both superpowers warn of nuclear war, the fallout from the bloodbath in Ukraine is likely to reverberate for years and demonstrate once again that what happens in Europe doesn’t stay in Europe.
It has been that way at least since Christopher Columbus sailed to the Americas in 1492. Columbus was the fearless explorer who discovered an entire new world, but his voyage was also the dawn of four centuries of colonial oppression verging on genocide.
Whether Columbus is viewed as a hero or a villain, his story personified the ambitions of Europeans who crossed oceans, re-drew maps, and reshaped societies. Columbus was the product of a continent that gave the world the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but also the Inquisition, Fascism, Communism, and, finally, Putin’s expansionist authoritarianism.
It’s a complicated legacy, and it’s this complexity that animates Seigel’s Remaking the World: European Distinctiveness and the Transformation of Politics, Culture, and the Economy.
Seigel is a heavyweight in cultural and intellectual history, with decades of teaching at Princeton and N.Y.U. Here, in this dense and challenging book, he takes on an enormous question: What makes Europe’s history so distinct, and how did it come to dominate most of the world?
His approach is measured and thoughtful. He refuses to paint Europe as either noble or amoral, but instead as a paradoxical mix of both. His view seems sensible and is presented in a tone that suggests this could be a grand compromise between divergent interpretations of history. But it will no doubt inspire arguments from different sides.
For Seigel, Europe’s history is a paradox—a source simultaneously of domination and liberation, cruelty and progress. Throughout their history, Paris and London, for instance, were centers of imperial empires that denied freedoms to others but also centers of enlightened thought and anti-colonial activism.
Even as the imperial powers violently imposed themselves across the globe, they established connections, ideas, and institutions that transformed human civilizations. For Seigel, “the paradox of Europe’s simultaneous identification with freedom and with domination” are “two faces of the same distinctive evolution.”
Seigel makes clear that Europe’s intellectuals have mirrored that inconsistency. Even while Alexis de Tocqueville felt deep respect for the formation of representative democracy in the United States, he endorsed France’s repression in Algeria.
Niccolo Machiavelli, the Florentine Renaissance political philosopher who counseled princes to make themselves feared rather than loved, was not simply a bully. He was also a promoter of inclusive Republican government and an opponent of Medici domination. In The Prince, Machiavelli concluded his hard-nosed treatise on power politics with a call on Italians to recover their liberty.
This tension between liberty and domination, Seigel argues, stems from Europe’s distinctive historical evolution. From the fall of Rome to the rise of modern nation-states, feudal fragmentation fostered economic, political, and social competition. These rivalries propelled Europe forward, spurring cycles of creative destruction. Seigel traces this pattern through vivid examples, from the urban communes of the 11th century to the Protestant Reformation, to the scientific revolutions of Galileo, Newton, and Darwin.
Several European rulers, such as Charles V, Louis XIV, and Napoleon, aspired to dominate empires across Europe and beyond. But their efforts all failed, leaving an enduring system of individual states, each seeking military but also economic advantage. Judeo-Christian traditions, secularism, individualism, and other cultural values were varied and often competing, producing upheavals of philosophical and scientific thought by Copernicus and Marx, to name just a couple of the numerous thinkers.
Unlike other civilizations, Europe thrived on diversity and even, ultimately, on conflict. Confucian thinking, for instance, rejected independent power centers in China outside the control of the imperial state. Islamic philosophy insisted on divine will across a wide swath of North Africa and the Middle East. Yet in Europe, powerful rivalries between neighbors goaded them to advance economically, but also served as catalysts for social and cultural development.
Seigel’s Eurocentric view may annoy those who study and admire the vitality of other great civilizations. Might not China or India have developed more robust industrialized societies in the 18th century had it not been for European interference? Seigel himself acknowledges that some of his views are debatable. “That readers may find reasons to criticize particular arguments or claims along the way,” he writes, is “the fate of every book.”
But it is hard to argue with Seigel that the human potential galvanized by Europe to remake the world could simultaneously afflict and deform it through wars and environmental degradation. Look no further than Ukraine today, and how the Russian war there unleashed global inflationary pressures and a rift between Washington and Western Europe, and potentially enabled a once unthinkable partnership between Washington and Moscow that would be felt across the world.
Clifford Krauss is a longtime correspondent for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He has reported from Latin America and the Middle East, and is the author of Inside Central America: Its People, Politics, and History
