The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History

by Siep Stuurman

For much of history, strangers were routinely classified as barbarians and inferiors, seldom as fellow human beings. The notion of a common humanity was counterintuitive and thus had to be invented. Siep Stuurman traces evolving ideas of human equality and difference across continents and civilizations from ancient times to the present.

Despite humans’ deeply ingrained bias against strangers, migration and cultural blending have shaped human experience from the earliest times. As travelers crossed frontiers and came into contact with unfamiliar peoples and customs, frontier experiences generated not only hostility but also empathy and understanding. Empires sought to civilize their “barbarians,” but in all historical eras critics of empire were able to imagine how the subjected peoples made short shrift of imperial arrogance.

Drawing on the views of a global mix of thinkers―Homer, Confucius, Herodotus, the medieval Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun, the Haitian writer Antenor Firmin, the Filipino nationalist Jose Rizal, and more― The Invention of Humanity surveys the great civilizational frontiers of history, from the interaction of nomadic and sedentary societies in ancient Eurasia and Africa, to Europeans’ first encounters with the indigenous peoples of the New World, to the Enlightenment invention of universal “modern equality.” Against a backdrop of two millennia of thinking about common humanity and equality, Stuurman concludes with a discussion of present-day debates about human rights and the “clash of civilizations.”

Genres: History, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Politics, Sociology

672 pages, Hardcover

First published February 20, 2017

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is no other book that does what this book tries to do: to tell a global history of ideas about the unity of the human race. The breadth which this requires is astonishing; the organized rigor which it necessitates is formidable.

The book is unique in two ways. First, most books which cover a similar topic do so from a very different angle. Many choose to trace the origins and development of ideas about inequality, generally in terms of race. Or they channel ideas about equality through its political forms, usually in terms of the spread of democracy or the articulation of the principle of human rights. Stuurman's subject is more expansive and more diffuse. More expansive because he considers three axes of difference: religious, gender, and racial. More diffuse because equality does not mean just political equality but something more holistic, more in line with anthropology as Antenor Firmin defined it: "the study of Man in his [sic] physical, moral, and intellectual dimensions, as he is found among the different races that make up the human species" (quoted on page 428).

Second, the book attempts to be a genuinely global history, not merely a comparative history of ideas or a pseudo-global history that sprinkles a basically Western history with a few token Asian or African thinkers. Stuurman thinks continuously about the global ramifications of new ideas, and he fully incorporates the insights of many historians of empire who have demonstrated the complex circuitry of intellectual activity between core and periphery. Neither the imperial periphery nor the metropolitan core has had a monopoly on intellectual innovation, and many conceptual breakthroughs have emerged in the process of either physical travel from one to the other or imaginative exploration, as metropolitan intellectuals find the periphery useful to think with (or vice versa).

The book's scope does present some (likely insoluble) problems. Readings of specific texts can end up perfunctory and the conclusions Stuurman draws from them can be a bit repetitive, but these flaws are clearly the consequences of attempting to cover so much territory while maintaining a conceptual framework that is simple enough to be consistent over so many centuries of material. If that is the price to be paid for such an expansive and inclusive history, it is an incredible bargain.

[Jan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"How and in what historical circumstances did cross-cultural humanity become thinkable? How could it happen that people can to see foreigners as fellow human beings or even as equals?" are just 2 of several questions he asks at the beginning of the book. The book is an exploration of these ideas. The chapters on the discovery of the Americas and the discussion of slavery were painful and sad to read.
It is a thorough and well researched book. Highly recommend especially to those who like to read about histories of ideas.

[Max Bodach · Rating 4 out of 5]

overuses the phrase “Janus-faced”
very good for exploring equality through the “anthropological turn”

[Roy Kenagy]

RK NOOK SAMPLE