It is also a reminder of how swiftly the culture moves, given that a claim such as McNeill’s would almost certainly require cancellation today. The species of historian who dared to make normative claims about culture, including the specific merits or lack thereof with respect to particular cultures, was essentially rendered extinct, or at least jobless, by the end of the twentieth century. Even modest attempts to point to the differences in economic output and military power between Europe and its former empires over the past five centuries or so have been pushed to the fringe of the cultural
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