World History - Rise of the West

According to many Western thinkers the “rise of the West” occurring in the last 500 years is attributed to internal, typically environmentally related factors that exclude or dismiss features relating to interaction and exchange among disparate societies at different levels of cultural development. The traditional narrative of global history offered by Max Weber proclaims the inevitable rise of Western Europe was made possible through an innate rationality unique to Western people. Karl Marx focuses his attention on industrialism and colonialism which lead to the emergence of capitalism, forming a class struggle and the separation of the private and public realms. Immanuel Wallerstien lectures on of a world economic system with Western Europe at the core of this system. Other bodies of popular discourse in world history declare the West’s success to have come at the expense of other societies through military exploits, economic accumulation and colonial expansion. While the descriptions above represent vast generalizations and oversimplifications of complex theories, the underlying assumptions of these theories create an “iron logic of immanence” that hinder Western imagination through of all of its historical, political and cultural self-renderings. The “rise of the West” is commonly given in self-contained Eurocentric terms that underscore the rational, virtuous and exceptional nature of Western Europeans, ultimately creating a moral success story rather than an honest rendering of history. Myths of superiority pertaining to European agency, environment, biology and culture should be discarded. When recording and studying global history, the entire world must be considered through interdisciplinary lenses taking into account contributions from different societies to explain complex and dynamic processes rather than characterizing it to some pristine reasoning.
The aim of this paper is not to undervalue European internal contributions to their

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