The appearance of this book is often seen as marking the origin of modern postcolonialism, which addresses issues of the temporalizing of difference, alternative modernities and the colonial ‘not yet’.
Edward W Said, Orientalism, London: Penguin, 1985.
Susan Rose-Ackerman, Corruption and Government: Causes, Consequences and Reform, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p 5.ġ6. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984 Robert Cooper, The Post-Modern State and the World Order, London: Demos, 1996.ġ4. Schiller, ‘On Naive and Sentimental Poetry’, p 194.ġ3. Friedrich von Schiller, ‘On Naive and Sentimental Poetry’, in H B Nisbet (ed), German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.ġ2. Claude Meillasoux, Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Community, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981 Emanuel Terray, Marxism and ‘Primitive' Societies: Two Studies, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972 Harold Wolpe, The Articulation of Modes of Production: Essays from Economy and Society, London: Routledge, 1980.ġ0. Lewis H Morgan, Ancient Society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964.ĩ. N Inayatullah and D L Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference, London and New York: Routledge, 2004 Eric R Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982.Ĩ. Edmund Burke, Letter to William Robertson, 9 June 1777, in Correspondence, T W Copeland (ed), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958–1978.ħ. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998 Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.Ħ. The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism. How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.ģ. F von Schiller, ‘The Nature and Value of Universal History’, History and Theory 11(3), 1972, pp 321–334.Ģ. I suggest that the most important of these are to be found in the early history of European imperialism.ġ. In this paper, I take the destructiveness of this view as a given and aim, rather, to explore its origins. This destructive view, which is commonly, but not always, associated with a sense of Western superiority, is one of the foundations of modern Western cosmopolitanism. This view also underlies the patronizing assumption that many in the non-Western world belong in the past of the Western present, that they are likely to have a poor understanding of their own pasts, which are merely truncated or incomplete forms of the past of the West itself. Here it flags the view, first, that all portions of humanity go through essentially the same historical stages that can be identified in the history of the West, and thus that, whatever our non-Western contemporaries may now be experiencing, the West has already ‘been there, done that’. The familiar phrase in my title is usually understood as indicating that one has already experienced the topic under discussion and become bored with it.