PhD student discovers lost Maya city with pyramids in Campeche, Mexico jungle

Interesting Engineering
Tue, October 29, 2024 

Archaeologists have uncovered over 6,500 previously unknown Maya structures, including a hidden city with grand pyramids, within southeast Mexico. This major discovery highlights the impressive and populous ancient Maya landscape that had long been hidden beneath dense forests and modern settlements.

Lead author Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student from Northern Arizona University noted the significance of the find, saying, “We didn’t just find rural areas and smaller settlements… We also found a large city with pyramids right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years.”

Using LiDAR technology, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging, researchers were able to peer beneath the forest canopy in eastern Campeche, a lesser-studied region of the Maya civilization.

This powerful remote-sensing technique, which fires laser pulses to generate highly accurate 3D models of the landscape, revealed intricate details of Maya urbanism in an area that had remained unexplored by archaeologists until now.
A lush, urbanized landscape

The study focused on a roughly 50-square-mile area in east-central Campeche, an “unmapped” zone in Maya archaeology. By analyzing LiDAR data initially gathered in 2013 to monitor carbon in Mexico’s forests, researchers discovered the hidden expanse of Maya settlements.

The Maya civilization thrived during the Classic Period (A.D. 250–900), and areas like the central Maya Lowlands—covering parts of Guatemala, Belize, and the Mexican states of Campeche and Quintana Roo—were hubs of advanced urbanism.

“Our analysis not only revealed a picture of a region that was dense with settlements, but it also revealed a lot of variability,” explained Auld-Thomas. Many of the newly found sites, including the urban area called Valeriana, showcase the diversity and scale of Maya settlements.

A map shows details of the Valeriana site's core in Campeche state, Mexico. Image Credit: Antiquity 2024

This “major urban area” includes two main hubs of monumental structures connected by continuous settlements, along with evidence of sophisticated landscape engineering that supported such a large population.

The Valeriana site contains multiple plazas, grand pyramids, a ball court, and a large reservoir created by damming an arroyo, or dry creek bed—a design common in Maya cities to capture seasonal rainwater for use in arid months.

The findings shed light on the Classic Maya’s ability to transform their natural surroundings into a highly organized, urban landscape. This discovery reshapes our understanding of Maya cities, showing that much of the central Maya Lowlands was as densely populated and urban as other ancient civilizations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1TO7-iG8Jw
Unseen depths of the Maya civilization

The study challenges previous assumptions about the Maya civilization by unveiling a picture of a more interconnected and urbanized society than previously known. While archaeologists have long understood that the Maya occupied and engineered vast tracts of land in the region, certain areas like east-central Campeche had largely escaped scientific attention.

By focusing on this “blank spot” in Maya archaeology, Auld-Thomas’s team has opened new doors to understanding the scope and organization of the ancient Maya.

LiDAR technology has become essential in modern archaeology, especially for exploring dense forests like those covering the Maya Lowlands. “Scientists in ecology, forestry and civil engineering have been using LiDAR surveys to study some of these areas for totally separate purposes,” Auld-Thomas added.

However, the technology is uniquely suited to archaeology, as it can reveal hidden structures buried under vegetation, exposing sites that would otherwise remain unknown.

The Valeriana site is a stark example of just how much more there is to uncover. The researchers wrote in the study, “The discovery of Valeriana highlights the fact that there are still major gaps in our knowledge of the existence or absence of large sites within as-yet unmapped areas of the Maya Lowlands.”



They concluded that the latest findings, when added to current knowledge, indicate that dense cities and extensive settlements were common across large portions of the central Maya Lowlands.

The findings are detailed in the journal Antiquity.

PhD student finds lost city in Mexico jungle by accident

Georgina Rannard -BBC  Science reporter
Tue, October 29, 2024

A huge Maya city has been discovered centuries after it disappeared under jungle canopy in Mexico.

Archaeologists found pyramids, sports fields, causeways connecting districts and amphitheatres in the southeastern state of Campeche.

They uncovered the hidden complex - which they have called Valeriana - using Lidar, a type of laser survey that maps structures buried under vegetation.

They believe it is second in density only to Calakmul, thought to be the largest Maya site in ancient Latin America.

The team discovered three sites in total, in a survey area the size of Scotland's capital Edinburgh, “by accident” when one archaeologist browsed data on the internet.

“I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring,” explains Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane university in the US.

It was a Lidar survey, a remote sensing technique which fires thousands of laser pulses from a plane and maps objects below using the time the signal takes to return.

But when Mr Auld-Thomas processed the data with methods used by archaeologists, he saw what others had missed - a huge ancient city which may have been home to 30-50,000 people at its peak from 750 to 850 AD.

That is more than the number of people who live in the region today, the researchers say.

Mr Auld-Thomas and his colleagues named the city Valeriana after a nearby lagoon.

The find helps change an idea in Western thinking that the Tropics was where “civilisations went to die”, says Professor Marcello Canuto, a co-author in the research.

Instead, this part of the world was home to rich and complex cultures, he explains.

We can’t be sure what led to the demise and eventual abandonment of the city, but the archaeologists say climate change was a major factor.

There are no pictures of the city but it had pyramid temples similar to this one in nearby Calakmul [Getty Images]

Valeriana has the “hallmarks of a capital city” and was second only in density of buildings to the spectacular Calakmul site, around 100km away (62 miles).

It is “hidden in plain sight”, the archaeologists say, as it is just 15 minutes hike from a major road near Xpujil where mostly Maya people now live.

There are no known pictures of the lost city because “no-one has ever been there”, the researchers say, although local people may have suspected there were ruins under the mounds of earth.

The city, which was about 16.6 sq km, had two major centres with large buildings around 2km (1.2 miles) apart, linked by dense houses and causeways.

It has two plazas with temple pyramids, where Maya people would have worshipped, hidden treasures like jade masks and buried their dead.

It also had a court where people would have played an ancient ball game.

How ancient Maya cities have withstood the ravages of time

There was also evidence of a reservoir, indicating that people used the landscape to support a large population.

In total, Mr Auld-Thomas and Prof Canuto surveyed three different sites in the jungle. They found 6,764 buildings of various sizes.

The ruins were found in eastern Mexico, in Campeche [BBC]

Professor Elizabeth Graham from University College London, who was not involved in the research, says it supports claims that Maya lived in complex cities or towns, not in isolated villages.

"The point is that the landscape is definitely settled - that is, settled in the past - and not, as it appears to the naked eye, uninhabited or ‘wild’," she says.

The research suggests that when Maya civilisations collapsed from 800AD onwards, it was partly because they were so densely populated and could not survive climate problems.

"It's suggesting that the landscape was just completely full of people at the onset of drought conditions and it didn't have a lot of flexibility left. And so maybe the entire system basically unravelled as people moved farther away," says Mr Auld-Thomas.

Warfare and the conquest of the region by Spanish invaders in the 16th century also contributed to eradication of Maya city states.

Evidence of the ruins were found by a plane using laser remote sensing to map beneath the jungle canopy [Getty Images]

Many more cities could be found

Lidar technology has revolutionised how archaeologists survey areas covered in vegetation, like the Tropics, opening up a world of lost civilisations, explains Prof Canuto.

In the early years of his career, surveys were done by foot and hand, using simple instruments to check the ground inch by inch.

But in the decade since Lidar was used in the Mesoamerican region, he says it’s mapped around 10 times the area that archaeologists managed in about a century of work.

Mr Auld-Thomas says his work suggests there are many sites out there that archaeologists have no idea about.

In fact so many sites have been found that researchers cannot hope to excavate them all.

"I've got to go to Valeriana at some point. It's so close to the road, how could you not? But I can't say we will do a project there," says Mr Auld-Thomas.



"One of the downsides of discovering lots of new Maya cities in the era of Lidar is that there are more of them than we can ever hope to study," he adds.

The research is published in the academic journal Antiquity.


Lost Mayan city discovered under Mexican jungle by accident

Sarah Knapton
Tue, October 29, 2024

The city, which has been named Valeriana by archaeologists, was found by studying laser scans

A lost Mayan city, complete with pyramids and a ball court, has been discovered buried deep under the Mexican jungle.

The city, which has been named Valeriana by archaeologists, was found by studying laser scans that had been taken in 2013 as part of a forest monitoring project in the southeastern state of Campeche.

The scans unveiled the outlines of multiple enclosed plazas, temple pyramids, a reservoir and several curved amphitheatre-like patios in the city, which is thought to be the second-largest of its kind in Latin America.



The team said Valeriana had “all the hallmarks of a Classical Maya political capital” and, at its peak, may have been home to up to 50,000 people between AD 750 and 850.

The find was initially made by Luke Auld-Thomas, a doctoral student at Tulane University in New Orleans, who was browsing Google to find out if anyone had carried out a Lidar (light detecting and ranging) survey of the area.

“Scientists in ecology, forestry and civil engineering have been using Lidar surveys to study some of these areas for totally separate purposes,” said Mr Auld-Thomas. “So what if a lidar survey of this area already existed?”

Lidar works by firing a short laser pulse from a plane or satellite and recording the time it takes for the signal to bounce back.

Mr Auld-Thomas discovered a laser survey of around 50 square miles of dense Mexican forest which was rarely visited, even by locals.

While there are no pictures of the city, it may have looked similar to ruins in Calakmul

Working with colleagues, he studied the maps and found a dense, vast array of totally unstudied Maya settlements dotted throughout the region, comprising 6,674 undiscovered Mayan structures.

“Our analysis not only revealed a picture of a region that was dense with settlements, but it also revealed a lot of variability,” said Mr Auld-Thomas. “We didn’t just find rural areas and smaller settlements.

“We also found a large city with pyramids right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years.



“The government never knew about it; the scientific community never knew about it. That really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered.”

Scans unveil more sites discovered in the lost Mayan city

Valeriana comprised two major hubs of monumental architecture 1.2 miles apart, which were linked by continuous dense settlement and landscape engineering and watercourses. It also appears to have pyramids like those at the famous sites of Chichén Itzá or Tikal.

A ball court, where the ancient Mayan game of Pitz may have been played, was also found. The game could last two weeks, and its aim was to get the ball to the other side of the court without dropping it using only the hip, knee or elbow.

The team are now planning to conduct fieldwork in the areas identified on the survey.

The findings are published in the journal Antiquity.

Ancient lost Mayan city with pyramids discovered accidentally by student

Vishwam Sankaran
Wed, October 30, 2024 


Ancient lost Mayan city with pyramids discovered accidentally by student

An American student analysing publicly available data found a sprawling Mayan city with thousands of undiscovered structures, including pyramids, under a Mexican forest.

The data came from laser scans of the Campeche region and revealed a buried world, since named “Valeriana”, with nearly 6,700 undiscovered structures.

Archeologists have been using laser scanning lidar technology to assess anomalies in landscapes across the Yucatan peninsula in Central America and stumbling upon pyramids, family houses and other Mayan infrastructure.

For a long time, surveys to find ancient structures sampled just a couple of hundred square kilometres. “That sample was hard won by archaeologists who painstakingly walked over every square metre, hacking away at the vegetation with machetes, to see if they were standing on a pile of rocks that might have been someone’s home 1,500 years ago,” said Luke Auld-Thomas, PhD candidate at the Northern Arizona University who made the discovery.

In recent years, researchers have been analysing data from lidar scans taken for unrelated purposes to look for evidence of Mayan structures.

Ancient buildings and landscape modifications, including public plazas, agricultural terraces and field walls, discovered under Mexican forest (Auld-Thomas et al, Antiquity)

Mr Auld-Thomas analysed data from one such lidar project from 2013, focused on measuring and monitoring carbon in Mexico’s forests, to see what lay underneath 50 square miles of Campeche. “I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring,” he told the BBC.

Analysing the data using modern archaeological methods revealed a dense and diverse array of Mayan settlements, including one sprawling city dating to between 250 to 900AD.

“The government never knew about it, the scientific community never knew about it. That really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered,” Mr Auld-Thomas said.

His study was recently published in the journal Antiquity.

The lost city has “all the hallmarks of a Classic Maya political capital”, Mr Auld-Thomas noted. “We did not just find rural areas and smaller settlements. We also found a large city with pyramids right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years.”

Studying such ancient cities could help solve modern problems facing urban development, researchers said. “There were cities that were sprawling agricultural patchworks and hyperdense,” Mr Auld-Thomas said. “Given the environmental and social challenges we are facing from rapid population growth, it can only help to study ancient cities and expand our view of what urban living can look like.”

Laser archeology finds lost Maya cities hidden under forests

Saul Elbein
Tue, October 29, 2024


Laser imaging of the rainforests of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula have turned up thousands of ancient Maya structures — and an entire previously unknown city, a new study has found.

By flying aircraft over jungle in the Mexican state of Campeche and pummeling the trees with laser pulses, scientists have shown that beneath the forest lie the ruins of both a dense city and its crowded suburban hinterlands, according to results published on Tuesday in Antiquity.

The Yucatan is remarkable for being an essentially post-apocalyptic landscape, where over the past millennium forests returned to fill in the parks and boulevards of once-powerful Maya cities like Tikal and El Mirador after their inhabitants left them around 900 CE.

On the east side of the peninsula, for example, the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve sprawls over the ruins of the ancient city of Muyil — where crocodiles swim through straight-line creeks that were once urban canals and howler monkeys swing through the trees above lakes that were once city reservoirs.

That combination of dense forest atop the long-vanished cities of what was once a dense urban region has meant a succession of surprising finds for archeologists. Last year, for example, Slovenian archeologist Ivan Šprajc found a significant regional hub — which he called Ocomtun — in the “black hole” of the Balamku Biosphere Reserve, in the center of Campeche.

As it did for Šprajc, the lack of easy road access forced the Antiquity researchers to turn to a high-tech solution to penetrate the trees: aircraft using LiDAR (light detection and ranging) to scan the forest, looking for obstructed and impermeable stone structures.

The new sites described in Antiquity are a combination of rural farming villages, regional market towns and “a large city with pyramids,”coathor Luke Auld-Thomas said in a statement.



LiDAR, he added, “allows us to map large areas very quickly, and at really high precision and levels of detail, that made us react, ‘Oh wow, there are so many buildings out there we didn’t know about, the population must have been huge.’”

Those surprising findings — indicating huge populations in places where the conventional historical record suggests they should not have been — represent part of the promise of LiDAR‘s use in archeology. The technology has also been used to find lost cities beneath the Amazon rainforest in Bolivia and Ecuador, upending established narratives that the region lacked a deep history of dense urban life — and suggesting that vast Amazonian metropolises of the present day like Manaus and Iquitos might be less modern innovation than a return to an ancient pattern.

“LiDAR is teaching us that, like many other ancient civilizations, the lowland Maya built a diverse tapestry of towns and communities over their tropical landscape,” coauthor Marcello Canuto, a professor of anthropology at Tulane, said in a statement.

Some newly discovered areas are Maya fields and farming villages, which offer insight about ancient rural life, Canuto said, while others once sported “dense populations.”

In 2018, Canuto and his team used LiDAR to uncover 60,000 previously unknown Maya structures beneath the Maya Biosphere Reserve in Northern Guatemala, a park that also houses the well-known site of Tikal, according to National Geographic.

“LiDAR is revolutionizing archaeology the way the Hubble Space Telescope revolutionized astronomy,” Francisco Estrada-Belli, a colleague of Canuto’s at Tulane, told National Geographic at the time. “We’ll need 100 years to go through all [the data] and really understand what we’re seeing.”

Whether the settlements discovered are big or small, in all cases, Canuto noted the new sites hidden beneath the forest show how the Maya managed their environment “to support a long-lived complex society” — urban structures that still shape the movement of animals through the forests that covered them.

The sites announced on Tuesday are, at least by the standards of the Yucatan, in plain sight. They were “right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years,” Auld-Thomas said.

But despite that local knowledge, Auld-Thomas said, “the government never knew about it; the scientific community never knew about it.”

The discovery, he added, “really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered.”

Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

 

Have we found all the major Maya cities? Not even close, new research suggests

Tulane University

Using laser-guided imaging to peer through dense jungle forests, Tulane University researchers have uncovered vast unexplored Maya settlements in Mexico and a better understanding of the ancient civilization's extent and complexity.

The new research, published in the journal Antiquity, was led by Tulane University anthropology doctoral student Luke Auld-Thomas and his advisor, Professor Marcello A. Canuto.

The team used lidar, a laser-based detection system, to survey 50 square miles of land in Campeche, Mexico, an area largely overlooked by archaeologists. Their findings included evidence of more than 6,500 pre-Hispanic structures, including a previously unknown large city complete with iconic stone pyramids.

“Our analysis not only revealed a picture of a region that was dense with settlements, but it also revealed a lot of variability,” said Auld-Thomas, a doctoral student in Tulane’s Anthropology Department and instructor at Northern Arizona University. “We didn’t just find rural areas and smaller settlements. We also found a large city with pyramids right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years. The government never knew about it; the scientific community never knew about it. That really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered.”

The Middle American Research Institute (MARI) at Tulane University has been pioneering the use of lidar technology in archaeological research. Over the past decade, the MARI has built a state-of-the art Geographic Information Systems (GIS) lab, managed by Francisco Estrada-Belli, to analyze remote sensing data, such as lidar.

Lidar technology uses laser pulses to measure distances and create three-dimensional models of specific areas. It has allowed scientists to scan large swaths of land from the comfort of a computer lab, uncovering anomalies in the landscape that often prove to be pyramids, family houses and other examples Maya infrastructure.

“Thanks to generous funding from the Hitz Foundation, MARI has been at the forefront of the use of lidar technology in archaeological research over the past decade,” said Canuto, director of the MARI. “Now our efforts are expanding from data analysis to data collection and acquisition. The work conducted on these data from Campeche represent how MARI’s ‘lidar footprint’ is expanding.”

This research may also help resolve ongoing debates about the true extent of Maya settlements.

"Because lidar allows us to map large areas very quickly, and at really high precision and levels of detail, that made us react, 'Oh wow, there are so many buildings out there we didn't know about, the population must have been huge,’” Auld-Thomas said. “The counterargument was that lidar surveys were still too tethered to known, large sites, such as Tikal, and therefore had developed a distorted image of the Maya lowlands. What if the rest of the Maya area was far more rural and what we had mapped so far was the exception instead of the rule?"

The study highlights the transformative power of lidar technology in unveiling the secrets of ancient civilizations. It also provides compelling evidence of a more complex and varied Maya landscape than previously thought.

"Lidar is teaching us that, like many other ancient civilizations, the lowland Maya built a diverse tapestry of towns and communities over their tropical landscape,” Canuto said. “While some areas are replete with vast agricultural patches and dense populations, others have only small communities. Nonetheless, we can now see how much the ancient Maya changed their environment to support a long-lived complex society."

---

Journal

Antiquity

DOI

10.15184/aqy.2024.148 

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Running. out of empty space: environmental lidar and the crowded ancient landscape of Campeche, Mexico

Article Publication Date

29-Oct-2024

 

The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers

How They Can’t Face Their Loss to the “Eurasian Miracle”

by Bruce Lerro / October 19th, 2024

International Relations (IR) theory fails to deliver on one of its key promises, specifically to produce positivist, value free analysis. What we encounter in the vast majority of international theory is the provincial or parochial normative purpose of defending and celebrating the ideal of the West in world politics. IR theory can no longer be represented as positivist, objective or value free.
~ John M. Hobson

Orientation

In 1981, Eric Jones wrote a very powerful book called The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia. He was not alone in claiming there was something unique about Europe compared to the rest of the world. Though I doubt it was his intention, his work perhaps unintentionally supported a Eurocentric, paternalistic, racist orientation of a Wren theory which claimed to explain world politics. This is called International Relations Theory which claimed to be positivist, objective and value free. International relations theory is so deeply embedded in Western triumphalism that it has failed to notice that the West has been losing to China, Russia and Iran for the last 20 to 30 years. International  relations theory barely understands that this has happened and it has no theory to explain it. What we are witnessing today is a “Eurasian Miracle.”

In my article “Neocon Realists and Global Neoliberals Dead on Arrival,” I identify five international relation theories: Neocon Realists; Neoliberal Globalists; Liberal Institutionalists; Constructivists and World-Systems Theorists. Most of my criticism in that article was leveled at the first three theories for their inability to account for the rise of China, Russia and Iran and the whole multipolar world. In this article, following the work of John A. Hobson in his book “The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics,” I point out a good reason for this is because of the Eurocentric nature of Neocon Realists, Neoliberal Globalists and Liberal Institutionalists theory. However, Hobson’s criticism of Eurocentrism does not stop there. He argues that even left-wing theories like constructionism and world-systems theory are guilty of Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism, not only because it takes different forms, but that some of these are even anti-imperialist. The conventional contrast of a Eurocentric or racist conception of imperialism from a constructivist and Marxist point of view is too simple and Eurocentrism is too deep.

What is Eurocentrism?
Hobson’s claim that there two steps in Eurocentric big-bang theory of world politics:

• Europeans single-handedly created a European capitalist international state system through their pioneering and exceptional institutional genius.
• They export their civilization to remake the world in their own image through globalization, imperialism or hegemony.
  To add to this, Eurocentrism claims the Eastern and Southern part of the world had no independent status. There was no East or South big bang. In the West the various movements of the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation the scientific revolution, capitalism, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution or socialism were purely Western. The East and South either helped out or they were left behind. With rare exceptions. Eastern and Southern parts of the world system never led Western development.

What is paternalism?
Historians of the modern West sought to explain social evolution. In doing so, they divided societies into three stages:

• savagery (hunter-gatherers);
• barbarism (horticultural and agricultural states) and
• civilization—industrial capitalist societies

Supposedly Europeans hoped that all societies would want to become civilized. But when societies of the East and South did not aspire to this, they were labelled either savages or barbarians. However, some historians and anthropologist thought it was their duty (white man’s burden) for the savages and barbarians to see the light. This led to paternalism.

An example of well-intentioned paternalist Eurocentrism: Rawls
John Rawls believed that his liberal vision has genuinely universalist criteria that do not offend cultural sensibilities of non-Western people. He was interested in culturally converting Eastern people rather than containing them as in Western liberal realism.

Yet there are five key Eurocentric dimensions of his theory:

• All well-ordered hierarchical societies must exhibit a separation of church and state (this will not work for Muslims).
• Imposition of free trade (free trade can only work with wealthy societies).
• Governed by a liberal law of peoples (teaching Eastern women to have less babies won’t work if they are being blocked by the IMF and the World bank from industrializing.
• Eastern states receive only conditional sovereignty because they are classified as despotic states and “failed” states are deemed uncivilized.
• Developed societies have a duty to assist burdened societies (paternalism).

Hobson’s claims

Hobson’s explicit claims are first that International Relations Theory contains six myths:

• the noble identity and foundational myth of the discipline;
• the positive myth of International Relations Theory;
• the great debates myth and reconceptualizing the clash of IR theories;
• the sovereignty or anarchy myth;
• the globalization myth; and
• the theoretical great traditions myth.

Hobson’s 2nd claim is there are six types of imperialism which are laid out over 250 years. His third claim is that Western racism was not always triumphant but was based on fear of what would become of Europe if Easterners and Southerners of the world  got the upper hand. Lastly, I close out with theories that are exceptions to the rule and are not Eurocentric or paternalistic and with a minimum of racism.

Hobson’s implicit claim is that without “the rest” there might be no West. The West was not an early, but a latedevelopment. This topic will be covered in my future article based on another of Hobson’s books, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization.

Six Eurocentric Myths of International Relations Theory
Hobson tells us the conscious or unconscious moral purpose of IR is to be a defender and promoter of Western Civilization. The key of disciplinary assumptions that are presently revered as self-evident truths really are largely Eurocentric myths. As stated above, these include the above myths.

The noble identity foundation myth: Whig and progress theory of history
International Relations Theory has embedded in a Whig an interpretation of its intellectual history. Whiggish means that the past is reorganized to make it seem that the present was the only possible passage that could have led to contemporary life. The Whig theory of history has the theory of progress embedded in it. The theory of progress claims that the later in time we go in social evolution the better societies get in material wealth, less labor, higher morality and happiness.

It is a now conventional assumption that the discipline of International Relations was born in 1919. Supposedly, it had a moral purpose to finding ways to solve the universal problem of war. This now conventional view was originally constructed by E.H. Carr in his classical text The Twenty Year’s Crisis (1946).

Contrary to this convention, IR theory did not appear all of a sudden after WW I out of the head of Zeus. It continued from its pre-1914 roots which were neither positive, objective nor value free. Rather they were paternalist, Eurocentric and intentionally or unintentionally racist. There are deep continuities that the 1919-1945 period of international theory has with the pre-1914 period of international theory. The Eurocentric racism and paternalism that underpinned it had been forged in the previous century. In addition, there is a continuum of imperialism that goes all the way back to the middle of the 18th century. Thirdly, there was an explosion of anti-colonial resistance. What were colonists resisting – those noble Western powers that colonialized them. In this larger scheme of things, the end of World War I was not the only game in town. As positivists, what Neocon realists and liberal globalists ignore is that the noble identity myth can also be a ideological justification for Eurocentrism, capitalism, racism and imperialism. The four stages are of Hobsons history if International relations include:

• 1760-1914 Manifest Eurocentrism and scientific racism
• 1914-1945 Manifest Eurocentrism and scientific racism
• 1945-1989 Subliminal Eurocentrism
• 1989-2010 Manifest Eurocentrism

The positive myth of IR of theory of liberalism as emerging between the wars

This myth was that the between the wars IR theory was dominated by liberal globalists who searched for a new cooperative global order as a reaction to the Neocon realism of World War I. It was characterized as a harmonious and optimistic theory because it stands for peace. But as Hobson points out, interwar international theory was not monopolized by idealism or liberalism because it also exhibited a vibrant racism realist stream that emerged after 1889, especially in the world of geopolitical theorists, Ratzel, Mackinder, Mahan and others.

IR claims to be positivist with a value free epistemological base. This has been challenged by African-American Marxists Ralph Bunche, WEB Dubois and CLR James. They say that when viewed through a non-European lens, the vast majority of international theory produces a parochial or provincial analysis of the West that can masquerade as if it were universal. Further, the imperialist aspect of interwar idealist theory has not been widely noticed among modern IR scholars. Realist and so-called Liberal Idealists were united by the concern to restore the mandate of Western civilizational hegemony in one guise of another.

The great debate myth and reconceptualizing the idea of the clash of IR theories

These debates include the controversy between realism and idealism in the interwar period between history and scientism in the 1960s and between positivists and post-positivists in the 1990s. The first two appear as if these were great qualitative struggles, but like with Republicans and Democrats in Mordor, all parties have far more in common than they have in differences. The struggle between positivists and post-positivists are real but it are presented in too stark a manner. There were post-positivists as far back as the 1960s and those political scientists who were more statistical and quantitative also go back to the 50s and 60s. In other words that debate did not begin in the 1990s as IR theorists claim but thirty years earlier. In spite of these differences, there is consensus of virtually all parties concerning the politics of defending and celebrating Western civilization in world politics. These theories supported the Western powers. Their differences were small compared to the paternalism, racism and imperialism that they all shared.

Sovereignty vs anarchy myth
The sovereignty vs anarchy myth claims that in International Relations Theory all states are sovereign. But because there is no world-state the relations between nation-states are characterized as anarchistic. In the first place, IR theory limits which nation-states are considered sovereign to European countries. Eastern and Southern states are not considered sovereign because they lack the proper Western European credentials such as voting systems, more than one party, and capitalism. The school of Realism operates with universalist analytical principles that supposedly apply to all states regardless of how 2nd class some states are treated in practice. The problem for IR theorists is that the post the 1648 era there had been a proliferation of international imperial hierarchies, which were comprised of a series of single sovereign colonial powers, many of which were not nation-states. Its supposedly universal and ideologically unbiased principles of state-centrism sovereignty directly contradict its practice. For example, in 1878 the conference in Berlin divided Africa between European imperial powers. These sovereign states had colonies.

Furthermore if by anarchy they mean disorder, the relationship between sovereign states without a world state is by no means disorderly. There are shifting alliances between states rather than a Hobbesian war of all single states against each other. Secondly, to characterize this disorder as “anarchy” reveals either complete political bias or ignorance of anarchism as a respectable political tendency on the socialist left. Anarchism has involved thousands of people in many countries around the world since the late 1840s. It has had some success in the Paris Commune, the Russian and especially the Spanish revolutions. To characterize this as disorderly is an unforgivable omission from theorists who claim to be political scientists.

The globalization myth
The myth is that globalization has only recently (the last century) become an issue for international theorists. But to Hobson’s own surprise in his initial research, in many areas including some though not all realists, international theorists since 1760 have placed considerable emphasis on globalization. In his book The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization,Hobson points out that there were globalizing trade networks of, Africa, West Asia, India and China as far back as 500 CE.

The theoretical great traditions myth
IR theorists are no different than those who initiate artistic or spiritual movements in their search for origins. All political, artistic or spiritual movements seek to find their origins in the deep past rather than the recent past. In the IR traditional textbooks realism is claimed to go back to Thucydides in the ancient world and then forward to Hobbes and Machiavelli to culminate in Waltz, Gilpin and Mearsheimer via Carr and Morgenthau. But each of these theories are not air-tight. In fact IR theories mix with other theories within a given moment in time and each theory changes internally due to  changes in history.

Defining Imperialism and Anti-imperialism International Theory
Hobson claims that the vast literature on imperialism and anti-imperialism generally lacks conceptual precision. Here Hobson confront two broad definitional approaches:

• Narrow Eurocentric
• Expansive postcolonial

Most of modern Eurocentric international theory embraces a narrow definition and allows for considerable wiggle room when confronted with a charge of imperialism. It sees Eurocentrism and imperialism as distinct. You can be Eurocentric and not imperialist and conversely imperialist without being Eurocentric. At the other extreme, by contrast, post-colonial theorists seek to completely shut down this wiggle room by assuming that being Eurocentric is inherently imperialist and imperialism is always Eurocentric.

In table 1 I have a divided a spectrum of imperialism throughout history into 6 types. The three types on the left accept that they are imperialists and don’t apologize for it. The theories on the right deny they are imperialists. The theories on the left are formal empires, while the theories on the right are informal liberal empires. The people in the last cell are the theorists of various types of imperialism. The cell above it include the nature and justification of their mission. The names of the theorists are not important for now, but some of the more famous ones might be familiar to you. The importance of this table are not the theorists but rather the systems of justification, none of which are value free, universal and objective.

Table 1 The Definitional Continuum of Imperialism, Past and Present

Definitional Consensus Most coercive definition Accept they are imperialists	Definitional Controversy Least coercive definition Deny they are imperialists
Formal Empire	Informal liberal empire

Tributary relations, political containment conquest of barbarism	National civilizing mission/cultural conversion	Civilizing mission, via international government protectorates	Anglo-Saxon hegemony	To protect, duty to prevent, duty to assist concept of democracies	Universalization of Western civilization and global empire of liberal democratic peace
Gumplowicz, Ward, Mahan Mackinder, K. Pearson, Hitler, Von Treitschke, Kidd, Spykman Haushofer	Cobden, Bright, Angell, Mill, Marx, Reinsch, W.Wilson	Hobson, Buell, Woolf Krasner, Fukuyama	Gilpin Kindleberger Kagan, Brzezinski, Cooper, Ignatieff	Slaughter, Ikenberry, Wheeler, Risse, Finnermore Rawls, Held Nussbaum	Friedman, Wolf, Russet, Owen

Eurocentric Imperialism: Liberal and Marxism

In Table 2 below, one interesting but expected difference between liberalism and Marxism is that liberals see imperialism as benign. J. A. Hobson and John Stuart Mill see imperialism is benign at an international level, but Cobden, Bright and Angell see imperialism as benign at a national level. The fact that Marxists thinks imperialism as coerced rather than benign should not come as a surprise to anyone. Traditional International Relations Theory sees liberal internationalism and classical Marxism as the antithesis of imperialism. However, John Hobson’s main point is what Marxism and liberals have in common. They all agree that:

• The East can be characterized as “barbaric oriental despotism”
• The capitalist peripheral countries (Third world) are savage, anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature
• Western agency is always pioneering, learning nothing from the rest of the world
• Eastern agency even at its best is conditional, always learning from the West

It is these four points that show how deep Eurocentrism of all Western theories, even Marxism. These are the type of deep assumptions, hundreds of years old the keep Western theorists of world politics that the BRICS world of the East is bypassing them.

Table 2 Paternalistic, Eurocentric. Institutional Imperial Concepts of World Politics

Marxism	Left Liberal	Liberal
Marx	Mill and Hobson	Cobden, Bright, Angell
Coerced national civilizing mission	Benign international mission	Benign national mission
East as barbaric Oriental Despotism	East as barbaric Oriental Despotism	East as barbaric Oriental Despotism
South as savage—3rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature	South as savage—3rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature	South as savage—3rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature
Pioneering Western agency	Pioneering Western agency	Pioneering Western agency
Conditional Eastern agency	Conditional Eastern agency	Conditional Eastern agency

Here are some further examples of Eurocentrism. In the 19th century, even when IR theory was sensitive to interdependence, it wasn’t world interdependence. Rather it was interdependence among the civilized states of Europe. Outside of Europe there was no recognition of interdependence. Eastern societies only got recognition once they became colonies or only if these countries were at war with Europe. It is something like calling the ultimate baseball playoffs “the World Series” even when it only includes the United States.

At the same time, the Eurocentrists had no problem imagining war with the East if it was profitable. But when it came to the civilized states of Europe, war was seen as unprofitable. Also, as we shall see later, racist theories bemoaned Europeans fighting because this would result in the depletion of the white race. Colonial annexation was entirely appropriate when it come to Europe’s relation with the East. The East has  conditional agency, such as Japan during World War II. However, the East cannot take the lead in historical development without being predator (as in the Yellow Peril).

As for the Global South, (Africa) for it  to be a respectable civilized state, Western core countries took a page out of Calvinism and insisted that these “savage societies” have a duty to develop their land productivity (meaning agriculturally) and abandon their primitivism (hunting and gathering). Non-Western politics, whether they be monarchies without constitutions or the egalitarian political consensus societies of hunting and gathering, are not recognized as sovereign. It was representative bourgeois state politics that was the “civilized” norm. As late as 1993 Paul Johnson said most African states are not fit to govern themselves. Their continued existence and the violence of human degradation they bring are a threat to the stability and peace as well as an affront to our moral sense. As of today Zionist Israel has massacred over 200,000 Palestinians. Yet there is no call from the United Nations (controlled by the West) to intervene in this “failed state”.

European imperialists hide their protectionist policies. As Friedrich List remarked, once imperialists have attained their summit of greatness, they kick away the ladder by which they climbed up in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up afterwards behind them.

Both the US and Britain industrialized on the back of extremely protectionist regimes and only turned to free trade once they arrived at the top of the global economic hierarchy. Thus, the imposition of free trade on developing countries by Britain after 1846 and the US after 1945 prevents Third World states from using tariffs to protect the infant industries. The projection of “free trade” by Americans…constitute an economic containment strategy to keep the Third World down.

A Century of Marxist Eurocentrism

Karl Marx’s paternal Eurocentrism and the political necessity of the Western civilizing mission
Marx appears to have had little appreciation for the complexity of ancient Chinese and Indian civilizations. For him China and India were the home of “Oriental Despotism”. The East could only be emancipated from its backwardness by the British colonialists. India stands outside world history and China was understood as a rotting semi-civilization. Believe it or not, for Marx, opium wars were emancipatory for China. Without British intervention there would be no future emancipatory socialist revolution. Imperialism was an instrument for both political progress and a requirement of global primitive accumulation. Was the result of British colonization Chinese emancipation? No, it was a century of Chinese humiliation (1839-1949). The imperialist engagement with China did not lead to order but to massive social-dislocation. The various Chinese revolutions were in part stimulated by a reaction against the encounter with the West.

For Marx and Engels, the East could belatedly jump aboard the Western developmental plane as Hobson says as “The Oriental Express”. It could participate in the construction of world history. But they could never lead the train in a progressive direction. They only had conditional agency. The Western states on the other hand had hyper-sovereignty. Sadly, Hobson says there hasn’t been much effort to reconstruct Marx’s theory along non-Eurocentric lines in traditional Marxism.

Lenin has no theory of Eastern emancipation
According to Hobson, Lenin says the East is inherently incapable of self-development. Lenin discusses how the period of free competition within Europe was succeeded after 1873 with the rise of cartels which intensified after 1903 into full-fledged monopoly capital and finance capital. But the causes of the crisis lay in the West whether underconsumption (Hobson) or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (Marx and Engels). There was no mention of resistance in the colonies. Lenin discussed the right of self-determination of nations, but those nations would never influence the West or provide leadership.

World-systems theory
Wallerstein
Immanuel Wallerstein was heavily criticized by Robert Brenner and other classical Marxists for overstating the interdependence of trade and hierarchy between societies and understating the class struggle within societies. But he maintains his traditional Marxian orientation in emphasizing the dynamics for the evolution of the world-system clearly in the Western part of the world. The West represents the civilized world, the core countries. The second division in the world is occupied by the regressive redistributive world empires in Asia. Division three of the world system is occupied by primitive reciprocal mini-systems found in North America, parts of Africa and Australasia (savage societies in the 19^thcentury parlance).

World-empires mainly in Asia saw their state structures weakened while their boundaries underwent a forced contraction and the surviving mini-systems of North American, Caribbean and Australia underwent wholesale destruction. 

Arrighi and Chase-Dunn

Other world-systems theorists like Giovanni Arrighi and Christopher Chase Dunn suggested that the world-system didn’t consist of just a core and a periphery but consisted of a semi-periphery which may or may not be Western. They argued that when core Western countries experienced crisis and decline, it was the semi-periphery countries that provided a new resource which allowed them to become a new core.

Exceptions to the rule Gunder Frank, Abu-Lughod

To be fair, both a sympathizer and an arch-critic of World-Systems theory, Andre Gunder Frank accused Wallerstein of Eurocentrism in his writings culminating in hisbook Re-Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. The work of Janet Anu-Lughod Before European Hegemony was so very powerful in showing the advanced state of non-Western trade networks  between 1250 and 1350 CE.

Exceptions to the Rule Outside of Marxism: James Watson

Watson’s analysis starts out with typical Eurocentrism with the Westphalian origins of European international society. He emphasizes the uniqueness of European restlessness and exceptional turbulence. Dynamic and enterprising as it is, it is  contrasted to the closed or isolated world of Asian cultures. The rise of the West is located in Weberian liberalism, neorealism and Marxism. Watson’s unusually explorative book The Evolution of International Society moves from the Italian city-state system and then proceeds with the emergence of sovereignly at the Westphalia conference by way of the Renaissance and the Reformation to arrive at the balance of power in 1713 at Utrecht. Yet he does talk about Eastern developments as reacting back on Europe as in a dialectical way. What the East contributed from the West included:

• the Italian city-state system was dependent on Eastern trade;
• financially cheques, bills of exchange, banks and commercial partnerships which had been pioneered in the Islamic and pre-Islamic Middle-East;
• overseas expansion which began in 1492 was only possible with the navigational and nautical techniques that were pioneered by Chinese and especially Muslims; and
• Industrialization, centerpiece of “British genius” was significantly enabled by Chinese innovations that stem back several millenniums.

Further, Watson analyzes in considerable detail many non-Western political formations prior to 1648.

Western Fear of Eastern and Southern Power

Most interesting is that many anti-imperialist racists argue against imperialism because it brings the white race in racially fatal conflict with the contaminating influences of non-white races. The impossibility of Eastern progressive development renders the Western civilizing mission all but futile.

Charles Henry Pearson: the decline of white supremacy and the barbaric rise of the yellow peril
Charles Henry Pearson (1830-1894) achieved immediate fame with the dire prophesy that he issued for the  white race in his book National Life and Character, a Forecast.  He argued that white racial supremacy was being superseded by very high levels of predatory Eastern agency. But in Pearson’s racist imagination it is the white West that has been fated to remain within its stationary limits while the yellow races are destined to expand and triumph over the higher whites. The barbaric threat also came from within as a result of the socialist states’ preference to prop up the unfit white working classes and from without via the Yellow Peril were all leading to deterioration.

James Blair and David Jordan

Jordan’s defensive social Darwinist racism was a pacifist’s eugenics. It had three components:

• The white race cannot survive in the topics.

It serves to affect a degeneration of the physical and intellectual energy of the Europeans. He gives an example of that as the Philippines lie in the heat of the torrid zone which he called natures asylum for degeneration. Benjamin Kidd argued though we in Europe have the greatest food-producing regions of the earth, we want to administer the tropic from a distance. The white races needed to wake up because the topics will lure them to their death. Kidd wanted to absolve the West of its home-grown liberal imperial guilt syndrome. His key concern about colonizing the tropics was the degenerative impact that the climate would have on white imperialists.

• The second anti-imperialist argument concerned the perils of immigration.

The Oriental is of the past. They have not progressed for centuries. The Easterner hates progress. He contends that the constitution of China is said to not have been changed for thousands of years. One the other hand, the West is progressive, energetic and intolerant of the very thing which is the East’s most marked characteristic, indolence. The two races should never amalgamate.

• Anti-war because the fittest white people would get kille

Jordan argues that warfare selects the best or fittest elements of the civilized white race to go out and fight, but in so doing leads to a reduction in the numbers of the fittest element as they lose their lives in futile colonial wars. Meanwhile the infirm and cowardly and feckless stay home, away from the battlefield. Some defensive racists were against the war between white countries so they could preserve white unity.

To summarize the threat from the East:

• Domestic white barbaric threat – unfit working class
• Racist interbreeding threat – contamination
• Tropical climatic threat
• Threat of European wars depleting the white race

The crisis of Western self-doubting and deep anxiety was reflected in a host of books which included:

• Spengler’s Decline of the West (European Institutionalist) (1919,1932)
• Madison Grant’s the Passing of the White Race (1918)
• Lothrop Stoddard The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy (1920)
• Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)

 Stoddard

Eurocentrism and racism do not always deny non-white race’s agency. The climax of eugenics reflected not the moment of supreme white confidence but an acute  sense of anxiety regardless the future hegemony of the white race. For Stoddard, globalization is a real threat. The greatest threat to white racial existence lies

• in colored immigration problem
• a demographic explosion

The white races are under siege and disunited within their inner sanctum excavated by the Trojan horse of Western liberalism. Stoddard takes the notion of predatory Eastern agency beyond Mahan and Mackinder. He wants to call out the hubris of the white race. He is nervous and panicked about the Japanese victory over the white Russians in 1905. Further, rise of communism dealt a cruel blow to white racial unity. He is afraid of the white wars in which the best white stock would be lost on the battlefields. The white need to retreat from their imperial bases in Asia and leave the land to yellow and brown rule.

Madison Grant
Grant claimed colonialism weakens the white races. The Nordic race is unable to survive south of the line of latitude on white Virginia because of the detrimental impact of the hot climate. Nordics must keep away from the native population for fear of racial contamination from the sun’s actinic rays. Grant says the rapid decline in the birthrate of native white Americans is gradually withdrawing from the scene, abandoning to these aliens the land which they once conquered and developed. The man of the old stock is being crowded out.

Patrick Moynihan
In Patrick Moynihan book Pandemonium, he explores a  Malthusian logic in predicting the demographic doomsday scenario at the hands of the Eastern Hordes as does Paul Kennedy in his book Preparing for the 21^st Century. For them, the greatest challenge to world order in the coming century is the rising relative demographic gap between West and East. Western civilizations will have stable or declining populations and would be swamped by the East and the South. While Malthus in his day did not prevent a rising demographic to Europe from the East, by the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries these became a staple of much of racist Western thought.

Huntington and Lind on demographics
In the work of Huntington and Lind a close parallel can be drawn between their work and the racist imperialist thinker Mahan. But an even closer link can be found with CH Pearson’s National Life and Character, a Forecast; Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920);  Clashing Tides of Color (1935).  In Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations (1996). The roots of the barbaric threat that the Chinese and Muslims pose for the Western Civilization are located within a neo-Malthusian framework. It begins with the Eastern population explosion. This surplus population is problematic because it will seek to flood into the heartlands of the West.

For Huntington and Lind, non-Western societies were increasingly becoming the movers and shakers of their own history and of Western history. This meant in their ability to economically develop as well as resist imperialism. Lind writes that with the break-up of the Soviet “empire” the West’s great right flank will almost certainly be endangered as the Islamic republics will seek to join their Muslim brothers. Islam will be at the gates of Vienna as either immigrants or terrorists. Domestically multiculturalism in the West today is a “political virus” for it serves to boost the vitality of foreign cultures within the West.

Conclusion
The purpose of this article is to expose the theoretical blockages to the West’s understanding that they are being left beyond by the multipolar world of BRICS.

First, their Western International Relations Theory history has hardly been a positivist value free theory. It oozes Eurocentrism, paternalism, racism and imperialism. Secondly International Relations Theory only dimly perceives that these theories are not 100 years deep, starting after World War I, but have a 250 year history as Table 3 below shows. Thirdly, table 3 shows over 50 theorists over that 250 years, thus cementing a deep ideological commitment to “the rise of the West”. Those international theorists who have really understood that the East and the South are not merely passive recipients of the wisdom of the West but are themselves innovators. These theorists are isolated and could be counted on two hands.

Table 3 Eurocentrism, Paternalism and Racism  in International Theory 1760-2010

1760-1914 Manifest Eurocentrism	Paternalism Cobden/ Bright, Angell, Hobson, Mill, Marx	Ant-paternalism Smith, Kant
Scientific racism	Offensive racism Ward, Reinsch, Kidd, Mahan, Mackinder and von Treitschke	Defensive Racism Spencer, Sumner, Blair, Jordan, CH Pearson, Ripley, Brinton
1914-1945 Manifest Eurocentrism	Paternalism Wolff, Zimmern, Murray, Angell	Anti-paternalism Subliminal Eurocentrism Laski/ Brailsford, Lenin, Bukharin
Scientific racism	Offensive Racism	Defensive racism
	Wilson, Buell, Kjellen, Spykman, Haushofer, Hitler	Stoddard, Grant, E. Huntington
1945-1989 Subliminal Eurocentrism	Paternalism Gilpin, Keohane Walz, Bull, Watson	Anti-Paternalism Carr, Morgenthau
1989-2010 Manifest Eurocentrism	Paternalist Rawls, Held, Nussbaum, Fukuyama	Anti-paternalist World-system theory, Cox
	Offensive Eurocentrism Kagan, Cooper, Ferguson	Defensive Eurocentrism SP Huntington, Lind

 

Below is the Conventional linear narrative of Liberal great tradition:

• From 1760 to 1816 there is classical liberal internationalism of Smith, Kant and Ricardo.
• From 1830 to 1913 classical liberal internationalism continues in the work of Cobden, Bright, JS Mill and Angell.
• Between 1900 to 1945 the emphasis switches to interdependence theory of liberal institutionalism of Hobson, Wilson, Zimmerman and Murray.
• Between 1989 and 2010 liberal cosmopolitanism is embodied in the theories of Fukuyama, Held and Rawls.

The Table 4 below shows Hobson’s very different breakdown of liberalism, calling it “paternalistic imperial liberalism”.

See Table 4 Hobson’s history in international Liberalism on Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

Table 5 shows that history of realism has also been filled with political activity about as far from positivism as one can imagine.

See Table 5 Hobson’s history of international realism on Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

Lastly Hobson charts the history of Marxism from 1840 to post 1989.

• With classical Marxism of Marx and Engels between 1840-1895. Hobson calls it explicit imperialism which is paternalist Eurocentrism.
• Between 1910 and the 1920s classical Marxism continues with the work of Lenin, Luxemburg, Hilferding and Bukharin which Hobson characterizes as anti-imperialist, but a subliminal anti-paternalist Eurocentrism.
• Between 1967 and 1989 although World-Systems Theory differs from classical Marxism with its emphasis on conflicts between states more than class struggles within states, it shares the same combination of anti-imperialist, subliminal, anti-paternalist Eurocentrism of the Marxists of 1910-1920. The same is true for Robert Cox’s Gramscian hegemony theory.
• In the post 1989 period we find in the work of Giovanni Arrighi and Christopher Chase-Dunn a continuation of anti-imperialist, anti-paternalist emphasis on Europe, but both are more willing to grant autonomy to non-Western countries. If Eastern or Southern countries  occupy what both call the capitalist  semi-periphery of the world system. Arrighi’s last book was called Adam Smith in Beijing, showing his interest in China as the new global hegemon
• In the same period It is in the work of Andre Gunder Frank and Janet Abu-Lughod that we finally theories that challenge any Eurocentrism or paternalism. Gunder Frank has always contended that World Systems Theory is Eurocentric and claims, as Hobson argues in another book that Europe only surpassed China after 1800. His book Re-Orient claims, correctly I think that the new Asian Age is on the horizon.FacebookRedditEmail

Bruce Lerro has taught for 25 years as an adjunct college professor of psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University and Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to his three books found on Amazon. He is a co-founder, organizer and writer for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. Read other articles by Bruce, or visit Bruce's website.