Winks, Robin W., Crane Brinton, John B. Christopher and Robert Lee Wolf, editors. *A History of Civilization: Prehistory to the Present*, 9th edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996.

Reviewed by H. Parker James, Tufts University.

Prentice Hall's *A History of Civilization* has been in print for more than four decades. Now in its ninth edition, this volume is edited by Robin Winks. The book has been around long enough that it has become a bit of an artifact: a survivor of the Cold War world. The book could still function as a competent, if politically conservative, textbook for an introductory survey course in European History. The title, however, seems to promise more: that it should cover the history of human civilization. It fails to do that. Instead, the book presents a definitively Eurocentric approach to the History of civilization: the implication is, in effect, if you learn the history of the West you'll have learned the history of civilization. Such notions seem to reflect the assumptions of another age, a time when Western Europe lay at the forefront of global politics.

Despite their Eurocentric approach, the authors do not mean to imply that there are not other civilizations. In a prefatory passage, which sounds a bit like a disclaimer, Winks goes out of his way to acknowledge the existence of other civilizations: "Neither the text nor the context is meant to imply that there are not complex, challenging and productive civilizations elsewhere."(1) It is interesting to note that Winks employs the plural construction, "civilizations" here. When he uses "civilization" in its singular form, he is invariably talking about the West. He continues:

...Since western societies have had so great an impact on the non-western world in recent centuries, there is a sense in which world history is legitimately viewed through the window of western history.(2)

This statement reveals a set of assumptions which, whether consciously or unconsciously, are restated over and over in the book: to know the history of Europe is to know the history of the world. After all, as the authors note on page 597, there are times when "...Western history and world history are virtually indistinguishable."(3)

In the book's introduction, the editors express their discomfort with the book's title. "...To Speak of "civilization" (of which this book is a history) is an once to plunge into controversy...."(4) They adopt the language of political correctness when they explain that the term "Western Civilization" has inherent biases:

...first, that we know what it means to be "civilized" and have attained that stature; and second that the West is a single unitary civilization...."(5) Unfortunately, authorial biases such as these inform the work throughout.

Not surprisingly, the most vivid examples of them are in the book's coverage of the non-western world, coverage which is sometimes not only misleading, but further tarnished by factual errors. The book's sketchy coverage of Africa is a case in point. The premodern empires of Ghana and Mali are mentioned, but only briefly. The capital of the Empire of Mali is incorrectly stated to be Timbuktu. The authors present early modern Africa as a huge obstacle that the Portuguese had to navigate around. No mention, for example, is made of the Portuguese gold trade, which helped bankroll the Portuguese voyages of exploration.

The authors' (hopefully unconscious) diminution of the relative value of non-western culture continues on the subject of religion. The Quran, for example, is described as "difficult to follow" and "full of allusions to things and persons not called by their right names."(6) The coverage of Buddhism is equally misleading. The text chooses to refer to Theravada Buddhism by the pejorative term "Hinayana," which translates roughly to "lesser vehicle." The authors continue, "...in theory the Hinayana relies more on ritual and its monks are wholly detached from the world."(7) In truth, what distinguishes the Theravada, or southern school of Buddhism from the larger Mahayana school is the fact that, theoretically, the former relies exclusively on the teachings of the historical Buddha. As such, it is a doctrine of individual salvation. It relies on far less ritual than many Mahayana sects, such as the Tantric Buddhism practiced by Tibetans. Theravada monks do not necessarily live a life "totally detached from the world." Even the most worldly male Theravada Buddhist is required to spend at least a short time living as a monk.

Problematic coverage goes on and on. For example, in the section on European empire building in early modern times, the text seems to conflate European expansion in the 16th century with that of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A passage on page 300, for example, asserts that:

Few of the improvements in health and sanitation that Europeans would bring to the east had yet come about, nor had greater public order come to India and Africa as it eventually would.(8)

Such a passage is, to say the least, ripe for deconstruction. To begin with, it fails to mention that those "improvements in health and sanitation" had not "yet come about" in 16th century Europe either. Secondly, it seems to imply that the legacy of European influence in Africa and India was "greater public order," a notion that is open to debate.

Such inaccuracies are not limited to the text. For example, on page 523 there is a map of the Asia-Pacific region, ca. 1910-26. The designers of the map took great pains to distinguish areas in India which were directly administered by the British from those which remained, at least nominally, under the rule of Indian princes. The British used this same model for their colonial government in Malaya. There, nearly all of the territory remained, to varying degrees, under the control of Malay sultans. The fact that the map does not reflect this may be dismissed as nit-picking. Less so is the fact that , on the same map, Taiwan is mis- labeled as a British colony, rather than a part of the Empire of Japan.

Many of the drawbacks of the book may stem from its origins at the height of the cold war. The coverage of 20th century China is a case in point. The book traces in detail the origin and growth of the Guomintang party, as well as the travails of Chaing Kai Shek during the Second World War. However, it does not extend enough detail in its coverage of Mao to define Maoism. Rather than, for example, explaining Mao's theories on peasant revolution, the authors merely describe him as an "undeviating Stalinist."(9)

It is interesting to compare this book's first edition, published in 1955,(10) with its ninth edition, published in 1996. The 1955 edition is truly an artifact of Cold War thought. It reflects a time, before the Suez Crisis of 1956, when the European colonial powers could still beguile themselves that the world was theirs to rule. A reader can forgive the 1955 edition for conflating the history of Europe with that of the world at large. Not so the 1996 version, which retains a surprising amount of the original copy. Rather than interpreting European History within a global framework, the book continues to place the rest of the world within the context of the history of Western Europe. In the post Cold War world, this paradigm is anachronistic, to say the least. In the past four decades, the global influence of Western Europe has been greatly diminished, even as western scholarship on the "rest of the world" has dramatically increased. The political history of Western Europe remains a legitimate unit of study. However, to mistake it for *A History of Civilization: Prehistory to the Present* is problematic. Perhaps the editors should consider a change of title. Maybe then they can discard the disclaimer in their preface.

NOTES: 1. Winks, Robin W., Crane Brinton, John B. Christopher and Robert Lee Wolf, editors. A History of Civilization: Prehistory to the Present., 9th edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996, page xxv. 2. Winks: 1996, page xxv. 3. Winks: 1996, page 597. 4. Winks: 1996, page xxix. 5. Winks: 1996, page xxix. 6. Winks: 1996, page 129. 7. Winks: 1996, page 288. 8. Winks: 1996, page 300. 9. Winks: 1996, page 630. 10. Brinton, Crane, John B. Christopher and Robert Lee Wolff. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1955.