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Beyond Eurocentrism: A New View of Modern World History. By PETER GRAN. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1996. Pp. xiii + 440.$49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
Readers are more likely to value Beyond Eurocentrism for its details than for its revisionist interpretation of the last 125 years. Armed with impressively broad, but often uneven, knowledge about the nine disparate countries that underpin his comparative analysis, Peter Gran challenges the world histories of William McNeill, Immanuel Wallerstein, Eric Wolfe [sic], Erik [sic] Hobsbawm, and others as too focused on "Western countries, their elites, and high cultures" (p. 4). Instead, Gran proposes that the development of modern nation-states can be understood in terms of "four different hegemonic logics," based on whether rulers disguised class conflict with an ideology based on caste (the "Russian road," also followed by Iraq), regionalism (the "Italian road," also taken by India and Mexico), gender (the "tribal-ethnic" road, exemplified by Albania and the Congo), or race (the "bourgeoisdemocratic" road, exemplified by Great Britain and the United States). Gran, who teaches world history and Islamic history at Temple University, not only traces the political economies of these nine countries, but also includes fascinating thumbnail sketches of their cultural histories and of their domestic historiographies. Along the way, he offers...