Anton K

“This emphasis calls into question some of the most ingrained insights into the history of the modern world—for example, conceptualizing the nineteenth century, as is so often done, as an age of “bourgeois civilization,” in contrast with the twentieth century, which historian Eric Hobsbawm has termed the “age of catastrophe.”19 An assessment such as this can only be derived from a vision of the world that focuses its moral judgments on Europe. Looked at from the perspective of much of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, one can argue just the opposite—that the nineteenth century was an age of barbarity and catastrophe, as slavery and imperialism devastated first one pocket of the globe and then another. It is the twentieth century, by contrast, that saw the weakening of imperial powers and thus allowed more of the world’s people to determine their own futures and shake off the shackles of colonial domination. Without its Eurocentric distortions, decolonialization would be at the very center of the narrative we tell about the twentieth century”
― Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History