Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Europeans began to see themselves as "white" primarily during the early modern period, especially from the 17th century onward, in the context of colonial expansion, Atlantic slavery, and the development of racial thinking. Key Phases in the Construction of Whiteness: 1. Medieval Period (before 1500s): Europeans did not have a unified concept of "race" as we understand it today. Identity was based more on religion, ethnicity, language, and region (e.g., Christian vs. Muslim, English vs. French, noble vs. peasant). The idea of being “white” did not function as a self-identifier or category of solidarity. 2. 16th–17th Centuries: Early Colonialism and Slavery As Europeans colonized the Americas and encountered Indigenous peoples and African slaves, new hierarchies were constructed. The transatlantic slave trade and European justifications for slavery helped formalize distinctions between Europeans (later “whites”) and Africans or Indigenous peoples as “non-white” and i...

  Western collective consciousness has long been socialised with the assumption that the non-West is naturally a place of unrest, deprivation, violence and, all in all, of inescapable backwardness. This thinking was proliferated in the earliest writings by the “founding fathers” of various disciplines as a matter of scientific fact. Take the case of my own discipline: international relations. It is meant to educate the future politician, diplomat, public intellectual or policymaker on how states interact in the international political system. Yet, its first textbooks are rooted in “Darwinist ideas”, that imagined a racially hierarchical global order and placed white Europeans at the top and all the darker peoples of the world at the bottom. This hierarchy, they insisted, was justified due to white people’s natural intellectual and cultural superiority. Over the years, the ways in which these hierarchies are perpetuated have changed and we started to use different lingo. But be it f...

"[I]n large measure," as Geoffrey Parker has observed, " 'the rise of the West' de­pended upon the exercise of force, upon the fact that the military balance between the Europeans and their adversaries overseas was steadily tilting in favour of the former;. . . [T]he key to the Westerners' success in creating the first truly global empires between 1500 and 1750 depended upon precisely those improvements in the ability to wage war which have been termed 'the military revolution.' " The expansion of the West was also facilitated by the superiority in organization, discipline, and training of its troops and subsequently by the superior weapons, transport, logistics, and medical services resulting from its leadership in the Industrial Revolution.  The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or  religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. W...

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