As was demonstrated above, the making of both the European Self and Atlantic Other were fundamentally interactive processes based on extant and changing forms of sociological unevenness. Likewise, the ideology of Eurocentrism cannot be historicised within the cultural or geographical borders of Europe alone, but only as an essentially intersocietal development.45 For it is in the colonial encounter that we find the emergent tendencies to read cultural differences between societies not simply as differences, but as absences: the Amerindians lacked those features the Spanish possessed. Absence in turn served as a marker
of ‘backwardness’ in the Amerindian Other, and enabled the hierarchical demar-cation of the European Self as ‘advanced’ and ‘superior’. Through this practice of demarcation, Europeans were able to imagine themselves as a culturally homogenous entity – civilised, advanced, distinct and separate from the ‘savage’
world outside. In this way the basic premises of Eurocentrism were prototypi-cally established. A methodological internalism (in which European development is conceptualised as endogenous and self-propelling) and assumptions of historical priority (which ‘posits the endogenous and autonomous emergence of modernity in Europe’46), first began to take shape in the Atlantic encounter.
Setting up this hierarchy established a ‘standard of civilization’, and with it, the moral obligation for the ‘the civilized to take control of the uncivilized’.47 As such, the practice of comparison established difference as something to be negated and overcome – an absence to be filled with the content of Spanish practices. ‘Indians’ had to be civilised, their peculiarities annihilated. Sepúlveda chillingly captured the affinities between ‘civilising’ activities and societal annihilation when he argued that ‘the loss of a single soul dead without baptism exceeds in gravity the death of countless victims, even were they innocent’.48 Sepúlveda’s imperative – a ‘moral’ and ‘humanitarian’ one, no less – implied ‘a projection of the subject speaking about the universe, an identi-fication of my values with the values’,49 the projection of Spanish practices as universal.
This projection and the possibility of civilisation through annihilation would in turn invoke the third marker of Eurocentrism – linear developmentalism based on a homogenous conception of time, or what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls
‘historicism’.50 By setting up sociocultural distinctions in terms of linear history, non-Europeans were seen to present an image of Europe’s past, and in turn Europe posited itself as the image of non-Europeans’ future. Amerindians, on this view, ‘served as a paradigm for an original state [of nature] before property became individuated and secure: “In the beginning all the world was America”
as John Locke put it’.51 Or, as Adam Ferguson would later write:
It is in their [the American savages] present condition, that we are to behold, as in a mirror, the features of our own progenitors; and from thence we are to draw our conclusions with respect to the influence of situations, in which, we have reason to believe, our fathers were placed.52
Such conceptions of linear developmentalism (re)constructed sociological relations of unevenness (that is, difference) through temporal conceptions of distance or separation.53 They also functioned as a framework to legitimise the annihilation of substantive sociological differences between the Spanish and Amerindians by naturalising the ‘culturally peculiar path of Western development based on private property and state-formation’.54
By the time of the Enlightenment, conceptions of linear developmentalism would find their fullest expression in Eurocentric stadial thinking.55 With an emphasis on clearly distinguishable stages of development (what the French Physiocrats and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers conceived in terms of succes-sive ‘modes of subsistence’)56 on the continuum of unilinear time, stagism would establish one of the key intellectual foundations for the emergence of ‘scien-tific’ conceptions of racism.57 In keeping with these unilinear stagist models, the employment of scientific and technological criteria in proving the superiority (and thus domination) of Europeans over non-European peoples would become the norm over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries. As material dispar-ities between a rising capitalist core and non-capitalist periphery developed, broader philosophical, societal, religious and cultural distinctions were super-seded by those ‘based on things’.58 This was one instance of a more generalised technological fetishism emerging from the rapid, but uneven, development of the productive forces under capitalism in its world-wide expansion. The level of technological development was perceived as determining the moral worth of a particular ‘race’ and/or society.59 In these ways, modern racism organically arose with the systematisation of unevenness constitutive of the capitalist mode of production and its interactions with other societies.60
The dispossession of the Amerindians, along with the many later European
‘humanitarian’ interventions abroad, thereby became justified on the basis of a stadial conception of development through which non-European societies were deemed materially (and thus normatively) ‘backward’ in comparison with the ‘West’. Hence, as with the formation of the United States, ‘Native Ameri-cans, like other less-powerful groups who possessed territory coveted by White Americans, were declared racially inferior and incapable of productive use of the land’.61 Those communities or ‘races’ that did not ‘adequately’ develop the productive forces were judged unfit to exist, or in need of instructive rule from the morally and culturally superior ‘Western’ societies. Tellingly, the so-called
‘father’ of modern liberalism, John Locke, evoked similar justifications for the dispossession of the Amerindians in the English-held Atlantic colonies. For Locke, the dispossession of the Amerindians was both necessary and legiti-mate since the ‘Indians had no right, or very tenuous right, to the land, because they had not “mixed their labour” with it sufficiently’.62 As E. P. Thompson notes, since Locke saw Amerindians as ‘poor “for want of improving” the land by labour’, and since such ‘labour (and improvement) constituted the right to property, this made it the more easy for the Europeans to dispossess the Indians of their hunting grounds’.63 In these ways, Europe’s colonisation of the Americas and the ideological apparatuses it spawned marked the embryonic origins of the ‘global colour line’64 that would subsequently evolve with capitalism’s development into a world system of imperialist domination.