human being. But in both theory and research the focus was often on white men. These were equated with individuals in general, producing misleading, falsely universal claims. The experience and situations of women were different from those of men – and left out when the focus was on an abstract, allegedly universal individual. For example, the sociological pioneer Jane Addams (excerpted here) pointed out the belated recognition of household work, done mainly by women, but commonly forgotten both by economists and labor organizers. Likewise, focusing on the abstract individual obscured race. In The Souls of Black Folk, (excerpted here) the great classical sociological theorist W.E.B. Du Bois developed the concept of ‘double consciousness’ to address what it meant to live with the duality of fitting into a universal category (whether individual or citizen) only with the recognition that one also embodied a marked difference.
The Wider World: Classical sociological theory was shaped by a new sense of how large and diverse the world was. Recognition of the existence of other societies helped Europeans recognize their own more clearly. The French, Germans, and English all compared themselves to each other. But more distant and radically distant civilizations also had an important effect on classical sociological theory.
For a thousand years, Europeans had known little about this wider world. Since the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Europe had not been central to any of the world’s large empires or expansive civilizations. There were great empires in China, India, Persia, and the Muslim Mediterranean while Europe was a relative backwater.
Connection to the Western Roman Empire is the reason Europeans thought of themselves as ‘the West’. The Eastern half of the Roman Empire did not ‘fall’ in the 5th Century the way the Western did; it split off. Centered in Constantinople, and henceforth commonly known as Byzantium, until the 15th Century it remained central to civilization from the Eastern Mediterranean into Asia. It was also the center of Orthodox Christianity while most of Western Europe was Catholic (and later Protestant). Orthodoxy linked Greek, Russian, Syrian, Egyptian (Coptic) and Ethiopian branches of Christianity, though without the central authority of a Pope. Western Europeans had little engagement with their fellow Christians to the East.
Constantinople was a Greek city, located in what is now Turkey. In 1453, it was conquered, renamed Istanbul, and made the capital of a growing, Turkish-led Ottoman Empire – the most recent of the great Islamic empires. Refugees from Byzantium flowed into Italian cities like Venice and from there into other parts of Europe. They brought texts and learning from ancient Greece and Rome the were preserved in the East while temporarily lost to the West. Their intellectual contributions helped to spark the Renaissance.
Even more important in this regard were the contributions of Arabic scholars.22 An Islamic ‘golden age’ had flourished from the 8th Century to the 14th. Among its most important centers was Andalusia, in Spain, long more closely connected to countries around the Mediterranean than to Northern Europe. The Arab Empires traded widely, and presided over perhaps the most ‘globalized’ phase of history before the rise of the modern Western-dominated capitalist world-system. Shakespeare’s character Othello, for example, was a general in the Venetian Army that fought the Ottomans over Cyprus. He was also a ‘Moor’ – the name Christian Europeans gave to Muslims from the North African territories of the Andalusian Islamic Empires.
One of the earliest precursors to classical sociological theory was Ibn Khaldun, an Andalusian Muslim of Yemeni background who was born in Tunis and worked mostly as a diplomat in North Africa. His book, the Muqaddimah, offered a universal history of the world, with attention to the differentiation of cultures, physical environments, and politics within it.23 It influenced not only other Arab thinkers and those of the Ottoman Empire but also Europeans from Florentine political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli to the German philosopher Georg Hegel.
The Ottoman empire was impressively cosmopolitan. When Christian rulers expelled Jews from Spain in 1492, most were absorbed into the Ottoman lands. This created the Sephardic diaspora, spread through Eastern Europe and the Middle East – by contrast to the Ashkenazim, who had been settled in Europe since the Middle Ages. Jewish Biblical thought, reflections on law, and understanding of the challenge of sustaining a minority culture all had a significant influence on classical sociological theory.
Parts of Southeastern Europe were incorporated into the Ottoman Empire. Conflicts with Tsarist Russia were recurrent. But Ottoman advance to the West was blocked when Vienna withstood devastating siege in 1529 and 1683. This gave Europeans – including classical sociological theorists – an enduring sense of Europe’s civilizational frontier. The very idea of civilization was shaped by awareness of the world to the East of Europe.
The word ‘civilization’ is rooted in the Latin term for an organized community or way of life. It was used increasingly from the 17th and 18th centuries to denote a process of ‘developing’ to a higher state of culture. It mattered to the rise of classical sociological theory in two ways. First, Europeans had to acknowledge that there were other great civilizations besides their own. They looked manly to the East for examples, but also to the ancient world. Second, Europeans focused on the idea of development to look for a sequence through which all peoples might pass as they moved from less civilized to more. They looked to their own history but also to peoples throughout the world they regarded as less civilized, especially in Africa and the Americas.
Europeans liked to think of themselves as becoming more civilized. It was not just history; it was aspiration. Civilization was linked to the development of states, not least through the elite culture of courts and palaces. Norbert Elias explored this ‘civilizing process’ in Europe.24 His work was shaped by Max Weber’s earlier studies of how political, legal, and cultural change entwined. Weber recognized that bureaucracy, which he analyzed as central to the consolidation of European nation-states, had actually originated in ancient empires (without the word, which he coined later). Weber put the history of religion at the center, and wrote studies of India (Hinduism and Buddhism) and China (Confucianism and Taoism). These informed his exploration of why capitalism emerged in Europe rather than, say, Japan – the non-Western society he thought the best candidate.
Focusing on civilization is broader than focusing on individual nation-states. Empires overlap civilizations more closely, and often connect their regions. But the idea is cultural and sociological more than political. Confucianism developed in China, for example, and the Chinese Empire is almost inconceivable without it. But Confucianism also became important throughout East Asia and in some places beyond. It guided not just politics but family life, ritual, ethics, and the pursuits of intellectuals.
Weber saw religion as central to civilizations, but religious traditions could mingle with each other and spread across civilizations. Western civilization was mainly Christian, but with multiple versions of Christianity and important influences from Judaism (not to mention pagan Greeks, Romans, and early Germans). Conversely, Western Christianity was distinct from Eastern, or Orthodox. Buddhism developed in India but influenced China and even more profoundly Japan as well as many societies in Southeast Asia.
This raised but didn’t settle the basic question of why the coexistence of religions in a common or at least overlapping civilizational context could become instead a bitter conflict. South Asia has offered a paradigmatic example. Its Hindu traditions are ancient, but also always plural. There was no single premodern Hindu orthodoxy – just as there was no single Indian language. Into this context came Muslim conquerors who established the Mughal empire. Despite arriving by conquest, they established an impressively tolerant, cosmopolitan empire. Though religiously Sunni, the Mughals were deeply influenced by Persia in matters of art and culture. They invited intellectuals, poets, and spiritual leaders of different backgrounds into their courts.
The Mughals ruled over most of South Asia, including what are now India and Pakistan, from the 16th Century until replaced by the British Empire in the 19th. Indeed, they were the last foreigners to successfully subjugate Afghanistan, over which they fought with Persia, and
