The principle of human equality is perhaps the most universally accepted dogma of moral life in our world. But this view is quite novel. In A Short History of Relations between Peoples, John M. Ellis crafts an argument that traces this transformation from about 1500 to the present.
Ellis opens the book with an example of what he has in mind. The International Chess Federation’s motto—gens una sumus (“we are one family”)—would have made little sense to most people before the twentieth century. Ellis uses this Latin phrase throughout his Short History as a shorthand for the ideal of human equality and unity, a notion that he argues would have utterly baffled people in centuries past: “The rule in 1500 was not gens una sumus, but the very different ‘my brother and I against my cousin; my cousin and I against the stranger.’ The less like you someone was, the more dangerous he was likely to be.” Ellis shows that many in the present day underappreciate how fragile our belief in equality truly is—and how difficult an idea it was to spread.
The book aims at helping readers understand how recent attempts to revise our understanding of the past—especially those driven by critical theory, like the 1619 Project—are unfair to our forebears. But more than that, Ellis attempts to show that these judgements operate on grounds that are practically unthinkable to past generations.
In the present, it is easy to forget how apart the world’s peoples really were. Before 1500, well-educated elites might speak one or more common languages, but deeply regional dialects were the norm, with few people ever traveling very far from home. Peoples were not just physically distant, but culturally worlds apart:
Until disturbed, the status quo on the globe was that peoples who had adapted physically to a certain kind of terrain and climate, and consequently shared certain characteristics that had resulted from that adaptation, would mostly be found in the place where those characteristics developed.
War was the most common way that people encountered those of different origins. Armies brought with them starvation and destruction, and “it didn’t matter whether you were overrun by your own troops or invading armies—both would plunder your food stores and leave you to starve.”
Over the course of a few brief chapters, Ellis outlines the state of the world circa 1500, and what caused this situation where the world’s peoples largely lived apart from one another in a mixture of fear, and—when Europeans began to encounter other, less technologically advanced peoples—disdain.
From this perspective, Ellis argues that today’s revisionist critiques of the age of exploration and settlement around the globe do little justice to the principles and interests driving European expansion. Moreover, such critiques entirely ignore how obvious attitudes of suspicion and distance would be to Europeans encountering other peoples:
Nation states were formed by slow accumulations of territory, as one people conquered and absorbed another. A general principle soon emerged: bigger is better. Larger states were obviously more secure than smaller ones. … The fears that ordinary people had were based on very real threats, endangering nothing less than their life and liberty. … Gens una sumus is a modern luxury made possible only by living conditions that are far more secure than those of 1500.
Ellis presents something of a realist history of European expansion. He argues that a major drive for voyages of exploration and successive waves of colonization from Europe to the rest of the world was the simple desire to expand their military and economic power. Naturally, it became the start of a collision between dramatically different cultures, with the Europeans able to leverage their technological advances to great effect around the world. Empire itself, Ellis notes, does not deserve the sort of categorical condemnation it now receives:
Though empires have existed at all times and in all places of human history, and among all races and religions, radical historians now want to ignore the hundreds of non-Western empires that have existed throughout history so that they can frame empire as a uniquely European, and thus White supremacist, phenomenon. That is either ignorant or dishonest. Until quite recently, any group of people that were able to conquer other people and territory did so, because that was a rational response to a dangerous world.
Ellis insists that the entire rhetoric surrounding these matters in current scholarship betrays a kind of utopianism: “From time immemorial, the reality was that ownership of land rested on the ability of its occupier to defend it. Most would take their neighbors’ land whenever they could.”
He further observes that Westerners would naturally feel superior to the cultures they encountered: “How could literate cultures of the iron age not feel superior to cultures that were, technologically, thousands of years behind them?” The story becomes more complicated as Europeans themselves began to view their relations with other peoples through a moral lens, a change that could only come to pass with ready access to ideas through print:
Throughout recorded history, individual thinkers have occasionally broached the issue of our common humanity, but before the printing press their ideas could have reached only a very small number of people. The closest thing to a wide dissemination of thought would have been through … the pulpits of the Christian churches, where some priests would certainly have spoken of all people as equally God’s children. But to judge from the results, this didn’t dissuade people from their inherited tribalism to any great extent.
The printing press facilitated discussion of moral questions in a way that nothing prior had allowed, and soon after, the Reformation’s encouragement of literacy “provided a country with the means of debating its values.” Though it took time, European mores gradually shifted from a sense of superiority and disdain for the less technologically advanced peoples they encountered to a slow appreciation of their common humanity. Where philosophers and theologians started arguments in this direction, literature provided a deeper signal of shifting views: By 1719, in “Robinson Crusoe, a White man and a Black man depend on each other, cooperate with each other, and defend each other. With Defoe we are on the road to the future.”
Ellis highlights the way Europeans grew interested in foreign cultures and suggests this became another pathway toward the extension of equality: “During the 18th century, Europeans became fascinated with Turkish culture. For the first time, a serious number of people of one culture became entranced by another, contemporary culture.” This was a qualitatively different experience from the lasting interest Europeans displayed toward ancient civilizations, as they could directly compare themselves to existing societies and find something worth learning or adopting. It is not just that favorite beverages like coffee and tea made their way into European culture through this, but that the encounter with literate and sophisticated peoples forced a moral conversation about the European place in the world.
Ellis wants historians to apply their own view of gens una sumus to the past, but to do that, scholars would have to view human beings as bearing equal dignity.
Yet it was not just a generically European change: Ellis argues that the real growth and propagation of gens una sumus centered on discussions taking place in Great Britain during the Enlightenment. Thinkers like David Hume, Edmund Burke, and Adam Smith contributed deeply to this conversation. Ellis argues that the practicality of British philosophy and its greater rootedness in everyday life led thinkers there toward egalitarian views of social and political life more quickly than anywhere else in Europe.
Additionally, many of the explicitly moral discussions about how Europeans related to the wider world flowed from Christian doctrine. Catholics were the first to suggest that Native Americans deserved to be treated with a basic level of respect, and opposition to slavery was deeply Christian: “There was no organized movement against slavery anywhere until the Christian Church (therefore mainly Europeans) began to oppose it, and the practice of slavery began to end in Europe as the attitude of the Church spread.” In recognizing the role of the Church, Ellis is at pains to undercut fashionable notions that “whiteness” or “systemic racism” are somehow central to understanding the spread of slavery.
Indeed, Ellis makes a thoughtful case that much of the later critique of “racism” is misplaced. He views contemporary categories of race and identity as depending in crucial ways on the preexisting notion of gens una sumus: “Only when we believe that human beings are all of one family is it possible to violate that belief,” and he argues it is profoundly unfair of modern readers to judge Romans or fifteenth-century Europeans through an egalitarian lens:
When leftist scholars criticize the racism of earlier times, they essentially assume that our modern belief in gens una sumus is quite simply the natural one—the basic, expected standard, whatever the era under consideration. The truth is exactly the reverse of this. … It’s the older attitude that is the norm throughout the ages, while it’s the modern attitude that is artificial, something that had to be learned.
We ought not be surprised, then, that gens una sumus spread unevenly and in various areas of human life at different times. Orthodoxies spread in strange ways, but once established, even those who disbelieve in them feel compelled to pay lip service to them as a public doctrine.
Throughout the book, Ellis subverts the platitudes of contemporary historians. A few examples should suffice: Scholars today often speak of indigenous wisdom or lifeways and remark at length about how it is important to maintain this knowledge. But why is it that non-Westerners have so “quickly adopted modern technologies, weapons, travel, and every other aspect of modern life”? Ellis observes: “To judge from their behavior, therefore, they didn’t think their former practices were of equal value to the innovations of modernity.” Ellis underestimates the degree to which adopting Western technology is separable from adopting Western cultural forms. Yet, he rightly criticizes scholars who assume that the spread of Western ideas and imperial power was a purely destructive force in history.
A Short History makes a similar sport of cultural relativists. Where many scholars seek to minimize, explain away, or outright ignore certain aspects of the cultures they lionize, Ellis argues that much of this advocacy is offered in bad faith: “The plain fact is that, nowadays, nobody is willing to condone torture, cannibalism, ritual murder, or sexual slavery as ‘alternate life-styles’—least of all the relativists, who are more dogmatic than anyone about, for example, how a society should treat its women.”
In all these reassessments, Ellis offers a necessary corrective to a discipline that has largely lost perspective on the past. But while he is forthright about the degree to which Christian teachings spread the doctrine of equality, the book does not provide an explanation for how equality went mad. Committed to an argument that emphasizes the power of interests, Ellis can recognize how equality spread, but his explanation for why modern egalitarians excoriate their forebears is lacking.
A Short History presents the unwillingness to view our past charitably as a failure of understanding and lack of gratitude, and he ties it to the continued embrace of communism and the doctrine’s near relations: “No matter how many years they have spent on this earth, leftist radicals remains stuck in adolescent rebellion against their own societies, and in primitive ignorance of political history.”
Despite being clear about the degree to which Christian faith paved the way for arguments about dignity and equality, Ellis does not link the rise of egalitarian madness to the loss of faith and the cultural assumptions that come with it. This does not diminish the book’s helpful correction of the historical profession, but his argument treats religious faith more as a cultural force than a claim about the nature of reality itself.
Ellis wants historians to apply their own view of gens una sumus to the past, but to do that, scholars would have to view human beings as bearing equal dignity. This suggests the challenge lies deeper than any history book can show.