John M. Ellis’ A Short History of Relations Between Peoples: How the World Began to Move Beyond Tribalism is an important book. It defends the values and history of Western civilization underlying the political and economic systems that have produced the prosperous and multifaceted world Westerners currently enjoy.
But it is also a controversial book. It rebuts the progressive left’s widespread charges of racism against the historical foundations of the modern Western world.
Consequently, this is a courageous book. It will no doubt be attacked by the left as a defense of racism, colonial imperialism, and white supremacy. But anyone who reads A Short History of Relations Between Peoples fairly will understand the falsity of these attacks, as well as the reasons underlying them.
John Ellis begins with the Latin phrase gens una sumus, meaning that we human beings are all of one family. The vast majority of people, at least in the Western world, now profess allegiance to this principle. That the world—and again, at least the Western world—has moved beyond the prejudices and tribalism of the past to embrace gens una sumus attracts widespread acclaim. It is here, however, that the agreement ends. The manner in which gens una sumus came to its prominent position in the modern worldview is the subject of much debate and accusation.
The progressive left claims that only a wholesale and vigorous assault against the racist intervention of white supremacists could return the world to its natural state of gens una sumus. Ellis, on the other hand, argues that the moral, intellectual, and scientific advances of the Western world paved the way for an end to the historic conditions of tribalism and separatism. To Ellis, the West ended systemic racism and prejudice and was not its cause.
As Ellis explains, the Western world embraced the commonality of all human beings “not through a gradual and universal drift in that direction but rather because of specific events and developments that happened at particular times and places.” Ellis outlines these specific events and developments, all the result of advances in Western thought and culture. In doing so, he reveals how deeply the progressive left misunderstands, or misrepresents, the history behind the monumental change of how the world came to the idea of our common humanity—gens una sumus.
In demonstrating the falseness of the left’s depiction of history, Ellis debunks numerous myths promulgated by the left. One such myth involves the claim that gens una sumus is now threatened by an ideology of arrogant white supremacy and unearned white privilege. According to this, whites enjoy economic prosperity only because they have stolen it from others and that European explorers like Christopher Columbus and their later colonial administrators were evil usurpers who oppressed native peoples and looted their cultures.
Prior to 1500, as Ellis demonstrates, the attitudes held by different ethnic and national groups toward each other were not free choices, in the sense that they could have been anything else, but rather were inevitable attitudes given the conditions that prevailed in those times—conditions “that were never compatible with the ideology of gens una sumus.” The universal human attitude in 1500 saw outsiders as a constant threat; consequently, gens una sumus would have been “a suicidal policy” in the 16th century.
And yet, “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.” But as the author explains, exactly the opposite is true. An attitude of hostility and suspicion toward other groups was the norm throughout all prior human history.
Ellis argues that the transition from the tribalist ethos of 1500 to the gens una sumus of today constituted one of the most important developments in human history. But “it could never have happened overnight.” Essential to this widening perspective was the Age of Discovery, during which European explorers ventured beyond their known world and initiated contact with heretofore unknown (to them) peoples and societies. Another major event was the advent of the printing press and the spread of literacy, which made available an increased knowledge about different peoples living in faraway lands.
The Age of Discovery “set the world moving toward the multi-racial societies” that characterize the modern Western world. It was also an age during which nearly all peoples of the world pursued empire. This empire-building, based on the conquest of other territories, became a rational response to a world in which every society was constantly in danger of being conquered itself. In the short term, the initial contact with new people only reinforced the discoverers’ sense of tribal identification. Finding solidarity with the native people they encountered, seeing them as fellow human brothers, was never likely to be the first response. The spirit of gens una sumus was not yet a part of the world’s outlook or mentality. Thus, a charge of racism against Europeans of that time is purely anachronistic, as it would have to be leveled equally at everyone. As Ellis notes, “what we would now call racism was nothing but the tribal practicality that was ubiquitous in these early times.”
In 1500, no society or country had any objection to empire, which became a means of defense in a dangerous world. The “only difference between countries, as far as empires were concerned, was not that some countries deemed empires morally acceptable while others did not, but that some were able to create an empire and some were not.”
Another major development influencing the adoption of a gens una sumus conviction was the spread of literacy, made possible by the invention of the printing press. The European Renaissance, the growth and popularity of European writers, the development of newspapers, the prominence of Enlightenment thinkers, and a steady expansion of the reading public all contributed to a more literate and knowledgeable society. This literate society began exploring ideas related to human rights, public morality, political structures, liberty and equality, and principles of governance—ideas that ran counter to the prevailing notions of tribalism. Indeed, the development of a philosophy that discarded tribalism for the beginnings of notions of human commonality “was the greatest achievement of the British Enlightenment.”
It was not that the British at long last stumbled onto the correct values, as their modern detractors want us to believe; instead, the British actually created these values. And having done so, they then gave them to the rest of the world, though not without considerable resistance from people beyond the Anglosphere. In fact, the British Empire became a powerful force in promoting the philosophy of gens una sumus, which at that point was the most anti-racist idea in world history. This became possible owing to the rising literacy of the English public, from 35% in 1600 to 60% in 1700, which made possible the dissemination throughout the sprawling British Empire of the enlightened political discourse generated by writers like John Milton and John Locke. Such works addressed liberty, equality, sovereignty, and the moral and social obligations owed to all human beings. As Ellis notes, Edmund Burke pushed the House of Commons to impeach Warren Hastings (the Governor-General of India from 1773 to 1785) because he had trampled on the rights of the Indian people.
The British, through the reach of their empire, led the world in opposing slavery, which had historically been a worldwide phenomenon. Based on their evolving anti-slavery morality, led by such thinkers as Adam Smith and David Hume, the British affirmatively moved to abolish slavery globally in the 18th century. An English court in 1772 declared slave-holding to be illegal, and by 1804 England had succeeded in convincing all northern states in the U.S. to abolish slavery. Despite opposition from the African slavers, the English ended the slave trade on the western coast of Africa, with the British navy stopping and searching any ships departing from West Africa suspected of carrying slaves.
As Ellis argues, the universal norm of racism receded only after the English created and spread a universal civilization of gens una sumus. Thus, modern radicals work within the tradition of a value system—gens una sumus—initiated and developed precisely by those they vilify. Indeed, modern radicals in their assault against Western civilization seem to want to take the world back to one of tribalism and separatism. Indeed, in those parts of the world where gens una sumus has not taken hold—e.g., many areas of the Middle East—racism and tribalism still exist if not prevail.
As a summary of Ellis’ arguments, the concluding paragraph of the book is worth repeating here:
The story I have told in this book—of the origin and development of modern attitudes to other peoples and races—is at odds with everything that the political radicals who now control our colleges and universities believe. They think that modernity is riddled with racism; the truth is that modernity has rescued us from racism. They think that capitalism is heavily implicated in racism, but history shows that it was free markets that gave us anti-racism. They think that Europeans are the villains of the story, but history tells us that they are its heroes. They think that the world would be sweetness and light without the corrupting influence of Western society, but the truth is that the world was a swamp of racism and nastiness until it was led out of those evils by the Anglosphere. They think that they, the radicals, are leading us to a more just and anti-racist world, but the truth is that they are returning us to racist chaos.
In their false depictions of racism, leftist radicals not only misread history but ignore the centuries of progress that have moved world societies beyond those based on racism and tribalism. This misreading of history, despite its obvious fallacies, may serve a much bigger and even more devious purpose. Their continual accusations of a society overrun with greed, racism, and racial injustice steadily undermine the health and confidence of that society. And, as Ellis observes, “only an unhappy society will consent to radical transformation,” which in fact may be the real goal.
Ellis has provided a valuable intellectual service by taking on the left’s empty denunciation of Western history and civilization. Ellis, for instance, comes to the defense of Bruce Gilley, who in 2017 was notoriously vilified and censured by academic leftists for his politically incorrect research showing that colonialism did, in fact, produce certain benefits.
Only by confronting false depictions of the origins and perpetuation of racism can Westerners begin to protect their culture and history from a radical deconstruction. In undertaking the monumental task of defending Western civilization from manufactured charges of racism and imperial oppression, Ellis obviously opens himself to a barrage of criticism, especially given the brevity of his book.
Critics could also list a wealth of historical data omitted from Ellis’ short but extremely readable polemic. A particular criticism might point to the absence of a greater discussion of how slavery in the American South resisted the momentum of the British Enlightenment. Yet Ellis focuses his book not on America but on the British Empire. Nonetheless, and despite potential reprovals, Ellis’ book might best be seen as an early volley in what is hoped to be a spirited intellectual rebuttal of the historical misrepresentations inherent in the left’s attack on the West.
