The colonization of World History began when Europeans carried their own peculiar forms of historical knowledge production deep into all the continents. Colonized History thus developed so as to privilege Europe, its colonies, and their relations with “others.” Colonized historical space became ubiquitous with the European-styled mapping of territorial management, all around the world. Even the empires, nations, and world regions ruled by “others” came to inhabit historical time synchronized with Europe’s ancient, medieval, and modern epochs.
Colonization sparked constant opposition. Indigenous, national, revolutionary, and post-colonial histories multiplied in many languages over the centuries. The result is a vast corpus of historical knowledge that reaffirms the fundamental centrality of colonization.
Decolonizing History requires alternative perspectives on space, time, and human agency that are not derived from colonization or its opposition. Global Asia provides such a perspective by showing that colonization emerged inside the vast spatio-temporality of connective mobility and territoriality that is Asia’s Circulatory System. Dynamic forces developed in Asia during the long first millennium — from Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan — which propelled Europe overseas, sustained the evolution of imperial modernity, and is now unraveling History’s colonization.
Decolonizing History can also apply to writing histories that embrace so-called Asian Civilizations. See this post.