Colonial Historiography: An Overview
It is critical to bear in mind that the modern historiography in its entirety is a fully colonialist product and therefore absolutely false and totally invalid; established by Western European academia at the dawn of the modern times, the Western Historiography at the times of Classicism focused mainly on Ancient Rome and Greece, in an effort to present the Antiquity as a preferable socioeconomic, political and cultural – behavioural model opposed to that of the so-called "Middle Ages". This aberration took also the form of an incredible bias, the embellishment (and therefore falsification) of the Greco-Roman Antiquity. With the rise of the bourgeoisie class, the aforementioned model was forcefully institutionalized, whereas it would have been rejected as deviate a few centuries earlier. This means that its prevalence has nothing to do with truth but is the mere result of political interest and interest clash.
Gathering information from travelers to faraway parts of Asia and Africa, and extensively referring to Greco-Roman historiography of the Ancient Orient (the term designates Asiatic and African civilizations that are at times located in the West of key parts of the Greco-Roman world, e.g. Carthage), which was indirect and posterior, and therefore inaccurate and useless, the Western academia created an embryonic Orientalism in the 18th century. With the successive decipherments of ancient Oriental scriptures, a procedure that took place in the 19th and the 20th centuries, vast, direct, contemporaneous, and therefore authoritative and accurate knowledge about the Ancient Orient became available to all; at least theoretically.
This knowledge virtually defies and demolishes all preconceived ideas of the Western academia, either they pertain to the Greco-Roman Antiquity and to its importance in the World History (which was a maximalist aphorism) or they concern the Oriental Antiquity itself, and its real significance for the World History.
These realities have been withheld by the Western academia from both, the average public of Western Europe and North America, and the Asiatic and African nations that have been one way or another progressively colonized.
The overall procedure had great political effect but mainly France and England benefited from this because these two countries prevailed as colonial powers. All the other European academia, who successfully competed with their English and French colleagues (i. e. Austrians, Germans, Italians, Swiss, Poles, Belgians, Dutch, Scandinavians, Russians, Czechs), merely contributed to the political benefits leveraged by the Anglo-French because their countries either were not colonial powers (Austria – Hungary, Switzerland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Scandinavian countries) or lost their colonies (Germany) or colonized unimportant territories (Indonesia, Congo, Siberia controlled respectively by Holland, Belgium, Russia).
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The Collapse of the Oriental Historiography
It is essential to understand that the victims of the second phase of Western European colonial expansion (the first phase mainly concerned the discovery of America and the colonial rise of Spain and Portugal) were three vast countries that before just 260 years controlled the entire area between Morocco and Indonesia: the Ottoman Empire, the (post-Safevid) Iranian Empire, and the (post-Aurangzeb) Mughal Indian Sultanate (totaling an area of more than 20 million km2).
Many historians focused on the reasons of the socioeconomic and political demise of the aforementioned three empires; but no one analyzed the fact that, along with them, collapsed and disappeared forever earlier, non-Western, models, systematic schools, functional libraries and diachronic depositories of Oriental Historiography that had helped establish completely different models of education, culture, knowledge and theoretical endeavour.
The Oriental nations today must bear always in mind that all the existing systematic knowledge of their own past is foreign, alien, Western, and non-Oriental, and that as such, it is indexed on Western sociopolitical needs, preconceived schemes, theoretical misperceptions, and disastrous biases. In other words, Western Orientalism, before being erroneous in thousands of specific points, is false as a general concept and approach. Worse, it consists in a biased system that mobilizes authoritative institutions in order to impose the acceptance of a fallacy as reality in thousands of particular cases, because simply each fallacy is per case necessary for the Anglo-French socioeconomic, political, cultural and academic interests.
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