Against “Premodern”
The term ‘premodern’ (or ‘pre-modern’) has become popular as a seemingly neutral way of referring to the world, or some part of it, before modernity — whatever that might be. It’s sometimes used as a way of saying ‘medieval’ without saying ‘medieval’. ‘Premodern’ has less obvious baggage than ‘medieval’ and is more capacious. The term isn’t strictly defined in chronological terms; some journals with ‘premodern’ in the name will accept submissions on topics up to the eighteenth century even in European contexts. Outside Europe all bets are off, and I’ve seen ‘premodern’ used in reference to the period up to the middle of the nineteenth century in books on Africa and Asia — that is to say, very often (but not always) up to the colonial era. (Implicit in this is the notion that colonialism brought ‘modernity’ — but let’s leave that aside for now.)
‘Premodern’ strikes me as a pretty unhelpful term unless ‘modernity’ is rigorously defined. The capaciousness of the term means that it doesn’t actually tell us which period is actually being referred to or when this period is supposed to have ended; some books and articles with ‘premodern’ in the title discuss events up to the sixteenth century, some up to the nineteenth, and some up to some point in between picked for one purpose or another. No attempt appears to have been made to standardise or even properly theorise the term. It does what you want it to do. I suppose some scholars appreciate its flexibility; I dislike its lack of clarity.
When ‘modernity’ is defined, it is in terms of the intellectual and aesthetic habits of wealthy educated Europeans. Modernity is globalisation and industrialisation; the Enlightenment, liberal democracy, and abstract art are modernity. Wear a suit and work in an office lit by electric lighting and you’re modern. Be an ‘individual’ and you’re modern.
I don’t think psycho-social developments like these are a good basis for periodisation, in large part because they’re never all-pervasive even in the societies affected by them. These things are amorphous and hard to identify in practice. They’re also obviously ethnocentric.
‘Premodern’ is, in effect, periodisation by means of vibes. And I think this is or would be pernicious when used in speaking of developing countries and tropical climes, where vibes often stand in for real understanding even at the best of times. ‘Premodern’ is a seemingly neutral way of saying ‘traditional’, ‘pre-colonial’, even ‘primitive’. It compresses pre-colonial histories into easily dismissable boxes. ‘Premodern’ is a way of saying ‘back in the old days’, when tradition and custom are supposed to have ruled and societies didn’t change much — people without history, or people living before history came along.
If you’ve been following me for a while then you’ll already know my opinion on the subject of periodisation and modernity: The entire world changed quickly and in an all-encompassing way at the end of the fifteenth century with the onset of the Columbian exchange. The world became truly global for the first time. The Americas and Afro-Eurasia came together in sustained contact, an unprecedented phenomenon with often catastrophic consequences, particularly so for the indigenous peoples of the Americas. If there is a meaningful deployment of the term ‘modernity’, it is here, in reference to the Columbian exchange and the growth of European and Euro-American imperialism at the turn of the sixteenth century. The world became ‘modern’ when it became a globe, and it became a globe when Afro-Eurasia and the Americas stopped being discrete largely non-interacting hemispheres. (It is not obvious that this was a good thing).
Regardless of the terms one uses, this is the key point — the pivot about which history turned. There are other relevant global historical changes after that, including especially industrialisation (presumably one of the reasons ‘premodernity’ sometimes stretches into the early industrial period but seldom beyond it), but the world we live in, the global one, was born about five centuries ago. The ‘Middle Ages’, if we’re going to use that term for the period before ‘modernity’ in Afro-Eurasia, ended in around 1500. ‘Modernity’, if we’re going to use that term, thus began in around 1500. We can call it ‘early modernity’ up to the Industrial Revolution in Britain and plain ‘modernity’ after that, I suppose.
If ‘premodern’ consistently meant ‘pre-1500-ish’, then I’d be all for it. It would be a handy way to refer to the Americas and Afro-Eurasia before 1492 without having to use the (baggage-laden) terms ‘pre-Columbian’ and ‘medieval’. Both terms have their problems. ‘Pre-Columbian’ foregrounds Christopher Columbus, a slaver and incompetent who kidnapped people from their homes in the Caribbean and brought about a genocide. Some people see the term as celebrating Columbus, which I’m not sure it does; it’s an acknowledgement that he was a significant figure, like talking about ‘Germany before Hitler’. Either way, though, indigenous Americans often dislike the term, and it’s not hard to see why.
‘Medieval’ carries unpleasant baggage too, albeit to a lesser degree. It’s often used as a pejorative. It does, however, have the advantage that people tend to know what you mean when you say it, at least in chronological terms — and it carries its baggage out in the open, where everyone can see it. I don’t think the same can be said for ‘premodern’, which packages a series of ethnocentric assumptions about human life as if they were neutral and universally applicable.
This is another Patreon post from last year (2022). It was intended as a short polemic and I didn’t polish it much at the time; I’ve changed a few things around but it still needs more thought and more polishing. I hope you can follow my line of reasoning anyway. Whether you agree with my opposition to it or not, I think it’s inarguable that ‘premodern’ is at the very least an undertheorised term.
A. J. West — Leiden, 2022/Lisbon, 2023.
