Is ‘Eurocentrism’ a Eurocentric Term?

The terms ‘Eurocentric’ and ‘Eurocentrism’, now widely used and discussed in history and cultural theory, are themselves of Western European origin. The question of when they were first used – and also where, and how – still requires clarification. Taking an approach from conceptual history, it is possible to trawl through reference works and online digital tools to pinpoint their birth and diffusion.

The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, identifies the first usage of the term – in the earlier form ‘Europocentric’ – in Processes of History by the Irish-born American historian and social scientist Frederick J. Teggart, published by Yale University Press in 1918. In this all-but-forgotten book, Teggart argued that ‘human history is not unitary but pluralistic; that what we are given is not one history but many and especially that the concept of “progress” is arrived at by the maintenance of a Europocentric tradition and the elimination from consideration of the activities of all peoples whose civilization does not at once appear as contributory to our own’.

That the term came to be used in a work on ‘the processes of history’ in the wake of World War I is in many ways to be expected. At this time, conceptions of European progress were coming under scrutiny in many countries both within Europe and without.