Communications
1993], 17-18, 32-42, 45-50, 52, 60, 94-95, 125-26,
179-80, 184-92). If some critics of the trials appear to
ignore fraud, this may not be due to any lack of
conviction that fraud was responsible for the "afflictions" but to the narrowed choices available to those
who sought to bring an end to the trials, or to purely
pragmatic considerations. To impugn the credibility of
the witchcraft court by raising charges of fraud might
have elicited retribution. Even if this were not the case,
there may have been a natural reluctance on the part
of the intellectual elite to find fault with members of
their own class. On a purely practical level, the intellectual elite realized that charges of fraud would not
have brought the witchcraft trials to an end. Given the
natural inclination of Governor Phips and the witchcraft court to deny being involved in a massive miscarriage of justice, it would not appear likely that the
authorities responsible for the Salem episode would
have accepted an explanation that discredited them.
Direct demonic causation offered a non-confrontational means for the administrative resolution of the
episode with the least amount of fuss and bother.
Massachusetts accommodated itself to "The Devil
made me do it!" Collective repentance was encouraged, and apologies-the few that there were-generally stopped short of individual blame. Victimology
had found a home in America.
PAUL E. CHEVEDDEN
Virginia Military Institute
DAVID HARLEY REPLIES:
It is surprising to find that my article was so provocative that a historian of medieval Islamic fortifications
should feel compelled to take me to task. However, I
find it difficult to recognize my essay from the furious
account given here. Perhaps I have inadvertently become embroiled in some pleasant game being played
by American historians, such as "Lynch the Social
Constructivist." My modest contention, that the role
played by the learned concept of possession has been
neglected as a factor in the Salem events, is largely
ignored.
Two accusations, that I have neither engaged with
the literature nor listened critically to all the participants, must be left to readers to assess. No examples
are produced, apart from some references to the work
of Bernard Rosenthal. My dissatisfaction with
Rosenthal's explanation of all the accusations in terms
of deceit led to my writing on Salem. I have concentrated on the published writings rather than the role of
the court, which was clearly crucial in the process of
definition, only because we have no full firsthand
accounts of the trials.
My other major crime is the way "the study molds
the events to conform to an interpretive model borrowed from the social sciences," a charge Rosenthal
makes against several historians. Chevedden doubtless
has his reasons for marking this boundary so conspic-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1351
uously, but I do not believe that reading outside
historiography has corrupted my analysis of how the
documents were created. Indeed, my central argument
was that much work on New England witchcraft has
been influenced by inappropriate models. Unlike the
history of medieval military architecture, social history
has always had a close but uneasy relationship with the
social sciences. I hope candid readers will regard my
principal interests as genuinely historical and my limited use of other disciplines merely as a spur to the
asking of fresh questions.
According to Chevedden, I have been so foolish as
to base my analysis on "a popular assumption that has
been repudiated." Apparently, I have asserted the
existence of "an immutable folkloric religion of the
masses" and depicted the Salem events as an episode
in a struggle between "two rival religious cultures." I
have never used the concepts of high culture and low
culture, attributed to me by Chevedden. I used the
terms "popular" to describe widely held unsystematic
beliefs and "learned" to describe carefully elaborated
concepts discussed at universities. I acknowledge that
this is a facile dichotomy, adopted as convenient
shorthand, but it is not quite the pair of grand hypostases ascribed to me.
At no point did I suggest that any oppression was
involved in the rediagnosis. Rather, I compared the
process to the normal phenomenon of medical diagnosis. In fact, it is Chevedden who deploys a class
analysis. Whereas I argued that there was conflict and
anxiety among the educated minority in Massachusetts, not all of whom accepted the rediagnosis easily,
Chevedden is happy to attribute motives to groups: "a
natural reluctance on the part of the intellectual elite
to find fault with members of their own class." I was
not aware that there was class consciousness in seventeenth-century New England. Reports of the death of
vulgar Marxism have clearly been exaggerated.
Perhaps Peter Burke and Natalie Zemon Davis are
the real targets, my article merely standing in as
surrogate. I will not defend myself by attacking them.
If pressed, I would contend that the fluctuating tensions between the culture of various European elites
and the popular traditions of Europe played an important role in the creation of witch hunting, in its
changing fortunes during the Reformation, and in its
ultimate demise. Learned concepts and popular beliefs
were not hermetically sealed from one another, and
the extent of their mutual influence differed over time
and across Europe. Local explanations are always
required.
Colonial New England is a special case, because of
the unusual social and cultural spectrum, but local
research in many parts of Europe has revealed particular characteristics to the patterns of prosecutions and
their internal dynamics. I would agree that popular
beliefs, neo-Platonism, and Calvinism mingled in Massachusetts to an extent that was unusual in England.
Nevertheless, demonic possession does not seem to
have been an explanation widely employed as a first
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1352
Communications
resort by the afflicted or their families on either side of
the Atlantic, because it involved ascribing guilt to the
afflicted person. Chevedden does not address this
aspect of my account. Having read Rosenthal, he
knows where guilt lay.
The blame is principally laid by Chevedden at the
door of "lying, deceitfulness, and fraud, all of which
are primal human characteristics." My ignorance of
the context of his rhetoric is such that I am unable to
see why three synonyms and an allusion to original sin
are needed here. Deception is obviously a major
function of human language, but this does not exempt
the historian from asking why people should tell their
stories in terms of a particular conceptual vocabulary
and why some stories were believed rather than others.
In any case, it is not clear that all, or even most, of the
accusers were consciously deceitful.
Chevedden asserts that seventeenth-century statements provide an insufficient basis for historical explanation, whether because he believes that his ideas are
more rational than those of Isaac Newton and Robert
Boyle, for example, or because he prefers the tangible
evidence of archaeology. I feel no desire to assert my
moral superiority over the people of colonial New
England by insisting that they were all lying. I regard
the difficulty of explaining complex interactive phenomena as a challenge, not as an affront to my dignity.
The reductionism of Rosenthal and Chevedden
would prevent sympathetic consideration of any nonmaterial phenomena whatsoever, turning social activity, the presentation of self, and all religious narratives
into mere mystification. For my part, I attempt to
respect the local reality of people in the past, as I
would that of people from another culture today.
DAVID HARLEY
Oxford, England
REVIEWS OF BOOKS
To
THE EDITOR:
When I wrote The Colonizer's Model of the World:
Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History, I
rather expected that my critique of Eurocentrism in
history would unsettle some colleagues and provoke a
few angry reviews. And I have been in the academic
trenches long enough to know that an angry reviewer
sometimes loses his or her scholarly cool and fires off
wild and false charges. Dane Kennedy does just that
[AHR 101 (February 1996): 148-49]. Kennedy makes a
number of false statements in his review, but most
consequentially he misrepresents the nature of the
book, calling it in essence propaganda, not scholarship
("sophism," "uninformed opinion," "willful neglect of
... the most important work," etc., p. 149). Whoever
scans the book will quickly see that this is nonsense. I
describe and critique in considerable detail, citing
some 500 scholarly sources, all of the important argu-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
ments for the so-called "European miracle"-the theory that Europe possessed some unique developmental
advantage (for instance, technology) or potential advantage (for instance, rationality) prior to 1492. I
argue at length that this theory is the world model
associated with colonialism, and I present evidence
that the selective rise of Europe after 1492 resulted
from colonialism, initially in America (which was much
more accessible to Europeans than to other mercantile-maritime communities). Evidently, Kennedy considers these positions so outrageous that any defense
of them must be sophistry.
Now to Kennedy's charges (all on p. 149). First: "[I]t
is simple nonsense to suggest that most historians
share a belief in the 'permanent superiority' of Europe
over other parts of the world." I do not suggest that.
The myth of permanent European superiority is indeed culturally pervasive; it is the core of the diffusionist world model (permanent progress at the center;
diffusion of progress to the periphery). What most
historians believe is that the selective rise of Europe in
early modern times reflected pre-existing European
superiority or priority in qualities of mind, culture,
and/or environment that favored modernization. I
question this belief. Second: "Blaut ... consigns any
historian who accepts any [proposition asserting European origin of a crucial innovation] ... to the category
of Eurocentric diffusionist." Not so. Third: "[He]
examines the work of relatively few scholars" and
mainly "targets" E. J. Jones, Michael Mann, and John
A. Hall. In fact, I critique Eurocentric views expressed
by about forty historians (and about thirty others),
discussing in some detail the views of Marx, Weber, L.
White, Jr., C. Cipolla, K. Werner, R. Brenner, J.
Baechler, J. Hajnal, A. Macfarlane, and L. Stone,
along with Jones, Mann, and Hall. Fourth: "Blaut
makes no mention of Jones's more recent book,
Growth Recurring (1988), which explicitly rejects a
Eurocentric perspective." I do mention it, and it does
not back away from the blind Eurocentrism of The
European Miracle. Fifth: Kennedy asserts that I do not
even "acknowledge the existence" of certain works by
William H. McNeill, Fernand Braudel, Philip Curtin,
and Alfred Crosby, but he fails to inform readers that
I discuss other works (more relevant ones) by all of
these authors. Sixth: Even more misleadingly, I am
accused of giving "little more than passing nods" to the
work of Edward Said, Immanuel Wallerstein, Eric
Wolf, and Janet Abu-Lughod, "perhaps because" they
"challenge" my assumptions. More nonsense. The
arguments put forward by these writers (particularly
Abu-Lughod) support my main position, and I say so.
Seventh: My careful arguments are dismissed as sophistry, hyperbole, "uninformed opinion." For instance,
my detailed (ll-page) critique of environmentalistic
theories accepted by Jones, Hall, McNeill, Curtin,
Joseph Miller, G. Irwin, J. Roberts, and others concerning tropical Africa is ridiculed as "rhetorical,"
"ad-hominem accusations," "innuendo." Eighth:
"When the meaning of a term does not [suit] Blaut
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