In recent years the notion of ‘Eurocentrism’ has become a major theme of modern scholarship, especially in the study of the historical development of the modern world. More and more scholars seem to be coming to the viewpoint that modern historical scholarship has been crippled by the bias of a Eurocentric perspective. Europeans have overstressed their own importance, it is claimed, and have failed to notice that the contributions of non-Europeans to the development of the modern world have been just as great as those of the Europeans. The charge being made really consists of two parts. First, it is claimed that much of the non-European world, Asia in particular, was, economically speaking, at least on a par with Europe in the centuries before AD 1500, and in some ways even more advanced. This claim is then coupled with the assertion that there was nothing especially distinctive about Europe, no particular qualities that set it apart from the rest of the world, nothing that gave it some sort of special dynamic. In this article I wish to argue that these claims are overstated. The first claim has some truth to it, but in and of itself it is highly misleading. In some ways the non-European world was as advanced as Europe in die year 1500, but by that time Europe had become economically different from the rest of the world in a way that would prove decisive for the historical development of die next five centuries. The second claim I believe is manifestly false. Europe indeed had distinctive qualities that set it apart and that gave it a dynamism that was lacking elsewhere. Elsewhere, that is, except for one other part of die world, namely Japan. Japan was surprisingly like Europe in several important ways and it is no accident that Japan is today the most economically and industrially advanced society in die non-western world. One of the most important things I want to do in this paper is to show what features Europe and Japan shared that eventually allowed them to leave the rest of the world behind.

On 13 April 1650 the young Chief (Opperhoofd) of the Siam factory of Dutch East India Company (VOC), the Merchant (Koopman) Jan van Muijden, arrived at Batavia aboard the flute de Gecroonde Liefde (Crowned Love), with a cargo unusual even by the standards of this thriving stapling port. Aboard were a total of twelve elephants, a gift from the King of Siam and his Mandarins, Oya Sabartiban (Okya Sabartiban) and Oya Berckelang (Okya Phrakhlang), to Governor-General Cornelis van der Lijn and the four Councillors of the Indies present in Batavia at the time, one of whom was the Director-General and second-in-command François Caron. When Van Muijden stepped ashore, he presented Van der Lijn and the Councillors with a letter from Prasat-Thong, the King of Siam, in which the King requested several precious diamond rings for himself and for his Mandarin, Oya Sabartiban, ‘various curiosities from the Netherlands and elsewhere’, military assistance against his rebellious subjects in Cambodia and on the Malay peninsula, and an end to the all-too-frequent molesting by Company ships of Chinese and Portuguese vessels en route to Siam.

‘Then Mr Johannes Bouchelioen said to me: “Willman, You have wished to travel this far, but here we must now turn back, for no Dutchman, Spaniard, Portuguese or Englishman has ever come any further”. I was fully satisfied with this, and wrote my Name at the top of the Wall in the Cottage, where some Names of Christians were already written. Jedo in Japan lies about 4,800 Miles from Stockholm.’ These words concluded Willman's report of his stay in Edo, but already in the opening sentence of the account of his travels the author had stated that his journey to the Far East was undertaken because of ‘an exceptional Longing and Desire to view foreign Parts by Means of Travel, for which I also had Permission from my Parents.’

This paper will examine how a group of theorists in the European tradition of language study was influenced by non-European and intra-European comparisons of language. These theorists were primarily based in Great Britain, although North American perspectives will also be considered. I shall trace this tradition of understanding from Francis Bacon to the American lexicographer Noah Webster. This way of considering language was initially a tool in the attempt to create a universal language that would enable Europeans to discuss and explain the new worlds then being explored. The context of Europe, however, proved significant in changing this outward looking view, resulting in an attempt to vernacularize the concept of a universal language and to make the English language an international language of discovery.

The subject of this article is Indian society in the Pampas and neighbouring territories in Argentina. I will focus on the deep changes that Indian societies experienced in their economy and socio-political structure during the period that followed Hispanic settlement on the Río de la Plata shores at the end of the sixteenth century. The original hunter-gatherer bands had transformed into true chiefdoms by the middle of the nineteenth century. How, when, and why they changed are the questions that I, and other scholars in Argentina, have tried to answer.