Damascus-Sana
Victor Kiernan is one of the most important historians in the world who appeared in the last century, and one of the English intellectuals most rigid in standing up to Western colonialism and the domination of peoples.
In order to introduce the results of this historian and his standing with the human civilizations that have suffered from the oppression of the West, the Syrian General Authority for Book issued the electronic version of one of his most famous books in which Kiernan reveals in a historical sequence starting from the end of the Middle Ages until the First World War, the West’s quest for world domination and its inferior view of it under the title "Masters of mankind.. European attitudes towards other cultures in the imperial era."
The book was first published by Kiernan in 1969 and considered by the thinker Edward Said as having a central impact on his most important book, “Orientalism.” It was translated into Arabic by Adnan Hassan, the owner of the great dealer in translating philosophical and intellectual books, conserving in his transmission of the original text on the language in it that gathered documentation, history and an easy and attractive literary template. .
Kiernan reveals in his book, which is located in 608 pages of large pieces, that Europeans have always viewed Islam as the tangible and most permanent danger, and this is what printed their relationship with him in Spain and through the Crusades, considering that the greatest impetus for the geographical discoveries made by European countries since the 15th century AD and the founding of Colonies in Asia, America and Africa is a blow to the countries of the Islamic world.
Kiernan devotes seven chapters to the continents and regions that the Europeans sought to occupy and dominate their bounties from India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Indochina, and China, which we find in Western literature many negative generalizations against its inhabitants while promoting the so-called yellow menace and the Islamic world in which it deals with the West’s efforts to acquire the Arab countries occupied by the Ottomans. And the Near East, Egypt, North Africa and Iran, pointing out that the Orientalists have worked for centuries to perpetuate a stereotype about the East and its societies, especially with regard to women, and to impart a negative and cynical character when talking about its rulers.
Kiernan stops at Western opinions towards entire peoples, which are mostly negative and of a general nature, as in their description of the Japanese and their bad qualities, and with early warning of the imminent danger that Japan poses to Western economies.
In the book also a chapter dealing with the Western colonization of Africa and the use of the children of this continent as slaves by the Europeans and in their new colonies in the American continent, where they were treated as second-class human beings, to present in another chapter with much detail what afflicted the indigenous people in North and South America in terms of massacres and wars of extermination over the centuries of European colonists.
Kiernan concludes in his book, which is full of testimonies by politicians, military leaders, intellectuals and Western orientalists, that what marked the relationship of the West with the rest of the world is that stark contradiction and disparity between the dealings of Western countries with their citizens and their dealings with the outside, which was marked by tyranny, control and the desire for monopoly.
Samer Al-Shoghry