Introduction

This chapter focuses on what can be called the primary agencies of de-civilization: totalitarianism, globalization, and colonialism. The relation between these three forces on the one hand, and totalitarianism, globalization, and colonialism on the other hand, is in fact the crux of the whole account. It is this relation that one hope to make fully explicit by the end of the work. And in the process one hope to explicate the unusual condition in which civilization now finds itself and explain why calling it a "technological civilization" is so misleading. The chapter explores how colonialism figured in the destruction of civilization in the third part of this work when we consider the fate of the non-Western civilizations, which Hobsbawm completely overlooked. Colonialism was nowhere near as virulently destructive as totalitarianism, but it, too, was harmful to civilization—in the case not so much Western civilization as those of non-European peoples.