ABSTRACT
It is too easy for modern historians to slip into glib platitudes about the nature of the early-modern 'imperial experience' for certain Western European communities, in order to construct a teleology which simply runs the history of earlier centuries into a deterministic model leading 'inevitably' to the racist, centralised overseas European empires of the age of steam power and steel. Thus 'the absolute or relative superiority of Western weaponry and Western military organisation over all others' — a concept which has to be, and has been, very carefully qualified by the best scholarship, and which only obtains during part of the nineteenth century as a defensible generalisation — is used very broadly so as to include much of the period after 1350. Marxist rhetoric about 'the primary extraction of surplus' is then used to suggest that the chartered European companies in the Orient used this 'superiority' of military technology to seize a large part of the product of that extraction process 'widiout the expenses, troubles and dangers of managing' it. From there the model moves rapidly through the creation of 'gradient of contempt' for lesser breeds, from Celts to Chinese, and ends with arguments about the emergence of militarised European proto-national states for whom 'the possession of overseas empire made the passage to nationhood possible or at least easier'. 1
