Early social science absorbed West-versus-Rest civilizational stereotypes into its frameworks.

Evidence

This idea of a universal criterion of progress modeled on the West became a feature of the new “social science” to which the Enlightenment gave birth. For example, when Edmund Burke wrote to the Scottish Enlightenment historian William Robertson on the publication of his History of America (1777), he said that “the great map of Mankind is unrolled at once, and there is no state or gradation of barbarism, and no mode of refinement which we have not at the same moment under our view; the very different civility of Europe and China; the barbarism of Persia and of Abyssinia; the erratic manners of Tartary and of Arabia; the savage state of North America and of New Zealand” (quoted by Meek 1976, 173). Enlightenment social science reproduced within its own conceptual framework many of the preconceptions and stereotypes of the discourse of “the West and the Rest.” — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 662

Categorization

• XREF: Burke’s ‘great map of Mankind’ — simultaneous viewing of all civilizational stages — connects to the synchronic-diachronic tension the reader will meet in Orientalism and colonial knowledge production.