Premodern non-Western historiography held a moral-ethical backbone in a circulatory model.

Evidence

History, to play on one of White’s famous terms, plots violence, and as such it has the selfsame epistemic structures of Orientalism. By contrast, in its circulatory model—the form that prevailed in premodern Islam, China, and India—history possessed, as Nietzsche vehemently argued in another context, a moral and ethical backbone. Instead of being an instrument of building destructive political and national identities, it contained narratives of ethical instruction (precisely the central themes of classical Islamic history, which stood at no remove from sharʿi and mystical discourses). — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 522

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the reader’s curated interest in civilizations as moral entities, and connects to writing about history as ethical instruction rather than identity-building.
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the reader’s interest in premodern infrastructures of meaning and could support an essay contrasting circulatory ethical histories with linear nationalist ones.