The modern state is a contingent European invention not a timeless truth

Evidence

Said, the author of the passage quoted above, and nearly every Orientalist and twentieth-century Muslim writer have taken the phenomenon of the modern state for granted, assuming it to be a timeless truth, when in fact the modern state is a particular political and politico-cultural arrangement that is distinctly European in origin, one that was the result of a particular set of circumstances and transformations that Europe underwent in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, transformations that were occasioned by rapid shifts in its own colonialist economies, unprecedented military technologies, social and political structures, and, indeed, epistemologies. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 221 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The modern state has been effectively shrinking for years, not growing — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 1018; The modern state is not a timeless arrangement but a distinctly European invention. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 221; The Han majority label is a modern nationalist invention, not an ancient fact

Broader Connections

• The modern state is not a timeless arrangement but a distinctly European invention. #corroborates (1.00) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 221