On the Remaking of History: How to Reinvent the Past- Janet Abu-Lughod

If the rise of the West can not be attributed to a unique genius, then the fall of the West can also not be attributed to the lack of a virtue. There are other factors that can account for the rise and fall of nations. When researching history, there are three problems with the methods:
1- Truims: The truisms that historical accounts are constructions instead of descriptions are still not accepted. Social events are not recorded constructions, they are observed descriptions and are not as objective as sociologists and historians would think. The solution to this problem is triangulation: "We assume that somewhere between the accounts given, duly discounted for 'distortions' due to partial perspectives and vested interests, one can 'find' an approximation of social reality that might have been constructed by an unbiased and virtually omniscient narrator, had such an observer been possible" (Abu-Lughod). Thus, any account of the other is from one perspective only. All accounts need to be taken into consideration and then a common detail must be found- which can be an approximation for the actual event.
2- Backwards constructions: All sociological accounts are constructed backwards. Only after an event takes place do the narratives and explanations form. We build narratives to explain historical events by looking at what factors made the events inevitable. Instead, we should look at the whole picture of factors surrounding the events. The solution to this problem is to assert relative conditions at successive points in time of the historical eent and then to analyze how these various states could have hapened. If the endpoint determines the history, then we need to take a series of different endpoints and find a common ground in their histories.
3- Starting point: Each narrator begins his account at a point that interests him/her. Starting points of history are relative to the historian, making for different and inaccurate accounts of the same history.

Abu-Lughod for the remainder of the article refutes accounts that claim that "Europe's leap into modernity was achieved solely by its own strengths and virtues" (Abu-Lughod) and explains how this history was written.
There are two biases in the making of European historical accounts. The historians start with the present hegemony of the West as a predetermined outcome. And then they explain why this outcome happened. The two biases:
-The starting point they use makes the outcome inevitable. The year 1400 is the earliest starting point used. It is the earliest point when the rise of the West could have been predicted. Historians should start earlier, in the thirteenth century, when they can examine the outcome whereby the East fell. This account would explain that the East declined in power at the same time that Portugese men-of-war entered Eastern waters and eventually helped the West rise. Western scholars tend to begin too late and even then, they only consider partial accounts. They should work together with archivists and synthesizers to make increase the chances of a complete history instead of making partial histories. The archivists would research material and compile their findings which the synthesizers would use this research and produce accounts/narratives.
Synthesis happens at two levels: Socio-economic or intellectual histories of smaller regions and global histories of wider regions.
Histories written by the hegemony creators will natually hold biases towards the hegemonized. We tend to gravitate towards facts and accounts in our language, and pull out relevant facts that are relevant to us. We need to apply triangulation and include non-Western accounts in order to prevent biases.
An example Abu-Lughod brings up is that historical accounts of the fall of Rome are in binary opposition to accounts of the Rise of the West. They place the East as backward and undeveloped. If that had been true, the East would have been of no interest nor use to the West. We know, now, that historical evidence points to the contrary. She goes on to present numerous examples of the East's technological innovations that the West was simply not capable of producing at the time. She traces history back to the point where it was inevitable that the East was declining in the mid-fifteenth century. There was a vacuum of power in the Indian Ocean that the Portugese men-of-war filled- and that led to the rise of the West. At the end of her article, she predicts a new world hegemony about to arrive. Could it be the Pacific?