David Wilkinson maps out how something he calls “Central Civilization” began in the ancient near East and spread eventually to the entire world. At its beginning, Central Civilization involved the encounter of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia and environs. From there, Persia, Greece, Rome, Germanic tribes, Slavic tribes, etc. Meanwhile, China, India, Africa, the Americas, and others were doing their own things. But it all globalized during the age of European conquest and colonization.
To put European colonial expansion down to Abrahamic religion is a bit monocausal. For one thing, the original proprietors of the Abrahamic tradition - the Jews - never had much luck at establishing pragmatic empire. The Christians did not either, until a Roman emperor decided to culturally appropriate Christianity and bend it to political purposes. All later Christian history must be viewed through the lens that a radically counter-cultural movement got repurposed for imperial governance. Christianity as a movement has been caught in that polarity ever since. Meanwhile, Islam amalgamated Jewish, Christian, and other elements and articulated what looked like a cleaner, simpler model. So why did Islam roll up so much of the known world, but not all of it? Finding root cause in the geography of camel caravans and trade wind mercantilism probably says more than anything ideological. When it comes to the global history of competing imperial expansions, ideology only explains so much. The Mongols, for example, managed to be plenty expansive and destructive, without being especially Abrahamic.
But thanks - or no thanks - to the colonizing Europeans, the entire world got dragged into the fundamentally Abrahamic framework of pragmatic politics in linear time conducted as moral contest. 2R, metacrisis thinking, collapsology, cultural evolutionary thinking, pretty much everything we traffic in in this forum, makes very little sense outside of the conceptual framework first articulated by squabbling tribes in the Sinai.
Yes, I am in agreement with you. Colonial expansion occurred not due to Abrahamic religion; it simply brought Abrahamic religions with it. I find it interesting to compare religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, which also expanded, but they were not accompanied by the same negative dynamics. That may be telling on the belief systems - or it may, as I’m more inclined to align with you and Simon on, a result of power structures bending the ideology to their own ends.
I’m currently rereading Civilizations in World Politics: plural and pluralist perspectives (Peter J. Katzenstein, ed). The essays in this book have a lot to say about all of that. Sanskrit culture radiated though pure cultural influence, no conquest attached. Chinese models likewise radiated through influence. The classic Chinese empires were content to have surrounding nations like Korea, Vietnam, and Japan adopt Chinese ideas and acknowledge China as the leading nation, with no need to directly colonize.
To really get into the how different religious systems expanded around the world, I find it useful to apply Habermas’s thinking on the question of why did ancient Greek philosophy not turn into a world religion? Ancient Greek thinking is not dissimilar to the works of the rishis in India or the sages in China. What Habermas gets down to is there is a difference between elite, abstract practice on the one hand and popular ritual practice on the other. The guts of any religious system is in the popular ritual practice.
In the case of Greek philosophy, the philosophers never bothered competing with popular polytheistic ritual. When Roman ritual morphed into Christian ritual, philosophy got added as a sort of superstructure. Christian legalism and doctrinal thinking really has as much to do with Greco-Roman thought and institutions as is does with anything strictly Abrahamic.
In the East, Buddhism ran somewhat parallel to Greek philosophy in the West. It more sits on top of popular ritual orders than transforming society from the ground up. The places where Buddhism became popular religion for the masses tended to feature a lot of localized ritual invention. In India, the popular religion eventually resurfaced and absorbed Buddhism back into its pantheon. In China, native ideas like Confucianism eventually limited Buddhistic scope. Japan somehow mashes up everything, but Shinto ritual core is arguably what allows all the flexible Japanese adoption of other ideas and practices from both East and West.
“Belief” is really a mostly Western fixation, especially prominent after the Reformation. For most of the world, religion is more about practices than ideations. What intrigues me about the current global situation is the potential to evolve new ideations that can reengage with ancient practices.