Saying 'endings' are forced on history after the fact really I think misses how histories are made.
There are a lot of times in the course of things, where there is a change in consciousness in a culture which causes certain institutions to end and other ones begin. For example, a lot of historians may argue that medieval Europe was really a continuation and adaptation of Roman institutions, and that there was really no 'collapse'. That's all fine, but there was some point in history where nobody could talk about 'Rome' in the same way anymore, because the concept of 'Rome' lost its institutional power.
This is more about how -history writes itself-, its less about how every aspect of Roman culture disappeared, than how because of inevitable circumstances the concept of a Roman authority existing piece by piece started to fall apart.
Similarly, people nitpick the idea that the change in the Renaissance from the middle ages was as large as has been talked about, but something that did happen is a sweeping change in consciousness that eventually took over where people looked at things differently. And history wrote itself.
We are under these changes all the time, the central fact about writing history may be that you focus on some rather than others, and it becomes centered around changes that the historian cares about. But to say these are arbitrary choices also I think is wrong.
Its more natural to focus on whats happening in positions of influence in powerful institutions than in something out of the way; to which history becomes about the change in institutions. In other words, its about the history of power.
And thats also part of our consciousness of history, because most people today, whether they're living in Ghana or Europe, recognize America as a major power and globalization as a major force. There are a lot of common ideologies prevailing, including postmodernism, which includes the idea that 'history is subjective', which itself is only a belief but one that is deeply influential today.
If any of these things change, it will be a change in consciousness and culture, and history will write itself again.
I think history has to be naturally organized around changes in consciousness, it has to track what people from a certain era thought about their own history and society, and how that changed.
And while 'Eurocentrism' did obscure a lot of what happened elsewhere and ignored other points of view, I think its an important focus and not arbitrary in that its concern is with institutional changes that occurred over the last few hundred years which were promoted and developed in Europe.
I don't think the story of the West was of subjective importance to its impact on the world.
![[pissed]](/images/smilies/pissed.gif "Pissed [pissed]")
Can't take another one of those...
here is what the famous satirist Ambrose Bierce says on history:
