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The state is an organic blend of its individual members, and “Universal History” is the organic patterning of the actions of each “National genius…treated as only One Individual” (53). This system is mapped geographically and historically such that the ancient civilisations of the East are foundational but stagnant, the classical empires of Greece and Rome are more vital but too absorbent of individual selves, and the democratic modern German nation is the first to find true freedom and thus the “end of history” (18). Anything prior to constitutional polity is “ante-historical” and so “India…has no History” (60–61). Indeed, it cannot have history because “[i]n the extreme zones man cannot come to free movement…The true theatre of History is therefore the temperate zone” (80). Africa lies altogether outside the possibility of history, “enveloped in the dark mantle of Night” such that the temperate, rational, European “we” “must quite give up the principle which naturally accompanies all our ideas—the category of Universality” (91, 93).
It is this model that underpins the structures of English literary criticism as it developed in the nineteenth century and the time of high imperialism, and it lies behind the histories of English Literature set up with their canons universally expressing a “national soul”. Such a Eurocentric and teleological structure clearly denies the possibility of equal acceptance of literatures—even those in English—from the tropics, and from people not organised into modern nation-states under a constitution, though it suggests that the Spirit of History should work universally to fulfil itself by overseeing the spread of rational freedom and the emergence of the conditions of modernity everywhere. From a postcolonial viewpoint, we can argue that peoples are not totally determined by the climate, that they do not have to be thought of only in terms of nation-states, that Reason is fundamentally an act of self-validating faith, and that Hegel’s claim to “[h]ave traversed the entire field” of world history (10) can only be made in a context of Orientalist-cum-imperialist hubris. There are other possible histories to be made. Hegel himself unwittingly allows this when, in a framework of disinterested rational seeking after Platonic universalist abstractions, he comments that “nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion” arising out of “interest” (23).