"discussion of rights in China has long been motivated by indigenous concerns, rather than imposed from without, and it has been interpretive and critical, rather than passive and imitative" ([32], p. xiii). More broadly, in the words of the best contemporary historian of human rights: "The historical origins of powerful visions capable of shaping world events and attitudes like those of international human rights are rarely simple. Instead, they emerge in complicated and interrelated ways from the influence of many forces, personalities, and conditions in different times and diverse settings, each flowing in its own unique way like tributaries into an ever larger and mightier river" ([28], p. 4).

Indeed, neither democracy nor human rights is an exclusively European invention. Functional equivalents have long been prominent in the world beyond Europe, and peoples from the larger world have made their own contributions to the recognition of democracy and human rights as we understand them today in the international community. In this presentation I have mentioned only a few routes by which knowledge and influence flowed from the larger world into Europe and North America, and I have mentioned only a few individuals from the world beyond Europe who contributed to the formulation of contemporary values. This is the case because only recently have historians even begun to consider it worth their while to investigate expressions of democracy and human rights beyond European and North American horizons. We simply do not yet have the foundation in basic research to present a fully fleshed account of democracy and human rights in all world regions.

European and North American peoples have been conspicuous in their own efforts on behalf of democracy and human rights, and I have absolutely no wish to minimize or disparage their contributions. But the time has come, in the interests of clear historical understanding unclouded by Eurocentric mythologies, to take the larger world seriously, to scour global archives just as assiduously as historians have examined the European record over the past two centuries, and to follow as clearly as Headley has done for Europeans the contributions that peoples beyond Europe have made to the development of democracy and human rights.
