This essay was included in the collection "Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture" and was written by Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak; it's in part a metacriticism of academically fashionable writing on Eurocentrism.

In the academy, there was when she was writing, and still is an industry of scholarship where "if a tree falls in the woods, it was caused by colonialism/racism/Eurocentrism/dead white men". That's not to say that she's a conservative critic of postcolonial critiques, it's more that its something of a hallmark of this thread of thought to be critical of itself. So when Spivak observes "there's no virtue in global laundry lists with 'woman' as a pious item", and takes much loved French philosophers to task for imagining that they've got some idea of what's happening in Asian history, about which they actually neither know nor care much at all, one shouldn't take that as being conservative reaction, it's more along the lines of doctrinal battles within a communist party. You denounced the traitor Bukharin, yes, but not for the right reasons.

What's challenging about her work for a less ideological reader is that along with the jargon, she makes good points which are worth thinking about. So while postcolonialist interpretations claim to be "about" the victimization of the colonized, they are often about the primacy of the colonizers. If your story of the Congo is centered in Brussels, then is it really "about" the Congo at all? Similarly: "the concept of Chinese writing thus functioned as a sort of European hallucination"; that is what Europeans were writing about was a straw man dressed in Chinese characters, which reflect European not Chinese philologic and historical priorities..

Spivak's argument can be hard to follow because of the blizzard of jargon, but that first sentence makes a point that even those of us less impressed by Derrida and Marx can sympathize with, that an obsession with the "West's effects on . . ." implicitly minimizes the agency of other civilizations, as she notes

[A]ppropriation of the proper name ‘Maoism’ for the eccentric phenomenon of French intellectual ‘Maoism’ and subsequent ‘New Philosophy’ symptomatically renders ‘Asia’ transparent.

. . . which is to say "French Maoists" were a lot more about France than they were about Mao and China.

The biggest part of her argument, which isn't so clearly implicated in the line you cite, is about just which voices from the non-Western world get listened to; that Eurocentric historians give priority to, for example, Indian elites with Western academic pedigrees-- effectively rendering voiceless the mass of people who don't participate in the Western established fora of political thought and discussion. In particular she explores the question of where women fit in this-- perhaps the most famous line from the work is the notion that the colonial enterprise was justified by the notion "White men are saving brown women from brown men"; but that's a different thread of this tapestry of arguments and references than you were asking about.

So it's an important paper and a cutting critique; I'd have liked it a lot more without all the rhetorical complexification . . . but I wasn't her editor. It's also not really "history" -- Professor Spivak is usually identified as a philosopher or literary critic-- but the argument does apply to the work of historians.