Worlds at War Lib/E: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West

by Anthony Pagden, John Lee (Reader)

Audio CD

Published March 25, 2008

About the author

Anthony Pagden was educated in Santiago (Chile), London, Barcelona and Oxford and holds a B.A.. M.A. and D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. He has been a free-lance translator and a publisher in Paris a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, Senior Research Fellow of the Warburg Institute (London), Professor of History at the European University Institute (Florence), University Reader in Intellectual History and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and the Harry C. Black Professor of History at Johns Hopkins. He joined UCLA in the Fall of 2002. His research has concentrated on the relationship between the peoples of Europe and its overseas settlements and those of the non-European world from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He is primarily interested in the political theory of empire, in how the West sought to explain to itself how and why it had come to dominate so much of the world, and in the present consequences of the erosion of that domination. His research has led to an interest in the formation of the modern concept of Europe and most recently in the roots of the conflict between the ‘West’ and the (predominantly Muslim) ‘East’. He has also written on the history of law, and on the ideological sources of the independence movements in Spanish-America, and is currently completing a book on cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment . He has written or edited some fifteen books, the most recent of which are, Lords of all the World. Ideologies of Empire in Britain, France and Spain (1995), Peoples and Empires (2001), La Ilustración y sus enemigos (2002), Worlds at War, The 2500 year struggle between East and West (2008), and, as editor, The Idea of Europe from Antiquity to the European Union (2002). – all of which have been translated into several European and Asian languages. He is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, and The London Review of Books, and has written for The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Il Sole 24 Ore (Milan), El Mundo (Spain), El Pais, (Spain) and La Nueva Provincia (Argentina).

He teaches classes in the history of political thought from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, in the theory of international relations, and seminars on imperialism and nationalism and on the theory of racism and ethnicity since antiquity.

Reviews

[Alexander Theofanidis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating: 2.5

Hardly what one expects when first embarking upon this volume.

But let us set aside expectations and focus instead on what one actually encounters.

To begin with, there are errors — ones that quite simply ought not to have passed either the author or the editor unnoticed. And since I took the trouble to check the Greek translation as well... these mistakes, alas, also slipped through there (not all of them, granted — in some instances the Greek translator or editor has taken corrective measures).

Then there are other inaccuracies which betray a certain unfamiliarity with the subject matter — perceptible even to the lay Greek reader, particularly in passages touching upon well-documented segments of Hellenic history, or on discredited narratives (e.g., the claim that Palaion Patron Germanos raised the banner of revolution on the 25th of March 1821 and held it aloft until sciatica laid him low — a notion as historically credible as the aquatic escapades of SpongeBob SquarePants in Bikini Bottom). Such errors do not, per se, disturb the reader unduly — but they do raise concerns about how many other such oversights might go undetected in areas of European and Middle Eastern history with which one is less acquainted.

Leaving aside the Manichaean framework — a dualism, incidentally, already telegraphed by the title — one cannot help but notice that beyond the arbitrary East/West dichotomy imposed by Europeans (fair enough, Anthony — I shan’t lay that one squarely at your door, though one might have hoped you’d lend a more critical eye to it), the author all but forgets about China. This is quite an omission, given that China — vast in both territory and population — not only clashed with Europe (i.e., “the West”), but was also compelled, under the gunboats of Queen Victoria (stiff-upper-lipped and properly buttoned-up lest a sock be seen above the ankle and scandal ensue), to open its markets to... opium. India, which endured the long twilight of British colonialism, is brushed off like dandruff from the author’s lapel, while Japan is acknowledged from a distance with a certain Melania-Trump-esque squint — the sort of look that says “I recognise you from somewhere but frankly couldn’t care less where from.” The Philippines, Indonesia, Timor (which, amusingly, has both an East and a West), KOREA (not for nothing do we say in Greek, “it turned into a Korea”), VIETNAM (really, Anthony — did you not detect a confrontation between East and West when the most westernised of Westerners, the Americans, fought the Viet Cong — geographically and ideologically eastern communists?) — all these places mewl faintly in the rafters like a multilingual dog and go utterly ignored. One suspects a slight laundering of Western imperialism, so long as it doesn’t emanate from Crusaders or that most infernal of villains, Napoleon. Oh, and when the term “imperialism” does appear in the book, it is invariably uttered by Easterners lamenting the actions of the West.

Still, there are sections where the book shines — where it is genuinely, impressively good — and these passages make up, at least in part, for the oversights and missteps elsewhere. As a result, one cannot in good conscience hurl it into the abyss. It scrapes by with a barely-earned 3 out of 5, largely because I lack the time (and, candidly, the stamina) to verify every dubious assertion and investigate whether they are indeed as shaky as they seem, or if they are the Middle Eastern and European equivalents of the Palaion Patron mythos.

Written — unmistakably — from a “Western” standpoint, the book struggles to avoid portraying the West (understood as a liberal, bourgeois-democratic fraternité-liberté-égalité archetype) as the natural vessel of progress, while laying the blame for the East’s “backwardness” at the feet of Islam. I am not wholly convinced by this line of analysis (not that I believe Islam to be the vanguard of civilisational brilliance — the stones used to execute adulteresses, homosexuals, and intellectuals would surely chuckle at such a suggestion), nor am I persuaded by the causality that is drawn between cultural factors and their alleged consequences (delay, underdevelopment, regression), or by the total failure to account for the complexities of secularisation in Islamic societies (that the difficulty level here is closer to a quadruple axel than to a waltz jump is, I concede, a given).

Among the most enjoyable moments in the book is the author’s demythologising of T.E. Lawrence — revealed here as a short, obsessive, mendacious, embittered homosexual with excellent PR skills and zero battlefield involvement.

All in all, then — worth keeping, though not without substantial reservations.