Worlds at War

by PAGDEN, ANTHONY

• ISBN13: 9780812968903
• ISBN10: 0812968905
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2009-03-10
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks

Summary

Spanning two and a half millennia, Anthony Pagden's mesmerizingWorlds at Wardelves deep into the roots of the "clash of civilizations" between East and West that has always been a battle over ideas. It begins with ancient Greece and its epic fight against the Persian Empire, then sweeps to Rome, which created the modern concepts of citizenship and the rule of law. Pagden dramatizes the birth of Christianity in the East and its use in the West as an instrument of government, setting the stage for what would become, and has remained, a global battle of the secular against the sacred. Islam, at first ridiculed in Christian Europe, drives Pope Urban II to launch the Crusades, which transform the relationship between East and West into one of competing religious beliefs. Modern times bring a first world war, which among other things seeks to redesign the Muslim world by force. In our own era, Muslims now find themselves in unwelcoming Western societies, while the West seeks to enforce democracy and its own secular values through occupation in the East. Pagden ends on a cautionary note, warning that terrorism and war will continue as long as sacred and secular remain confused in the minds of so many. Eye-opening and compulsively readable,Worlds at Waris a stunning work of history and a triumph of modern scholarship.

Author Biography

Anthony Pagden is distinguished professor of political science and history at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was educated in Chile, Spain, and France, and at Oxford. In the past two decades, he has been the reader in intellectual history at Cambridge, a fellow of King’s College, a visiting professor at Harvard, and Harry C. Black Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of many prizewinning books, including Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, from Greece to the Present and European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism. Pagden contributes regularly to such publications as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The New Republic.


From the Hardcover edition.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Perpetual Enmity	p. 3
In The Shadow Of Alexander	p. 41
A World of Citizens	p. 69
The Church Triumphant	p. 126
The Coming of Islam	p. 157
Houses of War	p. 224
The Present Terror of the World	p. 251
Science Ascendant	p. 294
Enlightened Orientalism	p. 326
The Muhammad of the West	p. 361
The Eastward Course of Empire	p. 420
Epilogue	p. 512
Acknowledgments	p. 539
Notes	p. 541
Bibliography	p. 583
Index	p. 603
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

WE LIVE IN an increasingly united world. The boundaries that once existed between peoples are steadily dissolving; ancient divisions between tribes and families, villages and parishes, even between nations, are everywhere disintegrating. The nation-state, with which most of the peoples of the Western world have lived since the seventeenth century, may yet have a long time to live. But it is becoming increasingly hard to see it as the political order of the future. For thousands of years, few people went more than thirty miles from their place of birth. (This, it has been calculated from the places mentioned in the Gospels, is roughly the farthest Jesus Christ ever traveled from his home, and, in this respect, at least, he was not exceptional.) Today places that less than a century ago were remote, inaccessible, and dangerous have become little more than tourist sites. Today most of us in the Western world will travel hundreds, often thousands, of miles in our immensely prolonged lives. And in the process we will, inevitably, bump up against different peoples with different beliefs, wearing different clothes and holding different views. Some three hundred years ago, when the process we now label “globalization” was just beginning, it was hoped that this bumping into others, this forced recognition of all the differences that exist in the world, would smooth away the rough edges most humans acquire early in life, making them, in the process, more “polished” and “polite”–as it was called in the eighteenth century–more familiar with the preferences of others, more tolerant of their beliefs and delusions, and thus better able to live in harmony with one another.

In part this has happened. The slow withering of national boundaries and national sentiments over the past half century has brought substantial changes and some real benefits. The ancient antagonisms that tore Europe apart twice in the twentieth century (and countless other times in the preceding centuries) are no more and, we can only hope, will never be resuscitated. The virulent racism that dominated so many of the ways other peoples were seen in the West during the nineteenth century may not have vanished, but it has certainly withered. The older forms of imperialism are no more, even if many of the wounds they left behind have still not healed. Nationalism is, in most places, something of a dirty word. Anti-Semitism, alas, is still with us, but there are few places where it is as casually accepted as it was less than a century ago. Religion has not quietly died, as many, in Europe at least, hoped and believed until recently that it would. But it is certainly no longer the cause of the bitter confessional battles it once was. (Even in Northern Ireland, the last outpost of the great religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the quarrel is slowly being resolved and has always been more about local politics and national identity than about faith.)

Some of the old fault lines that have divided peoples over the centuries are, however, still very much with us. One of these is the division–and the antagonism–between what was originally thought of as Europe and Asia and then, as these words began to lose their geographical significance, between “East” and “West.”

The division, often illusory, always metaphorical, yet still immensely powerful, is an ancient one. The terms “East and West” are, of course, “Western,” but it was probably an Eastern people, the ancient Assyrians, sometime in the second millennium B.C.E., who first made a distinction between what they calledereboririb– “lands of the setting sun”–and Asia,Asu–“lands of the rising sun.” For them, however, there was no natural frontier between the two, and they accorded no particular signific

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Excerpted from Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West by Anthony Pagden
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