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Worlds at War
The 2,500 - Year Struggle Between East and West
Anthony Pagden
576 pages
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21 black and white plates
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234x156mm
978-0-19-923743-2
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Hardback
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13 March 2008
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- The first ever continuous history of the conflicts between East and West - from the struggle between Greeks and Persians, through the centuries-long confrontation between Islam and Christianity, right through to the wars of the twenty-first century
- Shows how the antagonism between East and West predates the birth of Islam and Christianity
- Highlights the links between a series of conflicts over 2500 years that have previously only ever been treated in isolation from each other
- Reminds us how the struggle between East and West has shaped the West's vision of itself - and how fundamentally it has shaped the modern world
The differences that divide West from East go deeper than politics, deeper than religion, argues Anthony Pagden. To understand this volatile relationship, and how it has played out over the centuries, we need to go back before the Crusades, before the birth of Islam, before the birth of Christianity, to the fifth century BCE.
Europe was born out of Asia and for centuries the two shared a single history. But when the Persian emperor Xerxes tried to conquer Greece, a struggle began which has never ceased. This book tells the story of that long conflict.
First Alexander the Great and then the Romans tried to unite Europe and Asia into a single civilization. With the conversion of the West to Christianity and much of the East to Islam, a bitter war broke out between two universal religions, each claiming world dominance. By the seventeenth century, with the decline of the Church, the contest had shifted from religion to philosophy: the West's scientific rationality in contrast to those sought ultimate guidance it in the words of God.
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the disintegration of the great Muslim empires - the Ottoman, the Mughal, and the Safavid in Iran - and the increasing Western domination of the whole of Asia. The resultant attempt to mix Islam and Western
modernism sparked off a struggle in the Islamic world between reformers and traditionalists which persists to this day.
The wars between East and West have not only been the longest and most costly in human history, they have also formed the West's vision of itself as independent, free, secular, and now democratic. They have shaped, and continue to shape, the nature of the modern world.Readership: Anyone interested in the history of conflict between East and West, from classical antiquity, through the struggles between Islam and Christianity in the Crusades and the Enlightenment, to the problems of the twenty-first century
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Anthony Pagden, Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles
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"There is much to admire in Pagden's book. His bredth of knowledge across two and a half millenia of Western (and to a great extent Eastern) history is impressive... As an intellectual history of Western views of the East, the book is exemplary." - Ian Garrick Mason. Spectator. "'Worlds at War' offers some fine vignettes...witty, provocative conversation from a sage." - Economist "Learned, fluent and thoroughly entertaining account." - Dominic Sandbrook. Telegraph Review.
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Preface
1: Perpetual Enmity
2: In the Shadow of Alexander
3: A World of Citizens
4: The Church Triumphant
5: The Coming of Islam
6: Houses of War
7: The Present Terror of the World
8: Science Ascendant
9: Enlightened Orientalism
10: The Mohammed of the West
11: The Eastward Course of Empire
12: Epilogue: Towards the Future
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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