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Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West | 
| Author: Anthony Pagden
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Category: Book
Buy Used: $29.14
Used (8) from $29.14
Avg. Customer Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 2812578
Format: Import
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 576
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.6
ISBN: 0199237433
EAN: 9780199237432
ASIN: 0199237433
Publication Date: January 2008
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 shoddy framework May 15, 2008
14 out of 23 found this review helpful
I was appaled by the low quality of research that went into the book. From distortions to sheer factual errors and inventions, Pagden seems to think that he can freely translate the Greek "barbarian" as Oriental/Asian, and argue that both Greeks and Romans were somehow prejudiced against a decadent East. Nothing could be further from the truth. For both the Romans and the Greeks the lure of Persia, Egypt, Syria, was spellbinding, powerful, and largely positive. There may have been a Cultural Prejudice, but it never amounted to what Pagden labels as "World at War".
Pagden chose to select only quotes which reflect badly on both East and West. He genuinely seems to believe that the Greeks, for example, considered themselves a "Western" people. This is factually wrong. Nor does he correctly understand the Roman foundation legend of Aeneas. Wrongly attributing Latin pressure on the Etruscans, to assimilationist calls upon the Trojans! In touching upon Roman perception of Anatolian Greeks, he wrongfully claims that Anatolia was inhabited by Persians - because of a weak link between the Achamenids and Mithridates IV! This is an unpardonable error, in a book of such nature!
This book is poison. For years academics have been trying to rid themselves of Said's "Orientalism" slur against Western Academia, and here we have a self-proclaimed "Westerner" rehashing the very charge all over again- but trying to present it in a positive light!
Do yourself a favor, and skip this book all together. A wilder bag of lies is hard to find.
 First class perspective of history April 24, 2008
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
This book goes back to the beginning of European civilisation and its main feature: individualism of free people, compared with the oriental collectivism and slavery.
Very readable.
Words at War April 21, 2008
1 out of 6 found this review helpful
Excellent and easy to read historical review. Helps us understand the predicament we're in because many of our leaders are history-oblivious. History (and this book)shows that we continue to pursue policies that are counter productive because we ignore the lessons of history and repeat the same mistakes.
a magisterial work, useful and lucid April 15, 2008
12 out of 14 found this review helpful
This is an excellent work of history. Correction: it is not so much a history - though it is historical through and through - as it is a particular interpretation of one very important aspect of world history: namely, the seemingly endless and seemingly inexplicable antagonism between West (the cultural region where individual and group rights, liberty and liberties, and specific "modern"/modernity-inflected social formations arose) and the East (the cultural region, roughly equivalent to the Arab world, where rights and democracy, let alone the individual, have been largely ignored). As Pagden tells this story, he touches on the important and nodal episodes, but he also adds his view of some of the incidental episodes. He provides an excellent historical overview, supplemented by a clever and diligent scholar's look at key moments, of both of these regions, and of their interrelationships. Obviously a lot has to be left out given the sheer number of centuries in question, but Pagden is hugely learned and so packs in all kinds of salient details. (His academic expertise is on the rise of modern Europe, and its "collision" with other parts of the globe.)
The book is long but thankfully he writes very clearly. He moves fluidly from Aeschylus and Alexander the Great, through the legacy of the "citizen" empire (Rome) and the rise of Muhammad, to the medieval Popes, through to Quesnay, Voltaire and Montesquieu and the Enlightenment, and finally on to the complex recent past and the present (Qutb, etc). He doesn't pull any punches: yes, the "orient" actually has been largely despotic, and yes, the West has often been -- for all of its successes and both its authentic good intentions as well as its exploitative acquisitiveness -- hypocritical and inept even when it has been well-meaning. Re: the latter, he discusses the question of liberal interventions, which he treats almost in a Burkean fashion: these are overly optimistic social engineering efforts, which often naively assume that the conditions for a genuinely valuable and important Western form of government (democracy) can be transplanted to places where the conditions that might nourish it are sadly foreign. He is also tough on Islam's apologists, past and present, rightly noting their own hypocrisy and almost perennial cruelty and anti-democratic impulses. He rightly chastises the leftists who celebrated the rise of Khomeini, pointing out that none had bothered to read his writings before celebrating his accession. And no less a figure than Edward Said -- author of a well regarded but simplistic (if not downright mendacious) tome on a part of the history of West and East -- comes in for some curt but devastating criticism. All in all, this is a grand, sweeping read. It's very much worth acquiring, especially if one is interested in the present and how we got here, but it's also a book one can give to a high school student or university student, e.g., one's nephew and niece, just so they can sample a work that does a fine job of making sense of a vastly complicated relationship. If they get through it, as one would hope, they'll be as shocked and disappointed as I am, and as Pagden is, to learn that in Turkey, Winnie-the-Pooh is no longer televised because the "Piglet" character is deemed offensive to Muslims. Don't laugh. Try to get a piggy-bank for your grandchild in a UK bank these days.
(I must add: reading the review of this book by a top 1000 reviewer - above - I came away thinking that he hasn't even read it. Pagden does in fact credit the Islamic world for many advances, and early on in his preface, he makes it very clear that when he speaks of "East" and "West", he's not talking about "unstable" "relative" geographical categories but cultural, social and political dispositions. Is that the sign of a "book maven": one says some banal and inaccurate things about a book?)
Erudite But Accessible, Ascerbic But Not Scornful April 2, 2008
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
This study of the combative relationship between the West (secular, individualistic, progressive) and the East (intolerant and hidebound) might seem to be yet another entry into the triumphalist school of history: The West Beat The Rest Because Its The Best. However, those who actually read the book will recognize that Anthony Pagden has produced a remarkable work which traces and reassesses anew a centuries long struggle.
By the East Pagden means what most now call the Middle East and Central Asia. Beginning with the struggle between the Greek city-states and the Persian Empire, Pagden then covers the empires of Alexander and of Rome, the rise of Christianity and Islam, and the resultant struggles between the two monotheistic religions. Some of Pagden's most ascerbic comments come at the expense of monotheism, whose adherents' tendencies to see the world in black and white he considers to be the root of most of our troubles. Fortunately he resists the temptation to sneer at the followers of those religions, reserving his scorn for those popes, caliphs, and other religious "leaders" who abused their power and wasted the lives of their communicants. Inevitably Pagden must finish his work with an examination of the troubles between the West and the Islamic Middle East in the twentieth century, and he provides an excellent history of that ongoing dispute, ending with some penetrating analyses of the mistakes both East and West have made over the years.
Pagden writes well, with a good eye for an illuminating anecdote. I wish a few more maps had been included to help locate some of the more obscure locales he mentions, but overall this is a fine work which I really enjoyed.
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