No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
Shortly after the First World War, the French literary critic and historian Henri Massis (1886-1970) preached a crusade against the dangers threatening European values and thought – largely identified with those of France, in his mind. He wasn't entirely misguided: across the world, colonised nations were in revolt. He wrote: “The future of western civilisation, of humanity itself, is now under threat… Every traveller, every foreigner who has spent any time in the Far East agrees that the way in which the population thinks has changed more in the last 10 years than it did over 10 centuries. The old, easy-going submissiveness has given way to blind hostility – sometimes genuine hatred, just waiting for the right moment to act. From Calcutta to Shanghai, from the steppes of Mongolia to the plains of Anatolia, the whole of Asia trembles with a blind desire for freedom. These people no longer recognise the supremacy that the West has taken for granted since John Sobieski conclusively stemmed the Turkish and Tartar invasions beneath the walls of Vienna. Instead they aspire to rebuild their unity against the white man, whose overthrow they proclaim.”
(1) Henri Massis, Défense de l'Occident, Plon, Paris, 1927. An alliance of Poles, Germans and Austrians defeated the Ottomans outside Vienna on 12 September 1683.
(2) Anthony Pagden, Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West, Random House, New York, 2008.
(3) Paul Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle that Changed the World, Overlook Press, New York, 2006.
(4) See “300 Spartans” on Youtube.
(5) Touraj Daryaee, “Go tell the Spartans”, Iranian.com, 14 March 2007.
(6) Ernest Lavisse (1842-1922) was an important influence on the teaching of history in late 19th-century France.
(7) Marcel Detienne, The Greeks and Us: A Comparative Anthropology of Ancient Greece, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2007.
(8) See, for example, Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350, Oxford University Press, 1991; Andre Gunder Frank, Reorient: Global economy in the Asian Age, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1998; Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the World Modern Economy, Princeton University Press, 2000; Jack Goody, The Theft of History, Cambridge University Press, 2006.
(9) John M Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
(10) Tzvetan Todorov, La peur des barbares. Au-dèla du choc des civilisations, Robert Laffont, Paris, 2008. Also On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, Harvard University Press, 1998.
You have
Access
Open access