Today there is widespread scepticism about the achievements of
western civilisation. People doubt the value of its scientific and technological
advances and point to their often equivocal side-effects. So far as political
influence goes, western empires have vanished and western colonial powers have
retreated. The confidence once felt in a world economic order created by
Europeans has crumbled with that order itself. Yet western ideas and
institutions still exert huge influence throughout the world. China's one
billion inhabitants are ruled according to the ideas of a nineteenth-century
German, Karl Marx; and when African statesman assert principles of nationhood in
the UN, they are speaking of an idea imported from the West. Paradoxically,
perhaps the West has triumphed after all - even if not quite as its critics have
noticed.
This illuminating and authoritative account, linked with but
greatly expanded from a major 13-part television series written and presented by
the distinguished historian, John Roberts, comments upon the history of western
civilisation from its earliest roots in the Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian
traditions and seeks to uncover what it was that gave European culture its
outward push and confident energy for so many centuries. What has provided its
unique vigour beyond its own boundaries that so distinguished it from other
world civilisations? Professor Roberts here not only identifies and traces a
number of the continuing strands running through the West's conceptions of
itself and other civilisations, but draws a picture of the nature of its often
flawed and complicated triumph.
The paradoxical and, in the end, irreversible impact of the
West on the rest of the world provides a fascinating story. Its working-out
reverberates to this day in our own lives. Professor Roberts' telling of it, in
this richly illustrated and brilliantly argued book, is based on examples drawn
from a huge range of world history, examples which are stimulating, provocative
and always challenging.
One World
A Sense of Direction
The Birth of the West
The World's Debate
Defining a World
An Exploring Civilisation
New Worlds
A New Age
History Speeds Up
The Confident Aggressors
Responses and Repercussions
A Sense of Decline
A Post-Western World?
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