Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West

by Anthony Pagden

Book Overview

A history of the 2,500-year long conflict between East and West, from classical antiquity, through the wars of the Crusades, to the present and the continuing tensions of the 21st century. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812968905
• Release Date: March 2009
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
• Length: 656 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.7" x 1.4" x 5.0"

Customer Reviews

How History Should be Told

One does not have to embrace Pagden's story to appreciate what he has achieved here. First, this book must be commended for its readability. A quick perusal of any history section will show that once you look inside the pretty covers and catchy titles, most histories are written to present facts not captivate the reader. Pagden presents many facts, but does so in way that rewards the reader. This is perhaps because he tells Western history not so much from the angle of "what happened" but as the history of an idea. The campaigns of Alexander are not what are important as much as his significance to the Western (and Eastern) consciousness. Thus representative and iconic events are included, not necessarily every decisive moment. The story begins with Greek "Myth" and interweaves it in much the same way the Greeks themselves would have found little distinction between "history" and "myth." Thirdly, Pagden has the boldness to cut against the establishment perspective of Islam as essentially benign or at minimum better than Christianity. Ever since Edward Said scared the West into thinking we were mistelling the story of Islam, our academia has lived in a state of myopia concerning its worldview and intent. Thus we have the ironic situation where supposed secularists are apologists for Islam in most of the mainstream books. Pagden has no such prejudice. He tells a secular story from beginning to end, and the work is best read as an apology for a pre-Christian morality and conception of the West. As a Christian I of course disagree with Pagden's low view of Christianity and high view of Roman morality, but his consistency in presenting Islam and Christianity actually makes for a cohesive and more believable story. Overall an outstanding book.

Required reading to be coherent on the subject

History is always written from perspective and this topic, more than most, is at the risk of bias. The subject is epochal East vs West antagonism and it's 'at least' 2500 year progression. Pagden says he's of no religion. Christian's will wince at times as I'm sure the Muslim reader will. Pagden is rather uniquely steeped in the East/West history and may be one of a handful that might be considered `adequately unbiased'to write in this perspective. Pagden has a disdain of the trepidations and machinations of political man working on behalf of God, in equal measure East & West, but, the theological is not far from the enduring politics. Pagden begins from the earliest historical evidence ... the Trojan War ... earlier in pre-history; the conflict may be in fact be another 2500 years older. East & West do not get along and never have. This is a reader's digest that helps to pick up on the fine `silver threads'. The first half of Worlds at War provides the necessary and interesting backdrop to the conflict ... Greeks sparing with Persians, Persians beating Greeks, Greeks conquering the East, Rome conquering Greece, Persians re-conquering land lost to Greeks, #1 power Rome stalemating #2 power Parthia, Muslims blitzkrieg Christians out of their failing Roman Empire with drives into Europe as deep as France, Christians retaliate and beat back Muslims in the western Europe but fail at the Crusades in the east, the Ottoman machine makes another Muslim run into the European heartland, the Ottoman's are slowly and recently run out of Europe, and here we are. Pagden describes the continuous 2500 year war punctuated only by intensities. Pagden pays close attention to the periods of high and low intensity in the sine wave nature of the conflict. Diplomacy has merely provided the necessary time to regroup and birth new combatants for the next period of conflagration. The second half of the book digs deeper into the current story with its interesting roots in Napoleon's conquests in Egypt, followed by extraordinarily complex political experiments and intrigue, WW1, more experiments and intrigue, WW2, then through 2007. The closer you get to present, the more your own bias and understanding are tested by Pagden. The East vs West has been redefined most recently by the East from Christian or Jew vs Muslim into secular West vs Islam. Removing Christianity or Judaism from the equation has done an increasingly secular agnostic/atheist West no favor in the struggle. The secular East attempts to be flexible but Islam cannot change. The recent moderate/secular Muslim political experiments in Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, Algeria, etc have or are failing in the ascending and undeniable return to the historical roots of Islamic worldview ... the faithful cannot, tolerate challenges to the Quran or Sharia and remain Muslim... Allah must and will be carried to the globe through conquest of land and peoples. The book is a must read for the greater understanding of

a magisterial work, useful and lucid

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

Erudite But Accessible, Ascerbic But Not Scornful

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.