Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West - Anthony Pagden [epub]

Spanning two and a half millennia, Anthony Pagden’s mesmerizing Worlds at War delves deep into the roots of the “clash of civilizations” between East and West that has always been a battle over ideas, and whose issues have never been more urgent.

Worlds At War begins in the ancient world, where Greece saw its fight against the Persian Empire as one between freedom and slavery, between monarchy and democracy, between individuality and the worship of men as gods. Here, richly rendered, are the crucial battle of Marathon, considered the turning point of Greek and European history; the heroic attempt by the Greeks to turn the Persians back at Thermopylae; and Salamis, one of the greatest naval battles of all time, which put an end to the Persian threat forever.

From there Pagden’s story sweeps to Rome, which created the modern concepts of citizenship and the rule of law. Rome’s leaders believed those they conquered to be free, while the various peoples of the East persisted in seeing their subjects as property. Pagden dramatizes the birth of Christianity in the East and its use in the West as an instrument of government, setting the stage for what would become, and has remained, a global battle of the secular against the sacred. Then Islam, at first ridiculed in Christian Europe, drives Pope Urban II to launch the Crusades, which transform the relationship between East and West into one of competing religious beliefs.

Modern times bring a first world war, which among its many murky aims seeks to redesign the Muslim world by force. In our own era, Muslims now find themselves in unwelcoming Western societies, while the West seeks to enforce democracy and its own secular values through occupation in the East. Pagden ends on a cautionary note, warning that terrorism and war will continue as long as sacred and secular remain confused in the minds of so many.
Eye-opening and compulsively readable, Worlds at War is a stunning work of history and a triumph of modern scholarship. It is bound to become the definitive work on the reasons behind the age-old and still escalating struggle that, more than any other, has come to define the modern world–a book for anyone seeking to know why “we came to be the way we are.”

From the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

In the pessimistic words of the ancient historian Herodotus, there will ever be perpetual enmity between the globe's two halves. Pagden (Peoples and Empires), a professor of political science and history at UCLA, tackles the immense sweep of 2,500 years of bad blood and seeks to explain the feud's continuing existence despite the increasing erosion of national differences. Does the trouble have geographical roots, or might it stem from religious differences? Pagden is convinced that in fact East and West are separated more by values and culture than by anything else—democratic vs. authoritarian rule, secular vs. theocratic and, later, Christian vs. Muslim. Though some readers might cavil at Pagden's reductionist assertion that religion has caused more lasting harm to the human race than any other single set of beliefs, his book is an accessible and lucid exploration of the history of the East-West split, concluding with a nuanced look at the divisions and misapprehensions that continue to the present time. Fans of Jacques Barzun and Jared Diamond will be most impressed by Pagden's big picture perspective. (Mar. 4)
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From Booklist

Plumbing millennia of conflict between European civilizations and those of the Near East, historian Pagden outlines historical antecedents to present frictions between the secular West and the Muslim world. If the collisions between Greek and Persian, Roman and barbarian, Christian and pagan, Christian and Muslim, and imperialist and nationalist have something in common, according to Pagden, it is the rivalry of universalistic ideas about humanity and providence. Through each of these pairs of opposites, Pagden introduces intellectuals of the age who puzzled over their cultural adversary, often in response to a calamity, such as the Crusaders’ capture of Jerusalem in 1099 or the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Their analyses, whose realism or logic Pagden critiques, for returning humanity to its providential destination, be it Christianity, Islam, or liberal democracy, slot into the author’s chronological narrative of major exacerbations of West-East animosity, from the Trojan War to the Iraq War. Inquisitive and incisive about the sweep of history, Pagden will connect with readers wanting to deepen their grasp of contemporary news. --Gilbert Taylor