THE ARRIVAL OF THE
WEST (1750.2000)
The rise of the West is unparalleled in world history. The
countries north of the Alps had for centuries been regarded
as a backward region, which had attached itself to the
Greco-Roman culture of the south and had, gradually, de-
veloped its own distinctive version of Christianity and its
own form of agrarian culture. Western Europe lagged far
behind the Christian empire of Byzantium, where the
Roman Empire had not collapsed as it had in Europe. By the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries these western European
countries had just about caught up with the other core cul-
tures, and by the sixteenth century had begun a process of
major transformation that would enable the West to domi-
nate the rest of the world. The achievement of such ascen-
dancy by an outgroup is unique. It is similar to the emergence
of the Arab Muslims as a major world power in the seventh
and eighth centuries, but the Muslims had not achieved
world hegemony, and had not developed a new kind of civ-
ilization, as Europe had begun to do in the sixteenth cen-
tury. When the Ottomans had tried to reorganize their army
along Western lines in the hope of containing the threat
from Europe, their efforts were doomed because they were
too superficial. To beat Europe at its own game, a conven-
tional agrarian society would have to transform itself from
top to bottom, and re-create its entire social, economic,
educational, religious, spiritual, political and intellectual
structures. And it would have to do this very quickly, an im-
possible task, since it had taken the West almost three hun-
dred years to achieve this development.