The World and the West: The European Challenge and the Overseas Response in the Age of Empire

by Philip D. Curtin

Overview

This book is a study of the interaction of the Western societies of Europe and America with others around the world in the past two centuries—the age of European empire. Through a variety of case studies, it considers the European threat and the non-Western response, but the focus is on the ways in which people in Asia, African, and Indian America have tried to adapt their ways of life to the overwhelming European power of the period.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521771351
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	03/13/2000
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.38(w) x 9.37(h) x 0.98(d)

Table of Contents

Part I. Conquest: 1. The Pattern of Empire; 2. Technology and power; 3. The politics of Imperialism; Part II. Culture Change under Imperial Rule: 4. Culture change in plural societies: South Africa and Central Asia; 5. Culture change in Mexico; 6. Administrative choices and their consequences: examples from Bengal, Central Asia, Java, and Malaya; Part III. Conversion: 7. Christian missions in East Africa; 8. Varieties of defensive modernization; 9. Meiji Japan: revolutionary modernization; 10. Ottoman reactions to the West; Part IV. The Drive for Independence and the Liquidation of Empires: 11. Non-European resistance and the European withdrawal; 12. Personal and utopian responses: millenarianism; 13. The search for viable independence: Indonesia; 14. Paths to viable independence: Ghana.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Philips Curtin is one of the ablest, most prolific storytellers of our time. He has woven a number of these tapestries, often bringing together in elegant fashion many important and long-neglected threads (African history, the social consequences of migration, the impact of disease on the unfolding of empire) with themes and images more familiar from other, grander but less careful renderings of our portrait." The Boston Review

"Philip D. Curtin's new book is a fascinating contribution to the debate...The book is well-written; the case studies are carefully selected; complex development and events are expounded with great ease and elegance; and they show how enormously erudite and experienced a historian Curtin is." The International History Review

Editorial Reviews

"Philips Curtin is one of the ablest, most prolific storytellers of our time. He has woven a number of these tapestries, often bringing together in elegant fashion many important and long-neglected threads (African history, the social consequences of migration, the impact of disease on the unfolding of empire) with themes and images more familiar from other, grander but less careful renderings of our portrait." The Boston Review

"Philip D. Curtin's new book is a fascinating contribution to the debate...The book is well-written; the case studies are carefully selected; complex development and events are expounded with great ease and elegance; and they show how enormously erudite and experienced a historian Curtin is." The International History Review

From the Publisher

Philip Curtin has written a collection of provocative and learned essays examining, from a range of viewpoints, the complex interactions of empire and local cultures. It is left for readers not so much to admire his finished tapestry as to watch him at the weaver's loom, shaping richly textured and minutely detailed pieces of a larger image we are left to arrange for ourselves.
—The Boston Book Review

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