The Middle East – A New Western History

The traditional story of Western history is all around us: set out in school textbooks, encoded implicitly into children’s stories and Hollywood movies, proclaimed loudly and angrily by commentators on both sides of the political spectrum. It describes the history of civilization as a relentless ascent from primitive barbarism to enlightenment, with the West leading the way. It is a version of history that has a future.

But it’s also wrong. The classical culture that so defined the European and American civilizations – of ancient Greece and Rome, a quite different civilization shaped by Eastern Orthodoxy – did not exist in Asia or Africa, nor did it feature in the Indian and Mestizo cultures of Latin America. Those other civilizations were not enlightened; they were, in fact, lagging behind the West.

That was not the whole story, though. In the 19th and 20th centuries, many countries made great strides towards fully-fledged parliamentary democracy. In some cases, such as Britain, that meant a complete revolution from the oligarchy of monarchy to mass-party politics. In others, such as the United States, it was a much more gradual process.

During this same period, however, the world was changing fast as peoples of non-Western origin moved into Western societies. These changes were a result of colonialism, wars that pitted European nations against each other and with other nations around the world, and immigration. This inevitably led to tensions that are still being played out in the present.

It was also a time when we came to realize the importance of the environment and how the ways in which humans live on the planet affect each other. This has resulted in many of the issues that we face today, including poverty, violence, racial conflict and pollution.

What makes this a new Western history is that we are now aware of the interconnections between different parts of the world and how what happens in one part of the globe has an impact on other parts. This is what will make the next few years exciting for western historians.

Whether or not scholars studying the Middle East think of themselves as western historians will depend on their understanding of what we mean by western history. In the past, most scholars who study this area of history would have scoffed at the idea that they were Western historians. But the truth is that we have much to learn from these studies and it is only through awareness of how the West fits into the rest of the world that we will be able to understand our own place in it. The contributors to this book show how far we have come in this new western history and where we need to go in the future. The book is available through Oxford University Press.