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THE DANCE OF EAST AND WEST:
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AN UNSTABLE BUT ENDURING CONCEPTUAL PARTNERSHIP
TIM LOMAS1, BRENDAN CASE2, FLYNN CRATTY3, ALEXANDER BATSON4
ABSTRACT
e distinction between East and West is among the most prominent and in uential cross-cultural tropes in both
academic scholarship and public discourse. However, in most cases, this attention tends to focus narrowly on certain
instances or iterations of this binary. In particular, Edward Said’s in uential analysis of ‘Orientalism’ has led to a relative
xation on the dynamic between Western Europe and the ‘near’ and ‘far’ East in the 19th century. However, the East-
West polarity has been a de ning feature of at least the last 2,500 years of human history. It is, moreover, a complex
and contested binary, whose boundaries and contours have constantly shi ed. is paper therefore highlights these
complexities through a ‘psycho-historical’ approach, namely, exploring the psychological nature and dynamics of this
distinction through a historical lens. us, we explore variations on the East-West theme throughout six key historical
eras: pre-history; the Classical Age; the rise of Christianity; the medieval world; the Enlightenment; and the Cold War.
It is hoped that our analysis not only o ers a useful introduction to the evolution of the East-West distinction but also
encourages scholars to adopt a more subtle and nuanced approach to its dynamics.
Keywords: East, West, cross-cultural, history, orientalism.
INTRODUCTION
A wealth of research has indicated that human societies throughout history appear to have been invariably characterised by
(at least) three interlinked tendencies: (1) the creation of in-groups (e.g., one’s tribe) and out-groups (e.g., other tribes) (De
Dreu et al., 2016); (2) the formation of positive beliefs and attitudes regarding one’s in-group (e.g., loyalty, familiarity, and high
regard) versus negative beliefs and attitudes regarding out-groups (e.g., antipathy, suspicion, and low regard) (Shaw & Wong,
1987); and (3) an understanding of in-group versus out-group dynamics through the lens of spatial orientation (e.g., North
vs South) (Grigoryev, 2022). is paper charts the evolving history of a particularly in uential form of spatial comparison:
the distinction between West versus East (WvE). is binary has found myriad forms of expression throughout the centuries,
with fuzzy and disputed boundaries that are ever shi ing in response to historical events. Moreover, it has maintained its
rhetorical force to this day, serving as a powerful conceptual lens of analysis and comparison in numerous elds of endeavour,
from politics to the academy. Indeed, appeals to WvE di erences are frequently invoked today even within disciplines such as
psychology, in which cross-cultural nuances are o en overlooked in favour of a more universalising perspective.
Indeed, one crucial element in contemporary global political economy is the deep integration of China into the US-led
international liberal order. From this perspective, the rhetoric of political rivalry emphasised in US National Security Strategy
– as much as the small-scale trade wars caused by the US can be seen as an indication of assimilation problems on the part of
1 Psychology Research Scientist, Human Flourishing Program, Harvard University, e-mail: tlomas@hsph.harvard.edu
2 Associate Director for Research, Human Flourishing Program, Harvard University, e-mail: brendan_case@fas.harvard.edu
3 Associate Director for Research, Human Flourishing Program, Harvard University; ynncratty@fas.harvard.edu
4 PhD candidate, Yale History Department, Yale University, e-mail: alexander.batson@yale.edu
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TIM LOMAS, BRENDAN CASE, FLYNN CRATTY, ALEXANDER BATSON
e Dance of East and West: A Brief History of an Unstable but Enduring Conceptual Partnership
the Hegemon instead of what has been feared, the onset of Age of Empires, Global Game of rones, or the return of the state
of nature (Barbieri, 2020; Hopewell, 2021; Juutinen & Käkönen, 2016). However, the continuity of sui generis liberal world
order would involve tremendous regional changes. is is related to the American foreign policy agenda discussion towards
the “deep engagement” strategy to balance or counter the Rising Powers’ initiative.
However, many contemporary invocations of WvE are o en awed or at least partial and limited in some way. is is
frequently because they focus on only one particular iteration of WvE dynamics (hence being partial/limited), such as
Western Europe compared to the ‘Far East’ of East Asia in the 19th century, and take this as representative of WvE dynamics
more generally. In that respect, Said’s (1979) identi cation and articulation of ‘Orientalism’ has been hugely in uential. is
was his label for the process by which 19th-century Western thinkers came to understand themselves and their society by
contrasting it with the ‘Other’ of the Orient. ere were di erent strains of this thought process. More benevolent, albeit
still contentious, were forms of ‘Romantic Orientalism’, in which the East was viewed through a utopian lens as superior in
various ways, such as wiser, less materialistic, and more spiritual (Taylor, 2004). en, far more troubling were the discourses
used to justify and rationalise imperialism and colonialism, for instance presenting the East as ine cient and thus apparently
‘in need’ of intervention. Despite Said’s real and important insights though, such is his in uence that his particular iteration
of WvE dynamics has tended to overshadow all others, o en becoming the main or even only historical WvE distinction
acknowledged or cited by most scholars. is of course is not a criticism of Said per se, nor of those who have drawn on his
work; indeed, it is rather a sign of how original, compelling, and impactful his ideas have been. However, this dominance of
the subsequent literature has had some negative consequences, including that his particular iteration has since o en been
rei ed and essentialised in subsequent discourse in the form of stable generalisations and stereotypes. us, for instance, the
West has o en been interpreted as self-consciously individualistic, which is then juxtaposed with a view of the East as more
communal and – if seen in a negative light – conspicuously lacking in individuality (Martinez Mateo et al., 2013). is point
of comparison has then arguably provided the foundation for what is perhaps the most common WvE distinction in modern
scholarship – certainly in elds such as psychology (Lomas et al., 2022) – namely the idea that the West tends towards
individualism and the East towards collectivism, as in uentially articulated by Hofstede (1980) and Markus and Kitayama
(1991).
However, as this paper will show, the WvE distinction has seen many incarnations over the centuries, together with complex,
shi ing arrays of thought and behaviour patterns. Indeed, East and West are relative terms (e.g., who/what is West for one
group of people may be East for another), which contributes to the shi ing meanings. Indeed, as Emmerson (1984) illustrates
using the case of ‘Southeast Asia’, such words have a powerful function in that they ‘simultaneously describe and invent
reality’ (p. 1); while some names acknowledge what exists (e.g., ‘rose’) and others create what would otherwise not exist (e.g.,
‘unicorn’), the terms East and West e ectively play both roles. As such, we hope that our analysis will not only o er a useful
introduction to the evolution of the WvE binary but also encourage scholars to adopt a more nuanced and subtle approach
to the distinction. us, we have sought to provide what one might call a ‘psycho-historical’ account of this binary, that
is, an account that lies at the intersection of psychology and history. We are interested in the psychological nature and the
dynamics of this distinction, speci cally interrogated through a historical lens. is approach heeds calls from Muthukrishna
et al. (2020) to envisage psychology as a ‘historical science’, namely to consider how the phenomena it focuses on have
changed in meaningful ways over the centuries. Here, we use this temporal perspective to shed light on East-West dynamics
speci cally, but it bears emphasising that this approach can help illuminate myriad and indeed perhaps all aspects of human
psychology and culture more broadly. To that point, their foundational paper provides a wealth of ‘illustrative examples that
link contemporary psychological variation—including cooperation, trust, personality, and gender di erences—to historical
processes focused on religion, kinship, formal institutions (democracy), economic patterns, and ecological factors’ (p.721).
In terms of East-West considerations in particular, the historical terrain here is so vast that we cannot hope to be exhaustive.
Rather, our goal will be limited to brie y surveying just six epochs – and moreover o en focusing on an especially pivotal
year – to show the shi ing nature of WvE through the centuries. ese are: (1) the ‘pre-history’ before the WvE comparison
emerged; (2) the classical era; (3); the rise of Christianity; (4) the medieval world; (5) the European Enlightenment; and
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EAST-WEST STUDIES 13 (2023/2024)
(6) the Cold War. In each case, we highlight the internally complex and ever-shi ing contours of the WvE binary and show
how the legacies of each period’s WvE relations continue to shape the present. As a nal point, it might perhaps be deduced
from this choice of epochs that we authors are ourselves Western and have an intrinsically Western ‘take’ on the topic, with
an implicit privileging of Western empirics as evidence. Indeed, even more idiosyncratically, the selection of these eras and
our interpretation of them represent our own personal interests and areas of expertise (although all the instances chosen are
undeniably important and may well be selected by other scholars in similar papers). is we acknowledge as a limitation,
though we would also argue that there is no neutral ‘view from nowhere’ (Nagel, 1986); any account inevitably bears the
cultural and biographical imprint of its authors’ particular background. us, it would be most welcome if our paper were
to be augmented in the future by similar analyses of these WvE dynamics from other perspectives, including of course from
scholars in the East as well as from relevant cultures that are less easily categorised. Indeed, we hope our paper can inspire
and encourage such e orts and that collectively these works can approach a relatively full and comprehensive account of this
topic.
PRE-HISTORY
e WvE dichotomy may have emerged in an enduring and substantial sense in relation to the wars between the ancient
Greeks and the Persians around the 5th century BCE, as we explore in our second main section. However, notions of West
and East were developed well before that time, with roots in ‘pre-history’ (i.e., the vast epoch before written records were
kept or are now lost) (Lomas & Case, 2023). Of course, this lack of records makes tracing these roots di cult, but not
impossible. ere are two main sources of suggestive evidence pointing to the use of West and East in pre-history: linguistic
and cartographic. Here, we shall brie y explore each in turn. First, though, we should observe that although the concepts of
WvE existed in pre-history, these appear to mainly function as spatial directions, together with the associated symbolism.
ere, the kind of group-based spatial identi cation that began to emerge in the Classical era, whereby people conceptualised
themselves or others as being Western or Eastern, seems not to have been present. Rather, all peoples appeared to gravitate
towards a centre-periphery distinction, whereby their own in-group was at the centre of their conceptualisation of the world,
with out-groups, to the extent that people were aware of such, relegated to the periphery (Delnero, 2017).
Our earliest traces of notions of WvE are found in language, with the etymologies of these concepts, whose genesis may
stretch back far into the unrecorded mists of pre-history, revealing clues about their emergent conceptualisations. In short,
across many languages, they are associated with the passage of the sun, with words for East and West linked to sunrise
and sunset, respectively. ese words themselves stem from the Proto-Indo-European roots aus and wes, which refer to an
upward versus a downward movement and hence also to the rising or setting sun and likewise to dawn and dusk (Vasunia,
2012; Gąsiorowski, 2012). Similar patterns are found cross-culturally. With the East, the Proto-Indo-European root aus is
also re ected in languages such as Akkadian (asu), Dutch (oost), Frisian (ast), German (Ost), Greek (ēōs), Latin (aurora),
Old Norse (austr), Old Saxon (ost), and Sanskrit (usah). Similarly, beyond that speci c root, numerous languages use words
connoting or derived from sunrise – or more generically ‘rising’ – to denote the East, including Arabic (shurūq), Chinese
(dōng – involving a pictograph of the sun rising behind a tree), French (levant), Greek (anatolé), Hebrew (mizrahi), Latin
(oriens), Russian (vostok), and Persian (xavar). Such terms are also the roots for other labels for the East, such as the ‘Orient’
(from the Latin oriens) and ‘Asia’ (from the Akkadian asu). With the West, the Proto-Indo-European root wes is likewise
re ected in languages such as French (ouest), Greek (hesperos), Old Frisian, Middle Dutch, Dutch, and Old High German
(west), Old Norse (vestr), and Latin (vesper). Again, beyond that speci c root, numerous languages use words connoting or
derived from sunset – or more generically ‘falling’ or ‘resting’ – to denote the West, including Arabic (gharb), Chinese (xī,
with a pictograph that Sagart (2004) suggests may connote a bird settling into a nest), Hebrew (maarab), Russian (západ),
and Latin (occidens). As with the East, these words are also the roots of other terms linked to the West. For instance, Europe
may derive from the Semitic ereb (root of the Arabic gharb and Hebrew maarab above), arising in relation to the Phoenicians’
colonisation of territories in the Mediterranean to their West from the 10th century BCE (Vasunia, 2012).
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TIM LOMAS, BRENDAN CASE, FLYNN CRATTY, ALEXANDER BATSON
e Dance of East and West: A Brief History of an Unstable but Enduring Conceptual Partnership
We should emphasise though that as these concepts were developing, East and West were not xed in any relatively stable
location (unlike in later epochs) but were relative to the people creating them. Indeed, people generally viewed themselves
as a central reference point, as we discuss below. So, for instance, although North Africa (e.g., Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia)
might be deemed Eastern from a modern Western perspective, the Arabic term for this region is Maghreb – meaning ‘sunset’
– since this is how this region would be situated relative to an Arabian Peninsula perspective. Indeed, the etymology of ‘Arab’
itself, although o en interpreted as being rst used to convey meanings such as wanderer or nomadic, has been traced to the
aforementioned Semitic ereb, potentially implying that people identi ed as Arabic were to the Wes t of these Semitic speakers.
In any case, as cultures developed concepts of WvE, they began to attach symbolism and meaning to them. As be tting the
direction of the dawn and the rising sun, the East is o en associated with qualities such as birth, rebirth, renewal, life, and
youth. ese are re ected in the way that cardinal directions were o en personi ed as deities – as per the animistic and
polytheistic mindset of this era – with the East symbolised by goddesses of dawn such as Ēostre (Germanic), Ēos (Greek),
Aurora (Roman), and Usas (Vedic). Such symbolism continued into the realm of history. In the Old Testament, for instance,
the East is associated with the creation of life (Genesis 2:8 states that God ‘planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he
put the man whom he had formed’) (Meier, 1998). Likewise, in Christianity, the East – and similarly sunrise and dawn – was
associated with Christ himself (the ‘light of the world’) and with his Resurrection and Second Coming. For that reason, early
Christians would o en pray facing East; as Origen wrote in On Prayer (AD 231): ‘It should be immediately clear that the
direction of the rising sun obviously indicates that we ought to pray inclining in that direction, an act which symbolises the
soul looking towards where the true light rises’ (Lang, 2009, p. 93).
Conversely, as similarly be ts the direction of the dusk and the setting sun, the West was usually associated with ageing, death,
and the a erlife, though these were not necessarily negatively coded, especially if the a erlife was construed in bene cent
ways. For example, in various schools of Buddhism (e.g., ‘Pure Land’), the West is associated with enlightenment (Lye, 2002).
Such imagery is found cross-culturally and is frequently re ected in funeral and burial practices, evidence of which survives
today, such as symbolism on Western walls of tombs and bodies arranged in a Westerly direction – ranging from Ancient
Egypt (Omran, 2016) to Bronze Age burial sites in Central Asia (Sollohub, 1962). Such imagery persists to this day; in the
Great War, for instance, the phrase ‘Go West’ was o en used poetically as an image of soldiers dying (Seal, 2013).
In pre-history, we nd a general association of East and West with sunrise and sunset, respectively, together with the associated
symbolism (e.g., birth and death). Perhaps for this reason, East and West seem a more important dichotomy in this era than
North and South, with most early maps prioritising East as their focal point by positioning it at the top, as discussed below.
By contrast, before the discovery of polarity and the invention of the magnet (in China around the 2nd century BCE), North
and South were o en conceptualised merely in relation to East and West. e word North for example is thought to derive
from the Proto-Indo-European unit ner, which can mean either ‘le ’ (possibly re ecting the way the North is to the le as
one faces the sun) or ‘below’ (possibly re ecting the way the sun is at its ‘lowest’ point when in the north).
However, despite the importance of WvE, signi cantly, people did not appear to regard themselves as being in the East or
West. Rather, people tended to see themselves as being at the centre of the world. ey may well have been aware of other
peoples, even if only dimly, but these others were usually seen as being on the periphery or fringes of the world. us, even
if people had developed a sense of WvE in terms of direction and symbolism, as far as humankind was concerned, the
dominant conception seems to be more one of centre versus periphery. e evidence for this mode of understanding is again
linguistic, but also cartographic.
In terms of linguistic evidence, this conception of centre-periphery is re ected in the names cultures give to themselves
versus other peoples. Perhaps the clearest example is China, whose self-name – transliterated as Zhōngguó (中國) – literally
means ‘middle country’. One of the earliest articulations of the Chinese sense of their location in the world is found in the
Yu Gong, one of the Five Classics of ancient Chinese literature, describing the legendary Yu the Great and the provinces of
his time, which most scholars believe was written in the 5th century BCE. In this, as elucidated by Wang (1999), the term
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‘four ends’ (sizhi) was used to signify the utmost ends of the world (i.e., East, West, North, and South) at which one could
only encounter vast oceans or deserts. en, as Wang (1999) further articulates, in later centuries, as awareness of other
places and peoples developed, the Chinese developed a conception of three zones – expanding outwards from China at the
centre – depending on cultural a nities to and spatial distances from China. First was a ‘Sinic Zone’ (Korea, Vietnam, and
sometimes Japan). Second, an ‘Inner Asian Zone’, featuring non-Han ethnic groups of nomadic tribes. ird, an ‘Outer Zone’
including regions in Southeast and South Asia, and Europe in later ages. e di erences among the zones were re ected in
nomenclature: most places in the Sinic Zone were allocated names – such as Chaoxian (Korea) or Riben (Japan) – which, if
they did initially have derogatory meanings, eventually were lost; by contrast, states in the Inner Asian and Outer Zones were
simply referred to by terms equivalent to ‘barbarian’ (e.g., yi, fan, and man).
Comparable forms of linguistic ethnocentrism can be found in many cultures and languages. Even if people did not include
the idea of the ‘centre’ in their name, it is common for cultures to refer to themselves by terms that simply mean ‘people’. is
is seen, for example, in the original names of many Native North American peoples, such as ‘Inuit’. Some other groups also
qualify this label with an adjective that implies that, although other people are recognised, they are not thought especially
highly of, such as ‘Hopi’, which etymologically is thought to mean ‘peaceful people’ or ‘civilized people’ (Graves, 2016),
suggesting by contrast an awareness of other groups who are not peaceful or civilised. To that point, as per the names given
by the Chinese to people in the Inner Asian and Outer Zones, it is common to nd cultures referring to other peoples by
names that are relatively derogatory or at least not bestowing upon them the same dignity and worth as one’s own people.
Further support for this idea that pre-historic cultures tended to have a centre-periphery view comes from cartography. Put
simply, most early maps put the people the map was created by/for at the centre, with other peoples and places situated towards
the edge. Cartography extends far into pre-history, with some of the earliest surviving examples including a representation of
a region near Pavlov in the Czech Republic carved on a mammoth tusk, dated to 25,000 BCE, and an Aboriginal Australian
cylcon potentially depicting the Darling River, circa 20,000 BCE (Wolodtschenko & Forner, 2007). e art particularly
excelled in Ancient Babylonia, involving accurate surveying techniques, such as a map of a river valley on a clay tablet dated
to the 25th century BCE (Clark, 2016). Most famous is the Babylonian Imago Mundi, dated to the 6th century BCE (Delnero,
2017). It is the earliest known world map, though it is more symbolic than literal (e.g., it deliberately omits peoples such as the
Persians and Egyptians, who were well known to the Babylonians). It centres on Babylon on the Euphrates, surrounded by
a circular landmass including Assyria, Urartu (Armenia), and several cities, which in turn are surrounded by a ‘bitter river’
(Oceanus), with eight outlying regions (nagu) arranged around it in the shape of triangles, thereby forming a star.
Many other early maps – extending into history itself – maintain this centre-periphery orientation. For example, Anaximander
(c. 610–546 BCE) is credited with creating one of the rst literal world maps. Although no longer extant, surviving descriptions
depict it as circular with the known lands of the world grouped around the Mediterranean Sea at the centre (Couprie et al.,
2003). e sea was bisected by a line through Delphi – the world’s ‘gnomon’ (i.e., central axis) – with the northern half called
Europe and the southern half Asia. e habitable world – oikoumenê in Greek – consisted of small strips of land to the north
(Spain, Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor) and south (Egypt and Libya) of the sea, plus lands to the east (Palestine, Assyria, Persia,
and Arabia). Lands to the north were cold territories, inhabited by mythical people, and to the south, hot countries of ‘burnt’
people.
Interestingly, in many early maps, the cardinal directions were not located in the same spatial orientation as current maps.
As Gordon (1971) articulates, the genesis of specifying four directions is thought to have emerged by people identifying a
xed point on the horizon and then deriving the other three directions from that. is xed point was then given particular
signi cance, which in cartographic terms usually meant placing it at the top of the map as if it were the direction people were
facing. Crucially, given the symbolic signi cance of the East – signifying birth, life, renewal, etc., as argued above – it was
common to situate this at the top and West at the bottom. us, people o en construed themselves as facing East; in Hebrew,
for example, the term for East literally means ‘the front’ and the West ‘the back’.
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e Dance of East and West: A Brief History of an Unstable but Enduring Conceptual Partnership
ere are exceptions; ancient China placed more signi cance on the north-south axis, even before but especially a er their
discovery of polarity and invention of the compass, thought to be during the Han dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE) (Guan & Bai,
2021). Again though, intriguingly, this too di ered from contemporary orientations, being South bearing. But whichever way
the directions were located, a centre-periphery mode of understanding was the norm in pre-history and indeed also moving
into the epoch we call history. However, with this move into history, we also see the stirrings of the spatialisation of people.
Instead of the dominant centre-periphery mindset, as cultures became increasingly aware of the signi cance and location
of other peoples, there gradually emerged a view of oneself as existing in a particular direction relative to them. e rst
signi cant example of this is in the Classical age.
CLASSICAL AGE
Most scholars agree that perhaps the rst main case of WvE spatialisation – and certainly the most well-preserved, signi cant,
and in uential – arose in the Classical age. Speci cally, it occurred in the context of the wars between the Persians and the
Greeks. e most famous and consequential account of this con ict – and hence of this emerging WvE binary – comes from
Herodotus, the Greek historian and ethnographer, in his great work Histories. While the rivalry was long in the making, it
came to its conclusion in 480-79 BCE with the famous Greek victories over the Persian king Xerxes at Salamis and Plataea.
Herodotus posits real di erences between the Greeks and the Persians, but his analysis also subtly complicates these
distinctions, demonstrating how they are largely the product of convention and history rather than innate ethnic character
or environmental determinism. In doing so, Herodotus portrays East and West in perpetual, dynamic tension, constantly
informing and transforming each other through their interactions.
In purely geographical terms, the WvE divide forms an important structure for the narrative. In the beginning of the work,
Herodotus recounts the story of Homer’s Iliad and the war between the European Greeks and the Asian Trojans, explaining
that this was the beginning of the perpetual rivalry between East and West (I.4). For the Persians, this invasion of Troy was
a violation of natural geographic boundaries, ‘because the Persians claim Asia and the barbarian races dwelling in it as their
own, with Europe and the Greek states being, in their opinion, quite separate’ (I.4).
Yet Herodotus also blurs these rigid geographic borders. Speaking of Europe, Asia, and Libya, he wonders why ‘three distinct
women’s names should have been given to what is really a single land-mass’ (IV.45), raising the possibility that such continental
divisions might be merely conventional, rather than natural ( omas, 2000). Additionally, the stark polarities of North and
South reinforce the porosity of the WvE boundary. e Egyptians and Scythians live at the extreme edges of the world, the
former in the torrid South and the latter in the frigid North, and their opposite climates produce totally opposite peoples
(Hartog, 1988, pp. 15-19; Red eld, 1985, pp. 106-109). Whereas the northern and southern neighbours are completely
determined by their extreme environments, the WvE axis is a location of exchange, adaptation, and transformation. Herodotus
emphasises this fact by locating the start of the war in Lydia, on the frontier between Greece and Persia. Although Lydia
was technically in Asia Minor, the Lydian king Croesus was extremely interested in Greek culture, and his empire served
as a meeting point between the Persians and the Greeks (I.6-94). Political con icts over Lydia and the neighbouring Ionia
eventually ignited the war, and by beginning on the geographical and cultural margins, Herodotus blurred the boundaries
between East and West (Pelling, 1997, p. 56).
Herodotus also complicates the WvE dichotomy through his constant shi ing of perspectives. Although much of the book is
told from the viewpoint of the Greeks, the very rst and last episodes of the massive work are narrated through Persian eyes
(I.1 .; IX.122; see Flower, 2006, p. 274). He gives no hint that the actions or perspectives of the Persians are to be disparaged
(Isaac, 2004, p. 262). In the famous proem, he states that he wrote the work so that ‘[G]reat and marvellous deeds – some
displayed by the Greeks, some by barbarians – may not be without their glory’. is reference to the Persians as ‘barbarians’
should not be read as pejorative. In later centuries, the term had acquired a negative moral and cultural valence such that
Plutarch could criticise Herodotus as a ‘barbarophile’ (Isaac, 2004, p. 273). However, for Herodotus, the term is not an insult
but a self-conscious recognition of his own Greek perspective. In the second book, the historian notes that the Egyptians call
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EAST-WEST STUDIES 13 (2023/2024)
anyone who does not use their language a ‘barbarian’ (II.158), demonstrating the author’s sensitivity to each culture’s unique
vantage point. While Herodotus freely adopts a Hellenocentric framework, he also recognises that other peoples placed
themselves at the centre of the world.
Despite the complications and complexities that Herodotus introduces, he does point out substantial di erences between
the Greeks and Persians. One characteristic set of stereotypes, which informs much of Herodotus’ political theory, is that of
‘hard’ and ‘so ’ peoples (Red eld, 1985, pp. 110-113). In his narration of Xerxes’ invasion of Greece in 480 BCE, Herodotus
understands the war as a con ict between the hardy, virile Greeks and the so , languid Persians, whose luxury ultimately
led to their demise. When the Spartan general Pausanias captured the Persian camp upon Xerxes’ retreat, he sco ed at his
enemies’ lavish accommodations. He brought the Greek commanders to see the sumptuous tent of the Persian king ‘to show
[them] the folly of the Persians, who, living in this style, came to Greece to rob us of our poverty’ (IX.82).
e most important di erence between the Greeks and the Persians was their style of government. e Persians were ruled
by a powerful monarch, while the Greeks governed themselves in (mostly) democratic city-states. To take one example, the
contrast of Greek liberty and Persian despotism is clearly seen in the di ering atmospheres of political speech. Wary of the
king’s wrath, the Persian advisers must proceed lightly (III.33-36, VII.8-12), while Greek politicians are free to warn of the
dangers of tyranny and critique those in power (V.92, see Pelling, 1997, pp. 56-57; Rood, 2006, p. 276). Such themes have
led scholars to read Histories as a tale of the con ict between western free democracy and eastern autocratic despotism (see
Momigliano, 1979, p. 145 , and the literature cited in Isaac, 2004, pp. 257-261).
Although Herodotus acknowledges these very real di erences between East and West, he generally sees them as products
of custom and convention, not as parts of a static ethnic or cultural identity. He writes, ‘No race is so ready to adopt foreign
ways as the Persian’, and he notes that the Persians have adopted their clothing from the Medes, their military dress from
the Egyptians, and pederasty from the Greeks (I.135). e Persians were famous for their adaptability. Even the most
distinctive Persian characteristic, their despotic monarchy, was a product of intentional choice. When Cyrus’ son Darius re-
established the Persian kingdom, Herodotus recorded a sincere debate about whether it should be democratic, aristocratic,
or monarchical (III.80-82). Although Darius, the supporter of monarchy, eventually won out, there was no innate eastern
drive towards despotism in Persia. e monarchy was a product of historical development and conscious choice (Isaac, 2004,
p. 268; Gruen, 2011, p. 25). In Herodotus’ view, the Persians could have easily chosen another option.
For Herodotus, the Persians’ so ness and luxury were also products of convention. ey began as a hard people subjected
under the Medes, but Cyrus enticed them to revolt by contrasting the pleasures of a feast (symbolic of political independence)
with the agony of their forced labour (I.125-126). A er the Persians overthrew their Median masters, their morals so ened as
their empire grew, and by 480 BCE, they had devolved to the standard of the languid and luxurious Xerxes (Red eld, 1985,
pp. 110-113). e conclusion of Histories drives home this point. A er Xerxes’ expansionary designs had been rebu ed by
the Greeks at Salamis in 480 and Plataea in 479, the nal scene calls back to Xerxes’ grandfather Cyrus the Great. When Cyrus
was o ered the option of imperial expansion into ner lands, he declined, saying ‘So countries breed so men’ (IX.122).
He understood that a growing empire would bring wealth, comfort, and decline. rough their territorial conquests, Xerxes
and his father had eroded the Persian strength and discipline cultivated by their venerable ancestor. Cyrus’ aphorism sums
up Herodotus’ entire perspective on the Greek-Persian dynamic: as culture is malleable, every contact and con ict between
East and West contains dynamic, transformative potential.
Yet the nal episode is not really about the Persians. Herodotus intends it as a warning to the Greeks (Forsdyke, 2006, pp.
230-233). A er Athens played a leading role in defeating the Persian threat in 479, it rose to power over the next y years
and acquired hegemony over most of Greece (see ucydides I.89-117). Athens’ imperial ventures led to the outbreak of the
Peloponnesian War, which rent Hellas asunder. Herodotus lived through the beginning of the con ict, which began in 431,
and his work makes several references to the chaos wrought by the Athenian empire. By closing the work with an admonition
on the dangers of Persian imperialism, Herodotus re ects this message back on the Greeks, who are on the precipice of
destruction for exactly the same reasons. In the Persians, Herodotus sees a mirror image of his own people, and a warning
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for their future and what they may become. East and West may have their di erences, but they both fall prey to the same
temptations of human nature. In sum, in Herodotus’ distinction between the Greeks and Persians, we see one of the earliest
cases of the emerging East-West dichotomy. Herodotus mapped the Greek-Persian distinction onto the geographical axis of
East and West, but he did not hold this to be a rigid boundary. It was a boundary that was largely conventional and a porous
barrier that was constantly challenged by cultural exchange.
THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY
Our second historical tableau is set in 452 AD, just outside of Ravenna in Northern Italy, then capital of the Western Roman
Empire. An army of Huns, hailing from the Pontic Steppe near the Black Sea and under the command of the fearsome Attila,
is poised to pillage the city, just as they had sacked Aquileia and other towns further north along the Po Valley. ey were
met, not by an opposing Roman army – the emperor Valentinian III had ed the capital for refuge in southerly Rome, leaving
the city in panicked disarray – but rather by an unarmed delegation headed by Pope Leo (later dubbed ‘the Great’), who had
ridden north from Rome seeking to persuade the Huns to turn back. ‘By that time,’ Beckwith (2009) remarks, ‘Attila did
not need much persuading. His troops were su ering due to the famine and plague in the region, and an army sent by [the
Eastern Roman] Emperor Marcian had attacked the Huns’ homeland in Pannonia. Attila withdrew and returned home’ (p.
195). is near-sack of Ravenna marked the end of the rst invasion of the West by nomadic horsemen from Central Asia in
historical memory, but many more – the Avars, the Magyars, the Mongols, and the Turks – were to follow, setting a pattern
that dominated much of WvE relations for the next thousand years (Keay, 2009).
Attila, as we have said, was met by Leo, bishop of Rome, then the most senior Christian leader within the now o cially
Christian Roman empire. at Rome eventually adopted Christianity is, from a historical perspective, a deep irony, for
Christianity was itself an Eastern invader, born in the Empire’s far Eastern province of Palestine as a daughter of Hellenistic
Judaism. e Roman proconsul Pliny the Younger referred to earliest Christianity, which he was actively persecuting, as a
‘depraved, immoderate superstition [superstitionem pravam et immodicam]’ (1969, p. 288), while the rst-century historian
Tacitus, even as he decried the Emperor Nero’s brutal persecution of Christians in Rome, dismissed Christianity as ‘a
pernicious superstition [exitiabilis superstitio]’ (1937, 15.44, p. 283). Persecution notwithstanding, Christian missionary
e orts eventually bore fruit in the conversion of increasing numbers of Romans, including the upper classes. ese e orts
eventually culminated in Emperor Constantine’s extension of legal toleration to Christianity in 312 CE and nally in Emperor
eodosius’ formal establishment of Christianity – or at least those elements of it adhering to the confession of the Councils
of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381) – as the o cial imperial religion in 380 CE (MacMullen, 1984).
A further irony about the meeting of Leo and Attila presents itself: why was it a bishop rather than an emperor that rode out
to meet the advancing horde? Leo was no doubt an exceptional individual, the man for the moment, but he found an opening
to step into because of the increasing decrepitude and disarray of the Empire, particularly in the West. Since the death of
eodosius I in 394, the Empire had been ruled by two increasingly independent and even estranged Augusti, one with his
capital at Constantinople in the East, and the other with his capital at Ravenna in the West. In 450, the Western empire was
nearing its end, insofar as these matters can be cleanly demarcated. In 410, Rome itself had been sacked for the rst time in
its 900-year history; in 476, the last Western Roman emperor – at least until Charlemagne sought to renew the title – ttingly
named Augustulus (little Augustus) would be deposed by the Ostrogoth king, eodoric, who didn’t bother to adopt the
imperial style for himself (Heather, 2008).
is growing estrangement between Rome’s East and West set the empire’s two halves on decidedly di erent cultural
trajectories, with a legacy that looms large even today. In the West, the relative political strength of church leaders, especially
the Pope, provided a check on the growth of the state power, which contributed, in time, to the rise of constitutional principles
such as the rule of law or limited government (Fukuyama, 2011, pp. 418-434). Equally consequential was the decision of later
popes, notably Gregory the Great (r. 590-604 CE), to enforce an eccentric set of restrictions on cousin-marriage and divorce
that indirectly brought about the destruction of Europe’s tribal societies and their replacement by societies organised less by
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EAST-WEST STUDIES 13 (2023/2024)
kinship than by voluntary association via impersonal institutions such as law and the market (Fukuyama, 2011, pp. 73-87;
Henrich, 2020, pp. 155-192). Conversely, the Greek-speaking East and its cultural heirs (e.g., Russia), which were isolated
from these developments, found themselves set on a di erent course, more absolutist in government, more state-controlled
in religion, and less individualistic in psychology (Fukuyama, p. 419; Henrich, pp. 177, 225-240).
e growing identi cation of Christianity with the Roman Empire in this period accounts for the religious con ict at the
heart of much WvE interaction over the following 1500+ years, but in 450 or even centuries later, it would be a mistake to
think of the Church as even predominantly a ‘Western’ institution. Even as Paul and Peter were setting their sights on Greece
and Rome (cf. Acts 16:6-10), other missionaries, some of them also traditionally apostles of Jesus, such as omas and Jude,
were heading East, into Syriac-speaking regions in the Sassanid Empire (Dognini & Ramelli, 2001). (Syriac is a dialect of
Aramaic, which was likely Jesus’ rst language.)
e missions to the East bore enormous fruit in the Church’s rst several centuries, resulting in large and largely independent
Christian communities in Persia (King, 2018), and thence in Armenia (the rst polity to become o cially Christian with
the conversion of Tiridates III in 301) (Stopka, 2016), Georgia (Rapp, 2007), the Malabar coast of India (Dognini & Ramelli,
2001), and, by the 8th century, the T’ang Capital of Chang’an, where Syriac-speaking missionaries arrived roughly a millennium
before the rst Jesuit missions introduced Catholicism to the Ming court (King, 2018).
In 451, just a year before Leo met with Atilla, the fragile communion between the imperial and extra-imperial churches was
dealt a violent shock at the Council of Chalcedon, which circumscribed the ways of describing how Christ could be both
fully divine and yet also fully human. Many of the Churches outside the Roman Empire rejected this Council – and others
had rejected the similarly controversial Council of Ephesus (430), forming the ‘Nestorian’ Church of the East – resulting in
a schism that divided the ‘Western’ imperial churches, both Greek- and Latin-speaking, from their co-religionists in Persia,
Armenia, Egypt, Ethiopia, and beyond (Daley, 2018, pp. 174-232). ese so-called ‘Oriental Orthodox’ churches ourished
for centuries, though o en only as tolerated minorities within o cially Zoroastrian, Islamic, or (eventually) Communist
empires. In the early modern period, increasing persecution led to a steady decline in their numbers, but they still count
roughly 60 million adherents globally, most of them living outside of ‘the West’ as typically imagined today (Pew Research
Center, 2017).
In summary, the late-ancient world saw several important developments in the relations between and conceptualisation of
East and West, notably including the rise of Christianity as the dominant spiritual and moral force within the Roman Empire;
the growing divides between the eastern and western halves of Rome, reinforced by and reinforcing growing divisions
between eastern (‘Orthodox’) and western (‘Catholic’) Christians; and the rst of many invasions of the West by mounted
nomads from Central Asia.
THE MEDIEVAL WORLD
Our third tableau focuses on the warring tribes and empires in the medieval world. Here we leap ahead another eight hundred
years or so, to 1254 at the court of the Mongol Great Khan Möngke (r. 1251-59) in Karakorum, where a Flemish Franciscan
named William of Rubruck (sc. Willem van Ruysbroek) heads the Christian contingent – grudgingly joined by local priests
from the Church of the East – in a theological debate with Muslim clerics and Buddhist monks (Rubruck, 1900, p. 133).
William’s improbable journey into the heart of the Khanate neatly illustrates many of the critical dynamics of WvE relations
in the High Middle Ages, including Western Europe’s struggles with the Orthodox Byzantines; the civilisational con ict
between Christendom and the Islamic empires that girdled it; the violent eruption of a new nomadic force, the Mongols, out
of Central Eurasia; and underlying it all, the Silk Road, which knitted the continent together from Beijing to Paris.
William’s journey to the East began with his departure from Paris in 1248 on the Seventh Crusade (1248-1250), led by King
Louis IX to recapture Jerusalem from the reigning Islamic Ayyubid dynasty (Jackson, 2020). e Crusades were of course at
the heart of the cultural and frequently military rivalry of European Christianity and the Islamic world in the Middle Ages
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(Riley-Smith, 2005). In the seventh century, the Arab tribes, newly united (according to their later traditions) by the Prophet
Muhammad, burst into the predominantly Christian Levant and, over the course of roughly a century, created an empire
running continuously from Spain to the borders of China (Hodgson, 1974).
e fractious Islamic states, which now controlled much of Eurasia, generally tolerated Christians, Jews, and even Zoroastrians
in their midst, who were granted the protected, if decidedly second-class, legal status of dhimmitude, which subjected them to
additional taxes and restricted their ability to preach or even build and repair their places of worship (Friedman, 2003). (Later,
Frankish rulers in the Crusader states would impose similar legal disabilities on their Muslim subjects (Riley-Smith, 2005, p.
72).) By the late eleventh century, simmering European resentment boiled over in the face of reports of atrocities committed
by Arabs against Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem, which inspired a movement to retake the Holy Land for Christians (Riley-
Smith, 2005, pp. 1-23).
A er an overwhelming success in the First Crusade, which captured not only Jerusalem but nearly all of the Levant, the
European forces, overextended by the long distances and hampered by the reluctance of the suspicious Byzantines (a later
and prejudicial name, as it happens; the Greek dynasts still simply described themselves as ‘Romans’) to join the ght, were
slowly pushed back by the Arabs. Later Crusades consisted principally of rear-guard actions to stem the losses or largely futile
e orts to reverse them (Riley-Smith, 2005).
ese e orts frequently went awry, but never more disastrously than in the Fourth Crusade (1204), when a Frankish army,
angry at debts owed them by the Byzantine emperor Alexios V, whom they had helped install just a month before in a palace
coup, sacked Constantinople and installed a Frankish regime loyal to the Pope and the Western ‘Holy Roman Emperor’
(Riley-Smith, 2005, pp. 157-58). e Latin Empire of Constantinople was short lived (1204-1261) but still controlled the city
and its hinterland when William of Rubruck passed through in 1253 on his way to the Khanate.
e sack of Constantinople did irreparable damage to relations between the Latin and Greek halves of Roman Christianity,
widening a gulf that had been growing for centuries, driven by theological and political di erences, notably over the
primacy of the Pope, which most Greek Christians rejected or heavily quali ed. While the ‘o cial’ start of the Great Schism
between the Latins and the Greeks is typically dated to 1054 when the Pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople mutually
anathematised one another (cf. Chadwick, 2003, pp. 211-212), this event did much less to shape popular sentiment than the
shocking violence of the Fourth Crusade, which le the Byzantines intensely suspicious of further ‘assistance’ from the West
(Chadwick, 2003, pp. 235-237). e resulting isolation of Constantinople from Christian allies was a key factor in its eventual
fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, who then pressed deep into Europe, even besieging Vienna in 1529 and again in 1683.
Even as Latin and Greek Christians fought one another and the Islamic empires, the Mongols were rewriting the map of
Eurasia. Much as the Arabs had united under Muhammad and then conquered much of the known world, the Mongols,
newly united by Chinggis Khan in the 1220s, exploded out of Central Asia and toppled kingdom a er kingdom. By 1250, the
Khanate had united central Asia, captured most of northern China (leaving a rump Song dynasty to fester in the South until
the 1270s), raced across the (now) Russian steppe, and pressed into Europe, defeating a European coalition in Poland in 1241.
e Mongols only refrained from driving further into Europe because word reached them of the death of Ogedei, Chinggis’s
successor as Great Khan, prompting a mad scramble of generals back to Karakorum to vie for promotion (Beckwith, 2009,
pp. 333-345).
From Louis IX’s perch in the Crusader stronghold of Acre, news of the Mongols was both ominous and intriguing: they had
threatened Europe but now also hung like the sword of Damocles over the Abbasid Caliphate in the Middle East. Perhaps
they could be enlisted as allies against Islam? Despite the failure of several prior embassies to the Mongol court, rumours that
a key Mongol leader – Sartaq Khan, ruler of the Western half of the Golden Horde – had converted to Christianity inspired
Louis to make another, subtler overture by sending William of Rubruck as a Franciscan missionary to take stock of things
and report back (Rubruck, 1900, p. 10).
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ough William was not the rst medieval European visitor to the Far East, his is the earliest surviving eyewitness account
of such a journey, predating Marco Polo’s more famous and more southerly travels to the court of Kublai Khan at Beijing by
a generation (Polo, 1958). In William’s Itinerarium, we see an educated European attempting to make sense of a world that
had suddenly grown far larger and stranger than he had hitherto imagined; early on, he comments about his rst encounter
with Mongols (or Tatars, as they were known in Russia), ‘I really felt as if I were entering some other world’ (Rubruck, 1900,
p. 12). He o ers a vivid account of life in a Mongol camp, including reasonably accurate depictions of the making of yurts and
kumis, fermented mare’s milk (Rubruck, 1900, pp. 12-20). A er meeting Sarqat, he was passed along – much to his chagrin
and discomfort – progressively farther east, rst to Sarqat’s father, Baatu, and then by Baatu to the Great Khan Möngke
himself in impossibly remote Karakorum (Rubruck, 1900, p. 20, 90). He describes frequent encounters with representatives
of both ‘Nestorian’ Christianity (i.e., the Church of the East) and Armenian, ‘miaphysite’ Christians (Rubruck, pp. 42-48, i.a.),
all of whom he regarded as heretics and treated with considerable suspicion and disdain (which they frequently seem to have
returned), but with whom he also made a common cause in half-baked schemes to bring about the baptism of the various
Khans he visited or to confound their non-Christian rivals (Rubruck, 1900, pp. 94-95).
Particularly interesting are William’s impressions of Buddhists, as he is among the earliest Western Europeans to encounter
the Dharma. He typically refers to Buddhists as ‘idolaters’ (e.g., Rubruck, 1900, p. 66, i.a.), which re ects both typical Buddhist
worship and still more William’s own e orts to locate them on his familiar religious map, where ‘Christian’, ‘Jew’, ‘heretic’ (a
category that for most medieval Christians included Islam), and ‘idolater’ or ‘pagan’ exhausted the terrain (e.g., Augustine,
1865, 5.9–6.11). However, he also frequently refers to Buddhists as ‘Tuins’, which seems to re ect the Chinese epithet, t’ao-
ren, or ‘men of the Way’ (Rubruck, 1900, p. 78) and he occasionally describes them in vivid detail: ‘All the priests of the
idolaters shave their heads, and are dressed in sa ron color... Wherever they go, they have in their hands a string of one or
two hundred beads, like our rosaries, and they always repeat these words, on mani baccam, which is “God, thou knowest”,
as one interpreted it to me’ (1900, p. 70). Although the interpretation he was given is almost certainly spurious, the picture
of a sa ron-clad monk ngering his beads and chanting the traditional mantra ‘o
ṃ
m
a
ṇ
ipad
m
e hū
ṃ
’ is highly plausible (cf.
Studholme, 2002).
William described Karakorum as a cosmopolitan city, with quarters for the ‘Saracen’ (=Muslim) and ‘Cathayan’ (= Chinese)
population, twelve Buddhist temples, two mosques, and one (Nestorian) church (1900, p. 127). During his stay in this city,
the Great Khan arranged a debate among the city’s Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian clerics. While William’s account of
this episode is clearly partial (both incomplete and biased), there are hints of genuine interreligious encounter, as in the
Buddhists’ critique of the Christian and Muslim commitment to monotheism and creation ex nihilo: ‘Fools say that there
is only one God, but the wise that there are many’ (Rubruck, 1900, p. 141). is debate is perhaps most interesting for what
made it possible, namely the Khan’s ambivalence towards all three of the dominant religions in his newly-taken territories.
While most of the Mongol rulers – in the Golden Horde, the Il-Khanate in the Middle East, the Mughals in India – eventually
converted to Islam, some in the thirteenth century also adopted Buddhism, such as the emperors of the Yuan Dynasty in
China, but also, farther west, Hulegu Khan, founder of the Il-Khanate in former Persian and Abbasid territory, who was ‘a
Buddhist with two Nestorian Christian wives (Hildinger, 1997, p. 148; Beckwith, 2009, p. 339). In the same period, Christian
missionaries of many confessions also assiduously sought the Khans’ conversion, as William’s journey attests. Had the rulers
of the Ilkhanate become durably Buddhist or those of the Golden Horde adopted Christianity, the subsequent history of
Eurasia, and ipso facto the wider world, might well have been altogether di erent.
Although William’s journey was deeply enmeshed in his age’s many overlapping con icts – of Western Europe with the
Byzantines, of Christendom with Islam, of all the above and many others with the Mongols – it was ultimately made possible
by peaceful networks of trade and cultural exchange, the fabled Silk Road, that for centuries linked East Asia to the Levant and
thence to Europe via a slender thread of Central Asian oasis towns, such as Samarkand, Merv, and Bukhara (cf. Frankopan,
2016; Hansen, 2012). In historical terms, far more signi cant than the movement of armies over these caravan routes in
the Middle Ages was the movement of goods, ideas, and pathogens from the far East, which in this period was the richest,
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e Dance of East and West: A Brief History of an Unstable but Enduring Conceptual Partnership
most populous, and technologically most advanced region in the world, to the receptive West: ‘Arabic’ numerals (actually
developed in India), gunpowder, paper, and the compass, along with the Black Death, made their way from Asia to Europe,
where they were re ned and widely adopted, making possible the revolutionary developments of the early modern period.
By the high Middle Ages, relations between East and West had once again been profoundly reshaped by ideological and
geopolitical developments. Tensions between Orthodox and Catholic Christians reached fever pitch a er the sack of
Constantinople in 1204 and contributed in no small measure to the ultimate failure of the Crusades, which were but one
front in the centuries-long con ict between Islamic and Christian dominions, while the rise of the Mongols’ Eurasian empire
spelled not only conquest but also unprecedented exchange along trade routes such as the Silk Road.
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Our next era of interest is the European Enlightenment, of which 1772 can be considered the high-water mark. at year
witnessed the publication of the nal volumes of the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des
Métiers [Encyclopedia, or Reasoned Dictionary of the Sciences, the Arts, and the Professions]. e Encyclopédie had begun
with modest ambitions more than two decades earlier, but under the editorial supervision of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond
d’Alembert, it eventually lled thirty-three large volumes with more than 74,000 articles, 2,800 engravings, and copious other
materials (see Brewer, 2011, for an overview). As a publishing and business venture, the Encyclopédie was ambitious. As an
intellectual project, it was positively audacious. e preface to the rst volume had promised that it would expose ‘as much as
is possible, the order and sequence of human knowledge’ as well as ‘the body and substance’ of every science and art. In short,
it aspired to give an overview of all human knowledge, including knowledge of civilisations beyond Europe.
For all its aspirations to universality, the Encyclopédie was the undertaking of a particular community of French intellectuals.
ese philosophes had diverse interests and convictions, but they had all been shaped by a literary culture that had an endless
appetite for books and letters that recounted voyages to the East. ere was a great deal of this kind of literature. By the
second half of the eighteenth century, Europeans had been reporting on their encounters in the East for centuries. Western
Europeans had long interacted with the civilisations of the eastern Mediterranean. Starting in the late eenth century,
the Portuguese ventured farther east and opened up trade routes to India and China. By the time of the publication of the
Encyclopédie, the Jesuits had been established in China for more than two centuries.
e Encyclopédistes were hardly unique in their fascination with the East. A keen interest in the ancient civilisations of
the Near East (Levant) and Far East (Orient) was a hallmark of the Enlightenment as a whole (Osterhammel, 2018). e
Encylopédie included thousands of articles – long and short – devoted to describing the geography, culture, religion, and
commerce of di erent regions of the world. Many of these articles provided information – or sometimes misinformation
– about the peoples and lands of Asia. e Encyclopédistes relied on accounts that were o en inaccurate, but they tried to
communicate information as accurately as possible. At the same time, they attempted to compare Asian religions, polities,
and customs with European ones. ey o en used these comparisons to condemn barbarism in the East and the West
(Harvey, 2012). is was one of the main reasons they undertook these comparisons. At least since at least the publication of
Montesquieu’s Persian Letters in 1721, Enlightenment thinkers had made a habit of using real or imagined Eastern observers
to highlight the failings of their nearer neighbours. In many of these comparisons, the peoples of the East seemed more
civilised than those of the West.
e text of the Encyclopédie o en displayed admiration for the civilisations of Asia despite the fact that ‘the peoples of the
vast continent are little known to us’ (section on Asie). e entry on ‘China’ (Chine), for example, calls that country ‘the most
populated and best cultivated country in the world’. e author notes that the Chinese had employed paper, printing, and
gunpowder long before those inventions were known in Europe. e Encyclopédistes were particularly enamoured with the
Chinese state, which they praised as being ‘very gentle’ in its dealings with the people. ey especially appreciated the order
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of Mandarins (Mandarine) who received their posts based on merit rather than birth and were accordingly known for their
‘intelligence and fairness’. e Mandarines were even permitted to correct the Emperor when he erred. At the same time,
although the Chinese were undoubtedly the most advanced in Asia and had an e cient government, they were perceived as
lacking the knack for invention and discovery that so distinguished Europe. Diderot wrote, ‘in general, the spirit of the Orient
is more tranquil, more lazy, more concerned with essential needs’ than that of the dynamic, entrepreneurial West.
e Encyclopédia’s evaluation of India was similarly mixed. e author of its entry (Inde), the proli c Chevalier Louis de
Jaucourt, noted that the sciences had been established in India much earlier than in Europe or even Egypt. e Indians
had excelled from ancient times in astronomy, mathematics, and manufacturing. ey were even the inventors of the noble
game of chess. Tragically, Jaucourt wrote, Indian science had slipped from its preeminent position even as their religion
degenerated from its original theism into a superstitious polytheism. ey had little ability to arrest this slide. e oppressive
climate had made them timid and indolent. Moreover, they su ered from a tyrannical form of government that le the weak
with no recourse against the strong.
In their evaluations of the East, the Encyclopédistes repeatedly hit on a few themes. ey were very interested in Eastern
manufactured goods – especially textiles – that o en surpassed those produced in the West. ey were also convinced that
the standard Eastern form of government was ‘despotism’, as evidenced by the tyrannical governments of ‘Turkey, the Mughal
Empire, Japan, Persia, and nearly all of Asia’. e despotic vesting of all power in a single ruler reduced the rest of a nation’s
citizens to a single rank – that of slaves. is tyrannical polity necessarily had harmful e ects on the population, leaving
them ‘timid and dejected’ (Despotisme). However, they did not necessarily attribute the prevalence of despotism to distinctive
features of Asian psychology, nor did they think despotism the universal condition of Asian peoples. China was the great
exception to the rule of Eastern despotism.
e Encyclopédistes were also interested in the moral condition of the Asian peoples. While many Europeans stereotyped
the East as mired in a decadent luxury, the Encyclopédie was ambivalent about whether this was an essential feature of Asia.
It notes a pattern in which great empires of the East and West had risen from simplicity, grown despotic and decadent over
time, and then fallen into ruin. However, it suggests that bad government was more to blame than luxury. e author of the
entry on ‘luxury’ (Luxe) wrote, ‘If to prove to me the dangers of luxury, you were to cite Asia plunged into luxury, misery, and
vices, I would ask that you show to me in Asia, China excepted, a single nation where the government was concerned with
the morals and happiness of the majority of its subjects’. Bad government was more to blame for the weakness of the East than
predilection for leisure and consumption.
Overall, the Encyclopédie suggests that the Enlightenment view of the East was mixed and inconsistent. e philosophes drew
on old stereotypes of the Asian peoples as indolent and reduced to slavery by despotic government, but they also recognised
the intellectual achievements of Chinese, Indian, and Arab scholars in elds such as philosophy, religion, and mathematics.
ey also could not help but admire the sophistication of Asian manufactured goods such as silks. ey generally did not
think that cultural di erences between the East and the West were inevitable. Moreover, the Encyclopédistes frequently used
the East as a mirror that could reveal the blemishes of European states.
Perhaps the most striking feature of the Encyclopédie’s thinking about the East is the assumption that the East is fundamentally
intelligible. At least parts of the East were tormented by despotism and decadence, but this condition could be understood
as the result of bad governance, something Europeans were very familiar with, and perhaps an unfavourable climate. At the
same time, the comparativists of the Encyclopédie were conscious that they were writing about civilisations that were o en
older and more sophisticated than their own. e comparison between East and West o en turned up much to admire. is
admiration nds resonance in our nal era of interest, namely the Cold War.
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THE COLD WAR
Our last era of interest brings us into contemporary times, in which the dizzying pace of change has generated truly shape-
shi ing and complex WvE dynamics. Perhaps these are exempli ed best by a nation such as South Korea, which over recent
decades has been positioned as both Western and Eastern to an extent. In terms of focusing our attention more precisely, we
might select 1988 as an especially noteworthy historical moment for the nation. First, though, it is worth giving some brief
historical context to this era and the signi cance of South Korea. In that respect, the most salient reference point is the Cold
War, arguably the most consequential and emblematic event in modern times in terms of WvE dynamics. Indeed, the war
itself is o en interpreted primarily through the lens of such dynamics, being understood as a conquest between the ‘Western
bloc’ (i.e., the USA and its allies) and the ‘Eastern bloc’ (i.e., the Soviet Union and its allies).
However, this very interpretation shows how complicated these dynamics are. is point is made most vividly by considering
the status of the Soviet Union. Essentially, whether this is deemed a Western power, an Eastern power, or neither, has been
a perennial topic of debate – both within and outside the Soviet Union – and indeed still is (White et al., 2010). It is beyond
our scope here to drill into the nuances of this debate, but the most salient point here is simply that it exists: there is no
way to de nitively categorise the Soviet Union – nor the post-Soviet states – as East or West. is very fact highlights the
shi ing and contentious nature of the WvE polarity, both through history and in the present. In any case, complexities of the
Soviet Union notwithstanding, the Cold War involved an extensive period of hostilities between the Western and Eastern
blocs, usually considered as spanning the announcement of the Truman doctrine in March 1947 (i.e., in which the primary
stated foreign policy goal of the US was to contain Soviet geopolitical expansion) to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in
December 1991 (Gaddis, 2005).
What is the signi cance of South Korea here? e territory of the Korean peninsula has a long and complex history, the details
of which are beyond our scope here. However, in terms of its signi cance to our WvE considerations, the following facts are
especially salient (see e.g., Buzo, 2016). e peninsula had been united as one kingdom from the 7th century onwards, ruled
rst by the Goryeo dynasty (918-1392), then the Joseon dynasty (1392-1897), before becoming the Korean Empire (1897-
1910). However, in 1910, the Koran Empire was annexed into the Empire of Japan, a period of rule that lasted until Japan’s
surrender at the end of World War II (September 1945). Crucially, at this point, the two great allied powers, the USA and the
Soviet Union, agreed to divide Korea along the 38th parallel into two zones of occupation, with the former administering the
South and the latter the North.
is was initially intended as a temporary arrangement (Loth, 2004). However, as Cold War tensions between the USA
and the Soviet Union began to take root, by 1948 the occupied zones had become sovereign states: in the North, backed by
the Soviets, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was established by Kim Il-Sung as a communist state; conversely, in
the South, with the support of the USA, the Republic of Korea was founded by the authoritarian leader Syngman Rhee as a
capitalist state. In this way, tensions between North and South became emblematic of, and indeed a proxy for, the Cold War
hostilities between the USA and the Soviet Union. ese troubles then of course came to a head with the Korean War, which
began on 25th June 1950, when the North invaded the South, and continued until the armistice on 27th July 1953, a tense
and fragile agreement that is still in place today (but which is not actually a formal peace treaty, meaning the countries are
technically still at war).
Such are some of the basic historical facts and recent context regarding South Korea. Most relevant here, however, is its
ambiguous status regarding WvE dynamics. Essentially, from certain perspectives, it could be regarded as an Eastern country.
is is certainly so geographically; indeed, as an East Asian nation, it is almost prototypically Eastern (compared to other
countries, which while technically in the geographic East are closer to the periphery). Moreover, it is also o en considered
culturally and socially Eastern, as we discuss further below. Yet, the relevance of discussing the Cold War is that, in that
historical period at least, as a capitalist state backed by the USA, South Korea was an integral part of the Western bloc.
Likewise, it is central to an aggregation historically used as a synonym for the Western bloc, namely the ‘ rst world’, de ned
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EAST-WEST STUDIES 13 (2023/2024)
by Webster as ‘the highly developed industrialised nations o en considered the westernised countries of the world’. is
is in contrast to the ‘second world’ of the Eastern bloc, and the ‘third world’ (those countries in neither bloc), a taxonomy
rst proposed by French demographer Alfred Sauvy in 1952. Over time though, the taxonomy became more contentious,
especially in the way – perhaps inevitably, given the nomenclature – the labels seemed to imply a ranking, particularly
economically, whereby the First World came to imply countries that were more a uent and prosperous while the ird
World became a signi er for poorer, less ‘developed’ countries, especially in Africa. As a result, towards the end of the 20th
century, this framework fell out of favour, replaced by distinctions such as ‘developed’ versus ‘developing’ countries, which
took over the mantle of First and ird World categories, respectively (with Second World countries falling into either, as
appropriate). However, this too has its critics, not least because deeming a country developed or otherwise still brings the
kind of normative judgement and symbolic baggage associated with the First and ird World labels (Lomas, 2023). In any
case, South Korea remains a core member of groupings that have been vested with similar meanings to the ‘ rst world’, such
as the G20 (a forum of most of the world’s largest economies, though this also includes Russia, so does not map neatly onto
the rst and second world distinction).
If we were to view the Cold War through the prism of the Western bloc achieving victory at the expense of the Eastern bloc,
South Korea is certainly among the winners. is was the reason for citing 1988 as an especially meaningful year in these
dynamics. is is of course one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, which marked the e ective end of the Cold War in the
20th century (even if recent events involving Russia have le people wondering whether the war has indeed ended). Nineteen
eighty-eight was the year South Korea hosted the 24th Summer Olympics, widely viewed and celebrated as the culmination
and worldwide recognition of the ‘economic miracle’ that the country had achieved over recent years, a form of ‘coming out
party’ for the nation (Bridges, 2008).
Indeed, its rise was remarkable, being among the fastest-growing global economies from the early 1960s to the late 1990s,
and indeed recording the world’s very fastest rise in average GDP per capita between 1980 and 1990, with World Bank data
showing an annual growth rate of 8.63% (compared to the USA, for example, at only 2.37%). As a result, it was heralded as
one of the four ‘Asian Tiger’ economies (alongside Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan). Moreover, its economic prosperity
continues to this day. e country was one of the few to avoid a recession following the 2008 nancial crisis, and in 2023
ranked 6th worldwide in the number of companies on the Fortune 500 with 18 companies (headed by Samsung Electronics,
ranked 25th). us, South Korea is certainly a leading light of the industrialised world, and, moreover, in some respects –
given its previous standing as part of the Western bloc – is o en perceived as a relatively Westernised nation (Jeong, 2017).
However, as this paper has illustrated, East and West are relative terms. us, when compared to certain nations, such as
North Korea, South Korea may be judged as comparatively Western, but positioned in contrast to nations such as the USA,
it tends to be coded as distinctly Eastern. ere are many such examples, for instance, in the myriad business articles that
seek to compare occupational cultures among companies in South Korea and the USA. In these, we o en encounter various
stereotypes pertaining to WvE, though these appraisals can be both positive and negative as well as both traditional (i.e., with
long-standing historical themes) and modern (i.e., trends emerging more recently).
On the negative side of the ledger, for instance, are articles bemoaning a perceived ‘toxic work culture’ in South Korea.
Khameneh (2022), for instance, writes that ‘Korean corporate culture’ is characterised by ‘long hours, su ocating hierarchy,
and monotonous tasks’, in which ‘gapjil, the Korean word for authoritarian, toxic relationship dynamics, is embedded in
the culture of the country’s industrial giants’ (paragraph 4). Indeed, this may not necessarily be an unfounded stereotype. A
survey of South Koreans from 2021 showed that over 80% of respondents deemed gapjil a serious social problem (Yonhap,
2021). Making a similar point, the Economist (2021) accused South Korea of having a ‘notoriously punishing’ work culture,
which it also linked to gapjil, suggesting it licensed ‘the authoritarian attitude of senior managers who abuse their power
to shout at underlings, insist on unpaid all-nighters and weekend work, assign personal errands, and force juniors to go
out drinking for hours upon hours’ (paragraph 2). To the latter point, another poll highlighted an issue with the Korean
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e Dance of East and West: A Brief History of an Unstable but Enduring Conceptual Partnership
tradition of hoeshik, mandatory a er-work meal and drink gatherings, about which 95% of o ce-employee respondents
expressed relief at not having to attend due to COVID-19 restrictions (Choi, 2022). In such analyses, even if accurate, we
might nevertheless discern the kind of traditional ‘Orientalist’ stereotypes identi ed by Said (1979), such as a relative lack
of individual freedom and autonomy that Eastern cultures – as seemingly more ‘collectivist’ – are frequently thought to be
characterised by.
However, generalisations that are far more complimentary and more modern are also found. An article in Nature, for example,
attributes South Korean global leadership in information technologies to a top-down innovation system that promotes ‘close
collaboration between government, industry, and the academic community in the process of nation building’ (Dayton,
2020, paragraph 17). Similarly, an article by Roll (2021) sought to explain the notion of ‘hallyu’ – a Chinese term meaning
‘Korean wave’, which refers to the phenomenal growth and worldwide popularity of South Korean products and culture –
with reference to the nation’s express goal to develop its ‘so power’ and be a leading exporter of popular culture as well as
features such as ‘superior quality, cutting edge designs, and a contemporary feel for the products and services’ (paragraph 14).
Indeed, such qualities have been associated with East Asian cultures more broadly, where states such as Japan and Taiwan
have likewise developed particular reputations for high-end technological innovation and expertise. In that respect, we might
observe a new wave of stereotypes where Eastern cultures are praised as being especially technologically advanced, excelling
in intelligence, creativity, and design. However, there is still a trend of connecting such attributes to more traditional features
of such societies. Japanese companies such as Toyota have been celebrated for pioneering occupational philosophies such as
heijunka, described as a ‘lean’ production method that aims to ‘elegantly’ meet demand by reducing waste (Black, 2007). In
turn, heijunka has been linked to Zen philosophy and practice, which similarly valorises this kind of sparse and e cient yet
elegant and harmonious aesthetic and way of living (Hutchinson & Liao, 2009; Lomas et al., 2017).
ese are, of course, but a few select examples of contemporary stereotypes that are attached to Eastern cultures such as Japan
and South Korea in the modern age. Similarly, our primary focus in this nal section on South Korea is also but one example
of the complexities of WvE dynamics in recent years. However, such selectivity and partiality is a key point here. As we have
sought to demonstrate throughout the article, there are many ways of conceptualising and understanding WvE distinctions.
As such, we should be wary of merely viewing WvE di erences through the lens of any one comparison or era, and instead
be attentive to the incredible dynamic complexity of this binary.
CONCLUSION
is article has argued that the WvE distinction has been a salient feature of human cultural development from time
immemorial, with increasing importance over the past 2,500 years or so. We began in the era of pre-history, w here etymological
analyses indicated that these concepts mainly functioned as mere spatial orientation terms related to the passage of the sun,
with East and West associated with sunrise and sunset, respectively. It was not until around the 5th century BCE that people
began to regard themselves as being in either the East or West, and to attach markers of personal identity and meaning to
these locations. Our rst historical epoch then focused on what is widely considered to be the emergence of this kind of
spatialised understanding, namely the wars between the Greeks and the Persians. However, even though Herodotus drew
clear distinctions between the two peoples, he constantly subverts the idea of a static East-West dichotomy; while pointing out
legitimate di erences, he presents these disparities between Greeks and Persians as contingent and mutable and establishes
the East-West axis as one of transformation and exchange.
e second era witnessed the rise of Christianity as a dominant cultural form across much of Eurasia, one whose fractiousness,
already on display in the 5th century, helps to explain some important cultural variations between Western Europe and its
neighbours, both in the Orthodox world and farther East. In the third era, we found Eurasia as a stage for clashing armies
and vibrant trade, as Latin crusaders vied with Orthodox Byzantines, both battled Islamic armies, and all the rest looked
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EAST-WEST STUDIES 13 (2023/2024)
with trepidation on the explosion of the Mongols from Central Asia. e fourth era saw the Europeans of the Enlightenment
trying to systematise their knowledge of the East following centuries of increasing interaction, nding much to admire and
some things to criticise. Finally, we turned our attention to the present day, where we focused in particular on South Korea in
the Cold War and its a ermath as emblematic of the complexities and tensions of WvE dynamics in the modern era.
It is hoped that this analysis will deepen and enrich the understanding and discourse around WvE in contemporary scholarship.
While Said’s analysis of Orientalism is rightly still in uential and relevant, his analysis – which mainly attends to the issues
surrounding the relationship between Western Europe and the East in the 19th century – is only one part of the WvE story. As
we have seen, the WvE polarity is a complex and contested binary, whose boundaries and contours have constantly shi ed,
with East and West being relative terms (e.g., the ancient Greeks were West compared to the Persians, but East in contrast to
Rome). Indeed, this dynamic tension between the polarity has been a continual source of creation, innovation, and change,
whether ideas about government, Nestorian Christianity, European gunpowder, or Toyota automobiles. As such, this paper
will ideally encourage scholars to adopt a more subtle and nuanced understanding of its dynamics, to avoid the conventional
stereotypes that o en haunt discourse in this area (e.g., simplistically painting the West as individualistic and the East as
collectivistic) and to engage more thoughtfully and creatively with this fundamental distinction that remains – despite all its
issues – a central way of parsing and conceptualising the world in which we live.
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