If an Oxford don had set out in the 1960s on the formidable task of
writing a history of the world in the last millennium,
almost certainly his main theme would have been the rise to
dominance of the West, especially in the areas of science, politics,
and economic and military power. This would have been true no matter
which side he supported in the great ideological divide of the Cold
War. Both the political Left and the Right had little doubt the West
was the vanguard of history. The major Asian civilizations might
have held vastly greater populations but for at least five hundred
out of the past thousand years they had been
on the receiving end of the great historical movements of the era rather than out in front, setting
the pace.

In the Sixties, the history of Asia would have been written as
something of a tragedy, a story of opportunities lost, of the
closing of minds, of political weakness and disintegration. China,
in particular, would have been treated as a sorry case, a country
that began the millennium technologically advanced, wealthy,
politically and militarily powerful, keenly interested in navigation
and exploration, but which ended the era as one of the most backward
countries in the world on almost every one of these scores, its
population decimated by famine and ruled by an inept tyranny. In
contrast, the small fiefdoms that constituted Christendom in the
eleventh century had risen to become masters of the world,