“ [World history since 1500 is] a race between the West’s growing power to molest the rest of the world and the increasingly desperate efforts of other peoples to stave Westerners off, either by clinging more strenuously than before to their peculiar cultural inheritance or, when that failed, by appropriating aspects of Western civilization – especially technology – in the hope ofthereby finding means to preserve their local autonomy.
William Hardy McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community: With a Retrospective Essay (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 652.
