The division of the peoples of the globe into ‘West’ and ‘East’ is an ancient one, as is what the fifth-century Greek historian Herodotus called the ‘perpetual enmity’ between the two. As ancient Greece gave way to ancient Rome, and Rome itself divided into a western and eastern half, so the word ‘West’ was gradually replaced by the geographically and culturally more specific ‘Europe’, leaving everything east of the Dardanelles, more or less, to the ‘East’. By the early 19th century, however, large parts of Europe – including Greece itself – had for long been absorbed into the very ‘Eastern’ Ottoman Empire, and the Europeans had spread themselves out across much of the globe. 

The word ‘West’, as Georgios Varouxakis argues in his engaging and very detailed genealogy of the term, was first elaborated in the 1830s by the ‘positivist’ social theorist and philosopher Auguste Comte to describe both ‘most of the peoples of Europe’ and their overseas settler populations in North and South America and Australasia. There is an irony in this, as the ‘West’ has now become largely associated with European ‘high imperialism’. Comte, however, was virulently anti-imperialist and looked forward to the final union of the entire human race in an ‘altruistic peaceful federation’ – of which the ‘Western Republic’ was to be but one, if also the most advanced, part. Comte and his followers and admirers, of whom there have been a great many – the positivists’ motto ‘Order and Progress’ famously appears at the centre of the Brazilian flag – saw the concept of the ‘West’ as a means of reaching beyond the limits imposed by the new nation-state, also a creation of the 19th century, which would stop short of anything so amorphous as ‘humanity’. 

At the same time, with the rapid shrinkage of the Ottoman Empire, the ‘East’, a similarly slippery all-embracing term, became largely if not always consistently applied to Russia. No longer what Montesquieu had once described as that part of Europe to which the tsar, Peter the Great, had given ‘European