This book investigates the major changes in world history and world economy during the past five hundred years and explains to what extent world forces have been responsible for shaping both past and present. Its underlying theme is the struggle for power in which, since the sixteenth century, the West has prevailed. Many of the problems of the contemporary world - including terrorism - are the legacy of the period of Western domination. Until the rise of the West, and its incomparable impact on every branch of human activity, the centre of the world has been in Asia. By the nineteenth...

In an ever-shrinking world, the need for a global perspective in dealing with the modern world has become acute. This book attempts to provide such a perspective by investigating the major changes in geopolitics and world economy during the past 500 years. However compact, it enables us to understand the present unravelling of Communism and the growing challenge from Asia to Western Superiority. It is shown that in so many ways the problems of the contemporary world spring from the unprecedented era of western domination, which the non-western world is now trying to unlive.