Once upon a time there was the west, winner of history's race to modernity, and there were the rest, trying to catch up. Every society was thought to make the same journey, at greater or lesser speed, from hidebound tradition to the bright promise of industrial modernity and unrestricted economic growth. If it did not, something had gone wrong: it might be excessive attachment to (non-Christian) religions and creeds, or to pre-modern sources of loyalty such as the family and the tribe. Women were a litmus test: where their feet were bound or heads covered, there was little hope for their communities without radical change delivered by western-oriented saviours. Secularism, urbanisation and market forces would propel them forward.

During the cold war, fleshing out this self-congratulatory model kept academics busy. According to the historians, the west owed its ascent not just to anything as recent or crudely violent as 19th-century colonial expansion or the preceding industrial revolution but to other, more venerable institutions and values. For some, the west's ascent was thanks to a 17th-century "scientific revolution" - the moment at which humanity supposedly asserted its claim to knowledge over the censorious power of religious authorities; for others, it was the rise of capitalist bank ing, perhaps even the emergence of a church-state balance of powers centuries before.