The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

In the preface to The Silk Roads, his new world history, Oxford historian Peter Frankopan refers to and quotes in part a passage from anthropologist Eric Wolf's 1982 Europe and the People without History:

[We have been taught, inside the classroom and outside of it, that there exists an entity called the West, and that one can think of this West as a society and civilization independent of and in opposition to other societies and civilizations. Many of us even grew up believing that this West has a genealogy, according to which] ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution. Industry, crossed with democracy, in turn yielded the United States, embodying the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.