Similar to the examples of South Asia, also the Japanese tried to reinvent a distorted idea of a Christian Europe by turning Shinto into a politicized church, yes even the ‘Tomb of Jesus Christ’, like in Kashmir during the same period was discovered in Japan. Religious discourse as seen is also an essential component of totalitarianism. The transformation paid off handsomely. Japan remained uncolonized and quickly became a great power, one that managed, in 1905, to defeat Russia in a modern war. Indeed, Tolstoy described the Japanese victory as a triumph of Western materialism over Russia's Asiatic soul. Also Hitler, in his table talk, was of the opinion that “American civilization is of a purely mechanized nature” ironic in the light of the fact that Germans were certainly not much behind when it came to mechanics and science.

In fact soon after two Jumbo Jets brought the World Trade Center down in a blaze, videotapes went on sale in China showing the horrific highlights, spliced together with scenes from Hollywood disaster movies. It was as though the real thing­ two flaming skyscrapers collapsing on thousands of people­ were not dramatic enough, and only fantasy could capture the true flavor of such catastrophes, which most of us know only from the movies.

The deliberate conflation of reality and fantasy left an impression that the victims were not real human beings, but actors. And most were kept invisible anyway by the uncharacteristic modesty of the television networks, which refused to show suffering in close-up. For at least a few seconds, unreality was the impression many people got when they switched on their television sets. To pretend it wasn't real was a convenient way of distancing oneself from the horror. For a distressingly large number of people, not only in China, the idea that this was a kind of movie, a purely imaginary event, an act of theater, also made it easier to feel something more sinister. The destruction of the towers-symbols of U.S. power and wealth; symbols of imperial, global, capitalist dominance: symbols of New York City, our contemporary Babylon; symbols of everything American that people both hate and long for-the destruction of all that, in less than two hours, gave some people, not only in China, a feeling of deep satisfaction. The West, to many Asians, as I illustrated in early 2000 on hand of developments in South Asia also means colonialism.

Since the nineteenth century, when China was humiliated in the Opium War, educated Japanese realized that national survival depended on careful study and emulation of the ideas and technology that gave the Western colonial powers their advantages. Never had a great nation embarked on such a radical transformation as Japan between the 1850s and the 1910s. The main slogan of the Meiji period (1868-1912) was Bxnrnei Kaika, “Civilization and Enlightenment”-that is, Western civilization and enlightenment. Everything Western, from natural science to literary realism, was hungrily soaked up by Japanese intellectuals. European dress, Prussian constitutional law, British naval strategies, German philosophy, American cinema, French architecture, and much, were taken over and adapted. The above has been published on the internet as “The Matrix of Modernist Religions and Nationalism P.1”

From my research for part 1 end 1990’s it also was clear to me that not only did the West influence the East end 19th century the focus of part 1, earlier the East had clearly influenced the West much more than most scholars during the 20th century were willing to admit. In fact an eye-opener for me was when the 1995 Civilizations and World Systems was published, where among others William H. McNeill mentioned on p. 314:

“Analogous to the far better known opening of the oceans by European seamen after 1500. Arabia together with the oases and deserts of central Asia, the Steppelands to their north and sub-Saharan Africa were the regions most powerfully affected ... [and] were all brought into far more intimate contact with the established centers of civilized life - primarily with the Middle East and China than had been possible before. As a result, between about 500 and 1000 an intensified world system emerged.”

How much the legacy of Aryanism the object of the study I completed in 2000, still permeated scholarship during the earlier part of the 20th century is also evidenced by the fact that it took until that same year for Henry Reynolds to conclude from his research in Australia that: “Afro-Asian pioneers also made a  contribution to the development of  the West, which had never been fairly or fully acknowledged. It seemed as if the legend of the Western pioneer had been so central to the development of Western identity and Western theories of the Rise of the West that there was no discursive space left for Eastern pioneers. If included they would complicate the story, undermine white heroism, dim the glory. If 'non-whites' could be shown to have displayed the same skills and attributes as whites, then the Western pioneers could possible be diminished” (Black Pioneers, 2000).

So also it has been known that what we usually think of as the Italian Renaissance and Leonardo da Vinci who insisted that painting should be based on mathematics, especially geometry and optics, that  the geometry and optics upon which Da Vinci relied were developed, and passed on, by the Middle Eastern and North African Muslims.

In fact the traditional assumption that the baton of global power was subsequently passed from Italy to the Iberians who then launched the European age of discovery and supposedly set off the European dynamic that would culminate with the West's breakthrough to capitalist modernity is a myth.

It assumes that the major regional civilisations were insulated from each other before ‘the age of discovery’, that oriental rulers sought to stifle trade and that global trade could not have existed before 1500 because there was an absence credit, banks, contract law.

Another argument has been that, significant trade on a global level were unlikely because transport technologies were too crude thus only luxury goods consumed only by a small minority of the world's population were transported.

Finally to the extent that there were any global flows, they were too slow, not robust enough to have a major reorganization impact on the many societies of the world.

However it is easy to find counterclaims for each of these notions, because  Persians, Arabs, Africans, Javanese, Jews, Indians and Chinese, all created and maintained a global economy, through which  civilisations  major civilizations were interlinked.

For example already William H. McNeill noted:

Analogous to the far better known opening of the oceans by European seamen after 1500. Arabia together with the oases and deserts of central Asia, the Steppelands to their north and sub-Saharan Africa were the regions most powerfully affected ... [and] were all brought into far more intimate contact with the established centers of civilized life - primarily with the Middle East and China - than had been possible before. As a result, between about 500 and 1000 an intensified ... world system emerged. (Civilizations and World Systems, 1995, p. 314.)

But the key development here are the emergence of a series of interlinked world empires that enabled a significantly pacified environment within which overland as well as seaborne trade could flourish. For example the rise of T'ang China (618-907), the Islamic Ummayad/Abbasid empire in the Middle East (661-1258), as well as the Fatimids in North Africa (909-1171) were all part of an extensive global trading network.

The simultaneous power of the Abbasids and the T'ang made it comparatively easy for long distance traders to make the whole journey across Asia and North Africa'." And though Jack Goody, Andr6 Wink and Nigel Harris see global connections that run as far back as 3500 BCE or earlier still, they agree that the big expansion of global trade occurred during the post-600 period. Thus the prosperity and commercialisation of the Arab and Chinese (as well as the South Asian) world acted like a huge bellows that fanned the flames of an emergent global economy.

Noteworthy here is that the famous Pirenne thesis, that the Islamic invasions broke the unity of Western Europe from Eastern Europe (Byzantium), and that it was only by the turn of the millennium when trade resumed needs to be inverted.

There was a close connection between the Frankish and Arab worlds, and ... the Carolingian Renaissance, the successes of the Italian city-states, and the growth of the Hanseatic League were all enhanced rather than retarded by contacts with the Muslim East ... It seems quite certain that trade revived at many places in the late eighth and ninth centuries in Europe Contradicting Pirenne, therefore, historians now speak of the economic 'Islamization of early medieval Europe’.

Thus with the birth of the Carolingian empire -in 751 in Western Europe and the emergence of various Italian trading city states in the eighth and ninth centuries, the global trading system extended into Europe, thereby linking both extremes of the Eurasian landmass into one continuous network of interlinked world empires. Accordingly, globalisation is not unique to, or consequential only for, the twentieth century. Not only did it begin during Europe's 'Dark Age' but its ultimate significance lay in the fact that oriental globalisation was the midwife, if not the mother, of the medieval and modern West.

The birth of oriental globalisation owes much to the Muslims (and Negroes) of North Africa as well as the Middle East and sea-lanes from Western Europe across to China and Korea in the east, and Africa, Polynesia in the south (see Maps of Time, 2004).

According to Maxime Rodinson's examination of the Qu'ran it states that:

If thou profit by doing what is permitted, thy deed is a djihad. And if thou invest it for thy family and kindred, this will be a Sadaqa [that is, a pious work of charity]; and truly, a dhiram [drachma, silver coin] lawfully gained from trade is worth more than ten dhirams gained in any other way. And Muhammad's saying that 'Poverty is almost like an apostasy, implies that the true servant of God should be affluent or at least economically independent. The booths of the money-changers in the great mosque of the camp-town Kufa possibly illustrate the fact that there was no necessary conflict between business and religion in Islam.

It is also significant that the Qu'ran stipulates the importance of investment. And while we usually consider the Sharia (the Islamic sacred law) as the root of despotism and economic backwardness, it was in fact created as a means to prevent the abuse of the rulers' or caliphs' power and, moreover, it set out clear provisions for contract law. Not surprisingly, there was a rational reason why the Islamic merchants were strong supporters of the Sharia. Furthermore, that time at least, there were clear signs of greater personal freedom within Islam than in medieval Europe. Offices were determined on the basis of 'egalitarian contractual responsibilities' (see Europe and the Mystique of Islam, 2002).

Islam was to have an influence on the development of Europe especially, though not exclusively, via Islamic Spain. The picture of this urban trading network counters the traditional Eurocentric vision of Islam as a desert populated by nomads, born of the Bedouins' awed wonder at the vast openness of sky and land.

And although it is true that the fall of Acre in 1291 prompted Pope Nicholas IV to issue numerous prohibitions on trade with the 'infidel'. But the fact is that the Venetians managed to circumvent the ban and secured new treaties with the Sultan in 1355 and 1361. And right down to 1517, Venice survived because Egypt played such an important role within the global economy. Moreover, Venice and Genoa were not the 'pioneers' of global trade but adaptors, inserting themselves into the interstices of the Afro-Asian-led global economy and trading very much on terms laid down by the Middle Eastern Muslims and especially the Egyptians. In particular, European merchants were blocked from passing through Egypt. When they arrived in Alexandria they were met by customs officials, who stayed on board and supervised the unloading of the goods. Christians, in particular, required a special permit or visa and paid a much higher tax than did their Muslim counterparts. The Europeans then retired to their own quarters which were governed by their own laws. However, they were not allowed to leave their quarters in Alexandria and became wholly dependent upon the Egyptian merchants and government officials. Nevertheless, the Venetians and other Europeans accepted this regime because it was here where they gained access to the many goods produced throughout the East. indeed, the fortunes of Venice were only made possible by its access to Eastern trade via North Africa.

Venice and Genoa one should note continued their privileged access to the Afro-Asian-led global economy only through a strong dose of luck (rather than because of their economic strength). The geopolitical challenges posed against Egypt by the Mongols and Crusaders had led to a military reorganisation of Egyptian society. Because Egypt's Mamluke brand of military organisation was based on the use of slaves, who could not be recruited from Muslims, Venice and Genoa were permitted to maintain trading reiations providing they supplied non-Muslim slaves to Egypt. After 1261, Genoa provided a crucial role in supplying non-Muslim Circassian slaves, whom they shipped from the Crimea. But then during the fourteenth century a series of geopolitical shifts relieved the Egyptians of the need for non-Muslim slaves. This sealed the fate of the Genoan slave trade as the Egyptians no longer required their services.

The baton of Islamic power was passed from Egypt to the ottoman empire, which maintained its hold over the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. But the leading edge of global intensive power was passed not to Italy after 1000 or Portugal after 1500, but to China in 1100. And there it remained until the nineteenth century.

Thus the construction of a European collective identity was forged in a global context. Indeed, 'it was out of the diffusional and imaginary encounter between the European barbarians and the great civilizations of the East that Western civilization was born.

Nevertheless, the impression conveyed thus far is that Europe was dominated by a feudal or rural 'subsistence-based' economy. More important to the progressive story of the rise of the West was the revival of commerce after about 750, but we do need to tackle the 'myth of 1492'.

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