Picking up on the tendency in textbooks to provide “an adequate account of the ancient empires of the Middle East, after which they subside into a history of Western civilisation,” Power argued that portraying the modern East “merely as a barbaric force, which the West was obliged from time to time to hurl back” is “not only false to history, but dangerous. In the world into which his young readers are born, one of the most pressing problems is that of the relations of East and West…Only by a mutual understanding can the heirs of the great civilisations which were born in India, China and the
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