Over the past three centuries, the era of Western colonialism and imperialism has wrought both dynamic change and immense destruction across the world, rubbing out cultures that have often taken millennia to evolve. The great traditional civilisations of China, India and Islam, whose peoples make up the bulk of the population of the planet, have responded in different ways to the traumatic impact of colonialism and the challenges of modernity, with its new technologies and new ways of seeing.
