When Napoleon Bonaparte led his army into Egypt in 1798, he had more than military conquest on his mind. Along with 30,000 soldiers, his entourage included what amounted to a mobile university, complete with economists and poets, architects and astronomers, a balloonist, and a baritone from the Paris Opera. They carried with them a library of a thousand books, featuring Montesquieu and Rousseau, Montaigne and Voltaire, and other classics of the Western canon. Almost two centuries later, in 1971, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran, held a lavish, weeklong fete for foreign dignitaries on the grounds of an ancient Persian palace. Over peacock stuffed with foie gras and 25,000 bottles of Champagne, he declared himself heir to the great Achaemenid kings Darius and Xerxes. The claimed price tag: $200 million.
For Anthony Pagden, a professor of political science and history at the University of California, Los Angeles, the shah and Napoleon are archetypes, respectively, of East and West, each seeing himself as heir to a glorious civilization. But as Pagden points out, each man also had his own fascinating ambiguities. The Swiss-educated shah was a highly secular supporter of modernization (and the Champagne for his party came from Maxim’s of Paris). Napoleon proclaimed to the Egyptians that he revered the Prophet Muhammad and “the glorious Koran,” if only to win over the local clerics.
Pagden has a keen eye for the striking detail (a helpful attribute for someone plowing through 2,500 years of history in 12 chapters), and “Worlds at War,” like Pagden’s earlier work “Peoples and Empires,” is bold, panoramic and highly readable, at times a page turner.
Through a combination of legend, anecdote and evocative writing, Pagden brings alive the ancient Greco-Persian wars, the rise of Islam and the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman emperor Mehmed II. And he turns what might otherwise be dry history about the Investiture Controversy of the 11th century into almost a thriller, with an “outmaneuvered” Henry IV standing outside the castle of Canossa “in a hair shirt and robes of a penitent, barefoot on the ice for three days,” seeking an audience with Pope Gregory VII, who had excommunicated him. Having obtained Gregory’s forgiveness, Henry promptly “descended on Rome with an army.” Gregory called on the Normans to defend him, and they defeated Henry. But unfortunately they “sacked the city themselves,” causing the Pope “to flee south, where he died of fever in Salerno.”
But if “Worlds at War” is hard to put down, it’s also hard to pin down; almost to the end, its thesis is something of a moving target. For starters, Pagden casts his book as an exploration of the “perpetual enmity,” as Herodotus called it, between East and West. Yet he excludes from his account China, Japan and the rest of the Far East and, for the most part, India. So his “East” consists almost entirely of Islamic societies: Persia/Iran, the Ottoman Empire/Turkey, Egypt and today’s Arab world.
