In any case, the reader may be wondering, what has all this got to do with Xerxes? Pagden’s justification for beginning in the fifth century BC is a rather convoluted one. It depends partly on a familiar argument about the Greek origins of Western democracy, but also partly on an argument about the origins of Western rhetoric about the East — the East as barbaric, despotic, lascivious and so on.

Sometimes it is hard to tell whether he is talking about the rhetoric or the reality; his claim that all Greeks were committed to individualism hardly squares with the reality of life in Sparta, for example. Modern Europ­eans, framing their own rhetoric against the Islamic world, did indeed turn to ancient Greek sources for useful material; but that is another historical development which gets blurred when it is folded into an age-old story of permanent “struggle”. And the same is even more true of modern Islamic rhetoric against the West: Pagden all too easily assumes that when Islamists inveigh against the Crusades, they are part of a revenge-seeking complaint that has continued since the Middle Ages.

In the end, the reader is left with the feeling that what needs to be explained is not a permanent East-West struggle, but two separate and only partly coordinated things: the unique development of West European soc­iety and technology (unique vis-à-vis all parts of the world, not just the East); and the recent rise of a radical movement within the Islamic world (a movement directed against internal enemies or rivals as well as against external ones). Neither, in the end, is adequately explained by this book.