![]() ![]() The carving-up of a civilization into pieces labelled "nations" is, I believe, something peculiar to students of modern Western history, and, with them too, this present practice of theirs is only recent. This practice of dealing in civilizations instead of nations is taken for granted by orientalists, ancient-historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists. ![]() Examples of extinct civilizations are the Greco-Roman and the Ancient Egyptian. Examples of other living civilizations besides the Western Civilization are the Islamic and the Civilization of Eastern Asia, centring on China. The history of the United States, for instance, or the history of Britain, is, as I see it, a fragment of the history of Western Christendom or the Western Christian World, and I believe I can put my finger on a number of other societies, living or extinct, that are of the same species. These seemed, and still seem, to me to be fragments of something larger, and I found this larger and more satisfying unit of study in a civilization. I was led into this quest by finding myself dissatisfied with the present-day habit of studying history in terms of national states. In the first volume of A Study of History, I start by searching for a unit of historical study that is relatively self-contained and is therefore more or less intelligible in isolation from the rest of history. ![]()
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