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This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the changes that occurred in the religions history of the Western world during the ‘long 1960s’, a period which lasted from 1958 to 1974. Four major themes are highlighted. First, from the 1950s to the 1970s there was an enormous increase in the range of beliefs and world-views accessible to the majority of the population. Second, there was a change in the way that people in most Western countries understood the religious identity of their own society. Third, there was a serious weakening of the process by which the great majority of children were socialized into membership of a Christian society and in particular were given a confessional identity and a basic knowledge of Christian beliefs and practices. Fourth, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, Catholics and Protestants moved closer together. But as the divisions between the Christian churches were narrowing, the divisions within each of the churches were deepening. The main objectives of the books are then described.

The chapter studies the effects of the developing commerce with the Western world on the Ottoman social structure during the 18th and 19th centuries. Emerging as a principal social group to form social resources, Ottoman minority merchants challenged the sultan's control. The chapter analyzes the spread of Western goods and demonstrates how the urban populace increased their accumulation of these goods at the expense of officials and their households. A sample of the inheritance register of Ottoman officials, military, and populace in this chapter reveals a difference in their tendency to own Western goods at the time of their death. While the tendency of officials and military did not change throughout the 18th century, the tendency of the urban populace increased greatly. The data signify how the social group of Ottoman religious minorities entered the protection of Western powers and formed an independent economic resource—the Ottoman commercial bourgeoisie.

This introductory chapter outlines the case for focusing on deaf education beyond the Western world. Research into the effectiveness of educational approaches for deaf learners needs to be ecologically situated, because the geopolitical context in which the research is carried out will influence the results. To improve education for deaf and hard-of-hearing children in countries beyond the Western world, it is not sufficient simply to apply research results obtained in countries in the West. To do so is to ignore the specific political, economic, and cultural contexts in a given situation, risking a mismatch between findings and needs or, at worst, the potential to do significant harm, either in the short term or the long term. Rather, we must focus on the specific, local contexts in which deaf education is situated, together with any international obligations that might influence how education is to be conducted in these contexts. To build a context for the interpretation of the chapters in this volume, attention is given to the relationship between poverty and disability, to international policy frameworks influencing educational practices all over the globe, to the worldwide advocacy of inclusive education, and to development cooperation. In addition, data are given about the prevalence of hearing loss in children in Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Middle and Latin America.

This chapter presents a critical analysis of Chinese fans’ queer gossip discourse surrounding the American actress Katherine Moennig, most famous still for her breakthrough role as a butch lesbian character in the television series The L Word (Showtime, 2004–2009). Through a deconstructive reading of the gossip that imagines Moennig’s real-life lesbian gender identities and homoerotic relationships in one of the largest cross-cultural fandoms in Chinese cyberspace, The Garden of Eden (Yidianyuan), the author reveals that, rather than simply assimilating or rejecting the normative understandings of the West as a civilized, queer-friendly haven and China as a backward, heterocentric nation, the fans’ intricate fantasies about the Western queer world reflect their subjective, hybridized reappropriation and reinscription of the Chinese queer Occidentalist imaginations. Ultimately, she argues that the queer Occidentalism exemplified in this cross-cultural gossip functions as a survival strategy for queer fans to interrogate the depressing, heteropatriarchal realities in contemporary mainstream Chinese society.

America's entry into the Western world is the result of a process whose first phase is from the discovery by Christopher Columbus in 1942 from 1570. Latin America became Westernized because of its discovery by Europe. The initial collision between Iberians and Indians in the sixteenth century defines the central phase of colonization from about 1630 from about 1750. Amerindians and Iberians had essentially a local vision of their history and culture that offered no framework for interpreting their new experiences although Europe and America were known as group of nations that also have a continental history. The European invasion was not simply a matter of arms but also entailed the use of cultural and organizational resources by both parties.

This chapter reconstructs the conceptual, rather than geographical, separation of ‘the Americas’ into a North America and a South America with distinct sociopolitical connotations. More specifically, it examines what it calls the paradigmatisation of history and the emergence of the modern Western world, along with some aspects of what was regarded as America, the ‘New World’, before and after the modern ruptures that occurred in the liminal ‘age of revolutions’. It also discusses what became known as the ‘American Revolution’ with its notions of ‘manifest destiny’ and ‘American exceptionalism’. The chapter argues that what used to be understood as the New World went through a process of divergence during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that this divergence was appropriated by instituting different significant categories by the narratives of the enlargement of the modern Western world in the twentieth century.

After the international success of Rickshaw Boy, Lao She returned from the US to Mao's China in 1949 with high hopes. Welcomed back by his comrade from Chongqing days, Zhou Enlai, he was accorded the title, ‘People's Artist’ along with a slew of committee posts. Lao She had never shied from identifying himself as a ‘petty bourgeois’ writer who had a sense of righteousness but no enthusiasm for political factionalism. That he did so at a time when Mao's 1966 rectification campaign declared its objective to repudiate reactionary bourgeois academics, was to seal his own doom. 40 years after his fiction first started to explore China's emergence onto the global stage, Mao's Cultural Revolution got underway and Lao She was driven to drown himself. Lao She's play of the period, Teahouse, ranks in cultural magnitude with J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World (1907), each a monument to the twentieth-century struggle of decolonizing nationhood. The consensus is that non-Western modernisms have a place not as derivative products of a Euro-American original but as full partners in a literary movement, best understood by regarding modernism as an aesthetic response to conditions of modernity that are globally structured but nationally or locally particular.

This chapter introduces Paweł Pawlikowski's 2013 film titled Ida, which has been hailed by audiences around the world as the Polish-born director's masterpiece. It mentions film critics that laud Ida's mesmerising black-and-white cinematography and excellent acting and cultural critics that praise its courageous storyline. It also explains Ida as a film about meditation that focuses on a teenage novice nun and her world-weary aunt. This chapter reveals Ida's obscure references and ambiguous influences, as well as its essence as a quest for silence in the aftermath of tragedy. It analyses how Ida offers muted reflections on the major forces that have traumatised and shaped the contemporary Western world.

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. It argues that the cities of refuge examined in this book were intended to be sanctuaries from the modern world, but they became a source and stimulus for that world. Because of their compact nature, physical isolation, and social homogeneity, they had the purity of a control group in a laboratory experiment. And those variables that they were testing were precisely the ones that concerned the emerging modern world, such as the nature of labor, property ownership and means of production, and housing of industrial workers. The lessons of these societies of five hundred to a thousand members could be applied to much larger communities, or to countries themselves. In this way, these frail and marginal experiments, although they struggled at the fringe of the Western world, were at the very hub of modernity.

This chapter sheds light on how cultural developments have changed the thinking of bourgeois society of not allowing women into music field. One of the many enormous social changes which resulted from industrialization, everywhere in the Western world though at varying paces in different countries, was the shift from the relatively large “household” of the eighteenth century and earlier to what the Germans called the Kleinfamilie, the nuclear family. Studying family history can help to understand the kind of intimate situation that provided the context for girls' piano playing and for the mythic system of representation that enfolded the piano-girls. Several themes emerge from the girls' accounts allowing the observer to know all the ways in which their practicing and their playing were part of the family dynamic of the household. The instrument and the piece of furniture that embodied it, is associated with domesticity in women's minds.

This chapter considers Synge’s controversial, riot-inducing masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World (1907). Playboy, as a form of discursive retribution against certain restrictive politics, deploys a drama of sexual selection in a degenerated landscape in order to posit ironic humour, imaginative freedom, and ‘savage’ violence as a revitalizing impulse. Beginning with a curious phonetic letter sent to Synge by his friend, this chapter explores the themes of evolutionism, degeneration, and irony discussed in previous chapters, showing how Synge’s writing interacted with contemporary eugenicist discourses but posited the case for social and economic regeneration (rather than ‘race improvement’) as an antidote. Against this background, the chapter demonstrates that ThePlayboy is the apotheosis of Synge’s increasingly modernist, increasingly political, drama. For him, nationalist orthodoxies and certain forms of economic and social modernization were degenerative, and ThePlayboy purposefully acts as a sort of ironic protest against this. The chapter concludes by showing that writers such as W. B. Yeats, and later the playwright Teresa Deevy in her The King of Spain’s Daughter (1937), recognized Synge’s literary and political radicalism before he was effectively canonized as a cultivator of a Romantic cult of the peasant. Synge’s modernism, as The Playboy of the Western World shows most clearly, is simultaneously a form of political and literary protest. Rooted in his socialism and informed by his long-standing engagement with modernization, it is the apotheosis of his tendency towards a literary experiment which works in tandem with an ever-developing political, social, and aesthetic consciousness.

This chapter examines the foundations of human rights in the Western world, as a prelude to identifying their bases, if any, in Hinduism. Four foundations of human rights can be identified in the current literature on the subject in the West. These are legal, moral, ethical, and religious in nature or conception. According to the positivistic or legal view of human rights, human rights are legal entities—no more, no less. The moral view of human rights is grounded in the perception that human rights, as legal entities, stem from a moral vision of the world, of which they constitute a legal expression. The ethical view of human rights may be traced to Bentham, and especially his successor, John Stuart Mill. The religious view suggests that human rights can be derived from the different religious traditions of the world.

The markets and businesses that supplied democratic Greek city-states might well have remained a regional curiosity had Alexander the Great and his successors not wrought a social and economic revolution in the Middle East. The fascinating story begins with politics and power. This chapter is the prologue to the story of how Alexander the Great and his followers gave business to Western civilization. It provides a brisk summary of Hellenistic political history. It discusses the Hellenistic political revolution that made money, markets, and business common to urban economies throughout virtually the entire civilized Western world. It also had a profound impact on long-lasting features of business life like the guild system and the disrepute of business practitioners.

This chapter looks into how the Western world has forgotten the Christian tradition of natural law which forms the basis of current law systems. Today, very few remain aware of the profound arguments advanced by authoritative exponents of Christian and classical political thought that stood as enormous principled obstacles to the victory of modern ideas of radical religious freedom and toleration. But it is even more difficult to find anyone today who still seriously accepts the truth of the state of nature foundation—or any strictly rational, transcultural foundation—for the victory of the notions of religious freedom and toleration. The chapter describes how modern liberal principles can be inconsistent to natural law tradition. Unlike the Christian notions, Western people advocate a cause, which is declared to be universal and rational, for which persons can articulate no universally acceptable or strictly rational foundation.

This chapter provides a sketch of the author' s experiences up to the present time. Raised in New York, Eliza Potter went out at an early age to earn her living, in the service of people of ton. For some years, this occupation was agreeable to her; at length, however, she grew weary of it, and being at liberty to choose her own course, decided to travel and to gratify her long-cherished desire to see the world—most especially the Western world. Potter started as soon as possible toward the setting sun. At Buffalo, however, her journey was suddenly arrested by a sort of ceremony called matrimony, which she entered into very naturally, and became quieted down under it for a length of time, just as naturally. Potter had witnessed other people do the same thing, so she felt no shame in owning up to having committed a weakness, which has, from the beginning of time, numbered the most respectable of the earth among its victims.

This chapter underscores a number of problems in Keynes’s discussion of the long-term economic future of the Western world. What is primarily discussed here is his neglect of the positive implications for hours worked of the substitution effect induced by higher earnings, the difference between working habits of the rich English gentlemen of his time and that of Americans and many other rich individuals working in different countries, the nature of the utility function that would be motivating most consumer behavior, his ignoring the possibility of future inventions of revolutionary goods and services in great demand by consumers, the nontrivial economic challenges involved in the allocation of time, and the economic advance of the vast majority of the world’s population who then lived in very poor countries. The discussion of these issues is done in light of developments in economic analysis since Keynes wrote his essay almost eighty years ago.