By 1900 the Victorian empire upon which the sun never set included 11 million square miles and 390 million people. In the course of European expansion, the Andean and Mesoamerican civilizations were effectively eliminated, Indian and Islamic civilizations along with Africa were subjugated, and China was penetrated and subordinated to Western influence. Only Russian, Japanese, and Ethiopian civilizations, all three governed by highly centralized imperial authorities, were able to resist the onslaught of the West and maintain meaningful independent existence. For four hundred years intercivilizational relations consisted of the subordination of other societies to Western civilization. The causes of this unique and dramatic development included the social structure and class relations of the West, the rise of cities and commerce, the relative dispersion of power in Western societies between estates and monarchs and secular and religious authorities, the emerging sense of national cons
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51