Concept
Eastern world
Overview
The Eastern world, also known as the East or historically the Orient, is an umbrella term for various cultures or social structures, nations and philosophical systems, which vary depending on the context. It most often includes Asia, the Mediterranean region and the Arab world, specifically in historical (pre-modern) contexts, and in modern times in the context of Orientalism. The Eastern world is often seen as a counterpart to the Western world.
The various regions included in the term are varied, hard to generalize, and do not have a single shared common heritage. Although the various parts of the Eastern world share many common threads, most notably being in the "Global South", they have never historically defined themselves collectively. The term originally had a literal geographic meaning, referring to the eastern part of the Old World, contrasting the cultures and civilizations of Asia with those of Western Europe (or the Western world).
Conceptually, the boundary between east and west is more cultural and historical, rather than geographical, as a result of which Australia and New Zealand, which were founded as British settler colonies, are typically grouped with the Western world despite being geographically closer to the Eastern world, while the Central Asian nations of the former Soviet Union are grouped in the East. Other than much of Asia and Africa, Western Europe has absorbed almost all of the societies of the Americas, and Oceania into the Western world because of settler colonialism.
Countries such as the Philippines, which are geographically located in the Eastern world, may be considered Western in some aspects of their society, culture and politics due to immigration and historical cultural influences from the United States and Western Europe.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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The peculiarities of all nations are distinguished according to entire parallels and entire angles, and by their situation with regard to the Sun and the Ecliptic. The climate which we inhabit is situated in one of the Northern Quadrants: but other nations, which lie under more southern parallels, that is to say, in the space between the equinoctial line and the summer tropic, have the Sun in their zenith, and are…
Ptolemy, Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos
States what Eastern world is.
Indirect effects were as broad as direct. Not merely soldiers, but finance, industry and opinion were mobilized and consolidated. Neutrality was a precarious affair. There was a critical epoch in the history of the world when the Roman Empire assembled in itself the lands and peoples of the Mediterranean basin. The World War stands out as an indubitable proof that what then happened for a region has now happened for…
John Dewey, The public and its problems
States what Eastern world is.
In the few places where monarchy was cast off, the spirit of European monarchy was still left. Those countries still continued countries of states; that is, of classes, orders, and distinctions such as had before subsisted, or nearly so. Indeed, the force and form of the institution called states continued in greater perfection in those republican communities than under monarchies.
Edmund Burke, Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke
States what Eastern world is.
Philosophers who discussed Eastern world
Related ideas
- Belief
- Post-classical history
- Hinduism
- Philosophy
- Iran
- Arab world
- Cultural artifact
- Culture
- Indian subcontinent
- Eastern religions
- Western world
- Oceania
- Oxford English Dictionary
- Philippines
- Soviet Union
- Syncretism
- Technology
- Americas
- Tradition
- Buddhism
- Western Europe
- United States
- West Asia
- Australia
Place in the tradition
Part of Maoism.