From the time of Caesar (100 – 44 BC) to the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, Rome dominated Southern Europe, the Mediterranean coast of Northern Africa and the Western Middle East, including the ancient trade routes with population living outside. Historians, such as Carroll Quigley in "The Evolution of Civilizations",[20] contend that Western civilization was born around AD 500, after the total collapse of the Western Roman Empire, leaving a vacuum for new ideas to flourish that were impossible in Classical societies. The most famous of these merchant travelers pursuing East–west trade was Venetian Marco Polo. In this context, the Protestant Reformation (1517) may be viewed as a schism within the Catholic Church. Western civilization traces its roots back to Europe and the Mediterranean.It is linked to ancient Greece, the Roman Empire and with Medieval Western Christendom which emerged from the Middle Ages to experience such transformative episodes as the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, scientific revolution, and the development of … [76] At its apex, the phrase "the empire on which the sun never sets" described the British Empire, because its expanse around the globe meant that the sun always shone on at least one of its territories. Despite this, Christianity, in its different forms, remains the largest faith in most Western countries.[96]. [citation needed], The Roman Empire succeeded the approximately 500-year-old Roman Republic (c. 510 BC – 30 BC), which had been weakened by the conflict between Gaius Marius and Sulla and the civil war of Julius Caesar against Pompey and Marcus Brutus. It came to dominate Western, Central and Southeastern Europe and the entire area surrounding the Mediterranean Sea through conquest using the Roman legions and then through cultural assimilation by eventually giving Roman citizenship privileges to the whole population. "[37] There followed the sack of AD 455 lasting 14 days, this time conducted by the Vandals, retaining Rome's eternal spirit through the Holy See of Rome (the Latin Church) for centuries to come. Meanwhile, the extent of both Christendoms expanded, as Germanic peoples, Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, Scandinavia, Baltic peoples, British Isles and the other non-Christian lands of the northwest were converted by the Western Church, while Eastern Slavic peoples, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, Russian territories, Vlachs and Georgia were converted by the Eastern Church. The geographic line of religious division approximately followed a line of cultural divide. The Holy Roman Empire would dissolve on 6 August 1806, after the French Revolution and the creation of the Confederation of the Rhine by Napoleon. The Renaissance had a great influence on Western culture, as did the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Discovery, the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. Before AD 1100, the Catholic Church suppressed what they believed to be heresy, usually through a system of ecclesiastical proscription or imprisonment, but without using torture,[48] and seldom resorting to executions. [88][89][90] By August 2014, both sides had implemented economic, financial, and diplomatic sanctions upon each other: virtually all Western countries, led by the US and EU, imposed restrictive measures on Russia; the latter reciprocally introduced retaliatory measures. Based on a 2006–2008 worldwide survey by Gallup. “Western Civilization was responsible for a paradigm shift in history. Human Development Index Report (based on 2018 data, published in 2019). 1. Western civilization is also strongly associated with Christianity (and to a lesser extent, with Judaism), which is in turn shaped by Hellenistic philosophy and Roman culture. Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization, Occidental culture, the Western world, Western society, and European civilization, is a term used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, belief systems, political systems and specific … It might mean the Northern half of the North–South divide. Its movement was affected by the influence of the Byzantine empire and the fluctuating power and influence of the Catholic church in Rome. [citation needed]. Senate. European and predominantly white countries are part of western civilization. In the 13th and 14th centuries, a number of European travelers, many of them Christian missionaries, had sought to cultivate trading with Asia and Africa. Congress. The dark green areas show the countries where this alphabet is the sole official (or de facto official) national script. Augustine wrote in On True Religion: "Religion is to be sought... only among those who are called Catholic or orthodox Christians, that is, guardians of truth and followers of right. 7: The Scientific Revolution of the 17 Cent", Industrial Revolution and the Standard of Living: The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, "Expansion and Contraction Patterns of Large Polities: Context for Russia", "The World Factbook — Central Intelligence Agency", "Review of Global Reach: the Power of the Multinational Corporations, by Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Muller", "Securing the World's Commercial Sea Lanes | The American Spectator | Politics Is Too Important To Be Taken Seriously", "Table: Religious Composition by Country, in Percentages", "The new cold war: are we going back to the bad old days? The influence of Western Civilization is global; defining American culture and North American culture among others. 10 Of The Most Notorious Serial Killers In The World. There followed the discovery of the American continent, and consequent dissolution of West Christendom as even a theoretical unitary political body, later resulting in the religious Eighty Years War (1568–1648) and Thirty Years War (1618–1648) between various Protestant and Catholic states of the Holy Roman Empire (and emergence of religiously diverse confessions). [53][54][55][h], Both these religious wars ended with the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which enshrined the concept of the nation-state, and the principle of absolute national sovereignty in international law. [citation needed], The knowledge of the ancient Western world was partly preserved during this period due to the survival of the Eastern Roman Empire and the introduction of the Catholic Church; it was also greatly expanded by the Arab importation[22][23] of both the Ancient Greco-Roman and new technology through the Arabs from India and China to Europe.[24][25]. The Philippines is in itself a Spanish creation. This whole period of roughly a millennium is known as the Middle Ages, its early part forming the "Dark Ages", designations that were created during the Renaissance and reflect the perspective on history, and the self-image, of the latter period. But these journeys had little permanent effect on east–west trade because of a series of political developments in Asia in the last decades of the 14th century, which put an end to further European exploration of Asia: namely the new Ming rulers were found to be unreceptive of religious proselytism by European missionaries and merchants. More than half of the people in Western countries claim that religion is important, and most of them identify with Christianity. Although it is a scion of European (mainly Spanish and Portuguese) civilization, it also incorporates, to an extent, elements of indigenous American civilizations, absent from North America and Europe. ", "New Left Review – Jack Goody: The Labyrinth of Kinship", http://www.thearda.com/internationalData/regions/index.asp, "China blocks Wikipedia in all languages", "The Meaning of Privatization," Yale Law and Policy Review 6: 6–41" 1988, "Multinational Corporations in the Third World: Predators or Allies in Economic Development?" Western culture and civilization showed their mettle as well! Still, Russia accepted Eastern Christianity from the Byzantine Empire (by the Patriarch of Constantinople: Photios I) linking Russia very close to the Eastern Roman Empire world. Italy itself was considered central, until the reforms of Diocletian dividing the Empire into true two halves: Eastern and Western. The West began thinking in terms of Western Latins (those living in the old Western Empire) and Eastern Greeks (those inside the Roman remnant to the east). However, it is difficult to decide what its effects were. The geopolitical divisions in Europe that created a concept of East and West originated in the ancient tyrannical and imperialistic Graeco-Roman times. [97] A 2011 Pew Research Center survey found that 76.2% of Europeans, 73.3% in Oceania, and about 86.0% in the Americas (90% in Latin America and 77.4% in North America) described themselves as Christians. A series of scholars of civilization, including Arnold J. Toynbee, Alfred Kroeber and Carroll Quigley have identified and analyzed "Western civilization" as one of the civilizations that have historically existed and still exist today. In this context it is interest-ing that Wilkinson asserts that his so-called Central civilization is "less geographically determined" than other civilizations. [citation needed], The concept of Western culture is generally linked to the classical definition of the Western world. [103][104][105][106][107], American political scientist, adviser and academic Samuel P. Huntington considered Latin America as separate from the Western world for the purpose of his geopolitical analysis. Japan was involved primarily in the so-called Meiji period (1868–1912), though earlier contact with the Portuguese, the Spaniards and the Dutch were also present in recognition of European nations as strategically important to the Japanese Empire. It is a generally accepted[citation needed] western view to recognize the existence of at least three "major worlds" (or "cultures", or "civilizations"), broadly in contrast with the Western: the Eastern world, the Arab and the African worlds, with no clearly specified boundaries. In 1071, the Byzantine army was defeated by the Muslim Turco-Persians of medieval Asia, resulting in the loss of most of Asia Minor. Much of this set of traditions and knowledge is collected in the Western canon. The United States, following the Spanish–American War in 1898, quickly emerged as the new imperial power in East Asia and in the Pacific Ocean area. [citation needed], The Eastern Roman Empire, governed from Constantinople, is usually referred to as the Byzantine Empire after AD 476, the traditional date for the "fall of the Western Roman Empire" and beginning of the Early Middle Ages. Rome had expanded long before the empire reached its zenith with the conquest of Dacia in AD 106, under Emperor Trajan. The official religions of the United Kingdom and some Nordic countries are forms of Christianity, while the majority of European countries have no official religion. Although not part of Western colonization process proper, following the Middle Ages Western culture in fact entered other global-spanning cultures during the colonial 15th–20th centuries. Some Third World countries aligned themselves with either the US-led West or the Soviet-led Eastern bloc. [34], The terms "West" and "East" were not used by any Greek author to describe that conflict. [e] In 350 years, from the successful and deadliest war with the Phoenicians began in 218 BC to the rule of Emperor Hadrian by AD 117, Ancient Rome expanded up to twenty-five times its area. The Dalmatia remained under Venice domination throughout next centuries (even constituting an Italian territorial claim by the, Portuguese sailors began exploring the coast of Africa and the Atlantic archipelagos in 1418–19, using recent developments in navigation, cartography and maritime technology such as the, In the 16th century, the Portuguese broke the (overland) Medieval monopoly of the Arabs and Italians of trade (goods and slaves) between Asia and. [citation needed], Ancient Greek civilization had been growing in the first millennium BC into wealthy poleis, so-called city-states (geographically loose political entities which in time, inevitably end giving way to larger organisations of society, including the empire and the nation-state)[33] such as Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and Corinth, by Middle and Near Eastern ones (Sumerian cities such as Uruk and Ur; Ancient Egyptian city-states, such as Thebes and Memphis; the Phoenician Tyre and Sidon; the five Philistine city-states; the Berber city-states of the Garamantes). Huntington goes on to mention that Latin America could be considered a sub-civilization within Western civilization, or a separate civilization intimately related to the West and divided as to its belonging to it. [12] West was originally literal, opposing Catholic Europe with the cultures and civilizations of Orthodox Europe, West Asia and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, which early-modern Europeans saw as the East. Latin alphabet world distribution. [citation needed], In a debated Cold War II, a new definition emerged inside the realm of western journalism. For the purposes of this article, the “West” is that civilization which grew up in western Europe after the end of the Roman Empire.Its roots lay in the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome (which themselves built on foundations laid in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia). One specific example was the requirement that post-colonial societies were made to form nation-states (in the Western tradition), which often created arbitrary boundaries and borders that did not necessarily represent a whole nation, people, or culture (as in much of Africa), and are often the cause of international conflicts and friction even to this day. United States. The West rose further with the 18th century's Age of Enlightenment and through the Age of Exploration's expansion of peoples of Western and Central European empires, particularly the globe-spanning colonial empires of 18th and 19th centuries. 6 years ago. The name is also used even when the countries of the region are not in the West, for instance, Singapore, Japan, and South Korea. The "West" was originally defined as the Western world. pretty much western European nations, the U.S, Canada, Greenland, the U.K, places like those. Decline of the Byzantine Empire (13th–15th centuries) began with the Latin Christian Fourth Crusade in AD 1202–04, considered to be one of the most important events, solidifying the schism between the Christian churches of Greek Byzantine Rite and Latin Roman Rite. Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations, Learn how and when to remove this template message, building designs and proportions and architecture, populations have had a large presence of particular European ethnic groups, immigration of Europeans in the 20th century, civil wars, corruption, and devastating Germanic invasions, Roman Catholic and Eastern Greek Orthodox, including the heart of the Byzantine Empire, Western European colonialism and colonization, member states of the Commonwealth of Nations, 2015 Russian military intervention in the Syrian Civil War, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), "9780500040034: The Birth of Western Civilization: Greece and Rome", "Athens. Which Countries Are Considered Western Europe? A 'Modern West' emerged from the Late Middle Ages (after the Renaissance and fall of Constantinople) as a new civilization greatly influenced by the interpretation of Greek thought preserved in the Byzantine Empire, and transmitted from there by Latin translations and emigration of Greek scholars through Renaissance humanism. The geopolitical divisions in Europe that created a concept of East and West originated in the Roman Empire. The Eastern Mediterranean was home to the highly urbanized cultures that had Greek as their common language (owing to the older empire of Alexander the Great and of the Hellenistic successors. The Western countries refer to countries mainly in Europe, the Americas, and Australasia. The nuclear family based on monogamous marriage was an important factor in the emergence of Western individualism, and, therefore, in the rise and spread of Western civilization. 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