The East, the West, and the World History

Abstract

The author raises in the article an important question of human civilization development: what contribution the East has made to the centuries-long evolution of society. The author emphasizes that, despite the low attention to the countries of the East in the World History books, it was the “Eastern” way that laid down by the great despotisms: Ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Ancient India, Ancient China, and was the main way of human development. Indeed the “Western path” did not appear immediately in Europe itself: both Minoan and Mycenaean Greece developed along the Eastern path, and only in Homeric Greece did the features of “Western” development begin to emerge, more clearly manifested in archaic Greece. The author concludes that such a “Western” emerged as a result of historical coincidence. The author turns to the similarities between the Eastern and Western paths of development, reinforcing them with examples from the history of Ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, and Ancient China. The author pays special attention to the ancient Chinese model of statehood as a special kind of transformation of the supreme power. Many scholars record the presence in Ancient China in the 8th–7th centuries B.C. of the socio-political and political-administrative system typologically like the one that existed in Western Europe in the 11th–13th centuries. Ryabinin asks the question: “Why did this socio-political and politico-administrative system in Ancient China cease to exist?”. By the 8th–7th centuries, the Chinese state practice during the time of confrontation with the barbarians developed a new model of the political system and mobilization economy which did not allow the Chinese society to rebuild and avoid the format of a despotic regime. According to the author, the concept of “feudalism” in terms of relations within the ruling stratum does not belong exclusively to Western Europe. “Feudalism” as a system of vassal-loyal relations, for example, can also be observed in certain areas of India. Accordingly, the uniqueness of the European way of developing political systems lies not in democracy but something else. The paper emphasizes that this peculiarity is the priority of the wealthy people associated primarily with the market. It was those people who determined the main direction of the development of ancient society both in Classical Greece and in Republican Rome.