almost hypnotic preoccupation with the polarisation of world power in Washington and London has tended to obscure one of the most profound changes of the modern era: the re-emergence of an Asia as a new force in international relations and in the world economy. For some three or centuries, European frontiers have been moving eastwards, landwards across the European land mass, seawards round Africa and across America. The process of imperialism converted Asia into an appendage of Europe ; the search for the four hundred million customers of Cathay, of the Far East, overlooked the basic fact that there was a China but not Cathay, an India but not a British Empire of India. For more than a century, western sea power facilitated the exercise of pressure to ensure the subordination of Asia to Europe ; the electric telegraph helped to perfect the means of pressure. The missionary was an auxiliary figure, an ally of the trader and the soldier, positively assuming the inferiority of Asian religion and culture, negatively contributing to the undermining and disintegration of Asian society, preparing the way for a fuller material penetration of Asia by the west. The significant change of the last decade has been, not the growing tension between east and west, but rather the rapid development of the Asian revolution and the consequent need for a western reorientation of outlook to fit the fluid Asian situation. What for centuries has been a