Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
THE IRANIAN PIVOT
As University of Chicago scholar William McNeill has told us, India, China, and Greece all
lay “on the fringes of the anciently civilized world,” protected as they were by mountains,
was ravaged by Persia, China by the Mongols and the Turkic steppe people, and India by a
surfeit of Muslim invaders. Nevertheless, geography provided enough of a barrier for three
great and unique civilizations to take root. Lying in the immense space between these civiliz-
ations, as noted in an earlier chapter, was what McNeill's Chicago colleague Marshall Hodg-
son referred to as the Oikoumene, an antique Greek term for the “inhabited quarter” of the
world: this is Herodotus's world, the parched temperate zone of the Afro-Asian landmass
stretching from North Africa to the margins of western China, a belt of territory Hodgson
also calls Nile-to-Oxus.
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Hodgson's vision captures brilliantly several key and contradictory facts: that the Oikou-
mene—the Greater Middle East—is an easily definable zone existing between Greece, Ch-
ina, and India, distinctly separate from all three, even as it has had pivotal influence on
each of them, so that the relationships are extremely organic; and that whereas the Greater
Middle East is united by Islam and the legacies of horse and camel nomadism—as opposed
to the crop agriculture of China and India—it is also deeply divided within by rivers, oases,
and highlands, with great ramifications for political organization to this day. The disparity
between the Greater Middle East and China, say, is especially telling. John King Fairbank,
the late Harvard China expert, writes:
