Western world#Modern political

The origins of Western civilization can be traced back to the ancient Mediterranean world. Ancient Greece{{efn|See {{cite book|author=Ricardo Duchesne|title=The Uniqueness of Western Civilization|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=pWmDPzPo0XAC&pg=PA297|date=7 February 2011|publisher=BRILL|isbn=978-90-04-19248-5|page=297|quote=The list of books which have celebrated Greece as the "cradle" of the West is endless; two more examples are Charles Freeman's The Greek Achievement: The Foundation of the Western World (1999) and Bruce Thornton's Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization (2000)|author-link=Ricardo Duchesne}}{{cite book|author1=Chiara Bottici|author2=Benoît Challand|title=The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=QW1lrPMXprwC&pg=PA88|date=11 January 2013|publisher=Routledge|isbn=978-1-136-95119-0|page=88|quote=The reason why even such a sophisticated historian as Pagden can do it is that the idea that Greece is the cradle of civilisation is so much rooted in western minds and school curricula as to be taken for granted.}}{{cite book|author=William J. Broad|title=The Oracle: Ancient Delphi and the Science Behind Its Lost Secrets|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=8Oi_sVWIXLAC&pg=PA120|year=2007|publisher=Penguin Publishing Group|isbn=978-0-14-303859-7|page=120|quote=In 1979, a friend of de Boer's invited him to join a team of scientists that was going to Greece to assess the suitability of the ... But the idea of learning more about Greece — the cradle of Western civilization, a fresh example of tectonic forces at ...}}{{cite book|author1=Maura Ellyn|author2=Maura McGinnis|title=Greece: A Primary Source Cultural Guide|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=N69iOTtVHGYC&pg=PT8|year=2004|publisher=The Rosen Publishing Group|isbn=978-0-8239-3999-2|page=8}}{{cite book|author1=John E. Findling|author2=Kimberly D. Pelle|title=Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=QmXi_-Jujj0C&pg=PR23|year=2004|publisher=Greenwood Publishing Group|isbn=978-0-313-32278-5|page=23}}{{cite book|author1=Wayne C. Thompson|author2=Mark H. Mullin|title=Western Europe, 1983|year=1983|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=serMXIpALD0C|publisher=Stryker-Post Publications|page=337|isbn=9780943448114|quote=for ancient Greece was the cradle of Western culture ...}}{{cite book|author=Frederick Copleston|title=History of Philosophy Volume 1: Greece and Rome|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Y08L-MC36JUC&pg=PA13|date=1 June 2003|publisher=A&C Black|isbn=978-0-8264-6895-6|page=13|quote=PART I PRE-SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY CHAPTER II THE CRADLE OF WESTERN THOUGHT:}}{{cite book|author=Mario Iozzo|title=Art and History of Greece: And Mount Athos|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Q51-HAiZQwMC&pg=PA7|year=2001|publisher=Casa Editrice Bonechi|isbn=978-88-8029-435-1|page=7|quote=The capital of Greece, one of the world's most glorious cities and the cradle of Western culture,}}{{cite book|author=Marxiano Melotti|title=The Plastic Venuses: Archaeological Tourism in Post-Modern Society|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=jgIrBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA188|date=25 May 2011|publisher=Cambridge Scholars Publishing|isbn=978-1-4438-3028-7|page=188|quote=In short, Greece, despite having been the cradle of Western culture, was then an "other" space separate from the West.}}
See {{cite book|title=Library Journal|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=TFZVAAAAYAAJ|date=April 1972|publisher=Bowker|volume=97|page=1588|quote=Ancient Greece: Cradle of Western Culture (Series), disc. 6 strips with 3 discs, range: 44–60 fr., 17–18 min}}{{cite book|author=Stanley Mayer Burstein|title=Current Issues and the Study of Ancient History|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=17xmAAAAMAAJ|year=2002|publisher=Regina Books|isbn=978-1-930053-10-6|page=15|quote=and making Egypt play the same role in African education and culture that Athens and Greece do in Western culture.}}{{cite book|author=Murray Milner Jr. |title=Elites: A General Model|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=MvYlBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA62|date=8 January 2015|publisher=John Wiley & Sons|isbn=978-0-7456-8950-0|page=62|quote=Greece has long been considered the seedbed or cradle of Western civilization.}}{{cite book|title=Slavica viterbiensia 003: Periodico di letterature e culture slave della Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere Moderne dell'Università della Tuscia|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=f9fTPUTPPhkC&pg=PA148|date=10 November 2011|publisher=Gangemi Editore spa|isbn=978-88-492-6909-3|page=148|quote=The Special Case of Greece The ancient Greece was a cradle of the Western culture,}}{{cite book|author=Kim Covert|title=Ancient Greece: Birthplace of Democracy|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=KVMYJNvUiYkC&pg=PP5|date=1 July 2011|publisher=Capstone|isbn=978-1-4296-6831-6|page=5|quote=Ancient Greece is often called the cradle of western civilization. ... Ideas from literature and science also have their roots in ancient Greece.}}}} and Ancient Rome{{efn|See {{cite book|title=Rome: the cradle of western civilisation as illustrated by existing monuments |author=Henry Turner Inman |isbn=9781177738538 }}{{cite book |url=https://www.amazon.co.uk/Birth-Western-Civilisation-Greece-Rome/dp/B0013K3FW6 |title=The Birth Of Western Civilisation, Greece & Rome |author=Michael Ed. Grant |via=Amazon.co.uk |access-date=4 January 2016 |publisher=Thames & Hudson |year=1964 |archive-date=7 January 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160107211225/http://www.amazon.co.uk/Birth-Western-Civilisation-Greece-Rome/dp/B0013K3FW6 |url-status=live }}{{cite web |url=http://www.abebooks.com/9780500040034/Birth-Western-Civilization-Greece-Rome-0500040036/plp |title=9780500040034: The Birth of Western Civilization: Greece and Rome |author=HUXLEY, George |display-authors=etal |website=AbeBooks.com |access-date=4 January 2016 |archive-date=7 January 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160107211225/http://www.abebooks.com/9780500040034/Birth-Western-Civilization-Greece-Rome-0500040036/plp |url-status=live }}{{cite web |url=http://www.geographicus.com/P/AntiqueMap/AncientCities-bradford-1835 |title=Athens. Rome. Jerusalem and Vicinity. Peninsula of Mt. Sinai.: Geographicus Rare Antique Maps |website=Geographicus.com |access-date=4 January 2016 |archive-date=7 January 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160107211225/http://www.geographicus.com/P/AntiqueMap/AncientCities-bradford-1835 |url-status=live }}}} are generally considered to be the birthplaces of Western civilization—Greece having heavily influenced Rome—the former due to its impact on philosophy, democracy, science, aesthetics, as well as building designs and proportions and architecture; the latter due to its influence on art, law, warfare, governance, republicanism, engineering and religion. Western Civilization is also closely associated with Christianity,{{cite book |author1=Marvin Perry |author2=Myrna Chase |author3=James Jacob |author4=Margaret Jacob |author5=Theodore H. Von Laue |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=N6jytVCocwMC |title=Western Civilization: Since 1400 |year= 2012 |publisher=Cengage Learning |isbn=978-1-111-83169-1 |page=xxix}} the dominant religion in the West, with roots in Greco-Roman and Jewish thought. Christian ethics, drawing from the ethical and moral principles of its historical roots in Judaism, has played a pivotal role in shaping the foundational framework of Western societies.[http://www.britannica.com/topic/Judaism/The-Judaic-tradition Role of Judaism in Western culture and civilization] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180309200830/https://www.britannica.com/topic/Judaism/The-Judaic-tradition |date=9 March 2018 }}, "Judaism has played a significant role in the development of Western culture because of its unique relationship with Christianity, the dominant religious force in the West". [http://www.britannica.com/topic/Judaism Judaism] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181004115556/https://www.britannica.com/topic/Judaism/The-Judaic-tradition |date=4 October 2018 }} at Encyclopædia BritannicaReligions in Global Society – Page 146, Peter Beyer – 2006Cambridge University Historical Series, An Essay on Western Civilization in Its Economic Aspects, p.40: Hebraism, like Hellenism, has been an all-important factor in the development of Western Civilization; Judaism, as the precursor of Christianity, has indirectly had had much to do with shaping the ideals and morality of western nations since the Christian era. Earlier civilizations, such as the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians, had also significantly influenced Western civilization through their advancements in writing, law codes, and societal structures. The convergence of Greek-Roman and Judeo-Christian influences in shaping Western civilization has led certain scholars to characterize it as emerging from the legacies of Athens and Jerusalem,{{Cite journal |last=Celermajer |first=Danielle |date=2010 |title=Introduction: Athens and Jerusalem through a Different Lens |url=http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0725513610371046 |journal=Thesis Eleven |language=en |volume=102 |issue=1 |pages=3–5 |doi=10.1177/0725513610371046 |s2cid=147430371 |issn=0725-5136 |quote=The contrast between Athens and Jerusalem, as the twin fonts of Western civilization, is often thought to sum up a number of structural dichotomies... |access-date=17 December 2023 |archive-date=17 December 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20231217143922/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0725513610371046 |url-status=live }}{{Cite journal |last=Havers |first=Grant |date=2004 |title=Between Athens and Jerusalem: Western otherness in the thought of Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt |url=http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1084877042000197921 |journal=The European Legacy |language=en |volume=9 |issue=1 |pages=19–29 |doi=10.1080/1084877042000197921 |s2cid=143636651 |issn=1084-8770 |access-date=17 December 2023 |archive-date=17 December 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20231217143755/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1084877042000197921 |url-status=live }}{{Cite web |last=Brague |first=Rémi |date=2009 |title=Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization |url=https://philpapers.org/rec/BRAECA-6 |access-date=2023-12-17 |website=philpapers.org |language=en |quote=Western culture, which influenced the whole world, came from Europe. But its roots are not there. They are in Athens and Jerusalem... The Roman attitude senses its own incompleteness and recognizes the call to borrow from what went before it. Historically, it has led the West to borrow from the great traditions of Jerusalem and Athens: primarily the Jewish and Christian tradition, on the one hand, and the classical Greek tradition on the other. |archive-date=17 December 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20231217143754/https://philpapers.org/rec/BRAECA-6 |url-status=live }} or Athens, Jerusalem and Rome.{{Cite journal |last=Rosenne |first=Shabtai |date=1958 |title=The Influence of Judaism on the Development of International Law |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/netherlands-international-law-review/article/abs/influence-of-judaism-on-the-development-of-international-law/39DED917CD26138A2E247822CE9A04C6 |journal=Netherlands International Law Review |language=en |volume=5 |issue=2 |pages=119–149 |doi=10.1017/S0165070X00029685 |doi-broken-date=1 November 2024 |issn=2396-9113 |quote=The fact that modern international law is one of the products of Western European civilization means that it rests, as all that civilization, upon the threefold heritage of the ancient Mediterranean world, the heritage of Rome, Athens and Jerusalem. |access-date=17 December 2023 |archive-date=17 December 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20231217144414/https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/netherlands-international-law-review/article/abs/influence-of-judaism-on-the-development-of-international-law/39DED917CD26138A2E247822CE9A04C6 |url-status=live }}

In ancient Greece and Rome, individuals identified primarily as subjects of states, city-states, or empires, rather than as members of Western civilization. The distinct identification of Western civilization began to crystallize with the rise of Christianity during the Late Roman Empire. In this period, peoples in Europe started to perceive themselves as part of a unique civilization, differentiating from others like Islam, giving rise to the concept of Western civilization. By the 15th century, Renaissance intellectuals solidified this concept, associating Western civilization not only with Christianity but also with the intellectual and political achievements of the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Historians, such as Carroll Quigley in "The Evolution of Civilizations",{{cite web |date=10 March 2001 |title=The Evolution of Civilizations – An Introduction to Historical Analysis (1979) |url=https://archive.org/details/CarrollQuigley-TheEvolutionOfCivilizations-AnIntroductionTo |access-date=31 January 2014 |page=84}} contend that Western civilization was born around AD 500, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, leaving a vacuum for new ideas to flourish that were impossible in Classical societies. In either view, between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Renaissance, the West (or those regions that would later become the heartland of the culturally "western sphere") experienced a period of decline, and then readaptation, reorientation and considerable renewed material, technological and political development.{{Cite web |title=History of Europe – Crisis, Recovery, Resilience |url=https://www.britannica.com/topic/history-of-Europe/Crisis-recovery-and-resilience-Did-the-Middle-Ages-end |access-date=2024-01-15 |website=www.britannica.com |language=en |archive-date=28 December 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20231228230314/https://www.britannica.com/topic/history-of-Europe/Crisis-recovery-and-resilience-Did-the-Middle-Ages-end |url-status=live }} Classical culture 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 importationH. G. Wells, The Outline of History, [http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/sherwood/Wells-Outline/Text/Part-II.htm Section 31.8, The Intellectual Life of Arab Islam] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091214044419/http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/sherwood/Wells-Outline/Text/Part-II.htm|date=14 December 2009}} "For some generations before Muhammad, the Arab mind had been, as it were, smouldering, it had been producing poetry and much religious discussion; under the stimulus of the national and racial successes it presently blazed out with a brilliance second only to that of the Greeks during their best period. From a new angle and with a fresh vigour it took up that systematic development of positive knowledge, which the Greeks had begun and relinquished. It revived the human pursuit of science. If the Greek was the father, then the Arab was the foster-father of the scientific method of dealing with reality, that is to say, by absolute frankness, the utmost simplicity of statement and explanation, exact record, and exhaustive criticism. Through the Arabs it was and not by the Latin route that the modern world received that gift of light and power."{{cite book |last=Lewis |first=Bernard |url=https://archive.org/details/whatwentwrongcl00lewi/page/3 |title=What Went Wrong |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=2002 |isbn=978-0-06-051605-5 |page=[https://archive.org/details/whatwentwrongcl00lewi/page/3 3] |author-link=Bernard Lewis}} "For many centuries the world of Islam was in the forefront of human civilization and achievement ... In the era between the decline of antiquity and the dawn of modernity, that is, in the centuries designated in European history as medieval, the Islamic claim was not without justification." of both the Ancient Greco-Roman and new technology through the Arabs from India and China to Europe.{{cite web |title=Science, civilization and society |url=http://www.es.flinders.edu.au/~mattom/science+society/lectures/lecture11.html |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160327031433/http://www.es.flinders.edu.au/~mattom/science+society/lectures/lecture11.html |archive-date=27 March 2016 |access-date=6 May 2011 |website=Flinders University |publisher=}}{{cite web |author=Richard J. Mayne Jr. |title=Middle Ages |url=http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/195896/history-of-Europe |access-date=6 May 2011 |publisher=Britannica.com |archive-date=3 May 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150503085922/http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/195896/history-of-Europe |url-status=live }}

File:Landing of Columbus (2) (cropped).jpg arrives at the New World.]]

Since the Renaissance, the West evolved beyond the influence of the ancient Greeks and Romans and the Islamic world, due to the successful Second Agricultural, Commercial,[http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/bus/A0813037.html InfoPlease.com] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081022140436/http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/bus/A0813037.html|date=22 October 2008}}, commercial revolution Scientific,{{cite web |date=6 June 1999 |title=The Scientific Revolution |url=http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/ENLIGHT/SCIREV.HTM |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110501215623/http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/ENLIGHT/SCIREV.HTM |archive-date=1 May 2011 |access-date=6 May 2011 |publisher=Wsu.edu}} and Industrial{{cite web |author1=Eric Bond |author2=Sheena Gingerich |author3=Oliver Archer-Antonsen |author4=Liam Purcell |author5=Elizabeth Macklem |date=17 February 2003 |title=Innovations |url=http://industrialrevolution.sea.ca/innovations.html |access-date=6 May 2011 |publisher=The Industrial Revolution |archive-date=6 September 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110906051618/http://industrialrevolution.sea.ca/innovations.html |url-status=live }} revolutions (propellers of modern banking concepts). The West rose further with the 18th century's Age of Enlightenment and through the Age of Exploration's expansion of peoples of European empires in the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly the globe-spanning colonial empires of Western Europe.{{cite web |date=May 2016 |title=How Islam Created Europe; In late antiquity, the religion split the Mediterranean world in two. Now it is remaking the Continent. |url=https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/how-islam-created-europe/476388/ |access-date=25 April 2016 |publisher=The Atlantic |archive-date=23 April 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160423181353/http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/how-islam-created-europe/476388/ |url-status=live }} Numerous times, this expansion was accompanied by Catholic missionaries, who attempted to proselytize Christianity.

In the modern era, Western culture has undergone further transformation through the Renaissance, Ages of Discovery and Enlightenment, and the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions.{{cite web |title=Western culture |url=https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/western_culture.htm |publisher=Science Daily |access-date=11 April 2018 |archive-date=25 April 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190425141034/https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/western_culture.htm |url-status=live }}{{cite web |title=A brief history of Western culture |url=https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/cultures-religions-ap-arthistory/a/a-brief-history-of-western-culture |publisher=Khan Academy |access-date=11 April 2018 |archive-date=26 December 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181226071136/https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/cultures-religions-ap-arthistory/a/a-brief-history-of-western-culture |url-status=live }} The widespread influence of Western culture extended globally through imperialism, colonialism, and Christianization by Western powers from the 15th to 20th centuries. This influence persists through the exportation of mass culture, a phenomenon often referred to as Westernization.{{Cite web |title=Westernization |url=https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803121844996 |access-date=2024-01-15 |website=Oxford Reference |language=en |doi= |archive-date=15 January 2024 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240115035851/https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803121844996 |url-status=live }}

There was debate among some in the 1960s as to whether Latin America as a whole is in a category of its own.Cf., Arnold J. Toynbee, Change and Habit. The challenge of our time (Oxford 1966, 1969) at 153–56; also, Toynbee, A Study of History (10 volumes, 2 supplements).

{{Excerpt|Western culture}}

{{See also|History of Western civilization}}{{More citations needed section|date=July 2018}}

The geopolitical divisions in Europe that created a concept of East and West originated in the ancient tyrannical and imperialistic Graeco-Roman times.{{cite book | title=A history of eastern Europe: crisis and change |last1=Bideleux | first1=Robert | last2=Jeffries | first2=Ian | publisher=Routledge | isbn=978-0-415-16112-1 | page=48 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=U39AYJm1L94C|year=1998 }} 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), whereas the West was much more rural in its character and more readily adopted Latin as its common language. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the beginning of medieval times (or Middle Ages), Western and Central Europe were substantially cut off from the East, where Byzantine Greek culture and Eastern Christianity became founding influences in the Eastern European world such as the East and South Slavic peoples.{{citation needed|date=June 2020}}

File:Age of Discovery explorations in English.png (began in 15th century)]]

Roman Catholic Western and Central Europe thus maintained a distinct identity, particularly as it began to redevelop during the Renaissance. Even following the Protestant Reformation, Protestant Europe continued to see itself as more tied to Roman Catholic Europe than other parts of the perceived "civilized world". Use of the term West as a specific cultural and geopolitical term developed over the course of the Age of Exploration as Europe spread its culture to other parts of the world. Roman Catholics were the first major religious group to migrate to the New World, as settlers in the colonies of Spain and Portugal (and later, France) belonged to that faith. English and Dutch colonies, on the other hand, tended to be more religiously diverse. Settlers to these colonies included Anglicans, Dutch Calvinists, English Puritans and other nonconformists, English Catholics, Scottish Presbyterians, French Huguenots, German and Swedish Lutherans, as well as Quakers, Mennonites, Amish, and Moravians.{{citation needed|date=July 2018}}

{{Main|Roman Republic|Roman Empire|Fall of the Western Roman Empire}}

{{More citations needed section|date=April 2018}}File:Map of Rome and Carthage at the start of the Second Punic War.svg in 218 BC after having managed the conquest of most of the Italian Peninsula, on the eve of its most successful and deadliest war with the Carthaginians]]

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File:Roman Empire Trajan 117AD.png in AD 117. During 350 years the Roman Republic turned into an Empire expanding up to twenty-five times its area.]]

Ancient Rome (6th century BC – AD 476) is a term to describe the ancient Roman society that conquered Central Italy assimilating the Italian Etruscan culture, growing from the Latium region since about the 8th century BC, to a massive empire straddling the Mediterranean Sea. In its 10-centuries territorial expansion, Roman civilization shifted from a small monarchy (753–509 BC), to a republic (509–27 BC), into an autocratic empire (27 BC – AD 476). Its Empire came to dominate Western, Central and Southeastern Europe, Northern Africa and, becoming an autocratic Empire a vast Middle Eastern area, when it ended. Conquest was enforced using the Roman legions and then through cultural assimilation by eventual recognition of some form of Roman citizenship's privileges. Nonetheless, despite its great legacy, a number of factors led to the eventual decline and ultimately fall of the Roman Empire.{{citation needed|date=June 2020}}

The Roman Empire succeeded the approximately 500-year-old Roman Republic ({{circa}} 510–30 BC). In 350 years, from the successful and deadliest war with the Phoenicians which began in 218 BC to the rule of Emperor Hadrian by AD 117, ancient Rome expanded up to twenty-five times its area. The same time passed again before its fall in AD 476. Rome had expanded long before the empire reached its zenith with the conquest of Dacia in AD 106 (modern-day Romania) under Emperor Trajan. During its territorial peak, the Roman Empire controlled about {{Convert|5000000|km2|}} of land surface and had a population of 100 million. 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 Levant, including the ancient trade routes with population living outside. Ancient Rome has contributed greatly to the development of law, war, art, literature, architecture, technology and language in the Western world, and its history continues to have a major influence on the world today. The Latin language has been the base from which Romance languages evolved and it has been the official language of the Catholic Church and all Catholic religious ceremonies all over Europe until 1967, as well as one of, or the official language of countries such as Italy and Poland (9th–18th centuries).Karin Friedrich et al., The Other Prussia: Royal Prussia, Poland and Liberty, 1569–1772, Cambridge University Press, 2000, {{ISBN|0-521-58335-7}}, Google Print, p. 88{{citation needed|date=November 2021}}

File:Invasions of the Roman Empire 1.png on Roman Empire since the 2nd and throughout the 5th centuries establishing mostly Germanic kingdoms in its place]]

In AD 395, a few decades before its Western collapse, the Roman Empire formally split into a Western and an Eastern one, each with their own emperors, capitals, and governments, although ostensibly they still belonged to one formal Empire. The Western Roman Empire provinces eventually were replaced by Northern European Germanic ruled kingdoms in the 5th century due to civil wars, corruption, and devastating Germanic invasions from such tribes as the Huns, Goths, the Franks and the Vandals by their late expansion throughout Europe. The three-day Visigoths's AD 410 sack of Rome who had been raiding Greece not long before, a shocking time for Greco-Romans, was the first time after almost 800 years that Rome had fallen to a foreign enemy, and St. Jerome, living in Bethlehem at the time, wrote that "The City which had taken the whole world was itself taken."St Jerome, Letter CXXVII. To Principia, s:Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series II/Volume VI/The Letters of St. Jerome/Letter 127 paragraph 12. 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.Dominic Selwood, [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/02/day-ad-455-beginning-end-rome/ "On this day in AD 455: the beginning of the end for Rome"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180723112808/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/02/day-ad-455-beginning-end-rome/ |date=23 July 2018 }} 2 June 2017.Irina-Maria Manea, [https://www.historia.ro/sectiune/general/articol/alaric-barbarians-and-rome-a-complicated-relationship "Alaric, Barbarians and Rome: a Complicated Relationship"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180723034245/https://www.historia.ro/sectiune/general/articol/alaric-barbarians-and-rome-a-complicated-relationship |date=23 July 2018 }}. The ancient Barbarian tribes, often composed of well-trained Roman soldiers paid by Rome to guard the extensive borders, had become militarily sophisticated "Romanized barbarians", and mercilessly slaughtered the Romans conquering their Western territories while looting their possessions.Rodney Stark, [https://books.google.com/books?id=wqwMAwAAQBAJ&dq=barbarians+romans+slaughter+western&pg=PT45 "How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221117131747/https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wqwMAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT45&lpg=PT45&dq=barbarians+romans+slaughter+western&source=bl&ots=wGVZVw7NgO&sig=iyoMp01vWUMwo3R6EmXjtccwBoA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj2ir7_17PcAhUL16QKHdcYDn0Q6AEIzgEwIQ#v=onepage&q=barbarians%20romans%20slaughter%20western&f=false |date=17 November 2022 }}.

The Roman Empire is where the idea of "the West" began to emerge.{{Efn|By Rome's central location at the heart of the Empire, "West" and "East" were terms used to denote provinces west and east of the capital itself. Therefore, Iberia (Portugal and Spain), Gaul (France), the Mediterranean coast of North Africa (Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco) and Britannia were all part of the "West". Greece, Cyprus, Anatolia, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Egypt, and Libya were part of the "East". Italy itself was considered central, until the reforms of Diocletian dividing the Empire into true two halves: Eastern and Western.{{citation needed|date=June 2020}}}}

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 Roman Empire and beginning of the Early Middle Ages. The survival of the Eastern Roman Empire protected Roman legal and cultural traditions, combining them with Greek and Christian elements, for another thousand years. The name Byzantine Empire was first used centuries later, after the Byzantine Empire ended. The dissolution of the Western half, nominally ended in AD 476, but in truth a long process that ended by the rise of Catholic Gaul (modern-day France) ruling from around the year AD 800, left only the Eastern Roman Empire alive. The Eastern half continued to think of itself as the Roman Empire. The inhabitants called themselves Romans because the term "Roman" was meant to signify all Christians. The Pope crowned Charlemagne as Emperor of the Romans of the newly established Holy Roman Empire, and the West began thinking in terms of Western Latins living in the old Western Empire, and Eastern Greeks (those inside the Roman remnant of the old Eastern Empire).{{Cite web |date=2022-07-22 |title=Charlemagne: Facts, Empire & Holy Roman Emperor |url=https://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/charlemagne |access-date=2024-01-27 |website=HISTORY |language=en |archive-date=6 September 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220906070237/https://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/charlemagne |url-status=live }}

{{Main|Byzantine Empire|Holy Roman Empire|East–West Schism|Reformation}}

{{Further|Christendom|Greek scholars in the Renaissance|Peace of Westphalia}}{{More citations needed section|date=November 2021}}File:Justinien 527-565.svg's conquests (AD 527–565)]]In the early 4th century, the central focus of power was on two separate imperial legacies within the Roman Empire: the older Aegean Sea Greek heritage (of Classical Greece) in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the newer most successful Tyrrhenian Sea Latin heritage (of Ancient Latium and Tuscany) in the Western Mediterranean. A turning point was Constantine the Great's decision to establish the city of Constantinople (today's Istanbul) in modern-day Turkey as the "New Rome" when he picked it as capital of his Empire (later called "Byzantine Empire" by modern historians) in AD 330.File:Map of the Byzantine Empire, 1025 AD.PNG in AD 1025 before Christian East-West Schism]]

This internal conflict of legacies had possibly emerged since the assassination of Julius Caesar three centuries earlier, when Roman imperialism had just been born with the Roman Republic becoming "Roman Empire", but reached its zenith during 3rd century's many internal civil wars. This is the time when the Huns (part of the ancient Eastern European tribes named barbarians by the Romans) from modern-day Hungary penetrated into the Dalmatian (modern-day Croatia) region then originating in the following 150 years in the Roman Empire officially splitting in two halves. Also the time of the formal acceptance of Christianity as Empire's religious policy, when the Emperors began actively banning and fighting previous pagan religions.

File:Spread of Christianity to AD 600 (1).pngs.]]

The Eastern Roman Empire included lands south-west of the Black Sea and bordering on the Eastern Mediterranean and parts of the Adriatic Sea. This division into Eastern and Western Roman Empires was later reflected in the administration of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Greek Orthodox churches, with Rome and Constantinople debating over whether either city was the capital of Western religion.{{citation needed|date=June 2020}}

As the Eastern (Orthodox) and Western (Catholic) churches spread their influence, the line between Eastern and Western Christianity was moving. Its movement was affected by the influence of the Byzantine empire and the fluctuating power and influence of the Catholic church in Rome. The geographic line of religious division approximately followed a line of cultural divide.{{citation needed|date=June 2020}}

File:Frankish empire.jpg Frankish Empire before Charlemagne's coronation in Rome]]

In AD 800 under Charlemagne, the Early Medieval Franks established an empire that was recognized by the Pope in Rome as the Holy Roman Empire (Latin Christian revival of the ancient Roman Empire, under perpetual Germanic rule from AD 962) inheriting ancient Roman Empire's prestige but offending the Eastern Roman Emperor in Constantinople, and leading to the Crusades and the East–West Schism. The crowning of the Emperor by the Pope led to the assumption that the highest power was the papal hierarchy, quintessential Roman Empire's spiritual heritage authority, establishing then, until the Protestant Reformation, the civilization of Western Christendom.{{citation needed|date=June 2020}}

The earliest concept of Europe as a cultural sphere (instead of simple geographic term) is believed to have been formed by Alcuin of York during the Carolingian Renaissance of the 9th century, but was limited to the territories that practised Western Christianity at the time.{{cite book|author=Sanjay Kumar|title=A Handbook of Political Geography|publisher=K.K. Publications|year=2021|pages=125–127|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=iGc9EAAAQBAJ}}

The Latin Church of western and central Europe split with the eastern Greek patriarchates in the Christian East–West Schism, also known as the "Great Schism", during the Gregorian Reforms (calling for a more central status of the Roman Catholic Church Institution), three months after Pope Leo IX's death in April 1054.{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=RfO1J6hjcdgC&pg=PA210 |editor-first=Kenneth Meyer |editor-last=Setton |title=A History of the Crusades |publisher=Wisconsin University Press |year=1969 |isbn=9780299048341 |pages=209–210}} Following the 1054 Great Schism, both the Western Church and Eastern Church continued to consider themselves uniquely orthodox and catholic. 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."{{cite book|last1=Dulles S.J.|first1=Avery|editor1-last=Reno|editor1-first=R.R.|year=2012|title=The Orthodox Imperative: Selected Essays of Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J.|publisher=First Things Press|pages=224|edition=Kindle|url=https://www.amazon.com/Orthodox-Imperative-Selected-Essays-Cardinal-ebook/dp/B008R551PO|access-date=6 August 2018|archive-date=20 March 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210320002330/https://www.amazon.com/Orthodox-Imperative-Selected-Essays-Cardinal-ebook/dp/B008R551PO|url-status=live}} Over time, the Western Christianity gradually identified with the "Catholic" label, and people of Western Europe gradually associated the "Orthodox" label with Eastern Christianity (although in some languages the "Catholic" label is not necessarily identified with the Western Church). This was in note of the fact that both Catholic and Orthodox were in use as ecclesiastical adjectives as early as the 2nd and 4th centuries respectively. Meanwhile, the extent of both Christendoms expanded, as Germanic peoples, Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, Scandinavia, Finnic peoples, 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 Orthodox Church.{{citation needed|date=June 2020}}

File:Byzantium@1180.jpg]]

In 1071, the Byzantine army was defeated by the Muslim Turco-Persians of medieval Asia, resulting in the loss of most of Asia Minor. The situation was a serious threat to the future of the Eastern Orthodox Byzantine Empire. The Emperor sent a plea to the Pope in Rome to send military aid to restore the lost territories to Christian rule. The result was a series of western European military campaigns into the eastern Mediterranean, known as the Crusades. Unfortunately for the Byzantines, the crusaders (belonging to the members of nobility from France, German territories, the Low countries, England and Italy) had no allegiance to the Byzantine Emperor and established their own states in the conquered regions, including the heart of the Byzantine Empire.

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.

file:Empèri Bizantin - Partiment après la Quatrena Crosada.png after the Fourth Crusade (shown partly in Greece and partly in Turkey)]]

The 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. An anti-Western riot in 1182 broke out in Constantinople targeting Latins. The extremely wealthy (after previous Crusades) Venetians in particular made a successful attempt to maintain control over the coast of Catholic present-day Croatia (specifically the Dalmatia, a region of interest to the maritime medieval Venetian Republic moneylenders and its rivals, such as the Republic of Genoa) rebelling against the Venetian economic domination.{{cite book |chapter-url=http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/History/History-idx?type=turn&entity=History.CrusTwo.p0188&id=History.CrusTwo&isize=text&q1=Scandinavia |title=The later Crusades, 1189–1311 |chapter=V: The Fourth Crusade |last1=Wolff |first1=R. L. |editor=Hazard, H. W. |page=162 |publisher=University of Wisconsin Press |year=1969 |access-date=9 November 2013 |archive-date=12 November 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201112020236/http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/History/History-idx?type=turn |url-status=live }} What followed dealt an irrevocable blow to the already weakened Byzantine Empire with the Crusader army's sack of Constantinople in April 1204, capital of the Greek Christian-controlled Byzantine Empire, described as one of the most profitable and disgraceful sacks of a city in history.Phillips, The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople, Introduction, xiii. This paved the way for Muslim conquests in present-day Turkey and the Balkans in the coming centuries (only a handful of the Crusaders followed to the stated destination thereafter, the Holy Land). The geographical identity of the Balkans is historically known as a crossroads of cultures, a juncture between the Latin and Greek bodies of the Roman Empire, the destination of a massive influx of pagans (meaning "non-Christians") Bulgars and Slavs, an area where Catholic and Orthodox Christianity met,{{cite book |author=Goldstein, I. |title=Croatia: A History |url=https://archive.org/details/croatia00ivog |url-access=registration |publisher=McGill-Queen's University Press |year=1999}} as well as the meeting point between Islam and Christianity. The Papal Inquisition was established in AD 1229 on a permanent basis, run largely by clergymen in Rome,{{cite web|url=http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08026a.htm|title=CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Inquisition|website=Newadvent.org|access-date=13 October 2017|archive-date=26 October 2007|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071026132112/http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08026a.htm|url-status=live}} and abolished six centuries later. 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,{{cite book |last=Lea |first=Henry Charles |author-link=Henry Charles Lea |title=A History of the Inquisition In The Middle Ages |volume=1 |chapter=Chapter VII. The Inquisition Founded |quote=The judicial use of torture was as yet happily unknown... |year=1888|publisher=General Books LLC |isbn=1-152-29621-3}} and seldom resorting to executions.{{cite book|last=Foxe |first=John |author-link=John Foxe |title=Foxe's Book of Martyrs |chapter=Chapter V |chapter-url=http://www.jesus.org.uk/vault/library/foxes_book_of_martyrs.pdf |title-link=Foxe's Book of Martyrs |access-date=21 July 2018 |archive-date=26 November 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121126164105/http://www.jesus.org.uk/vault/library/foxes_book_of_martyrs.pdf |url-status=dead}}{{cite encyclopedia |last=Blötzer |first=J. |encyclopedia=The Catholic Encyclopedia |title=Inquisition |url=http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08026a.htm |access-date=26 August 2012 |year=1910 |publisher=Robert Appleton Company |quote=... in this period the more influential ecclesiastical authorities declared that the death penalty was contrary to the spirit of the Gospel, and they themselves opposed its execution. For centuries this was the ecclesiastical attitude both in theory and in practice. Thus, in keeping with the civil law, some Manichæans were executed at Ravenna in 556. On the other hand, Elipandus of Toledo and Felix of Urgel, the chiefs of Adoptionism and Predestinationism, were condemned by councils, but were otherwise left unmolested. We may note, however, that the monk Gothescalch, after the condemnation of his false doctrine that Christ had not died for all mankind, was by the Synods of Mainz in 848 and Quiercy in 849 sentenced to flogging and imprisonment, punishments then common in monasteries for various infractions of the rule. |archive-date=26 October 2007 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071026132112/http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08026a.htm |url-status=live }}{{cite encyclopedia |last=Blötzer |first=J. |encyclopedia=The Catholic Encyclopedia |title=Inquisition |url=http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08026a.htm |access-date=26 August 2012 |year=1910 |publisher=Robert Appleton Company |quote=[...] the occasional executions of heretics during this period must be ascribed partly to the arbitrary action of individual rulers, partly to the fanatic outbreaks of the overzealous populace, and in no wise to ecclesiastical law or the ecclesiastical authorities. |archive-date=26 October 2007 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071026132112/http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08026a.htm |url-status=live }}{{cite book|last=Lea |first=Henry Charles |title=A History of the Inquisition In The Middle Ages |volume=1 |chapter= VII. The Inquisition Founded |date=January 2010 |publisher=General Books LLC |isbn=978-1-152-29621-3}}

File:Martin Luther, 1529.jpg, Protestant Reformer]]

This very profitable Central European Fourth Crusade had prompted the 14th century Renaissance (translated as 'Rebirth') of Italian city-states including the Papal States, on eve of the Protestant Reformation and Counter-Reformation (which established the Roman Inquisition to succeed the Medieval Inquisition). 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). In this context, the Protestant Reformation (1517) may be viewed as a schism within the Catholic Church. German monk Martin Luther, in the wake of precursors, broke with the pope and with the emperor by the Catholic Church's abusive commercialization of indulgences in the Late Medieval Period, backed by many of the German princes and helped by the development of the printing press, in an attempt to reform corruption within the church.{{cite web |url=http://courses.wcupa.edu/jones/his101/web/37luther.htm |title=Background to Against the Sale of Indulgences by Martin Luther |publisher=West Chester University of Pennsylvania |website=Wcupa.edu |date=2012 |access-date=6 July 2018 |archive-date=19 December 2014 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141219220326/http://courses.wcupa.edu/jones/his101/web/37luther.htm |url-status=dead}}{{cite web |url=http://www.markedbyteachers.com/as-and-a-level/history/how-important-was-the-role-of-the-princes-in-bringing-about-the-success-of-the-lutheran-reformation-in-germany-in-the-years-1525-to-1555.html |title=How important was the role of the princes in bringing about the success of the Lutheran Reformation in Germany in the years 1525 to 1555? |publisher=Marked by Teachers |website=markedbyteachers.com |date=2009 |access-date=29 August 2018 |archive-date=29 August 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180829110019/http://www.markedbyteachers.com/as-and-a-level/history/how-important-was-the-role-of-the-princes-in-bringing-about-the-success-of-the-lutheran-reformation-in-germany-in-the-years-1525-to-1555.html |url-status=live }}{{cite web |url=https://www.history.com/topics/reformation |title=The Reformation |publisher=A&E Television Networks |website=history.com |access-date=29 August 2018 |archive-date=28 September 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180928051657/https://www.history.com/topics/reformation |url-status=live }}

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. As European influence spread across the globe, these Westphalian principles, especially the concept of sovereign states, became central to international law and to the prevailing world order.{{cite book|author=Henry Kissinger|year=2014|title=World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History|chapter=Introduction and Chpt 1|publisher=Allen Lane|isbn=978-0241004265|author-link=Henry Kissinger}}

{{Main|New World|Analysis of Western European colonialism and colonization|Mercantilism|Imperialism}}{{More citations needed section|date=November 2021}}

File:Portuguese discoveries and explorationsV2en.png and explorations since 1336: first arrival places and dates; main Portuguese spice trade routes in the Indian Ocean (blue); territories claimed by King John III of Portugal ({{circa|1536}}) (green)]]

File:SpanishEmpire1790.svg in 1790]]

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. With the Crusades came the relative contraction of the Orthodox Byzantine's large silk industry in favor of Catholic Western Europe and the rise of Western Papacy. The most famous of these merchant travelers pursuing East–west trade was Venetian Marco Polo. 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. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Turks consolidated control over the eastern Mediterranean, closing off key overland trade routes.{{citation needed|date=June 2020}}

The Portuguese spearheaded the drive to find oceanic routes that would provide cheaper and easier access to South and East Asian goods, by advancements in maritime technology such as the caravel ship introduced in the mid-1400s. The charting of oceanic routes between East and West began with the unprecedented voyages of Portuguese and Spanish sea captains. In 1492, European colonialism expanded across the globe with the exploring voyage of merchant, navigator, and Hispano-Italian colonizer Christopher Columbus. Such voyages were influenced by medieval European adventurers after the European spice trade with Asia, who had journeyed overland to the Far East contributing to geographical knowledge of parts of the Asian continent. They are of enormous significance in Western history as they marked the beginning of the European exploration, colonization and exploitation of the American continents and their native inhabitants.{{efn|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 caravel, in order that they might find a sea route to the source of the lucrative spice trade.{{citation needed|date=June 2020}} In 1488, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the southern tip of Africa under the sponsorship of Portugal's John II, from which point he noticed that the coast swung northeast (Cape of Good Hope).{{citation needed|date=June 2020}}

In 1492 Christopher Columbus would land on an island in the Bahamas archipelago on behalf of the Spanish, and documenting the Atlantic Ocean's routes would be granted a coat of arms by Pope Alexander VI motu proprio in 1502.{{citation needed|date=June 2020}}

With the discovery of the American continent or 'New World' in 1492–1493, the European colonial Age of Discovery and exploration was born, revisiting an imperialistic view accompanied by the invention of firearms, while marking the start of the Modern Era. During this long period the Catholic Church launched a major effort to spread Christianity in the New World and to convert the Native Americans and others. 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. (Popular typefaces such as italics were inspired and designed from transcriptions during this period.) Renaissance architectural works, revivals of Classical and Gothic styles, flourished during this modern period throughout Western colonial empires.

In 1497 Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama made the first open voyage from Europe to India.{{citation needed|date=June 2020}}

In 1520, Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese navigator in the service of the Crown of Castile ('Spain'), found a sea route into the Pacific Ocean.}}{{efn|In the 16th century, the Portuguese broke the (overland) medieval monopoly of the Arabs and Italians of trade (goods and slaves) between Asia and Europe by the discovery of the sea route to India around the Cape of Good Hope.M. Wiesner-Hanks, Early Modern Europe 1450–1789 (Cambridge, 2006) With the ensuing rise of the rival Dutch East India Company, Portuguese influence in Asia was gradually eclipsed; Dutch forces first established fortified independent bases in the East and then between 1640 and 1660 wrestled some southern Indian ports, and the lucrative Japan trade from the Portuguese. Later, the English and the French established some settlements in India and trade with China, and their own acquisitions would gradually surpass those of the Dutch. In 1763, the British eliminated French influence in India and established the British East India Company as the most important political force on the Indian Subcontinent.}} The European colonization of the Americas led to the Atlantic slave trade between the 1490s and the 1800s, which also contributed to the development of African intertribal warfare and racist ideology. Before the abolition of its slave trade in 1807, the British Empire alone (which had started colonial efforts in 1578, almost a century after Portuguese and Spanish empires) was responsible for the transportation of 3.5 million African slaves to the Americas, a third of all slaves transported across the Atlantic.{{Cite book |first=Niall |last=Ferguson |author-link=Niall Ferguson |title=Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power |location=New York |publisher=Basic Books |year=2004 |page=[https://archive.org/details/empire00nial/page/62 62] |isbn=978-0-465-02329-5 |url=https://archive.org/details/empire00nial/page/62 }} The Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in 1806 by the French Revolutionary Wars; abolition of the Roman Catholic Inquisition followed.{{citation needed|date=June 2020}}

Due to the reach of these empires, Western institutions expanded throughout the world. This process of influence (and imposition) began with the voyages of discovery, colonization, conquest, and exploitation of Portugal enforced as well by papal bulls in 1450s (by the fall of the Byzantine Empire), granting Portugal navigation, war and trade monopoly for any newly discovered lands,{{harvnb|Daus|1983|p=33}} and competing Spanish navigators. It continued with the rise of the Dutch East India Company by the destabilizing Spanish discovery of the New World, and the creation and expansion of the English and French colonial empires, and others.{{citation needed|date=June 2020}} Even after demands for self-determination from subject peoples within Western empires were met with decolonization, these institutions persisted. 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. 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.{{citation needed|date=June 2020}} Historically colonialism had been justified with the values of individualism and enlightenment.{{cite book |last=Carlin |first=Na'ama |title=Morality, Violence, and Ritual Circumcision |quote=Specifically, these are 'Western' or 'White' values that find their foundation in Greco-Roman philosophy and espouse key notions such as individualism and enlightenment. |pages=34 |url=https://www.routledge.com/Morality-Violence-and-Ritual-Circumcision-Writing-with-Blood/Carlin/p/book/9780367551957 |year=2022 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-0367551957 |access-date=31 December 2022 |archive-date=31 December 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221231130103/https://www.routledge.com/Morality-Violence-and-Ritual-Circumcision-Writing-with-Blood/Carlin/p/book/9780367551957 |url-status=live }}

The concepts of a world of nation-states born by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, coupled with the ideologies of the Enlightenment, the coming of modernity, the Scientific Revolution{{cite web |url=http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/lect/mod07.html |title=Modern West Civ. 7: The Scientific Revolution of the 17 Cent |publisher=Fordham.edu |access-date=6 May 2011 |archive-date=11 May 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110511153904/http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/lect/mod07.html |url-status=dead }} and the Industrial Revolution,{{cite web|url=http://mars.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/wc2/lectures/industrialrev.html |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20001214091900/http://mars.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/wc2/lectures/industrialrev.html |url-status=dead |archive-date=14 December 2000 |title=The Industrial Revolution |publisher=Mars.wnec.edu |access-date=6 May 2011}} would produce powerful social transformations, political and economic institutions that have come to influence (or been imposed upon) most nations of the world today. Historians agree that the Industrial Revolution has been one of the most important events in history.[http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/IndustrialRevolutionandtheStandardofLiving.html Industrial Revolution and the Standard of Living: The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130701131352/http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/IndustrialRevolutionandtheStandardofLiving.html |date=1 July 2013 }}, Library of Economics and Liberty

The course of three centuries since Christopher Columbus' late 15th century's voyages, of deportation of slaves from Africa and British dominant northern-Atlantic location, later developed into modern-day United States of America, evolving from the ratification of the Constitution of the United States by thirteen States on the North American East Coast before end of the 18th century.

{{Main|Age of Enlightenment|Scientific Revolution}}

Eric Voegelin described the 18th-century as one where "the sentiment grows that one age has come to its close and that a new age of Western civilization is about to be born". According to Voeglin the Enlightenment (also called the Age of Reason) represents the "atrophy of Christian transcendental experiences and [seeks] to enthrone the Newtonian method of science as the only valid method of arriving at truth".Voeglin, E., From Enlightenment to Revolution, p. 3 Its precursors were John Milton and Baruch Spinoza.{{cite book |title=Enlightenment Essays: Volumes 1-4 |date=1970 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=VuEYAAAAIAAJ}} Meeting Galileo in 1638 left an enduring impact on John Milton and influenced Milton's great work Areopagitica, where he warns that, without free speech, inquisitorial forces will impose "an undeserved thraldom upon learning".{{cite magazine |last1=Rosen |first1=Jonathan |title=Return to Paradise: The Enduring Relevance of John Milton |url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/02/return-to-paradise |access-date=27 February 2021 |magazine=The New Yorker |date=26 May 2008 |archive-date=18 January 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210118150150/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/02/return-to-paradise |url-status=live }}

The achievements of the 17th century included the invention of the telescope and acceptance of heliocentrism. 18th century scholars continued to refine Newton's theory of gravitation, notably Leonhard Euler, Pierre Louis Maupertuis, Alexis-Claude Clairaut, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Pierre-Simon de Laplace. Laplace's five-volume Treatise on Celestial Mechanics is one of the great works of 18th-century Newtonianism. Astronomy gained in prestige as new observatories were funded by governments and more powerful telescopes developed, leading to the discovery of new planets, asteroids, nebulae and comets, and paving the way for improvements in navigation and cartography. Astronomy became the second most popular scientific profession, after medicine.{{cite book |last=Burns |first=William E. |title=Science in the Enlightenment: An Encyclopedia |publisher=ABC-CLIO |date=2003 |pages=10–12}}

A common metanarrative of the Enlightenment is the "secularization theory". Modernity, as understood within the framework, means a total break with the past. Innovation and science are the good, representing the modern values of rationalism, while faith is ruled by superstition and traditionalism.{{cite book|author1-link=David Biale |last1=Biale |first1=David |title=Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought |publisher=Princeton University Press |page=x}} Inspired by the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment embodied the ideals of improvement and progress. Descartes and Isaac Newton were regarded as exemplars of human intellectual achievement. Condorcet wrote about the progress of humanity in the Sketch of the Progress of the Human Mind (1794), from primitive society to agrarianism, the invention of writing, the later invention of the printing press and the advancement to "the Period when the Sciences and Philosophy threw off the Yoke of Authority".{{cite book |title=Science and Technology in World History |publisher=Johns Hopkins University Press |date=2015 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=eR0AEAAAQBAJ&dq=Enlightenment+Scientific&pg=PA293 |page=293|isbn=9781421417752 }}

French writer Pierre Bayle denounced Spinoza as a pantheist (thereby accusing him of atheism). Bayle's criticisms garnered much attention for Spinoza. The pantheism controversy in the late 18th century saw Gotthold Lessing attacked by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi over support for Spinoza's pantheism. Lessing was defended by Moses Mendelssohn, although Mendelssohn diverged from pantheism to follow Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in arguing that God and the world were not of the same substance (equivalency). Spinoza was excommunicated from the Dutch Sephardic community, but for Jews who sought out Jewish sources to guide their own path to secularism, Spinoza was as important as Voltaire and Kant.{{cite book |last=Biale |first=David |title=Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought |year= 2015 |publisher=Princeton University Press |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=KW2YDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA29 |page=29|isbn=9780691168043}}

In the early 19th century, the systematic urbanization process (migration from villages in search of jobs in manufacturing centers) had begun, and the concentration of labor into factories led to the rise in the population of the towns. World population had been rising as well. It is estimated to have first reached one billion in 1804.{{cite web |url=https://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/sixbillion/sixbillion.htm |title=The World at Six Billion |publisher=United Nations |date=12 October 1999 |access-date=1 August 2010 |archive-date=5 March 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160305042434/http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/sixbillion/sixbillion.htm |url-status=live }} Also, the new philosophical movement later known as Romanticism originated, in the wake of the previous Age of Reason of the 1600s and the Enlightenment of 1700s. These are seen as fostering the 19th century Western world's sustained economic development.{{Cite book |author=Wim Van Den Doel |title=The Dutch Empire. An Essential Part of World History |publisher=BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review |year=2010 |quote=The Western belief in progress, Enlightenment thinking and the scientific revolution were elements that enabled the Western economy to develop in the nineteenth century in a way that was fundamentally different from most of the economies in the rest of the world. Europeans had not been able to sell much to the Asians in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but after the Industrial Revolution the situation was completely different, and the European textile industry, for example, was easily able to sell its cheap products throughout Asia. Improved transport methods also meant that European products could reach the Asian market at a relatively low cost. From about 1800, what historians term 'the great divergence' took place, which was the separation of the economic development of the Western World, on the one hand, and of almost all of Asia and Africa on the other.}} Before the urbanization and industrialization of the 1800s, demand for oriental goods such as porcelain, silk, spices and tea remained the driving force behind European imperialism in Asia, and (with the important exception of British East India Company rule in India) the European stake in Asia remained confined largely to trading stations and strategic outposts necessary to protect trade.{{cite encyclopedia |last=Webster |first=Richard A. |title=European expansion since 1763 |url=https://www.britannica.com/topic/colonialism/European-expansion-since-1763 |access-date=23 July 2018 |encyclopedia=Encyclopædia Britannica |quote=The global expansion of western Europe between the 1760s and the 1870s differed in several important ways from the expansionism and colonialism of previous centuries. Along with the rise of the Industrial Revolution, which economic historians generally trace to the 1760s, and the continuing spread of industrialization in the empire-building countries came a shift in the strategy of trade with the colonial world. Instead of being primarily buyers of colonial products (and frequently under strain to offer sufficient salable goods to balance the exchange), as in the past, the industrializing nations increasingly became sellers in search of markets for the growing volume of their machine-produced goods. |archive-date=23 July 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180723035348/https://www.britannica.com/topic/colonialism/European-expansion-since-1763 |url-status=live }} Industrialization, however, dramatically increased European demand for Asian raw materials; and the severe Long Depression of the 1870s provoked a scramble for new markets for European industrial products and financial services in Africa, the Americas, Eastern Europe, and especially in Asia (Western powers exploited their advantages in China for example by the Opium Wars).{{cite web |url=https://www.britannica.com/topic/colonialism/European-expansion-since-1763 |title=European expansion since 1763 |publisher=Encyclopædia Britannica |access-date=4 August 2018 |archive-date=23 July 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180723035348/https://www.britannica.com/topic/colonialism/European-expansion-since-1763 |url-status=live }} This resulted in the "New Imperialism", which saw a shift in focus from trade and indirect rule to formal colonial control of vast overseas territories ruled as political extensions of their mother countries.{{efn|The Scramble for Africa was the occupation, division, and colonization of African territory by European powers during the period of New Imperialism, between 1881 and 1914. It is also called the 'Partition of Africa' and by some the 'Conquest of Africa'. In 1870, only 10 percent of Africa was under formal Western/European control; by 1914 it had increased to almost 90 percent of the continent, with only Ethiopia (Abyssinia), the Dervish state (a portion of present-day Somalia)Camille Pecastaing, Jihad in the Arabian Sea (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2011), In the land of the Mad Mullah: Somalia {{Full citation needed|date=July 2019}} and Liberia still being independent.}} The later years of the 19th century saw the transition from "informal imperialism" (hegemony){{efn|In ancient Greece (8th century BC – AD 6th century), hegemony denoted the politico-military dominance of a city-state over other city-states.{{cite book |title=The Columbia Encyclopedia|edition=Fifth|year=1994|location=New York |publisher= Columbia University Press |isbn= 0-231-08098-0|editor-first=Barbara A.|editor-last=Chernow|editor2-first=George A.|editor2-last=Vallasi |page=1215}} The dominant state is known as the hegemon.Oxford English Dictionary: "A leading or paramount power; a dominant state or person"}} by military influence and economic dominance, to direct rule (a revival of colonial imperialism) in the African continent and Middle East.Kevin Shillington, History of Africa. Rev. 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 2005), 301.

During the socioeconomically optimistic and innovative decades of the Second Industrial Revolution between the 1870s and 1914, also known as the "Beautiful Era", the established colonial powers in Asia (United Kingdom, France, Netherlands) added to their empires also vast expanses of territory in the Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia. Japan was involved primarily during the Meiji period (1868–1912), though earlier contacts with the Portuguese, Spaniards and Dutch were also present in the Japanese Empire's recognition of the strategic importance of European nations. Traditional Japanese society became an industrial and militarist power like the Western British Empire and the French Third Republic, and similar to the German Empire.{{verify source|date=July 2021}}{{citation needed|date=July 2021}}

At the close of the Spanish–American War in 1898 the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam and Cuba were ceded to the United States under the terms of the Treaty of Paris. The US quickly emerged as the new imperial power in East Asia and in the Pacific Ocean area. The Philippines continued to fight against colonial rule in the Philippine–American War.{{cite journal |last=Coloma |first=Roland Sintos |title=White gazes, brown breasts: imperial feminism and disciplining desires and bodies in colonial encounters |journal=Paedagogica Historica |volume=48 |issue=2 |date=2012 |page=243|doi=10.1080/00309230.2010.547511 |s2cid=145129186 }}

By 1913, the British Empire held sway over 412 million people, {{Percentage|412,000,000|1,791,020,000}} of the world population at the time,Maddison 2001, pp. 97 "The total population of the Empire was 412 million [in 1913]", 241 "[World population in 1913 (in thousands):] 1 791 020". and by 1920, it covered {{convert|35500000|km2|sqmi|-5|abbr=on}},{{cite journal|date=September 1997|title=Expansion and Contraction Patterns of Large Polities: Context for Russia|journal=International Studies Quarterly|volume=41|issue=3|page=502|doi=10.1111/0020-8833.00053|author=Rein Taagepera|author-link=Rein Taagepera|jstor=2600793|url=http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/3cn68807|access-date=30 June 2019|archive-date=19 November 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181119114740/https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3cn68807|url-status=live}} {{Percentage|35,500,000|148,940,000}} of the Earth's total land area.{{cite web|title=The World Factbook — Central Intelligence Agency|url=https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/world/|website=www.cia.gov|access-date=10 September 2016|quote=land: 148.94 million sq km|archive-date=6 September 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210906150456/https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/world/|url-status=live}} 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.Jackson, pp. 5–6. As a result, its political, legal, linguistic and cultural legacy is widespread throughout the Western world.{{citation needed|date=June 2020}} In the aftermath of the Second World War, decolonizing efforts were employed by all Western powers under United Nations (ex-League of Nations) international directives.{{citation needed|date=June 2020}} Most of colonized nations received independence by 1960. Great Britain showed ongoing responsibility for the welfare of its former colonies as member states of the Commonwealth of Nations. But the end of Western colonial imperialism saw the rise of Western neocolonialism or economic imperialism. Multinational corporations came to offer "a dramatic refinement of the traditional business enterprise", through "issues as far ranging as national sovereignty, ownership of the means of production, environmental protection, consumerism, and policies toward organized labor." Though the overt colonial era had passed, Western nations, as comparatively rich, well-armed, and culturally powerful states, wielded a large degree of influence throughout the world, and with little or no sense of responsibility toward the peoples impacted by its multinational corporations in their exploitation of minerals and markets.{{Cite journal|last=Zamora|first=Stephen|title=Review of Global Reach: the Power of the Multinational Corporations, by Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Muller.|url=https://scholarship.law.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2459&context=lawreview|journal=Catholic University Law Review|volume=26|issue=2 Winter 1977|pages=449–456|access-date=13 November 2019|archive-date=23 May 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200523122657/https://scholarship.law.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2459&context=lawreview|url-status=live}}R. Vernon, Sovereignty at Bay: the Multinational Spread of U.S. Enterprises (1971). The dictum of Alfred Thayer Mahan is shown to have lasting relevance, that whoever controls the seas controls the world.{{Cite web|url=https://spectator.org/securing-the-worlds-commercial-sea-lanes/|title=Securing the World's Commercial Sea Lanes {{!}} Politics Is Too Important To Be Taken Seriously|website=The American Spectator|language=en|access-date=13 November 2019|archive-date=13 November 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191113133748/https://spectator.org/securing-the-worlds-commercial-sea-lanes/|url-status=live}}

{{Main|Cold War}}

{{unreferenced section|date=April 2021}}

During the Cold War, a new definition emerged. Earth was divided into three "worlds". The First World, analogous in this context to what was called the West, was composed of NATO members and other countries aligned with the United States.

The Second World was the Eastern bloc in the Soviet sphere of influence, including the Soviet Union (15 republics including the then occupied but now independent Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) and Warsaw Pact countries like Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, East Germany (now united with West Germany), and Czechoslovakia (now split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia).

The Third World consisted of countries, many of which were unaligned with either the west or the east; important members included India, Yugoslavia, Finland (Finlandization) and Switzerland (Swiss Neutrality); some include the People's Republic of China, though this is disputed, since the People's Republic of China, as communist, had friendly relations—at certain times—with the Soviet bloc, and had a significant degree of importance in global geopolitics. Some Third World countries aligned themselves with either the US-led West or the Soviet-led Eastern bloc.

A number of countries did not fit comfortably into this neat definition of partition, including Switzerland, Sweden, Austria, and Ireland, which chose to be neutral. Finland was under the Soviet Union's military sphere of influence (see FCMA treaty) but remained neutral and was not communist, nor was it a member of the Warsaw Pact or Comecon but a member of the EFTA from 1986, and was west of the Iron Curtain. In 1955, when Austria again became a fully independent republic, it did so under the condition that it remain neutral; but as a country to the west of the Iron Curtain, it was in the United States' sphere of influence. Spain did not join NATO until 1982, seven years after the death of the authoritarian Franco.

The 1980s advent of Mikhail Gorbachev led to the end of the Cold War following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

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The exact scope of the Western world is somewhat subjective in nature, depending on whether cultural, economic, spiritual or political criteria are employed. It is a generally accepted 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. Additionally, Latin American and Orthodox European worlds are sometimes either a sub-civilization within Western civilization or separately considered "akin" to the West.

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Many anthropologists, sociologists and historians oppose "the West and the Rest" in a categorical manner.{{cite journal|last=Goody|first=Jack|date=2005|title=The Labyrinth of Kinship|url=https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii36/articles/jack-goody-the-labyrinth-of-kinship|access-date=24 July 2007|journal=New Left Review|issue=36|pages=127–139|archive-date=6 November 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181106221836/http://newleftreview.org/II/36/jack-goody-the-labyrinth-of-kinship|url-status=live}} The same has been done by Malthusian demographers with a sharp distinction between European and non-European family systems. Among anthropologists, this includes Durkheim, Dumont, and Lévi-Strauss.

{{Further|Western culture|Culture of Europe|Culture of the United States}}

The Oxford English dictionary noted that the earliest use of the term "Western world" in the English language was in 1586, found in the writings of William Warner.

In modern usage, Western world refers to Europe and to areas whose populations largely originate from Europe, through the Age of Discovery's imperialism.{{cite book | last1 = Thompson | first1 = William |first2 = Joseph|last2= Hickey | year = 2005 | title = Society in Focus | publisher = Pearson|location = Boston, MA| id = 0-205-41365-X}}{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=TjIRhe9eWqgC&q=age+of+discovery%2C+christian+imperialism&pg=PA1 | last1 = Gregerson | first1 = Linda |first2 = Susan|last2= Juster | year = 2011 | title = Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic | publisher = University of Pennsylvania Press |access-date=28 June 2018| isbn = 978-0812222609 }}{{cite book |last=Stuenkel |first=Oliver |title=Post-Western World: How Emerging Powers Are Remaking Global Order |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ZvpNDwAAQBAJ |year=2016 |publisher=Polity Press|location=Cambridge, UK. Malden, US |isbn=978-1509504572}}

In the 20th century, Christianity declined in influence in many Western countries, mostly in the European Union where some member states have experienced falling church attendance and membership in recent years,{{cite news|work=USA Today|url=https://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-02-21-god-europe_x.htm|title=What place for God in Europe|access-date=24 July 2009|date=22 February 2005|first=Peter|last=Ford|archive-date=4 March 2009|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090304133824/http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-02-21-god-europe_x.htm|url-status=live}} and also elsewhere.

Secularism (separating religion from politics and science) increased. However, while church attendance is in decline, in some Western countries (i.e. Italy, Poland, and Portugal), more than half of the people state that religion is important,{{Cite journal|journal=Special Eurobarometer 225 |title=Social values, Science and Technology|publisher=Europa, web portal|author=Eurostat|year=2005 |url=http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_225_report_en.pdf|page=9|access-date=11 June 2009|author-link=Eurostat|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060524004644/http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_225_report_en.pdf|archive-date=24 May 2006|url-status=dead}} and most Westerners nominally identify themselves as Christians (e.g. 59% in the United Kingdom) and attend church on major occasions, such as Christmas and Easter. In the Americas, Christianity continues to play an important societal role, though in areas such as Canada, a low level of religiosity is common due to a European-type secularization. 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. Despite this, Christianity, in its different forms, remains the largest faith in most Western countries.See [http://www.thearda.com/internationalData/regions/index.asp ARDA data archives] – {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170723043144/http://www.thearda.com/internationalData/regions/index.asp |date=23 July 2017 }}

Christianity remains the dominant religion in the Western world, where 70% are Christians.{{cite web |author=ANALYSIS |url=http://www.pewforum.org/Christian/Global-Christianity-exec.aspx |title=Global Christianity |publisher=Pewforum.org |date=19 December 2011 |access-date=17 August 2012 |archive-date=26 December 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181226061838/http://www.pewforum.org/christian/global-christianity-exec.aspx |url-status=dead }} 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 the Caribbean and 77.4% in Northern America) described themselves as Christians.{{cite web |author=ANALYSIS |url=http://www.pewforum.org/Christian/Global-Christianity-europe.aspx |title=Europe |publisher=Pewforum.org |date=19 December 2011 |access-date=17 August 2012 |archive-date=4 January 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120104153842/http://www.pewforum.org/Christian/Global-Christianity-europe.aspx |url-status=dead }}

Since the mid-twentieth century, the west became known for its irreligious sentiments, following the Age of Enlightenment and the French Revolution, inquisitions were abolished in the 19th and 20th centuries, this hastened the separation of church and state, and secularization of the Western world where unchurched spirituality is gaining more prominence over organized religion.{{cite book |last=Peterson |first=Paul Silas |title=The Decline of Established Christianity in the Western World |isbn=9780367891381 |url=https://www.routledge.com/The-Decline-of-Established-Christianity-in-the-Western-World-Interpretations/Peterson/p/book/9780367891381 |pages=46, 76, 84 |year=2019 |publisher=Routledge |quote=Hugh McLeod, emeritus professor of Church History at the University of Birmingham, provides a helpful summary of the decline of Christendom in Western Europe in four stages: 1 Toleration of alternative forms of Christianity (in the Reformation and post-Reformation era in the 16th century and onward). 2 Publication of literature that was critical of Christianity (in the Enlightenment era of the 18th century). 3 Separation of church and state (from the 18th century onward). 4 The "gradual loosening of the ties between church and society". [...] At least since the mid-20th century, many European countries have experienced a decline in churched religion. In particular, declining church attendance has been an important aspect of this process, and a characteristic of the development that has been described as the secularization process. [...] The secularization processes in the Western world involve a partial replacement of established Christianity by unchurched spirituality, characterized by á la carte religion and a focus on "me and my experiences". |access-date=29 January 2023 |archive-date=29 January 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230129162247/https://www.routledge.com/The-Decline-of-Established-Christianity-in-the-Western-World-Interpretations/Peterson/p/book/9780367891381 |url-status=live }}

Certain parts of the Western world have become notable for their diversity since the late 1960s.

Earlier, between the eighteenth century to mid-twentieth century, prominent western countries like the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand have been once envisioned as homelands for whites. Racism has been noted as a contributing factor to Westerners' colonization of the New World, which makes up much of the geographical West today.

Countries in the Western world are also the most keen on digital and televisual media technologies, as they were in the postwar period on television and radio: from 2000 to 2014, the Internet's market penetration in the West was twice that in non-Western regions.{{cite book |author=Maurice Roche |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=1BonDwAAQBAJ&q=%22western+world%22+tv+age&pg=PA28 |title=Mega-Events and Social Change: Spectacle, Legacy and Public Culture |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=2017 |isbn=9781526117083 |page=329}}

File:World Bank income groups, 2023.png

File:The Western World.png (as defined by James Bennett), the European Union and European Single Market members, 2017]]

The term "Western world" is sometimes interchangeably used with the term First World or developed countries, stressing the difference between First World and the Third World or developing countries. This usage occurs despite the fact that many countries that may be culturally Western are developing countries – in fact, a significant percentage of the Americas are developing countries. It is also used despite many developed countries or regions not being culturally Western (e.g. Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao). Privatization policies (involving government enterprises and public services) and multinational corporations are often considered a visible sign of Western nations' economic presence, especially in Third World countries, and represent a common institutional environment for powerful politicians, enterprises, trade unions and firms, bankers and thinkers of the Western world.Paul Starr, [https://www.princeton.edu/~starr/articles/articles80-89/Starr-MeaningPrivatization-88.htm "The Meaning of Privatization," Yale Law and Policy Review 6: 6–41" 1988] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170928144035/http://www.princeton.edu/~starr/articles/articles80-89/Starr-MeaningPrivatization-88.htm |date=28 September 2017 }}.James C. W. Ahiakpor, [https://acton.org/pub/religion-liberty/volume-2-number-5/multinational-corporations-third-world-predators-o "Multinational Corporations in the Third World: Predators or Allies in Economic Development?" 20 July 2010] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180723034211/https://acton.org/pub/religion-liberty/volume-2-number-5/multinational-corporations-third-world-predators-o |date=23 July 2018 }}.Investopedia, [https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/021715/why-are-most-multinational-corporations-either-us-europe-or-japan.asp "Why are most multinational corporations either from the US, Europe or Japan"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220325085716/https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/021715/why-are-most-multinational-corporations-either-us-europe-or-japan.asp |date=25 March 2022 }}.Jackson J. Spielvogel, [https://books.google.com/books?id=ZXYWAAAAQBAJ&dq=corporations+western+world&pg=PA710 "Western Civilization: A Brief History, Vol. II: Since 1500" 2016].United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations. Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations, [https://books.google.com/books?id=UeuQzyI17B4C&dq=corporations+western+world&pg=PA178 "Multinational corporations and United States foreign policy Part 11" 1975] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221117131748/https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=UeuQzyI17B4C&pg=PA178&lpg=PA178&dq=corporations+western+world&source=bl&ots=Q0FpS9fCcs&sig=LQh86Zv4hLfsLqd4ii8Tg8y_P2o&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiSooXH9bPcAhWOKFAKHSjTDl0Q6AEI6QEwGQ#v=onepage&q=corporations%20western%20world&f=false |date=17 November 2022 }}.

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. Toynbee entered into quite an expansive mode, including as candidates those countries or cultures who became so heavily influenced by the West as to adopt these borrowings into their very self-identity. Carried to its limit, this would in practice include almost everyone within the West, in one way or another. In particular, Toynbee refers to the intelligentsia formed among the educated elite of countries impacted by the European expansion of centuries past. While often pointedly nationalist, these cultural and political leaders interacted within the West to such an extent as to change both themselves and the West.

The theologian and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin conceived of the West as the set of civilizations descended from the Nile Valley Civilization of Egypt.Cf., Teilhard de Chardin, Le Phenomene Humain (1955), translated as The Phenomena of Man (New York 1959).

Palestinian-American literary critic Edward Said uses the term "Occident" in his discussion of Orientalism. According to his binary, the West, or Occident, created a romanticized vision of the East, or Orient, to justify colonial and imperialist intentions. This Occident-Orient binary focuses on the Western vision of the East instead of any truths about the East. His theories are rooted in Hegel's master-slave dialectic: The Occident would not exist without the Orient and vice versa.{{citation needed|date=April 2021}} Further, Western writers created this irrational, feminine, weak "Other" to contrast with the rational, masculine, strong West because of a need to create a difference between the two that would justify imperialist ambitions, according to the Said-influenced Indian-American theorist Homi K. Bhabha.{{Citation needed|date=May 2021}}

The idea of "the West" over the course of time has evolved from a directional concept to a sociopolitical concept, and has been temporalized and rendered as a concept of the future bestowed with notions of progress and modernity.

{{portal|Civilizations|World}}

• Americas
• Anti-Western sentiment
• Atlanticism
• East–West dichotomy
• Far West
• Global Northwest
• Global North and Global South
• Monroe Doctrine
• Western Hemisphere
• Western Culture
• Greater Europe

{{notelist|35em}}

{{reflist|35em}}

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{{Refend}}

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• V. 1. From the earliest times to the Battle of Lepanto; {{ISBN|0-306-80304-6}}.
• V. 2. From the defeat of the Spanish Armada to the Battle of Waterloo; {{ISBN|0-306-80305-4}}.
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{{Western culture}}

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