This work is a study of history, and ‘all of history is contemporary history’. Which, then, are the contemporary issues that influence the perception and articulation of this study? Our era is characterised by the exasperating contradictions of the ideology that one could call ‘Occidentalism’. Occidentalism is the ideology that there exist clearly bounded entities in world history, such as the West, the Orient and the primitives, and that these metaphysical entities have a genealogy (or rather only the Occident has a true genealogy); that there is a pattern in human history, which leads to the evolution of the modern West, which is the natural path of history, while the history of the Rest of the world is a story of aberrations that have to be explained; that the whole world is actually following the lead of the West and one day it will manage to assimilate; that the conceptual tools and the disciplines created by the West are in some way the natural way to organise experience and analyse reality, and that the reality of the past, and the present outside the West, ought to be explicable in these Western terms.

These are not simply academic arguments; they have a real, deadly impact in the world around us.