" A very disappointing book. The contents are a much smarter and more nuanced standard of clash of civilizations type: the West, which is, for whatever reason, democratic, rational, liberal, pitted against 'the East', here only the Arab Middle East, Iran and Turkey, which is despotic, irrational, arbitrary and everything else we're supposed to hate. Mind you, Pagden is at least aware that these concepts are not just innate or natural, and he attempts to add some social, economic and political analysis to muddy up his shallow waters. When that history isn't questionable (his bit on Roman citizenship and universal human rights) it is badly twisted to fit a mendacious argument about the inherent and abiding differences between East and West. Why is it dishonest? Well, Pagden deliberately leaves out China and India, for starters, and writes as if Said's 'Orientalism' (a troubled but insightful book) had never existed. Most unforgivably, Pagden is a historian of imperial ideologies: he has devoted much of his academic career to studying the ways in which European justified their overseas conquests, and yet he seems barely away of the supreme irony that his work is itself redolent with imperialist ideology. Ugh. "
— Cameron, 1/21/2014