[In the following excerpt, Howe evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of The Missionary and the Libertine.]

The idea of a fundamental difference between “east” and “west,” Europe and Asia, has been one of the most constantly renewed clichés of world history. It is at least as old as the Greek-Persian wars of 2,500 years ago, and as new as the febrile US debates about the “clash of civilisations,” the supposed economic threat from East Asia and the political one from Islam.

It has never been clear where Europe ends and Asia starts, geographically or culturally. In one sense, that is what Greeks and Turks, Serbs and Croats, even Russian presidential candidates, fight about. Ian Buruma and Jack Goody are hardly the first to point out the falsity of that edifice of ideas, but in their radically different ways, both cast new light on what is wrong with it.

From Montesquieu to Samuel Huntington, “western” writers have pondered the great divide. The dominant approach has been to start from the assumption of Europe's uniqueness—above all, as sole birthplace of capitalism—and then seek to explain it. A long tradition, by no means defunct, used the categories of race to account for divergent paths. Now the concept of cultural difference, just as all-embracing and almost as meaningless as race, is employed to the same ends. …

Buruma's collection of essays [The Missionary and the Libertine], mostly written for the New York Review of Books, is far more popular in style, more centred on the present. Its general line, though, is very similar to Goody's. Buruma ranges across swathes of Asia and the Pacific, with brief excursions into Arabia and Africa via Wilfred Thesiger and Baden-Powell. His core concerns, as in much of his previous writing, are with Japan.

Buruma enjoys tracing the external influences on things often claimed to be culture-specific. Thus, where he finds Japanese writers celebrating “unique” national traits of homoerotic sensuality or aggressive masculinity, he emphasizes how much they draw on Oscar Wilde or Friedrich Nietzsche. And he underlines just how changeable the cultural stereotypes of east and west have been. If many Japanese, Singaporeans and Koreans now see westerners as lazy, amoral and decadent—and themselves as hardworking, puritanical and family-oriented—then these are mirror-image reversals of earlier transcultural perceptions, of how “we” once saw “them.”

Both Buruma and Goody [in The East in the West] focus on European and Asian cultural forms; both emphasise their similarities. How far, though, could Goody's demonstration of east-west unities across Eurasia be extended beyond it? Can the same story be applied to ancient Africa, or (less likely) to the pre-Columbian Americas? Goody implies not. In previous books, he suggested that shared developments in literacy, cuisine and the fascinatingly symptomatic culture of flowers can be found across Eurasia but not in sub-Saharan Africa, nor in the New World. Does it follow that capitalism, industry—the whole bundle of things we call modernity—could never have emerged among the states of West Africa or the Aztecs?

Goody does not say and only a few other scholars have addressed the subject. Instead, debate has hung up on issues that presuppose Eurocentric assumptions, like the possible African influence on Classical Greece, or on completely stupid questions—like the skin colour of the ancient Egyptians.