Oriente e Occidente nella traiettoria della mondialità europea

The essay analyzes the relationship between East and West as it took shape and evolved during the rise and decline of so-called «mondialità europea», that is, the historical phase, roughly between the mid-18th and mid-20th centuries, in which Europe assumed and main- tained a central role in the formation and governance of the global ecumene. Adopting the methodological approach of global history, the author proposes to consider European expansion not as the result of unilateral supremacy, but as the product of dynamic interactions between different regional modernities, in which non-European societies played an active and creative role. From this perspective, the trajectory of European centrality is revisited in light of the con- tribution of non-European actors to both the construction and dismantling of colonial empires. Particular attention is paid to the case of British India and the strategies of Europeanizing «self-strenghtening» undertaken by the major Asian empires in the face of Western pressure. European colonialism thus appears as a phenomenon based on forms of collaboration, media- tion, and institutional hybridization with local elites, rather than on absolute European domi- nation. Using this interpretative key, the essay highlights how the formation of the globalized world is the result of multipolar historical processes, in which East and West have mutually transformed each other, contributing together to the genesis of the current planetary order (and disorder).