Decentring the West in the history of world civilisation is nothing new. Two great Cambridge academics, Sir Joseph Needham and Sir Jack Goody, were doing it decades ago. Both were men of the Left, and their aim was optimistic and generous, as well as intellectually coherent: to show that other civilisations (ancient China in Needham’s case) had helped to make the modern world, and to broaden our understanding and sympathies.
