When we think of the encounter between Asia and Europe, we are aware of a lack of balance between the two entities. ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ may be counterposed geographically; but in cultural and civilizational terms, the counterposing is problematical. There is a historic cultural unity to Europe, due largely to the influence of the Roman Catholic Church during the Middle Ages, which has no counterpart in Asia. By the mid-12th century, the Cistercian order of monks regularly held annual meetings in central France, its monasteries’ abbots, or their representatives, travelling there from the far ends of Europe—Ireland, Sweden, Greece, Portugal. For near comparisons in Asia, we would have to think of similar gatherings within China, within the world of Islam in West and Central Asia, or within India. Asia has been multi-civilizational.

China and India had a thin link in Buddhism; as did India and Southeast Asia in Hinduism. Islam spread through India and Southeast Asia rather swiftly, but the regions under its sway have been too disparate, and its institutional impulses too diffuse, to achieve the kind of shared ‘personality’ that Europe came to acquire. What gives Asia its unity, perhaps, is its common experience of Europe as an expansive—indeed aggressive— civilization; but that experience we have shared with Africa and with the pre-Columban Americas and Australia too. On the other hand, between Asia and Europe, there had been contacts much earlier, as with the Arabs in Spain, or Marco Polo in China at the Mongol court; and these contacts were profoundly consequential in shaping the course of history.

This essay considers only the period after Vasco da Gama. For all of us in Asia, Europe's expansion, and its more recent withdrawal from colonies, have had significant consequences in the making of the present. The record of the encounter between Asians and Europeans over these five centuries is a priceless resource, for, on our shrinking planet, such cultural encounters are becoming denser and more frequent than ever before.