Western world

The Western world, also known as the West, refers to various nations depending on the context, most often including at least parts of Europe, Australasia, and the Americas, with the status of Latin America disputed by some. There are many accepted definitions, all closely interrelated. The Western world is also known as the Occident (from the Latin word occidens, 'sunset, West'), in contrast to the Orient (from the Latin word oriens, 'rise, East'), or Eastern world. It is often correlated with the Northern half of the North-south divide. Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome are generally considered to be the birthplaces of Western civilization (with Greece having influenced the development of Rome): the former due to its impact on philosophy, democracy, science and art, building designs and proportions, architecture; the latter due to its influence on law, warfare, governance, republicanism, engineering and religion. Western civilization is also strongly associated with Christianity, which is in turn shaped by Hellenistic philosophy, Judaism and Roman culture. In the modern era, Western culture has been heavily influenced by the Renaissance, the Ages of Discovery and Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolutions. Through extensive imperialism and Christianization by Western powers in the 15th to 20th centuries, and later mass culture much of the rest of the world has been extensively influenced by Western culture. The concept of the Western part of the earth has its roots in the theological, methodological and emphatical division between the Western Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. West was originally literal, opposing Catholic Europe with the cultures and civilizations of Orthodox Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia and the remote Far East, which early-modern Europeans saw as the East. By the mid-20th century, worldwide export of Western culture went through the new mass media: film, radio and television and recorded music, while the development and growth of international transport and telecommunication (such as transatlantic cable and the radiotelephone) played a decisive role in modern globalization. In modern usage, Western world sometimes refers to Europe and to areas whose populations largely originate from Europe, through the Age of Discovery. Western culture was influenced by many older great civilizations of the ancient Near East, such as Phoenicia, Ancient Israel, Minoan Crete, Sumer, Babylonia, and also Ancient Egypt. It originated in the Mediterranean basin and its vicinity; Ancient Greece and Rome are often cited as its birthplaces. Over time, their associated empires grew first to the east and west to include the rest of Mediterranean and Black Sea coastal areas, conquering and absorbing. Later, they expanded to the north of the Mediterranean Sea to include Western, Central, and Southeastern Europe. Christianization of Ireland (5th century), Christianization of Bulgaria (9th century), Christianization of Kievan Rus' (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus; 10th century), Christianization of Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, Sweden; 12th century) and Christianization of Lithuania (14th century) brought the rest of present-day European territory into Western civilization. Historians, such as Carroll Quigley in 'The Evolution of Civilizations', contend that Western civilization was born around AD 500, after the total collapse of the Western Roman Empire, leaving a vacuum for new ideas to flourish that were impossible in Classical societies. In either view, between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Renaissance, the West (or those regions that would later become the heartland of the culturally 'western sphere') experienced a period of first, considerable decline, and then readaptation, reorientation and considerable renewed material, technological and political development. This whole period of roughly a millennium is known as the Middle Ages, its early part forming the 'Dark Ages', designations that were created during the Renaissance and reflect the perspective on history, and the self-image, of the latter period. The knowledge of the ancient Western world was partly preserved during this period due to the survival of the Eastern Roman Empire and the introduction of the Catholic Church; it was also greatly expanded by the Arab importation of both the Ancient Greco-Roman and new technology through the Arabs from India and China to Europe.