The Myth of Western Superiority: East-West Relations in Historical Context

The myth of Western superiority, one of the world’s most powerful myths, has endured through the ages. But in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, critiques from the Japanese intellectual Fukuzawa Yukichi and Marguerite Harrison, an intrepid American journalist and thinker, laid bare its mendacity. Even though it was not immediately overturned, Fukuzawa and Harrison contributed to the decline of this myth. The journalist Marguerite Harrison also recognised the ferment of Asia in her book, Asia reborn , predicting the region’s emerging power and dynamism.