ABSTRACT
The analysis in this chapter puts forward the appreciably post-colonial thesis that the invasion and colonisation of those parts of the world that were discovered by western European powers between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries gave voice to a renewed embodiment of ‘western’ subjectivity. The very discovery of the New World was itself a consequence of the ‘westernisation’ of Christian Europe, since the fall of Constantinople to the Muslim Ottoman Empire in 1453 strengthened the western outlook of Christianity (and literally, its western identity) by closing the trade route from Europe to the east and forcing Christian powers to ‘go west’. In doing so, western Europe was made to turn its gaze away from the east and, to paraphrase John Locke, all the world became America.
