ABSTRACT
The Chinese, Hindu and Moslem civilisations differ as much from each other as from the civilisation of Europe or of any part of Europe. Nationalism is an European export to Asia, which hardly has its equivalent in Asian history. The most advanced economy among the states of Asia in the 1920's was that of Japan, which was of the mixed industrial-agrarian type. In Asia's agrarian society the social class that had most economic power was that which owned most land. European influence—direct conquest in the colonies, indirect domination in all the still independent states except Japan— brought very substantial benefits to the Asian peasant masses. The Christian communities of Armenia, Georgia and the Lebanon were no more than isolated outposts of the Byzantine or Latin world on the fringe of Asia. Turkish nationalism was confined to Anatolia, where it won mass support only after the Ottoman Empire had lost both its European and its Arab provinces.
