* The eleven were Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Of these only France, Portugal and Spain existed in 1500 in anything resembling their early twentieth-century form. For Russia’s claim to be considered a part of the West, see below.

* This question was indeed being posed in non-Western empires in the eighteenth century. In 1731 the Ottoman writer İbrahim Müteferrika asked: ‘Why do Christian nations, which were so weak in the past compared with Muslim nations, begin to dominate so many lands in modern times and even defeat the once victorious Ottoman armies?’

* It is an idiosyncratic notion that one of the world’s most venerable civilizations should have a name that no one but a political theorist has ever heard of. In his original 1993 essay, Huntington used ‘Confucian’.