Editing Eurocentrism (section)

===Anticolonialism===
Even in the 19th century, [[anticolonial movements]] had developed claims about national traditions and values that were set against those of Europe in Africa and India. In some cases, as China, where local ideology was even more exclusionist than the Eurocentric one, [[Westernization]] did not overwhelm longstanding Chinese attitudes to its own cultural centrality.<ref name="ReferenceA">Cambridge History of China, CUP,1988</ref>

[[Orientalism]] developed in the late 18th century as a disproportionate Western interest in and idealization of Eastern (i.e. Asian) cultures.

By the early 20th century, some historians, such as [[Arnold J. Toynbee]], were attempting to construct multifocal models of world civilizations. Toynbee also drew attention in Europe to non-European historians, such as the medieval Tunisian scholar [[Ibn Khaldun]]. He also established links with Asian thinkers, such as through his dialogues with [[Daisaku Ikeda]] of [[Soka Gakkai International]].<ref>{{cite book |last=McNeill |first=William |year=1989 |title=Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life |location=New York and Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press |pages=[https://archive.org/details/arnoldjtoynbeeli00will/page/272 272–273] |isbn=978-0-19-505863-5 |author-link=William H. McNeill (historian) |quote=From Toynbee's point of view, Soka Gakkai was exactly what his vision of the historical moment expected, for it was a new church, arising on the fringes of the 'post-Christian' world.... Convergence of East and West was, indeed, what Toynbee and Ikeda sought and thought they had found in their dialogue. In a preface, written in the third person, Toynbee emphasized and tried to explain this circumstance. 'They agree that a human being ought to be perpetually striving to overcome his innate propensity to try to exploit the rest of the universe and that he ought to be trying, instead, to put himself at the service of the universe so unreservedly that his ego will become identical with an ultimate reality, which for a Buddhist is the Buddha state. They agree in believing that this ultimate reality is not a humanlike divine personality.' He explained these and other agreements as reflecting the 'birth of a common worldwide civilization that has originated in a technological framework of Western origin but is now being enriched spiritually by contributions from all the historic regional civilizations.' ... [Ikeda's] dialogue with Toynbee is the longest and most serious text in which East and West—that is, Ikeda and a famous representative of the mission field that Ikeda sees before him—have agreed with each other. In the unlikely event that Soka Gakkai lives up to its leader's hopes and realizes Toynbee's expectations by flourishing in the Western world, this dialogue might, like the letters of St. Paul, achieve the status of sacred scripture and thus become by far the most important of all of Toynbee's works. |url=https://archive.org/details/arnoldjtoynbeeli00will/page/272 }}</ref>