The Huntington hoax
Cultures have always been open-ended
9 September 2025
Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations thesis does not deserve the long afterlife it has enjoyed. Even today, it still gets dragged out of its shallow grave whenever pundits want to explain the latest spasm of violence between “the West” and “Islam,” or whenever a right wing politician needs a grand framework to justify walls, drone strikes, and culture-war paranoia. Huntington’s thesis is simple enough to tattoo on the back of your hand: the post-Cold War world will be defined not by ideological conflict, but by clashes between hermetically sealed, long-lasting civilisations — the West, Islam, Confucianism, Hinduism, and so on. Like billiard balls, they are doomed to crash into one another across history’s green felt, but never to hybridise or cross-pollenate.
It’s tidy. It’s seductive. And it is, to put it bluntly, hogwash.
Civilisations have always been porous
The first strike against Huntington is historical. Civilisations, those grand abstractions, have never been hermetically sealed. They are not billiard balls; they are sponges, rivers, hybrid creatures stitched together out of a thousand encounters.
Take China, so often presented as the exemplar of an ancient, continuous, homogeneous civilisation. Chinese civilisation without Indian Buddhism? Unthinkable. Without Persian and Central Asian artistic motifs, Tang China would be a drabber place. Without the Arab transmission of mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, Song China would not have been the world’s most advanced economy. The very idea of a sealed Chinese essence collapses the moment you look closely.
Or take Islam. Is it “Islamic civilisation” that invented algebra, or was it Persian bureaucratic technique, Indian numeracy, and Greek rationalism reworked within the vast Islamic ecumene? Huntington might want Islam to be a single, coherent bloc. In reality, it was always a kaleidoscope of appropriations and recombinations.
And Europe? Spare me the fairy tale of a pristine Western tradition. Medieval Europe lived off Arabic translations of Aristotle, algebra from al-Khwarizmi, optics from Ibn al-Haytham, numerals from India, navigational technology from the Indian Ocean world. To call this a sealed “Western civilisation” is not just misleading — it is historical malpractice.
Beaujard’s world systems: cycles of connection
This is where the work of French anthropologist Philippe Beaujard matters. In his studies of the Indian Ocean and Afro-Eurasian world systems, he demolishes the notion that global interconnection begins with Columbus or Vasco da Gama.
Beaujard tracks four successive Afro-Eurasian world systems before the so-called “early modern period”:
- The Roman–Han Convergence (1st–3rd centuries CE): Rome and Han China sat at either end, with India, Persia, and Egypt in between. Long-distance trade was robust; silks, spices, and ideas crossed continents.
- The Caliphal–Tang Cycle (7th–9th centuries CE): Abbasid Baghdad and Tang China created vibrant cores; the Indian Ocean was a thoroughfare linking Africa, Arabia, India, and Southeast Asia.
- The Song–Chola–Seljuk Era (11th–13th centuries CE): Polycentric, dynamic, integrating new maritime powers from South India and new semi-peripheries in East Africa and Southeast Asia.
- The Mongol–Mamluk Cycle (13th–14th centuries CE): The largest land empire in history facilitated continental integration, while Mamluk Egypt dominated Red Sea trade.
Each system expanded and contracted. Climatic shifts, pandemics, and political breakdowns ended cycles. But the lesson is unmistakable: long before Europe barged in with its cannon and caravels, Afro-Eurasia already functioned as a set of interlinked systems spanning thousands of miles.
What does this mean for Huntington? It means his billiard-ball civilisations were forged not in isolation but in crucibles of contact. Cultures were never sealed. They were porous, open-ended, defined by circuits of at least continental scale.
The myth of Europe as pioneer
Huntington’s story relies on another myth: that Europe, with its modern states and seaborne empires, invented globalisation. That too collapses under scrutiny.
Far from being pioneers, early modern European nation-states were the new kids on the block. When the Portuguese rounded the Cape, they found an Indian Ocean already thick with Arab, Gujarati, and Chinese ships. When Columbus blundered into the Caribbean, he was not creating global trade, but diverting it onto a new axis. The Spanish silver fleets did not invent intercontinental integration; they hijacked and militarised it.
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The truth is that Afro-Eurasia had been globally integrated for centuries. Europe’s “achievement” was to inject unprecedented violence into these systems: cannon on the coast, conquest backed by plague, the invention of racial slavery. If anything, Europe pioneered not globalisation but a brutal form of coercive extraction.
Global consciousness before 1492
One of Huntington’s defenders might counter: even if exchanges existed, surely people only began to imagine the world as a whole in the early modern period? Again, history says otherwise.
- Roman geographers and merchants had maps of India, descriptions of East Africa, and hazy but real knowledge of China (Da Qin).
- Chinese dynastic histories record embassies from Rome and detailed accounts of India and Central Asia.
- Muslim geographers like al-Idrīsī (12th century) compiled world maps showing interconnected continents. Ibn Khaldūn theorised about civilisational cycles on a hemispheric scale.
- Indian Ocean merchants carried in their heads accurate mental maps linking Zanzibar, Gujarat, and Sumatra.
The capacity to imagine processes on a continental or even global scale is not a post-1492 invention. It is as old as the circuits themselves.
The fatal conceit of the “clash”
What Huntington offers is not explanation but ideology. By portraying civilisations as self-contained essences, he provides a convenient script for those who want to naturalise conflict. If the West and Islam are sealed and eternal, then of course they must clash. If China has always been a monolith, then of course it will always stand apart from “Western values.”
But the record of history is the opposite. Civilisations are always-already entangled. They do not clash as blocks; they bleed into one another, borrow from one another, and co-create the very traditions Huntington imagines as discrete.
Islam and the West? Their “fault line” is also a seam of exchange: philosophy, medicine, science, architecture, trade. China and the West? Without the transmission of papermaking, gunpowder, and the compass, there would be no “Western modernity” to boast about. India and the West? Without Indian numerals, Western mathematics would still be stumbling around with Roman numerals like a drunk in the dark.
The idea of hermetically sealed civilisations does not describe history. It mutilates it.
Civilisations as braided rivers
A better metaphor than Huntington’s billiard balls is the braided river. Cultures are like multiple streams: sometimes separate, sometimes merging, always in motion, always drawing in new tributaries.
Look at the Mediterranean — not a frontier between Islam and Christendom, but a shared sea of traders, pirates, translators, and migrants. Look at the Indian Ocean — not a line dividing Africa, Arabia, and Asia, but a liquid continent linking them. Look at Central Asia — a corridor of movement where nomads, monks, and merchants stitched together the fabric of Afro-Eurasia.
Civilisations, in other words, are not static blocs destined to collide. They are the outcomes of millennia of cross-pollination.
The political stakes
Why does this matter now? Because Huntington’s thesis is not just bad history; it is dangerous politics.
When you tell people that cultures are sealed and destined to clash, you legitimate xenophobia and endless war. You fuel policies that see Muslims as eternal outsiders, Chinese as inassimilable adversaries, Africans as permanently “other.” Huntington’s model is an intellectual prop for walls, bans, and drone strikes.
Beaujard’s world-systems approach, by contrast, tells us something very different: that cultures have always been porous, that human history is a history of contact, that the “global” is not a modern invention but a recurring reality. It shows us that what we share is older, deeper, and more enduring than what divides us.
Bad history
So let’s be clear. Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” is not a bold vision of the future. It is a comforting fairy tale for those who want enemies neatly labelled and history packaged into sealed boxes. It is not only empirically false, it is politically poisonous.
The real history of the world — the one Beaujard and others are painstakingly reconstructing — is far messier, more entangled, and more interesting. Civilisations do not clash like billiard balls. They flow like rivers, converge like trade winds, mingle like languages in a port city.
Huntington belongs in the dustbin of failed theories, alongside other grand theorists who mistook ideological convenience for historical truth. The world has always been bigger, more connected, and more open-ended than his cramped imagination could allow. And the sooner we stop parroting his nonsense, the better equipped we’ll be to understand both our past and our future.
