What, if anything, unites Asia as a continent?

‘Asia is one’, wrote Okakura Kakuzo, the Japanese art historian, at the start of his The Ideals of the East in 1901. Nile Green disagrees in this sparky and impressive book. There is no reason why ‘Buddhism, Confucianism or Shinto should be more intelligible to a “fellow Asian” from the Middle East or India than to a European’. For one thing, ‘Asia’ is home to a vast number of language groups, including ‘Sino-Tibetan and Turkic, Indo-European and Semitic, Dravidian and Japonic, Austroasiatic, and others’, as well as ‘to a far wider variety of writing systems than Europe, Africa and the Americas combined’. So how and why, then, did the clumsy label come into being and stick?

The blame, argues Green, lies with Europeans. Ancient European geographers had grouped large numbers of people together as ‘Asians’, leading to the formulation of a ‘European idea of Asia’ that came to be widely adopted – not least by ‘cultures that had for centuries cultivated their own conceptions of geography’.