"Perhaps most radically, Ferguson concludes that to see the 20th century as the triumph of the West, or the “American Century”, with its long, irreversible glide into liberal democratic capitalism (vide Francis Fukuyama’s “the end of history”), is “fundamentally to misread the trajectory of the past hundred years”. What he sees is a reorientation of the world towards the East, which redresses a balance between West and East that had been lost in the four centuries after 1500."