Book excerpt: This monumental series, acclaimed as a "masterpiece of comprehensive scholarship" in the New York Times Book Review, reveals the impact of Asia's high civilizations on the development of modern Western society. The authors examine the ways in which European encounters with Asia have altered the development of Western society, art, literature, science, and religion since the Renaissance. In Volume III: A Century of Advance, the authors have researched seventeenth-century European writings on Asia in an effort to understand how contemporaries saw Asian societies and peoples.