title: Harold Macmillan

text: In retirement Macmillan took up the chairmanship of his family's publishing house, Macmillan Publishers, from 1964 to 1974. The publishing firm remained in family hands until a majority share was purchased in 1995 by the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group; the imprint, however, persists.


title: Harold Macmillan

text: Macmillan's biographer acknowledges that his memoirs were considered "heavy going". Reading these volumes was said by Macmillan's political enemy Enoch Powell to induce 'a sensation akin to that of chewing on cardboard'. Butler wrote in his review of "Riding the Storm": "Altogether this massive work will keep anybody busy for several weeks."


title: Harold Macmillan

text: Since Macmillan's death, his diaries for the 1950s and 1960s have also been published, both edited by Peter Catterall:


title: Harold Macmillan

text: Macmillan burned his diary for the climax of the Suez Affair, supposedly at Eden's request, although in Campbell's view more likely to protect his own reputation.


title: Harold Macmillan

text: Macmillan was a member of many clubs. On his first evening as Prime Minister he made a public show of taking the Chief Whip Edward Heath for oysters at the Turf Club.


title: Harold Macmillan

text: He became President of the Carlton Club in 1977 and would often stay at the club when he had to stay in London overnight. Within a few months of becoming President he merged the Carlton and Junior Carlton. He was also a member of Buck's, Pratt's, the Turf Club and Beefsteak Club. He also once commented that White's was 75% gentlemen and 25% crooks, the perfect combination for a club.


title: Harold Macmillan

text: Macmillan made occasional political interventions in retirement. Responding to a remark made by Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson about not having boots in which to go to school, Macmillan retorted: 'If Mr Wilson did not have boots to go to school that is because he was too big for them.'


title: Harold Macmillan

text: Macmillan accepted the Order of Merit in 1976. In October of that year he called for 'a Government of National Unity' including all parties, which could command the public support to resolve the economic crisis. Asked who could lead such a coalition, he replied: "Mr Gladstone formed his last Government when he was eighty-three. I'm only eighty-two. You mustn't put temptation in my way." He discussed the idea with Eden, but the IMF loan saved the country and the Labour government.


title: Harold Macmillan

text: Macmillan still travelled widely, visiting China in October 1979, where he held talks with senior Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping.


title: Harold Macmillan

text: Macmillan found himself drawn more actively into politics after Margaret Thatcher became Conservative leader in February 1975. After she ended Labour's five-year rule and became Prime Minister in May 1979, he told Nigel Fisher (his biographer, and himself a Conservative MP): "Ted [Heath] was a very good No2 {pause} not a leader {pause}. Now, you have a "real" leader. {long pause} Whether she's leading you in the right direction ..."


title: Harold Macmillan

text: The record of Macmillan's own premiership came under attack from the monetarists in the party, whose theories Thatcher supported. In a celebrated speech he wondered aloud where such theories had come from:


title: Harold Macmillan

text: Macmillan was one of several people who advised Thatcher to set up a small War Cabinet to manage the Falklands War. On his advice she excluded the Treasury from this body. Having first inquired whether Argentina was known to have atomic weapons, Macmillan's advice was to appoint a senior military advisor, as Pug Ismay had been in the Second World War (in the event Admiral Lewin, Chief of Defence Staff, performed this role). She had already received advice to exclude the Treasury from Frank Cooper (the Permanent Under-Secretary for Defence), not least because of Macmillan's own behaviour, as Chancellor, in demanding a halt to the Suez operation. She later recalled: 'I never regretted following Harold Macmillan's advice. We were never tempted to compromise the security of our forces for financial reasons. Everything we did was governed by military necessity.'


title: Harold Macmillan

text: With hereditary peerages again being created under Thatcher, Macmillan requested the earldom that had been customarily bestowed to departing prime ministers, and on 24 February 1984 he was created Earl of Stockton and Viscount Macmillan of Ovenden. He is the last Prime Minister to have been given an hereditary peerage. He took the title from his former parliamentary seat on the edge of the Durham coalfields, and in his maiden speech in the House of Lords he criticised Thatcher's handling of the coal miners' strike and her characterisation of striking miners as 'the enemy within'. He received an unprecedented standing ovation for his oration, which included the words:


title: Harold Macmillan

text: As Chancellor of Oxford University, Macmillan condemned its refusal in February 1985 to award Thatcher an honorary degree. He noted that the decision represented a break with tradition, and predicted that the snub would rebound on the university.


title: Harold Macmillan

text: Macmillan is widely supposed to have likened Thatcher's policy of privatisation to 'selling the family silver'. His precise quote, at a dinner of the Tory Reform Group at the Royal Overseas League on 8 November 1985, was on the subject of the sale of assets commonplace among individuals or states when they encountered financial difficulties: 'First of all the Georgian silver goes. And then all that nice furniture that used to be in the salon. Then the Canalettos go.' Profitable parts of the steel industry and the railways had been privatised, along with British Telecom: 'They were like two Rembrandts still left.'


title: Harold Macmillan

text: Macmillan's speech was much commented on, and a few days later he made a speech in the House of Lords, referring to it:


title: Harold Macmillan

text: Macmillan had often play-acted being an old man long before real old age set in. As early as 1948 Humphry Berkeley wrote of how "he makes a show of being feeble and decrepit", mentioning how he had suddenly stopped shambling and sprinted for a train. Nigel Fisher tells an anecdote of how Macmillan initially greeted him to his house leaning on a stick, but later walked and climbed steps perfectly well, twice acting lame again and fetching his stick when he remembered his "act". However, in genuine old age he became almost blind, causing him to need sticks and a helping arm.


title: Harold Macmillan

text: Macmillan died at Birch Grove, the Macmillan family mansion on the edge of Ashdown Forest near Chelwood Gate in East Sussex, four days after Christmas in 1986. His age was 92 years and 322 days—the greatest age attained by a British Prime Minister until surpassed by Lord Callaghan on 14 February 2005. His grandson and heir Alexander, Viscount Macmillan of Ovenden, said: "In the last 48 hours he was very weak but entirely reasonable and intelligent. His last words were, 'I think I will go to sleep now'."


title: Harold Macmillan

text: On receiving the news, Thatcher hailed him as "a very remarkable man and a very great patriot", and said that his dislike of "selling the family silver" had never come between them. He was "unique in the affection of the British people".


title: Harold Macmillan

text: Tributes came from around the world. US President Ronald Reagan said: "The American people share in the loss of a voice of wisdom and humanity who, with eloquence and gentle wit, brought to the problems of today the experience of a long life of public service." Outlawed African National Congress president Oliver Tambo sent his condolences: 'As South Africans we shall always remember him for his efforts to encourage the apartheid regime to bow to the winds of change that continue to blow in South Africa.' Commonwealth Secretary-General Sir Shridath Ramphal affirmed: "His own leadership in providing from Britain a worthy response to African national consciousness shaped the post-war era and made the modern Commonwealth possible."


title: Harold Macmillan

text: A private funeral was held on 5 January 1987 at St Giles' Church, Horsted Keynes, West Sussex, where he had regularly worshipped and read the lesson. Two hundred mourners attended, including 64 members of the Macmillan family, Thatcher and former premiers Lord Home and Edward Heath, as well as Lord Hailsham, and "scores of country neighbours". The Prince of Wales sent a wreath "in admiring memory". He was buried beside his wife and next to his parents and his son Maurice, who had died in 1984.


title: Harold Macmillan

text: The House of Commons paid its tribute on 12 January 1987, with much reference made to his book "The Middle Way". Thatcher said: "In his retirement Harold Macmillan occupied a unique place in the nation's affections", while Labour leader Neil Kinnock struck a more critical note: "Death and distance cannot lend sufficient enchantment to alter the view that the period over which he presided in the 1950s, while certainly and thankfully a period of rising affluence and confidence, was also a time of opportunities missed, of changes avoided. Harold Macmillan was, of course, not solely or even pre-eminently responsible for that. But we cannot but record with frustration the fact that the vigorous and perceptive attacker of the status quo in the 1930s became its emblem for a time in the late 1950s before returning to be its critic in the 1980s."


title: Harold Macmillan

text: A public memorial service, attended by the Queen and thousands of mourners, was held on 10 February 1987 in Westminster Abbey. Macmillan's estate was assessed for probate on 1 June 1987, with a value of £51,114 (equivalent to £ in ).


title: Harold Macmillan

text: In 1976 he received the Order of Merit. In 1984 he received the Freedom medal from the Roosevelt Study Center.


title: Harold Macmillan

text: C. P. Snow wrote to Macmillan that his reputation would endure as, like Churchill, he was "psychologically interesting".


title: Harold Macmillan

text: An early biographer George Hutchinson called him "The Last Edwardian at Number Ten" (1980), mistakenly in the view of Nigel Fisher. Fisher described him as "complex, almost chameleon". At times he portrayed himself as the descendant of a Scottish crofter, as a businessman, aristocrat, intellectual and soldier. Labour leader Harold Wilson wrote that his "role as a poseur was itself a pose". Wilson also argued that behind the public nonchalance lay a real professional. Fisher also wrote that he "had a talent for pursuing progressive policies but presenting them tactfully in a Conservative tone of voice".


title: Harold Macmillan

text: Historian John Vincent explores the image Macmillan crafted of himself for his colleagues and constituents:


title: Harold Macmillan

text: Alistair Horne, his official biographer, concedes that after his re-election in 1959 Macmillan's premiership suffered a series of major setbacks.


title: Harold Macmillan

text: Campbell writes that: "a late developer who languished on the back benches ... in the 1930s, Macmillan seized his opportunity when it came with flair and ruthlessness, and [until about 1962] filled the highest office with compelling style". However, he argues that Macmillan is remembered as having been "a rather seedy conjuror", famous for Premium Bonds, Beeching's cuts to the railways and the Profumo Scandal. He is also remembered for "stop-go" economics: first expansion despite the opposition of Thorneycroft and his team, then Selwyn Lloyd's Pay Pause, and then finally the Maudling boom, with Britain's relative economic decline, especially compared to the EEC, becoming clear despite perceptions of consumer "affluence" in the late 1950s. In the 1980s the aged Macmillan was seen as "a revered but slightly pathetic figure".


title: Harold Macmillan

text: Dominic Sandbrook writes that Macmillan's final weeks were typical of his premiership, "devious, theatrical and self-seeking" although not without droll wit and intelligence. Macmillan is best remembered for the "affluent society", which he inherited rather than created in the late 1950s, but chancellors came and went and by the early 1960s economic policy was "nothing short of a shambles", while his achievements in foreign policy made little difference to the lives of the public. By the time he left office, largely unlamented at the time, he was associated not with prosperity but with "anachronism and decay".


title: Harold Macmillan

text: D. R. Thorpe writes that by the early 1960s Macmillan was seen as "the epitome of all that was wrong with anachronistic Britain. This was an unfair charge." "The essence of his persona was as elusive as mercury." He was not a member of "the Establishment"—in fact he was a businessman who had "married into" the aristocracy and a rebel Chancellor of Oxford. "He had style in abundance, (and) was a star on the world stage". Thorpe argues that despite his 1960 "Winds of Change" speech, he was largely pushed into rapid independence for African countries by Maudling and Macleod.


title: Harold Macmillan

text: Richard Lamb argues that Macmillan was "by far the best of Britain's postwar Prime Ministers, and his administration performed better than any of their successors". Lamb argues that it is unfair to blame Macmillan for excessively quick African independence (resulting in many former colonies becoming dictatorships), or for the Beeching Plan (which was accepted by Labour in 1964, although Macmillan himself had reservations and had asked civil servants to draw up plans for extra road-building), and argues that had he remained in power Macmillan would never have allowed inflation to get as far out of hand as it did in the 1970s.


title: Harold Macmillan

text: "Note:" In a radical reshuffle dubbed "The Night of the Long Knives", Macmillan sacked a third of his Cabinet and instituted many other changes.


title: Western world

text: The Western world, also known as the West, primarily refers to the various nations and states in the regions of Europe, North America, and Oceania. The Western world is also known as the Occident (from the Latin word "occidēns" "setting down, sunset, west") in contrast to the Eastern world known as the Orient (from the Latin word "oriēns" "origin, sunrise, east"). Following the Discovery of America in 1492, the West came to be known as the "world of business" and trade; and might also mean the Northern half of the North–South divide, the countries of the "Global North" (often equated with capitalist developed countries).


title: Western world

text: The concept of "the West" first came into existence with the emergence of the Roman Republic, the roots of which can be traced back to Ancient Greece. The concept also held its presence in the East–West Schism of the Western Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. The present day West is politically rooted in the revolutionary fervour of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in much of Europe and the Americas; the early twentieth century saw populist dictatorships in Europe leading to two World Wars with the aftermath of the Cold War, which led to the formation of Western Bloc that adopted the model of liberal democracy with capitalist and free market economy. The West is also known for its gendered identities, and various antireligious sentiments; following the Age of Enlightenment and the French Revolution, inquisitions were abolished in the 19th and 20th centuries, leading to separation of church and state, and the establishment of secular states.


title: Western world

text: Home to an array of diverse people in present-day, the West was once envisioned as the homeland for whites.


title: Western world

text: The transition from 1800s industrialization to 1900s mass production, consumerism and computing revolution was trailed with a fundamental shift from physical to intellectual labor, permitting the 1960s-80s development of revolution in gender roles and providing an irreligious but more woman-centered Western world after former male-dominancy.


title: Western world

text: Used to develop national identities, the overarching concept of the West was forged in opposition to ideas such as "the East", "the Orient", "Eastern barbarism", "Oriental despotism", or the "Asiatic mode of production" by Karl Marx. Depending on the context and the historical period in question, Russia has sometimes been seen as a part of the West, and at other times, juxtaposed with it. Transformed from a directional concept to a socio-political concept and with the backdrop of the perception of an increasing acceleration of time, the idea of the West was temporalized and rendered as a concept of the future () bestowed with notions of progress and modernity.


title: Western world

text: Running parallel to the rise of the United States as a great power, and the development of communication and transportation technologies "shrinking" the distance between both the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, the aforementioned country became more prominently featured in conceptualizations of the West. In modern usage, the term "Western world" sometimes refers to Europe and to areas whose populations have large presence of European ethnic groups since the 15th century Age of Discovery. This is most evident by the inclusion of Australia and New Zealand in the modern definitions of the Western world: despite being part of the Eastern Hemisphere; these regions and those like it are included due to its significant British influence deriving from the colonisation of British explorers and the immigration of Europeans in the 20th century which has since grounded both the countries to the Western world politically and culturally.


title: Western world

text: Western culture was influenced by many older civilizations of the ancient Near East, such as Canaan, Minoan Crete, Sumer, Babylonia, and also Ancient Egypt. It originated in the Mediterranean basin and its vicinity; Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome are generally considered to be the birthplaces of Western civilization—Greece having heavily influenced Rome—the former due to its impact on philosophy, democracy, science, aesthetics, as well as building designs and proportions and architecture; the latter due to its influence on art, law, warfare, governance, republicanism, engineering and religion. Western civilization is also strongly associated with Christianity (and to a lesser extent, with Judaism), which is in turn shaped by Hellenistic philosophy and Roman culture. In the modern era, Western culture has been heavily influenced by the Renaissance, the Ages of Discovery and Enlightenment and the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions. Through extensive imperialism, colonialism and Christianization by some Western powers in the 15th to 20th centuries and later exportation of mass culture, much of the rest of the world has been extensively influenced by Western culture, in a phenomenon often called Westernization.


title: Western world

text: Historians, such as Carroll Quigley in ""The Evolution of Civilizations"", contend that Western civilization was born around AD 500, after the total collapse of the Western Roman Empire, leaving a vacuum for new ideas to flourish that were impossible in Classical societies. In either view, between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Renaissance, the West (or those regions that would later become the heartland of the culturally "western sphere") experienced a period of first, considerable decline, and then readaptation, reorientation and considerable renewed material, technological and political development.


title: Western world

text: The knowledge of the ancient "Western world" was partly preserved during this period due to the survival of the Eastern Roman Empire and the introduction of the Catholic Church; it was also greatly expanded by the Arab importation of both the Ancient Greco-Roman and new technology through the Arabs from India and China to Europe.


title: Western world

text: Since the Renaissance, the West evolved beyond the influence of the ancient Greeks and Romans and the Islamic world, due to the successful Second Agricultural, Commercial, Scientific, and Industrial revolutions (propellers of modern banking concepts). The West rose further with the 18th century's Age of Enlightenment and through the Age of Exploration's expansion of peoples of Western and Central European empires, particularly the globe-spanning colonial empires of 18th and 19th centuries. Numerous times, this expansion was accompanied by Catholic missionaries, who attempted to proselytize Christianity.


title: Western world

text: The geopolitical divisions in Europe that created a concept of "East" and "West" originated in the ancient tyrannical and imperialistic Graeco-Roman times. The Eastern Mediterranean was home to the highly urbanized cultures that had Greek as their common language (owing to the older empire of Alexander the Great and of the Hellenistic successors.), whereas the West was much more rural in its character and more readily adopted Latin as its common language. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the beginning of the Medieval times (or "Middle Ages"), Western and Central Europe were substantially cut off from the East where "Byzantine" Greek culture and Eastern Christianity became founding influences in the Eastern European world such as the East and South Slavic peoples.


title: Western world

text: Roman Catholic Western and Central Europe, as such, maintained a distinct identity particularly as it began to redevelop during the Renaissance. Even following the Protestant Reformation, Protestant Europe continued to see itself as more tied to Roman Catholic Europe than other parts of the perceived "civilized world".


title: Western world

text: Use of the term "West" as a specific cultural and geopolitical term developed over the course of the Age of Exploration as Europe spread its culture to other parts of the world. Roman Catholics were the first major religious group to immigrate to the New World, as settlers in the colonies of Spain and Portugal (and later, France) belonged to that faith. English and Dutch colonies, on the other hand, tended to be more religiously diverse. Settlers to these colonies included Anglicans, Dutch Calvinists, English Puritans and other nonconformists, English Catholics, Scottish Presbyterians, French Huguenots, German and Swedish Lutherans, as well as Quakers, Mennonites, Amish, and Moravians.


title: Western world

text: Ancient Greek civilization had been growing in the first millennium BC into wealthy poleis, so-called city-states (geographically loose political entities which in time, inevitably end giving way to larger organisations of society, including the empire and the nation-state) such as Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and Corinth, by Middle and Near Eastern ones (Sumerian cities such as Uruk and Ur; Ancient Egyptian city-states, such as Thebes and Memphis; the Phoenician Tyre and Sidon; the five Philistine city-states; the Berber city-states of the Garamantes).


title: Western world

text: The then Hellenic division between the barbarians (term used by Ancient Greeks for all non-Greek-speaking people) and the Greeks contrasted in many societies the Greek-speaking culture of the Greek settlements around the Mediterranean to the surrounding non-Greek cultures. Herodotus considered the Persian Wars of the early 5th century BC a conflict of Europa versus Asia (which he considered all land north and east of the Sea of Marmara, respectively). The Greeks would highlight what they perceived as a lack of freedom in the Persian world, something that they viewed as antithetical to their culture.


title: Western world

text: According to a few writers, the future conquest of parts of the Roman Empire by Germanic peoples and the subsequent dominance by the Western Christian Papacy (which held combined political and spiritual authority, a state of affairs absent from Greek civilization in all its stages), resulted in a rupture of the previously existing ties between the Latin West and Greek thought, including Christian Greek thought.


title: Western world

text: Ancient Rome (6th century BC – AD 476) is a term to describe the ancient Roman society that conquered Central Italy assimilating the Italian Etruscan culture, growing from the Latium region since about the 8th century BC, to a massive empire straddling the Mediterranean Sea. In its 10-centuries territorial expansion, Roman civilization shifted from a small monarchy (753–509 BC), to a republic (509–27 BC), into an autocratic empire (27 BC – AD 476). Its Empire came to dominate Western, Central and Southeastern Europe, Northern Africa and, becoming an autocratic Empire a vast Middle Eastern area, when it ended. Conquest was enforced using the Roman legions and then through cultural assimilation by eventual recognition of some form of Roman citizenship's privileges. Nonetheless, despite its great legacy, a number of factors led to the eventual decline and ultimately fall of the Roman Empire.


title: Western world

text: The Roman Empire succeeded the approximately 500-year-old Roman Republic ( 510–30 BC). In 350 years, from the successful and deadliest war with the Phoenicians began in 218 BC to the rule of Emperor Hadrian by AD 117, Ancient Rome expanded up to twenty-five times its area. The same time passed before its fall in AD 476. Rome had expanded long before the empire reached its zenith with the conquest of Dacia in AD 106 (modern-day Romania) under Emperor Trajan. During its territorial peak, the Roman Empire controlled about of land surface and had a population of 100 million. From the time of Caesar (100–44 BC) to the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, Rome dominated Southern Europe, the Mediterranean coast of Northern Africa and the Levant, including the ancient trade routes with population living outside. Ancient Rome has contributed greatly to the development of law, war, art, literature, architecture, technology and language in the "Western world", and its history continues to have a major influence on the world today. Latin language has been the base from which Romance languages evolved and it has been the official language of the Catholic Church and all Catholic religious ceremonies all over Europe until 1967, as well as an or the official language of countries such as Italy and Poland (9th–18th centuries).


title: Western world

text: In AD 395, a few decades before its Western collapse, the Roman Empire formally split into a Western and an Eastern one, each with their own emperors, capitals, and governments, although ostensibly they still belonged to one formal Empire. The Western Roman Empire provinces eventually were replaced by Northern European Germanic ruled kingdoms in the 5th century due to civil wars, corruption, and devastating Germanic invasions from such tribes as the Huns, Goths, the Franks and the Vandals by their late expansion throughout Europe. The three-day Visigoths's AD 410 sack of Rome who had been raiding Greece not long before, a shocking time for Graeco-Romans, was the first time after almost 800 years that Rome had fallen to a foreign enemy, and St. Jerome, living in Bethlehem at the time, wrote that "The City which had taken the whole world was itself taken." There followed the sack of AD 455 lasting 14 days, this time conducted by the Vandals, retaining Rome's eternal spirit through the Holy See of Rome (the Latin Church) for centuries to come. The ancient Barbarian tribes, often composed of well-trained Roman soldiers paid by Rome to guard the extensive borders, had become militarily sophisticated 'romanized barbarians', and mercilessly slaughtered the Romans conquering their Western territories while looting their possessions.


title: Western world

text: The Eastern Roman Empire, governed from Constantinople, is usually referred to as the Byzantine Empire after AD 476, the traditional date for the fall of the Roman Empire and beginning of the Early Middle Ages. The Eastern Roman Empire surviving the fall of the Western protected Roman legal and cultural traditions, combining them with Greek and Christian elements, for another thousand years more. The name Byzantine Empire was first used centuries later, after the Byzantine Empire ended.


title: Western world

text: The dissolution of the Western half, nominally ended in AD 476, but in truth a long process that ended by the rise of Catholic Gaul (modern-day France) ruling from around the year AD 800, left only the Eastern Roman Empire alive. The Eastern half continued to think of itself as the Eastern Roman Empire for a while until AD 610–800, when Latin ceased to be the official language of the empire. The inhabitants calling themselves Romans was because the term “Roman” was meant to signify all Christians. The Pope crowned Charlemagne as "Emperor of the Romans" of the newly established Holy Roman Empire and the West began thinking in terms of "Western Latins" living in the old Western Empire, and "Eastern Greeks" (those inside the Roman remnant of the old Eastern Empire).


title: Western world

text: In the early 4th century, the central focus of power was on two apart Imperial (including army generals') legacies, within the Roman Empire: the older Aegean Sea Greek heritage (of Classical Greece) in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the newer most successful Tyrrhenian Sea Latin heritage (of Ancient Latium and Tuscany) in the Western Mediterranean. Constantine the Great's decision to establish the city of Constantinople (today's Istanbul) in modern-day Turkey as the "New Rome" when he picked it as capital of his Empire (later called "Byzantine Empire" by modern historians) in 330 AD, was a turning point.


title: Western world

text: This internal conflict of legacies had possibly emerged since the assassination of Julius Caesar three centuries earlier, when Roman Imperialism had just been born with the Roman Republic becoming "Roman Empire", but reached its zenith during 3rd century's many internal civil wars. This is the time when the Huns (part of the ancient Eastern European tribes named "barbarians" by the Romans) from modern-day Hungary penetrated into the Dalmatian (modern-day Croatia) region then originating in the following 150 years in the Roman Empire officially splitting in two halves. Also the time of the formal acceptance of Christianity as Empire's religious policy, when the Emperors began actively banning and fighting previous pagan religions.


title: Western world

text: The Eastern Roman Empire included lands south-west of the Black Sea and bordering on the Eastern Mediterranean and parts of the Adriatic Sea. This division into Eastern and Western Roman Empires was later reflected in the administration of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Greek Orthodox churches, with Rome and Constantinople debating over whether either city was the capital of Western religion.


title: Western world

text: As the Eastern (Orthodox) and Western (Catholic) churches spread their influence, the line between Eastern and Western Christianity was moving. Its movement was affected by the influence of the Byzantine empire and the fluctuating power and influence of the Catholic church in Rome. The geographic line of religious division approximately followed a line of cultural divide. The influential American conservative political scientist, adviser and academic Samuel P. Huntington argued that this cultural division still existed during the Cold War as the approximate Western boundary of those countries that were allied with the Soviet Union.


title: Western world

text: In AD 800 under Charlemagne, the Early Medieval Franks established an empire that was recognized by the Pope in Rome as the Holy Roman Empire (Latin Christian revival of the ancient Roman Empire, under perpetual Germanic rule from AD 962) inheriting ancient Roman Empire's prestige but offending the Eastern Roman Emperor in Constantinople, and leading to the Crusades and the east–west schism. The crowning of the Emperor by the Pope led to the assumption that the highest power was the papal hierarchy, quintessential Roman Empire's spiritual heritage authority, establishing then, until the Protestant Reformation, the civilization of Western Christendom.


title: Western world

text: The Latin Rite Catholic Church of western and central Europe split with the eastern Greek-speaking Patriarchates in the Christian East–West Schism, also known as the "Great Schism", during the Gregorian Reforms (calling for a more central status of the Roman Catholic Church Institution), three months after Pope Leo IX's death in April 1054. Following the 1054 Great Schism, both the Western Church and Eastern Church continued to consider themselves "uniquely" orthodox and catholic. Augustine wrote in On True Religion: "Religion is to be sought... only among those who are called Catholic or orthodox Christians, that is, guardians of truth and followers of right." Over time, the Western Church gradually identified with the "Catholic" label, and people of Western Europe gradually associated the "Orthodox" label with the Eastern Church (although in some languages the "Catholic" label is not necessarily identified with the Western Church). This was in note of the fact that both Catholic and Orthodox were in use as ecclesiastical adjectives as early as the 2nd and 4th centuries respectively. Meanwhile, the extent of both Christendoms expanded, as Germanic peoples, Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, Scandinavia, Finnic peoples, Baltic peoples, British Isles and the other non-Christian lands of the northwest were converted by the Western Church, while Eastern Slavic peoples, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, Russian territories, Vlachs and Georgia were converted by the Eastern Church.


title: Western world

text: In 1071, the Byzantine army was defeated by the Muslim Turco-Persians of medieval Asia, resulting in the loss of most of Asia Minor. The situation was a serious threat to the future of the Eastern Orthodox Byzantine Empire. The Emperor sent a plea to the Pope in Rome to send military aid to restore the lost territories to Christian rule. The result was a series of western European military campaigns into the eastern Mediterranean, known as the "Crusades". Unfortunately for the Byzantines, the crusaders (belonging to the members of nobility from France, German territories, the Low countries, England, Italy and Hungary) had no allegiance to the Byzantine Emperor and established their own states in the conquered regions, including the heart of the Byzantine Empire.


title: Western world

text: The Holy Roman Empire would dissolve on 6 August 1806, after the French Revolution and the creation of the Confederation of the Rhine by Napoleon.


title: Western world

text: The decline of the Byzantine Empire (13th–15th centuries) began with the Latin Christian Fourth Crusade in AD 1202–04, considered to be one of the most important events, solidifying the schism between the Christian churches of Greek Byzantine Rite and Latin Roman Rite. An anti-Western riot in 1182 broke out in Constantinople targeting Latins. The extremely wealthy (after previous Crusades) Venetians in particular made a successful attempt to maintain control over the coast of Catholic present-day Croatia (specifically the Dalmatia, a region of interest to the maritime medieval Venetian Republic moneylenders and its rivals, such as the Republic of Genoa) rebelling against the Venetian economic domination. What followed dealt an irrevocable blow to the already weakened Byzantine Empire with the Crusader army's sack of Constantinople in April 1204, capital of the Greek Christian-controlled Byzantine Empire, described as one of the most profitable and disgraceful sacks of a city in history. This paved the way for Muslim conquests in present-day Turkey and the Balkans in the coming centuries (only a handful of the Crusaders followed to the stated destination thereafter, the Holy Land). The geographical identity of the Balkans is historically known as a crossroads of cultures, a juncture between the Latin and Greek bodies of the Roman Empire, the destination of a massive influx of pagans (meaning ""non-Christians"") Bulgars and Slavs, an area where Catholic and Orthodox Christianity met, as well as the meeting point between Islam and Christianity. The Papal Inquisition was established in AD 1229 on a permanent basis, run largely by clergymen in Rome, and abolished six centuries later. Before AD 1100, the Catholic Church suppressed what they believed to be heresy, usually through a system of ecclesiastical proscription or imprisonment, but without using torture, and seldom resorting to executions.


title: Western world

text: This very profitable Central European Fourth Crusade had prompted the 14th century Renaissance (translated as 'Rebirth') of Italian city-states including the Papal States, on eve of the Protestant Reformation and Counter-Reformation (which established the Roman Inquisition to succeed the Medieval Inquisition). There followed the discovery of the American continent, and consequent dissolution of West Christendom as even a theoretical unitary political body, later resulting in the religious Eighty Years War (1568–1648) and Thirty Years War (1618–1648) between various Protestant and Catholic states of the Holy Roman Empire (and emergence of religiously diverse confessions). In this context, the Protestant Reformation (1517) may be viewed as a schism within the Catholic Church. German monk Martin Luther, in the wake of precursors, broke with the pope and with the emperor by the Catholic Church's abusive commercialization of indulgences in the Late Medieval Period, backed by many of the German princes and helped by the development of the printing press, in an attempt to reform corruption within the church.


title: Western world

text: Both these religious wars ended with the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which enshrined the concept of the nation-state, and the principle of absolute national sovereignty in international law. As European influence spread across the globe, these Westphalian principles, especially the concept of sovereign states, became central to international law and to the prevailing world order.


title: Western world

text: In the 13th and 14th centuries, a number of European travelers, many of them Christian missionaries, had sought to cultivate trading with Asia and Africa. With the Crusades came the relative contraction of the Orthodox Byzantine's large silk industry in favour of Catholic Western Europe and the rise of Western Papacy. The most famous of these merchant travelers pursuing was Venetian Marco Polo. But these journeys had little permanent effect on east–west trade because of a series of political developments in Asia in the last decades of the 14th century, which put an end to further European exploration of Asia: namely the new Ming rulers were found to be unreceptive of religious proselytism by European missionaries and merchants. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Turks consolidated control over the eastern Mediterranean, closing off key overland trade routes.


title: Western world

text: The Portuguese spearheaded the drive to find oceanic routes that would provide cheaper and easier access to South and East Asian goods, by advancements in maritime technology such as the caravel ship introduced in the mid-1400s. The charting of oceanic routes between East and West began with the unprecedented voyages of Portuguese and Spanish sea captains. In 1492 European colonialism expanded across the globe with the exploring voyage of merchant, navigator, and Hispano-Italian colonizer Christopher Columbus. Such voyages were influenced by medieval European adventurers after the European spice trade with Asia, who had journeyed overland to the Far East contributing to geographical knowledge of parts of the Asian continent. They are of enormous significance in Western history as they marked the beginning of the European exploration, colonization and exploitation of the American continents and their native inhabitants. The European colonization of the Americas led to the Atlantic slave trade between the 1490s and the 1800s, which also contributed to the development of African intertribal warfare and racist ideology. Before the abolition of its slave trade in 1807, the British Empire alone (which had started colonial efforts in 1578, almost a century after Portuguese and Spanish empires) was responsible for the transportation of 3.5 million African slaves to the Americas, a third of all slaves transported across the Atlantic. The Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in 1806 by the French Revolutionary Wars; abolition of the Roman Catholic Inquisition followed.


title: Western world

text: Due to the reach of these empires, Western institutions expanded throughout the world. This process of influence (and imposition) began with the voyages of discovery, colonization, conquest, and exploitation of Portugal enforced as well by papal bulls in 1450s (by the fall of the Byzantine Empire), granting Portugal navigation, war and trade monopoly for any newly discovered lands, and competing Spanish navigators. It continued with the rise of the Dutch East India Company by the destabilising Spanish discovery of the New World, and the creation and expansion of the English and French colonial empires, and others. Even after demands for self-determination from subject peoples within Western empires were met with decolonization, these institutions persisted. One specific example was the requirement that post-colonial societies were made to form nation-states (in the Western tradition), which often created arbitrary boundaries and borders that did not necessarily represent a whole nation, people, or culture (as in much of Africa), and are often the cause of international conflicts and friction even to this day. Although not part of Western colonization process proper, following the Middle Ages Western culture in fact entered other global-spanning cultures during the colonial 15th–20th centuries.


title: Western world

text: The concepts of a world of nation-states born by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, coupled with the ideologies of the Enlightenment, the coming of modernity, the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, would produce powerful social transformations, political and economic institutions that have come to influence (or been imposed upon) most nations of the world today. Historians agree that the Industrial Revolution has been one of the most important events in history.


title: Western world

text: The course of three centuries since Christopher Columbus' late 15th century's voyages, of deportation of slaves from Africa and British dominant northern-Atlantic location, later developed into modern-day United States of America, evolving from the ratification of the Constitution of the United States by thirteen States on the North American East Coast before end of the 18th century.


title: Western world

text: In the early-19th century, the systematic urbanisation process (migration from villages in search of jobs in manufacturing centers) had begun, and the concentration of labour into factories led to the rise in the population of the towns. World population had been rising as well. It is estimated to have first reached one billion in 1804. Also, the new philosophical movement later known as Romanticism originated, in the wake of the previous Age of Reason of the 1600s and the Enlightenment of 1700s. These are seen as fostering the 19th century "Western world"'s sustained economic development. Before the urbanisation and industrialization of the 1800s, demand for oriental goods such as porcelain, silk, spices and tea remained the driving force behind European imperialism in Asia, and (with the important exception of British East India Company rule in India) the European stake in Asia remained confined largely to trading stations and strategic outposts necessary to protect trade. Industrialisation, however, dramatically increased European demand for Asian raw materials; and the severe Long Depression of the 1870s provoked a scramble for new markets for European industrial products and financial services in Africa, the Americas, Eastern Europe, and especially in Asia (Western powers exploited their advantages in China for example by the Opium Wars). This resulted in the "New Imperialism", which saw a shift in focus from trade and indirect rule to formal colonial control of vast overseas territories ruled as political extensions of their mother countries. The later years of the 19th century saw the transition from "informal imperialism" (hegemony) by military influence and economic dominance, to direct rule (a revival of colonial imperialism) in the African continent and Middle East.


title: Western world

text: During the socioeconomically optimistic and innovative decades of the Second Industrial Revolution between the 1870s and 1914, also known as the "Beautiful Era", the established colonial powers in Asia (United Kingdom, France, Netherlands) added to their empires also vast expanses of territory in the Indian Subcontinent and South East Asia. Japan was involved primarily during the Meiji period (1868–1912), though earlier contacts with the Portuguese, Spaniards and Dutch were also present in the Japanese Empire's recognition of the strategic importance of European nations. Traditional Japanese society became an industrial and militarist power like the Western British Empire and the French Third Republic, and similar to the German Empire.


title: Western world

text: At the close of the Spanish–American War in 1898 the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam and Cuba were ceded to the United States under the terms of the Treaty of Paris. The US quickly emerged as the new imperial power in East Asia and in the Pacific Ocean area. The Philippines continued to fight against colonial rule in the Philippine–American War.


title: Western world

text: By 1913, the British Empire held sway over 412 million people, of the world population at the time, and by 1920, it covered , of the Earth's total land area. At its apex, the phrase "the empire on which the sun never sets" described the British Empire, because its expanse around the globe meant that the sun always shone on at least one of its territories. As a result, its political, legal, linguistic and cultural legacy is widespread throughout the "Western World". In the aftermath of the Second World War, decolonizing efforts were employed by all Western powers under United Nations (ex-League of Nations) international directives. Most of colonized nations received independence by 1960. Great Britain showed ongoing responsibility for the welfare of its former colonies as member states of the Commonwealth of Nations. But the end of Western colonial imperialism saw the rise of Western neocolonialism or economic imperialism. Multinational corporations came to offer "a dramatic refinement of the traditional business enterprise", through "issues as far ranging as national sovereignty, ownership of the means of production, environmental protection, consumerism, and policies toward organized labor." Though the overt colonial era had passed, "Western" nations, as comparatively rich, well-armed, and culturally powerful states, wielded a large degree of influence throughout the world, and with little or no sense of responsibility toward the peoples impacted by its multinational corporations in their exploitation of minerals and markets. The dictum of Alfred Thayer Mahan is shown to have lasting relevance, that whoever controls the seas controls the world.


title: Western world

text: Eric Voegelin described the 18th-century as one where "the sentiment grows that one age has come to its close and that a new age of Western civilization is about to be born". According to Voeglin the Enlightenment (also called the Age of Reason) represents the "atrophy of Christian transcendental experiences and [seeks] to enthrone the Newtonian method of science as the only valid method of arriving at truth". Its precursors were John Milton and Baruch Spinoza. Meeting Galileo in 1638 left an enduring impact on John Milton and influenced Milton's great work "Areopagitica", where he warns that, without free speech, inquisitorial forces will impose "an undeserved thraldom upon learning".


title: Western world

text: The achievements of the 17th century included the invention of the telescope and acceptance of heliocentrism. 18th century scholars continued to refine Newton's theory of gravitation, notably Leonhard Euler, Pierre Louis Maupertuis, Alexis-Claude Clairaut, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Pierre-Simon de Laplace. Laplace's five-volume "Treatise on Celestial Mechanics" is one of the great works of 18th-century Newtonianism. Astronomy gained in prestige as new observatories were funded by governments and more powerful telescopes developed, leading to the discovery of new planets, asteroids, nebulae and comets, and paving the way for improvements in navigation and cartography. Astronomy became the second most popular scientific profession, after medicine.


title: Western world

text: A common metanarrative of the Enlightenment is the "secularization theory". Modernity, as understood within the framework, means a total break with the past. Innovation and science are the good, representing the modern values of rationalism, while faith is ruled by superstition and traditionalism. Inspired by the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment embodied the ideals of improvement and progress. Descartes and Isaac Newton were regarded as exemplars of human intellectual achievement. Condorcet wrote about the progress of humanity in the "Sketch of the Progress of the Human Mind" (1794), from primitive society to agrarianism, the invention of writing, the later invention of the printing press and the advancement to "the Period when the Sciences and Philosophy threw off the Yoke of Authority".


title: Western world

text: French writer Pierre Bayle denounced Spinoza as a pantheist (thereby accusing him of atheism). Bayle's criticisms garnered much attention for Spinoza. The pantheism controversy in the late 18th century saw Gotthold Lessing attacked by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi over support for Spinoza's pantheism. Lessing was defended by Moses Mendelssohn, although Mendelssohn diverged from pantheism to follow Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in arguing that God and the world were not of the same substance (equivalency). Spinoza was excommunicated from the Dutch Sephardic community, but for Jews who sought out Jewish sources to guide their own path to secularism, Spinoza was as important as Voltaire and Kant.


title: Western world

text: During the Cold War, a new definition emerged. Earth was divided into three "worlds". The First World, analogous in this context to what was called "the West", was composed of NATO members and other countries aligned with the United States.


title: Western world

text: The Second World was the Eastern bloc in the Soviet sphere of influence, including the Soviet Union (15 republics including the then-occupied and presently independent Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) and Warsaw Pact countries like Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, East Germany (now united with Germany), and Czechoslovakia (now split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia).


title: Western world

text: The Third World consisted of countries, many of which were unaligned with either, and important members included India, Yugoslavia, Finland (Finlandization) and Switzerland (Swiss Neutrality); some include the People's Republic of China, though this is disputed, since the People's Republic of China, as communist, had friendly relations—at certain times—with the Soviet bloc, and had a significant degree of importance in global geopolitics. Some Third World countries aligned themselves with either the US-led West or the Soviet-led Eastern bloc.


title: Western world

text: A number of countries did not fit comfortably into this neat definition of partition, including Switzerland, Sweden, Austria, and Ireland, which chose to be neutral. Finland was under the "Soviet Union's" military sphere of influence (see FCMA treaty) but remained neutral and was not communist, nor was it a member of the Warsaw Pact or Comecon but a member of the EFTA since 1986, and was west of the Iron Curtain. In 1955, when Austria again became a fully independent republic, it did so under the condition that it remain neutral; but as a country to the west of the Iron Curtain, it was in the "United States"' sphere of influence. Spain did not join the NATO until 1982, seven years after the death of the authoritarian Franco.


title: Western world

text: The 1980s advent of Mikhail Gorbachev led to the end of the Cold War following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.


title: Western world

text: In a debated Cold War II, a new definition emerged inside the realm of western journalism. More specifically, Cold War II, also known as the Second Cold War, New Cold War, Cold War Redux, Cold War 2.0, and Colder War, refers to the tensions, hostilities, and political rivalry that intensified dramatically in 2014 between the Russian Federation on the one hand, and the United States, European Union, NATO and some other countries on the other hand. Tensions escalated in 2014 after Russia's annexation of Crimea, military intervention in Ukraine, and the 2015 Russian military intervention in the Syrian Civil War. By August 2014, both sides had implemented economic, financial, and diplomatic sanctions upon each other: virtually all Western countries, led by the US and EU, imposed restrictive measures on Russia; the latter reciprocally introduced retaliatory measures.


title: Western world

text: The exact scope of the "Western world" is somewhat subjective in nature, depending on whether cultural, economic, spiritual or political criteria are employed. It is a generally accepted Western view to recognize the existence of at least three "major worlds" (or "cultures", or "civilizations"), broadly in contrast with the Western: the "Eastern world", the "Arab" and the "African" worlds, with no clearly specified boundaries. Additionally, "Latin American" and "Orthodox" worlds are sometimes separately considered "akin" to the West.


title: Western world

text: Many anthropologists, sociologists and historians oppose "the West and the Rest" in a categorical manner. The same has been done by Malthusian demographers with a sharp distinction between European and non-European family systems. Among anthropologists, this includes Durkheim, Dumont, and Lévi-Strauss.


title: Western world

text: Since the fall of the iron curtain the following countries are generally accepted as the Western world: the United States, Canada; the countries of the European Union plus the UK, Norway, Iceland and Switzerland; Australia and New Zealand.


title: Western world

text: In modern usage, "Western world" refers to Europe and to areas whose populations largely originate from Europe, through the Age of Discovery's imperialism.


title: Western world

text: In the 20th century, Christianity declined in influence in many Western countries, mostly in the European Union where some member states have experienced falling church attendance and membership in recent years, and also elsewhere. Secularism (separating religion from politics and science) increased. However, while church attendance is in decline, in some Western countries (i.e. Italy, Poland, and Portugal), more than half of the people state that religion is important, and most Westerners nominally identify themselves as Christians (e.g. 59% in the United Kingdom) and attend church on major occasions, such as Christmas and Easter. In the Americas, Christianity continues to play an important societal role, though in areas such as Canada, a low level of religiosity is common due to a European-type secularization. The official religions of the United Kingdom and some Nordic countries are forms of Christianity, while the majority of European countries have no official religion. Despite this, Christianity, in its different forms, remains the largest faith in most Western countries.


title: Western world

text: Christianity remains the dominant religion in the "Western world", where 70% are Christians. A 2011 Pew Research Center survey found that 76.2% of Europeans, 73.3% in Oceania, and about 86.0% in the Americas (90% in Latin America and the Caribbean and 77.4% in Northern America) described themselves as Christians.


title: Western world

text: Countries in the "Western world" are also the most keen on digital and televisual media technologies, as they were in the postwar period on television and radio: from 2000 to 2014, the Internet's market penetration in the "West" was twice that in non-"Western" regions. Wikipedia has been blocked intermittently in China since 2004.


title: Western world

text: American political scientist, adviser and academic Samuel P. Huntington considered Latin America as separate from the "Western world" for the purpose of his geopolitical analysis. However, he also states that, while in general researchers consider that the "West" has three main components (European, North American and Latin American), in his view, Latin America has followed a different development path from Europe and North America. Although it is a scion of European (mainly Spanish and Portuguese) civilization, it also incorporates, to an extent, elements of indigenous American civilizations, absent from North America and Europe. It has had a corporatist and authoritarian culture that Europe had to a much lesser extent. Both Europe and North America felt the effects of the Reformation and combined Catholic and Protestant culture. Historically, Latin America has been only Catholic, although this is changing due to the influx of Protestants into the region. Some regions in Latin America incorporate indigenous cultures, which did not exist in Europe and were effectively annihilated in the United States, and whose importance oscillates between two extremes: Mexico, Central America, Peru and Bolivia, on the one hand, and Argentina and Chile on the other. However, he does mention that the modus operandi of the Catholic Church was to incorporate native elements of pagan European cultures into the general dogma of Catholicism, and the Native American elements could be perceived in the same way.


title: Western world

text: Subjectively, Latin Americans are divided when it comes to identifying themselves. Some say: "Yes, we are part of the West." Others say: "No, we have our own unique culture"; and a vast bibliographical material produced by Latin Americans and North Americans exposes in detail their cultural differences. Huntington goes on to mention that Latin America could be considered a sub-civilization within Western civilization, or a separate civilization intimately related to the West and divided as to its belonging to it. While the second option is the most appropriate and useful for an analysis focused on the international political consequences of civilizations, including relations between Latin America, on the one hand, and North America and Europe, on the other, he also mentions that the underlying conflict of Latin America belonging to the West must eventually be addressed in order to develop a cohesive Latin American identity. Huntington's view has, however, been contested on a number of occasions as biased.


title: Western world

text: The Philippines, although geographically part of the Eastern world and having a majority population that does not possess European ethnic origins aside from a significant minority, maintains strong Western-based influences in its culture. From the country's traditional art, architecture, fashion, music, cuisine, language (Spanish and English) and Christianity. The Philippines itself was a creation of Spain, unifying certain parts of Southeast Asia into one entity as part of Spanish Empire through conquest and negotiation, naming it after King Philip II as Las Islas Filipinas. Cape Verde also has significant influence from the Western world due to Portuguese colonization, seen through the country's language (Portuguese), music, art and the prevalence of Christianity. The country's population is also overall, a mixture of African and European descent. European influence is also evident in Namibia, which has a sizeable minority of European descent and was previously administered by Germany and then South Africa.


title: Western world

text: Most of South Africa's population is not of European ancestry, excepting a sizeable minority. The primary sources of the country's constitution are Roman-Dutch mercantile law & personal law and English Common law, imports of Dutch settlement and British colonialism respectively. English, the country's "lingua franca", is the main language used in official and business capacities and the sole language of record in South African courts. English and Afrikaans – most similar to Dutch – are two of South Africa's eleven official languages. Christianity is the dominant religion and many denominations incorporate worship practices from traditional African religions. The Methodist, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Dutch Reformed, Lutheran, Pentecostal and Seventh-day Adventist dominations are also popular.


title: Western world

text: The term ""Western world"" is sometimes interchangeably used with the term First World or developed countries, stressing the difference between First World and the Third World or developing countries. This usage occurs despite the fact that many countries that may be culturally Western are developing countries – in fact, a significant percentage of the Americas are developing countries. It is also used despite many developed countries or regions not being culturally Western (e.g. Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao). Privatization policies (involving government enterprises and public services) and multinational corporations are often considered a visible sign of Western nations' economic presence, especially in Third World countries, and represent a common institutional environment for powerful politicians, enterprises, trade unions and firms, bankers and thinkers of the "Western world".


title: Western world

text: According to Samuel P. Huntington, some countries are torn on whether they are Western or not, with typically the national leadership pushing for Westernization, while historical, cultural and traditional forces remain largely non-Western. These include Turkey, whose political leadership has since the 1920s tried to Westernize the predominantly Muslim country with only 3% of its territory within Europe. It is his chief example of a "torn country" that is attempting to join Western civilization. The country's elite started the Westernization efforts, beginning with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who took power as the first president of the modern Turkish nation-state in 1923, imposed western institutions and dress, removed the Arabic alphabet and embraced the Latin alphabet. It joined NATO and since the 1960s has been seeking to join the European Union with very slow progress.


title: Western world

text: A series of scholars of civilization, including Arnold J. Toynbee, Alfred Kroeber and Carroll Quigley have identified and analyzed "Western civilization" as one of the civilizations that have historically existed and still exist today. Toynbee entered into quite an expansive mode, including as candidates those countries or cultures who became so heavily influenced by the West as to adopt these borrowings into their very self-identity. Carried to its limit, this would in practice include almost everyone within the West, in one way or another. In particular, Toynbee refers to the "intelligentsia" formed among the educated elite of countries impacted by the European expansion of centuries past. While often pointedly nationalist, these cultural and political leaders interacted within the West to such an extent as to change both themselves and the West.


title: Western world

text: The theologian and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin conceived of the West as the set of civilizations descended from the Nile Valley Civilization of Egypt.


title: Western world

text: Palestinian-American literary critic Edward Said uses the term "Occident" in his discussion of Orientalism. According to his binary, the West, or Occident, created a romanticized vision of the East, or Orient, to justify colonial and imperialist intentions. This Occident-Orient binary focuses on the Western vision of the East instead of any truths about the East. His theories are rooted in Hegel's master-slave dialectic: The Occident would not exist without the Orient and vice versa. Further, Western writers created this irrational, feminine, weak "Other" to contrast with the rational, masculine, strong West because of a need to create a difference between the two that would justify imperialist ambitions, according to the Said-influenced Indian-American theorist Homi K. Bhabha.


title: Leo (astrology)

text: Leo () (Greek: , "Leōn"), Latin for Lion, is the fifth sign of the zodiac. It corresponds to the constellation Leo and comes after Cancer and before Virgo. The traditional Western zodiac associates Leo with the period between about July 23 and August 22, and the sign spans the 120th to 150th degree of celestial longitude.


title: Leo (astrology)

text: Leo is associated with fire, accompanied by Aries and Sagittarius, and its modality is fixed. The constellation Leo is associated with the mythological Nemean lion. The lion is a very important and prominent symbol in Greek mythology.


title: Leo (astrology)

text: Egyptians worshipped the constellation, which they referred to as "Knem", because it was present during the flooding of the Nile River. This event signified plentiful harvests for the upcoming year, and the people interpreted it as a gift from the earth. Ruler of Egypt, Tutankhamun's gold throne features lion heads where the seat and front legs meet, as well as clawed feet at the end of each leg, symbolizing power and royalty.


title: Andrew Scott (actor)

text: Andrew Scott (born 21 October 1976) is an Irish actor. He played Jim Moriarty in the BBC series "Sherlock", for which he won the BAFTA Television Award for Best Supporting Actor. Scott's role as the priest on the second series of "Fleabag", received a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Series, Miniseries or Television Film and won the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. He won further acclaim playing the lead role of Garry Essendine in a 2019 stage production of "Present Laughter" at The Old Vic, for which he won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Play.


title: Andrew Scott (actor)

text: Scott has received various other awards, including the Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre for his role in "A Girl in a Car with a Man" at the Royal Court Theatre.


title: Andrew Scott (actor)

text: Scott was born in Dublin, Ireland, on 21 October 1976, the son of Nora and Jim Scott. His mother was an art teacher, while his father worked at an employment agency. He is the second of three children. He has an older sister, Sarah, and a younger sister, Hannah. He was raised as a Catholic, but has since left the faith. He attended Gonzaga College while taking weekend classes at Ann Kavanagh's Young People's Theatre in Rathfarnham, and appeared in two ads on Irish television. At 17, he was chosen for a starring role in his first film, "Korea". He won a bursary to art school, but elected to study drama at Trinity College Dublin, leaving after six months to join Dublin's Abbey Theatre before moving to London when he was 22. He once stated to the "London Evening Standard" magazine that he always had a "healthy obsession" with acting.


title: Andrew Scott (actor)

text: After filming a small part in Steven Spielberg's "Band of Brothers", Scott worked with film and theatre director Karel Reisz in the Gate Theatre, Dublin, production of "Long Day's Journey into Night" taking the role of Edmund Tyrone, the younger son, in Eugene O'Neill's play about a wealthy but tortured Lace Curtain Irish family living in Connecticut during the Gilded Age. He won Actor of the Year at the Sunday Independent Spirit of Life Arts Awards 1998 and received an Irish Times Theatre Award 1998 nomination for Best Supporting Actor.


title: Andrew Scott (actor)

text: Scott had the small part of Michael Bodkin in the film "Nora", and in a television adaptation of Henry James's "The American", before making his London theatre debut in Conor McPherson's "Dublin Carol" at the Royal Court Theatre. He was cast in the BAFTA-winning drama "Longitude", and the HBO miniseries "Band of Brothers". Scott has described the working atmosphere on "Band of Brothers" as "awful".


title: Andrew Scott (actor)

text: In 2004, he was named one of European Film Promotions' Shooting Stars. After starring in "My Life in Film" for the BBC, he received his first Laurence Olivier Award for his role in "A Girl in a Car with a Man" at The Royal Court, and the Theatregoers' Choice Award for his performance in the Royal National Theatre's "Aristocrats". He created the roles of the twin brothers in the original Royal Court production of Christopher Shinn's "Dying City", which was later nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2006, he made his Broadway debut in the Music Box Theater production of "The Vertical Hour" written by David Hare and directed by Sam Mendes, for which he was nominated for a Drama League Award.


title: Andrew Scott (actor)

text: Scott appears as Col. William Smith in the 2008 HBO miniseries "John Adams". In 2009, he appeared in "Sea Wall", a one-man show written especially for him by playwright Simon Stephens.


title: Andrew Scott (actor)

text: He starred in a sell-out run of "Cock" at the Royal Court in late 2009, a production which won an Olivier Award in 2010.


title: Andrew Scott (actor)

text: His turn in an episode of "Foyle's War", in which he plays a prisoner determined to allow himself to hang for a crime he may not have committed, was described in "Slant" magazine as a "standout performance".


title: Andrew Scott (actor)

text: His film appearances include a role in "Chasing Cotards" (a short film made for IMAX) and a role in the short film, "Silent Things"; he plays the role of Paul McCartney in the BBC film "Lennon Naked". He also stars in the critically acclaimed 2010 film "The Duel".


title: Andrew Scott (actor)

text: He is best known for his role as Sherlock Holmes' nemesis Jim Moriarty in the BBC drama series "Sherlock".


title: Andrew Scott (actor)

text: In 2011, he played the lead role of Julian in Ben Power's adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's epic "Emperor and Galilean" at the Royal National Theatre in London.


title: Andrew Scott (actor)

text: In addition to his stage and TV work, Scott is also known for his voice acting in radio plays and audiobooks, such as the roles of Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" and Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's "Ulysses".


title: Andrew Scott (actor)

text: In November 2013, Scott took part in the Royal National Theatre's 50 Years on Stage, a theatrical event which consisted of excerpts from many plays over the National's fifty-year run and was broadcast live on television. Scott performed a scene from "Angels in America" by Tony Kushner.


title: Andrew Scott (actor)

text: In 2014 Scott took to the stage in "Birdland", written by Simon Stephens and directed by Carrie Cracknell at the Royal Court Theatre, playing the central character of Paul, a rock star on the verge of a breakdown. Scott received positive reviews for the performance, with comments such as "beautifully played" and [he] "pulls off the brilliant trick of being totally dead behind the eyes and fascinating at the same time, an appalling creature who's both totem and symptom".


title: Andrew Scott (actor)

text: In 2015, he appeared in the James Bond film "Spectre", as Max Denbigh, a member of the British government intent on shutting down the Double-0 section.


title: Andrew Scott (actor)

text: In 2016, Scott appeared in the romantic drama film "This Beautiful Fantastic", directed and written by Simon Aboud.


title: Andrew Scott (actor)

text: In 2017, Scott's performance in the title role of "Hamlet" won critical acclaim and earned him the nomination for Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Play. The play was directed by Robert Icke and first produced at the Almeida Theatre. The production was filmed and broadcast on BBC Two at Easter 2018. Scott provided the voice of Obake in "".


title: Andrew Scott (actor)

text: Scott worked with the charity IdeasTap mentoring young actors and helping to start their careers, until the charity closed in June 2015 due to lack of funds.


title: Andrew Scott (actor)

text: In 2019, Scott played The Priest in series two of the award-winning BBC Three comedy-drama "Fleabag". Also in 2019, he appeared in the Netflix anthology series "Black Mirror", as the lead character Chris in the Season 5 episode "Smithereens". In June to August 2019, Scott starred as the matinee idol Garry Essendine in Matthew Warchus's revival of Noël Coward's "Present Laughter" at the Old Vic in London. He has been cast as Colonel John Parry/Jopari/Stanislaus Grumman in the HBO/BBC adaptation of Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials".


title: Andrew Scott (actor)

text: On 25 September 2019, it was announced that Scott had been cast as Tom Ripley in "Ripley", a television series to be adapted from Patricia Highsmith's "Ripley" novels.


title: Andrew Scott (actor)

text: Scott first commented publicly on his sexuality in an interview with "The Independent" in November 2013. He stated, "Mercifully, these days people don't see being gay as a character flaw. But nor is it a virtue, like kindness. Or a talent, like playing the banjo. It's just a fact. Of course, it's part of my make-up, but I don't want to trade on it."


title: Patrick Warburton

text: On television, he has played David Puddy on "Seinfeld", the title character on "The Tick", Jeb Denton on "Less Than Perfect", Jeff Bingham on "Rules of Engagement" and Lemony Snicket on "A Series of Unfortunate Events". His voice acting roles include Joe Swanson on "Family Guy", Kronk in "The Emperor's New Groove", Buzz Lightyear on "Buzz Lightyear of Star Command", Ian in "Open Season", Blag in "The Wild", Ken in "Bee Movie", King Agamemnon in "Mr. Peabody & Sherman", Pulaski in "", Sheriff Bronson Stone in "Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated", Mr. Barkin on "Kim Possible", Brock Samson on "The Venture Bros.", Flynn in "Skylanders" and Hugo Vasquez in "Tales from the Borderlands". In advertising, he plays a "control enthusiast" in commercials for National Car Rental.


title: Patrick Warburton

text: Patrick Warburton was born in Paterson, New Jersey on November 14, 1964. He is the son of orthopedic surgeon John Charles Warburton Jr. and Barbara Jeanne Gratz (an actress credited as Barbara Lord). He and his three sisters, Mary, Lara, and Megan, were raised in a "very religious" and "conservative" Catholic family in Huntington Beach, California, where he attended Saints Simon and Jude Catholic School. He later attended Servite High School (in Anaheim, California), then transferred to Newport Harbor High School (in Newport Beach, California). He studied marine biology at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, California, but dropped out to pursue modeling and acting.


title: Patrick Warburton

text: Warburton's acting roles often rely on his distinctive deep, booming voice and large physique. In the 1990s, he was known for his recurring role in "Seinfeld" as David Puddy, the on-again, off-again boyfriend of Elaine Benes. He played Eric in the sitcom "Dave's World", and had a small role in the 2002 film "Men in Black II" as J's new partner, T.


title: Patrick Warburton

text: Warburton played the title role in FOX's short-lived series "The Tick". He has repeatedly criticized FOX's mismanagement of the series after its cancellation, stating that the network "apparently didn't have a clue." In 2016 he was a producer for the Amazon streaming version of the series.


title: Patrick Warburton

text: He played Nick Sharp in "8 Simple Rules;" and in 2003, joined the cast of "Less Than Perfect" as anchorman Jeb Denton. He also played Jeff Bingham in "Rules of Engagement", and Rip Riley in the FX series "Archer".


title: Patrick Warburton

text: Warburton has provided voices for several animated films and TV programs, including a lead character in "Game Over", Buzz Lightyear; the Little Green Men in "Buzz Lightyear of Star Command;" and Kronk in "The Emperor's New Groove", with David Spade, Eartha Kitt, and John Goodman. Spade and Warburton reunited for the CBS sitcom "Rules of Engagement", which aired from 2007 to 2013, and "" in 2015. Warburton reprised his role as Kronk for the direct-to-video sequel "Kronk's New Groove", and the subsequent TV series "The Emperor's New School". He voiced Steve Barkin in the Disney Channel show "Kim Possible".


title: Patrick Warburton

text: Warburton was also cast in "The Venture Bros.", where he voices Brock Samson, and voices Joe Swanson on Fox's "Family Guy" and Detective Cash in "The Batman". He recorded voices for the computer-animated feature films "Hoodwinked", "Chicken Little", "Bee Movie", "Open Season". In video games, he voiced Lok in the "Tak and the Power of Juju" video game series and has also reprised the role again in the television series of the same name, as well as Flynn in the "Skylanders" series. He was also the voice of Commander Blaine H. Tate on the Comedy Central animated series "Moonbeam City" in October 2015.


title: Patrick Warburton

text: Warburton appeared on GSN's "Poker Royale Celebrities vs. the Pros" tournament in 2005, winning the tournament and the $50,000 grand prize. On November 8, 2009, he appeared as the Wild West character Cal Johnson on "Seth & Alex's (Almost Live) Comedy Show", hosted by Seth MacFarlane and Alex Borstein on Fox. He was also cast as Sheriff Bronson Stone in the Cartoon Network series "Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated," and appeared as Bowser in a video by CollegeHumor, "The Roast of Mario".


title: Patrick Warburton

text: He appeared on the American version of "Top Gear" on February 21, 2012, where he set the "Big Star, Small Car" lap record, beating previous record-holder Arlene Tur.


title: Patrick Warburton

text: Warburton starred in the 2016 NBC sitcom "Crowded", where he and Carrie Preston played parents who were about to enjoy their empty-nest years only to find their daughters and his parents moving back in to live with them. It ran for one season of 13 episodes.


title: Patrick Warburton

text: He is featured as the flight attendant, Patrick, in the "preboarding" video shown to guests at Soarin' Around the World in Disney California Adventure in Anaheim, California and Epcot at the Walt Disney World Resort, in Orlando, Florida where he explains the ride's requirements, reprising his role from the preboarding video of the predecessor ride, Soarin' Over California. He lent his voice to the droid G2-4T in the queue of at Disney's Hollywood Studios in Orlando, Florida and Disneyland in Anaheim, California.


title: Patrick Warburton

text: Despite being a lifelong fan of the Los Angeles Kings hockey team, Warburton has appeared at multiple New Jersey Devils games with his face (and chest) painted similar to that of his Devils crazed role in an episode of "Seinfeld", exhorting the crowd in a manner like that of his David Puddy character. His real-life relationship with the Devils began when the team invited him to drop the ceremonial first puck of the 1995 season, and he showed up with his face painted. After dropping the puck, he slipped and fell, but rescued the moment by regaining his balance and ripping off his shirt to reveal his chest was painted with the letter "D", which came to be regarded as an iconic moment in Devils history. The Devils gave out a Puddy bobblehead doll to fans at a 2019 game.


title: Patrick Warburton

text: In the commercial and advertising world, Warburton is the voice in the Carrier Corporation commercials for their air-conditioning and HVAC units, and was the voice of Superman in "The Adventures of Seinfeld and Superman" for American Express. He is the voice of Lewis in the "Clark & Lewis Expedition" radio commercials for Horizon Air. In August 2009, he played a high-end PC in a "Get a Mac" ad for Apple Inc. He became the spokesman for Japanese automaker Honda's "Good Reasons" advertising campaign in September 2011. He is the voice in NAPA's "Can of Know How" commercial. In 2015, he appeared in National Car Rental's "Be the Boss of You" commercials. He is the voice of the current "Discover Fresh" radio ad campaign by Souplantation, a California-based buffet-style restaurant chain (known as Sweet Tomatoes in other markets).


title: Patrick Warburton

text: Warburton is also the voice of Ranger, a forest ranger, in a series of radio spots for the national Smokey Bear campaign sponsored by the U.S. Forest Service and the Ad Council.


title: Patrick Warburton

text: In 1991, Warburton married Cathy Jennings, whom he met in college. They have three sons and one daughter: Talon, Alexandra, Shane and Gabriel. They live in Santa Rosa Valley, California.


title: Patrick Warburton

text: Warburton is a Christian, and has said that he is willing to turn off "Family Guy" "when it takes its religious humor too far", perceiving such moments "as diminished returns".


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Sodium hydroxide, also known as lye and caustic soda, is an inorganic compound with the formula NaOH. It is a white solid ionic compound consisting of sodium cations and hydroxide anions .


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Sodium hydroxide is a highly caustic base and alkali that decomposes proteins at ordinary ambient temperatures and may cause severe chemical burns. It is highly soluble in water, and readily absorbs moisture and carbon dioxide from the air. It forms a series of hydrates . The monohydrate crystallizes from water solutions between 12.3 and 61.8 °C. The commercially available "sodium hydroxide" is often this monohydrate, and published data may refer to it instead of the anhydrous compound.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: As one of the simplest hydroxides, sodium hydroxide is frequently used alongside neutral water and acidic hydrochloric acid to demonstrate the pH scale to chemistry students.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Sodium hydroxide is used in many industries: in the manufacture of pulp and paper, textiles, drinking water, soaps and detergents, and as a drain cleaner. Worldwide production in 2004 was approximately 60 million tons, while demand was 51 million tons.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Pure sodium hydroxide is a colorless crystalline solid that melts at without decomposition, and with a boiling point of . It is highly soluble in water, with a lower solubility in polar solvents such as ethanol and methanol. NaOH is insoluble in ether and other non-polar solvents.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Similar to the hydration of sulfuric acid, dissolution of solid sodium hydroxide in water is a highly exothermic reaction where a large amount of heat is liberated, posing a threat to safety through the possibility of splashing. The resulting solution is usually colorless and odorless. As with other alkaline solutions, it feels slippery with skin contact due to the process of saponification that occurs between NaOH and natural skin oils.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Concentrated (50%) aqueous solutions of sodium hydroxide have a characteristic viscosity, 78 mPa·s, that is much greater than that of water (1.0 mPa·s) and near that of olive oil (85 mPa·s) at room temperature. The viscosity of aqueous NaOH, as with any liquid chemical, is inversely related to its service temperature, i.e., its viscosity decreases as temperature increases, and vice versa. The viscosity of sodium hydroxide solutions plays a direct role in its application as well as its storage.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Sodium hydroxide can form several hydrates , which result in a complex solubility diagram that was described in detail by S. U. Pickering in 1893. The known hydrates and the approximate ranges of temperature and concentration (mass percent of NaOH) of their saturated water solutions are:


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Early reports refer to hydrates with "n" = 0.5 or "n" = 2/3, but later careful investigations failed to confirm their existence.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: The only hydrates with stable melting points are (65.10 °C) and (15.38 °C). The other hydrates, except the metastable ones and (β) can be crystallized from solutions of the proper composition, as listed above. However, solutions of NaOH can be easily supercooled by many degrees, which allows the formation of hydrates (including the metastable ones) from solutions with different concentrations.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: For example, when a solution of NaOH and water with 1:2 mole ratio (52.6% NaOH by mass) is cooled, the monohydrate normally starts to crystallize (at about 22 °C) before the dihydrate. However, the solution can easily be supercooled down to −15 °C, at which point it may quickly crystallize as the dihydrate. When heated, the solid dihydrate might melt directly into a solution at 13.35 °C; however, once the temperature exceeds 12.58 °C. it often decomposes into solid monohydrate and a liquid solution. Even the "n" = 3.5 hydrate is difficult to crystallize, because the solution supercools so much that other hydrates become more stable.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: A hot water solution containing 73.1% (mass) of NaOH is a eutectic that solidifies at about 62.63 °C as an intimate mix of anhydrous and monohydrate crystals.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: A second stable eutectic composition is 45.4% (mass) of NaOH, that solidifies at about 4.9 °C into a mixture of crystals of the dihydrate and of the 3.5-hydrate.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: The third stable eutectic has 18.4% (mass) of NaOH. It solidifies at about −28.7 °C as a mixture of water ice and the heptahydrate .


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: When solutions with less than 18.4% NaOH are cooled, water ice crystallizes first, leaving the NaOH in solution.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: The α form of the tetrahydrate has density 1.33 g/cm. It melts congruously at 7.55 °C into a liquid with 35.7% NaOH and density 1.392 g/cm, and therefore floats on it like ice on water. However, at about 4.9 °C it may instead melt incongruously into a mixture of solid and a liquid solution.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: The β form of the tetrahydrate is metastable, and often transforms spontaneously to the α form when cooled below −20 °C. Once initiated, the exothermic transformation is complete in a few minutes, with a 6.5% increase in volume of the solid. The β form can be crystallized from supercooled solutions at −26 °C, and melts partially at −1.83 °C.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: The "sodium hydroxide" of commerce is often the monohydrate (density 1.829 g/cm). Physical data in technical literature may refer to this form, rather than the anhydrous compound.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: NaOH and its monohydrate form orthorhombic crystals with the space groups Cmcm (oS8) and Pbca (oP24), respectively. The monohydrate cell dimensions are a = 1.1825, b = 0.6213, c = 0.6069 nm. The atoms are arranged in a hydrargillite-like layer structure, with each sodium atom surrounded by six oxygen atoms, three each from hydroxide ions and three from water molecules. The hydrogen atoms of the hydroxyls form strong bonds with oxygen atoms within each O layer. Adjacent O layers are held together by hydrogen bonds between water molecules.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Sodium hydroxide reacts with protic acids to produce water and the corresponding salts. For example, when sodium hydroxide reacts with hydrochloric acid, sodium chloride is formed:


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: This type of reaction with a strong acid releases heat, and hence is exothermic. Such acid–base reactions can also be used for titrations. However, sodium hydroxide is not used as a primary standard because it is hygroscopic and absorbs carbon dioxide from air.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Sodium hydroxide also reacts with acidic oxides, such as sulfur dioxide. Such reactions are often used to "scrub" harmful acidic gases (like and ) produced in the burning of coal and thus prevent their release into the atmosphere. For example,


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Glass reacts slowly with aqueous sodium hydroxide solutions at ambient temperatures to form soluble silicates. Because of this, glass joints and stopcocks exposed to sodium hydroxide have a tendency to "freeze". Flasks and glass-lined chemical reactors are damaged by long exposure to hot sodium hydroxide, which also frosts the glass. Sodium hydroxide does not attack iron at room temperatures, since iron does not have amphoteric properties (i.e., it only dissolves in acid, not base).


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Nevertheless, at high temperatures (e.g. above 500 °C), iron can react endothermically with sodium hydroxide to form iron(III) oxide, sodium metal, and hydrogen gas. This is due to the lower enthalpy of formation of iron(III) oxide (−824.2 kJ/mol) compared to sodium hydroxide (-500 kJ/mol) and positive entropy change of reaction, which imply spontaneity at high temperatures (, ) and non-spontaneity at low temperatures (, ). Consider the following reaction between molten sodium hydroxide and finely divided iron filings:


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: A few transition metals, however, may react vigorously with sodium hydroxide under milder conditions.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: In 1986, an aluminium road tanker in the UK was mistakenly used to transport 25% sodium hydroxide solution, causing pressurization of the contents and damage to the tanker. The pressurization was due to the hydrogen gas which is produced in the reaction between sodium hydroxide and aluminium:


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Unlike sodium hydroxide, which is soluble, the hydroxides of most transition metals are insoluble, and therefore sodium hydroxide can be used to precipitate transition metal hydroxides. The following colours are observed:


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Aluminium hydroxide is used as a gelatinous flocculant to filter out particulate matter in water treatment. Aluminium hydroxide is prepared at the treatment plant from aluminium sulfate by reacting it with sodium hydroxide or bicarbonate.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Sodium hydroxide can be used for the base-driven hydrolysis of esters (as in saponification), amides and alkyl halides. However, the limited solubility of sodium hydroxide in organic solvents means that the more soluble potassium hydroxide (KOH) is often preferred. Touching a sodium hydroxide solution with bare hands, while not recommended, produces a slippery feeling. This happens because oils on the skin such as sebum are converted to soap.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Despite solubility in propylene glycol it is unlikely to replace water in saponification due to propylene glycol's primary reaction with fat before reaction between sodium hydroxide and fat.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Sodium hydroxide is industrially produced as a 50% solution by variations of the electrolytic chloralkali process. Chlorine gas is also produced in this process. Solid sodium hydroxide is obtained from this solution by the evaporation of water. Solid sodium hydroxide is most commonly sold as flakes, prills, and cast blocks.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: In 2004, world production was estimated at 60 million dry tonnes of sodium hydroxide, and demand was estimated at 51 million tonnes. In 1998, total world production was around 45 million tonnes. North America and Asia each contributed around 14 million tonnes, while Europe produced around 10 million tonnes. In the United States, the major producer of sodium hydroxide is Olin, which has annual production around 5.7 million tonnes from sites at Freeport, Texas, and Plaquemine, Louisiana, St Gabriel, Louisiana, McIntosh, Alabama, Charleston, Tennessee, Niagara Falls, New York, and Becancour, Canada. Other major US producers include Oxychem, Westlake, Shintek and Formosa. All of these companies use the chloralkali process.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Historically, sodium hydroxide was produced by treating sodium carbonate with calcium hydroxide in a metathesis reaction which takes advantage of the fact that sodium hydroxide is soluble, while calcium carbonate is not. This process was called causticizing.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: This process was superseded by the Solvay process in the late 19th century, which was in turn supplanted by the Leblanc process and then chloralkali process which is in use today.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Sodium hydroxide is also produced by combining pure sodium metal with water. The byproducts are hydrogen gas and heat, often resulting in a flame.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: This reaction is commonly used for demonstrating the reactivity of alkali metals in academic environments; however, it is not commercially viable, as the isolation of sodium metal is typically performed by reduction or electrolysis of sodium compounds including sodium hydroxide.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Sodium hydroxide is a popular strong base used in industry. Sodium hydroxide is used in the manufacture of sodium salts and detergents, pH regulation, and organic synthesis. In bulk, it is most often handled as an aqueous solution, since solutions are cheaper and easier to handle.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Sodium hydroxide is used in many scenarios where it is desirable to increase the alkalinity of a mixture, or to neutralize acids.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: For example, in the petroleum industry, sodium hydroxide is used as an additive in drilling mud to increase alkalinity in bentonite mud systems, to increase the mud viscosity, and to neutralize any acid gas (such as hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide) which may be encountered in the geological formation as drilling progresses.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Another use is in Salt spray testing where pH needs to be regulated. Sodium hydroxide is used with hydrochloric acid to balance pH. The resultant salt, NaCl, is the corrosive agent used in the standard neutral pH salt spray test.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Poor quality crude oil can be treated with sodium hydroxide to remove sulfurous impurities in a process known as "caustic washing". As above, sodium hydroxide reacts with weak acids such as hydrogen sulfide and mercaptans to yield non-volatile sodium salts, which can be removed. The waste which is formed is toxic and difficult to deal with, and the process is banned in many countries because of this. In 2006, Trafigura used the process and then dumped the waste in Ivory Coast.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Sodium hydroxide is also widely used in pulping of wood for making paper or regenerated fibers. Along with sodium sulfide, sodium hydroxide is a key component of the white liquor solution used to separate lignin from cellulose fibers in the kraft process. It also plays a key role in several later stages of the process of bleaching the brown pulp resulting from the pulping process. These stages include oxygen delignification, oxidative extraction, and simple extraction, all of which require a strong alkaline environment with a pH > 10.5 at the end of the stages.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: In a similar fashion, sodium hydroxide is used to digest tissues, as in a process that was used with farm animals at one time. This process involved placing a carcass into a sealed chamber, then adding a mixture of sodium hydroxide and water (which breaks the chemical bonds that keep the flesh intact). This eventually turns the body into a liquid with a dark brown color, and the only solids that remain are bone hulls, which can be crushed between one's fingertips.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Sodium hydroxide is frequently used in the process of decomposing roadkill dumped in landfills by animal disposal contractors. Due to its availability and low cost, it has been used by criminals to dispose of corpses. Italian serial killer Leonarda Cianciulli used this chemical to turn dead bodies into soap. In Mexico, a man who worked for drug cartels admitted disposing of over 300 bodies with it.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Sodium hydroxide is a dangerous chemical due to its ability to hydrolyze protein. If a dilute solution is spilled on the skin, burns may result if the area is not washed thoroughly and for several minutes with running water. Splashes in the eye can be more serious and can lead to blindness.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Strong bases attack aluminium. Sodium hydroxide reacts with aluminium and water to release hydrogen gas. The aluminium takes the oxygen atom from sodium hydroxide, which in turn takes the oxygen atom from the water, and releases the two hydrogen atoms. The reaction thus produces hydrogen gas and sodium aluminate. In this reaction, sodium hydroxide acts as an agent to make the solution alkaline, which aluminium can dissolve in.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Sodium aluminate is an inorganic chemical that is used as an effective source of aluminium hydroxide for many industrial and technical applications. Pure sodium aluminate (anhydrous) is a white crystalline solid having a formula variously given as , , , or . Formation of sodium tetrahydroxoaluminate(III) or hydrated sodium aluminate is given by:


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: This reaction can be useful in etching, removing anodizing, or converting a polished surface to a satin-like finish, but without further passivation such as anodizing or alodining the surface may become degraded, either under normal use or in severe atmospheric conditions.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: In the Bayer process, sodium hydroxide is used in the refining of alumina containing ores (bauxite) to produce alumina (aluminium oxide) which is the raw material used to produce aluminium metal via the electrolytic Hall-Héroult process. Since the alumina is amphoteric, it dissolves in the sodium hydroxide, leaving impurities less soluble at high pH such as iron oxides behind in the form of a highly alkaline red mud.


title: Sodium hydroxide

text: Other amphoteric metals are zinc and lead which dissolve in concentrated sodium hydroxide solutions to give sodium zincate and sodium plumbate respectively.