The future is Asian, argues the respected analyst, Parag Khanna. But this piece of conventional wisdom needs unwrapping. Geographically, Asia is no more a continent than is Europe. “Asia” itself is not even an Asian idea: Europeans invented it. Asians did not conceive of themselves as being part of a single continental entity. The region is too vast and diverse for that to have been possible.It still is. What is happening is rather a global rebalancing, as the historically brief, but world-changing, domination over humanity of Europe and its colonial progeny dwindles away. A multipolar and messy world will replace it. Will “Asia” make up a huge part of this? Certainly. China and India will be actors. But Asia is rather an arena than an actor.

Look at a globe: Europe and Asia are one continent. For historical and cultural reasons, it also makes sense to include north Africa in Asia, rather than Africa. This then is Eurasia, the continent of the long-lasting human civilisations. Historically, this supercontinent was home to Confucian civilisation to the east, Hindu civilisation to the south, Islamic civilisation in the near west and Christendom in the far west. To the north were the steppe nomads. The interactions among these neighbours were profound. But Eurasia was too vast to be, or to be conceived of as, a unity.

The Greeks appear to have invented the idea of dividing this single continent into two. The name is first attested in Herodotus, in about 440BC. At that time, nobody knew quite how vast what he called Asia was.