Herodotus notes that the Persians, while proclaiming themselves superior to all their neighbors, borrowed their civilian dress from the Medes and a number of outlandish indulgences, including unnatural vice, from the Greeks; and 'the Old Oligarch', in the course of his pungent criticisms of fifth-century Athens, remarks that his fellow-countrymen had been exposed, through their command of the sea, to a more extensive debasement by foreign customs than was to be seen in the cities of less enterprising Greek communities. As for ourselves, our tobacco-smoking commemorates our extermination of the red-skinned aborigines of North America, and coffee-drinking and tea-drinking and polo-playing and pyjama-wearing and Turkish baths commemorate the enthronement of the Frankish man-of-business in the seat of the Ottoman Qaysar-i-Rum and of the Mughal Qaysar-i-Hind, and our jazzing commemorates the enslavement of the African Negro and his transportation across the Atlantic to labour on American soil in plantations which had taken the place of the hunting-grounds of the vanished Red Indians.
p. 521
From Arnold Toynbee's 'A Study of History: Volume 1'
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