Eurasia is the continent of Europe and Asia. It is alternatively considered to be a supercontinent composed of the continents of Europe and Asia. The earth sciences (with a more precise definition of continent) consider Eurasia to be a continent in and of itself. Eurasia can be geographically defined by subtracting Africa from the supercontinent of Africa-Eurasia.
Due to the perceived cultural differences between Asia and Europe by Europeans, it was traditional to consider the two to be separate continents. The dividing line between Europe and Asia is traditionally placed along the Ural Mountains. This distinction then spread to the rest of the world. Obviously, the idea of Asia as a single cultural group is not shared by Asians. Wheras Central Asia commonly refers to only the landlocked interior countries, recent decades have brought forth a view toward a greater Eurasian scope of history, centering largely on Silk Road trade, but seeking deeper cultural linkages and origins. This view deals largely with establishing genetic, cultural, and linguistic relationships between European and Asian cultures of antiquity, which had long been thought as isolate.
Anthropologically, historically, and linguistically, Eurasia is more appropriately, though vaguely, subdivided into West Eurasia (often including North Africa) and East Eurasia, and they are further subdivided into regions like Europe, East Asia, South Asia, and Southwest Asia, which have distinct cultural, religious, historic, and linguistic differences. Alternatively, some historians perceive much of South Europe, South Asia, and West Asia as historically closer to each other than to their northern counterparts, creating a vague South Eurasia . North Europe and parts of North Asia create another vaguely similar cultural and geographic sphere known as North Eurasia.
In British English, Asian often refers to people from the Indian Subcontinent. This is in contrast to American English, where Asian tends to refer to East and Southeast Asians. This can easily be explained by the fact that the Indian subcontinent was historically the most important part of Asia from a modern British perspective, and that most migrants from Asia to the UK come from there, where as in the US, most Asian migrants traditionally tended to come from the Pacific-rim countries, thus the contrasting imageries of the Asian in the cultural imagination of both countries.
The term Eurasia is also sometimes used to refer to the newly independent former Soviet states in Central Asia and the Caucasus.
Subregions of Eurasia:
Other uses
People of mixed race whose parents are White and East Asian are called Eurasian, though this term was originally used for people of mixed Indian (South Asian) and European ancestry.
Eurasia was also a fictional country comprising approximately the same land area in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, excluding the British Isles (controlled by Oceania) and Eastasia, which was formed ,as the novel says, by an alliance of the states of the region, being the most important couple China and Japan after a 'decade of confused fighting'. India was a contested border zone between Eurasia and Oceania.
See also
