Amartya Sen in a talk at Rice University happened to mention something interesting about the geographic metaphors we use to distinguish between the "developed" and "underdeveloped" parts of the world.
The British colonial way was to refer to "East and West", or London vs. India, while the French colonial way was to refer to "North and South", or Paris vs. Africa. Sen observes, drily, that the French won.
I'd add that the French victory might be due to overloading of the "East and West" metaphor with another distinction, that of Washington vs. Moscow, with perhaps some additional cognitive interference from the prosperity of Japan and other countries at the eastern edge of westerners' mental maps.