How the World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History

by Josephine Quinn

Penguin Random House

572 pp., $20.00

I first saw this book in the window of Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford. I was struck—though not surprised—by how logically out of place it was, surrounded by the handsome architecture of old intellectual England. A book that attempts to negate the very idea of Western civilization, written by a historian at one of the West’s most prestigious universities and published by one of its largest publishing houses; it was yet another reminder of how once outré ideas have captured the citadels.

Josephine Quinn, daughter of a Labour politician noted for her interest in gender equality, seems to have taken her mother’s views to heart by becoming the first female appointed to Cambridge’s chair of ancient history. This is not to suggest her eminence is unmerited; her 2018 book In Search of the Phoenicians was a clear-eyed analysis of the celebrated sailor-traders (she concluded they were never a monolithic group), and she has made other noteworthy contributions to the study of the ancient world. Nor is she consciously pursuing any agenda; indeed, most of what she writes is objectively true. This book is, nevertheless, profoundly political and one-sided.

The author’s aim is to call into question the conceptual connection between Greece and Rome, and a Western world she views as morally wanting. One might have assumed that, for a Cambridge don, the notion of Western civilization would be not just a given, but a given gratefully received. But no. “I want to tell a different story,” she says. 

One that doesn’t begin in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean and then re-emerge in Renaissance Italy, but traces the relationships that built what is now called the West from the Bronze Age to the Age of Exploration… I want to make the case that it is connections, not civilizations, that drive historical change.

To the author, the very idea of there being discrete civilizations is not just chimerical, but an anachronistic and damaging distortion. The ancients would never have seen the world in such a way, she maintains, and our seeing it so entails confrontation and conflict. For centuries, she avers, Westerners have used civilizational models to explain and justify their exploitation, hierarchism, imperialism, injustice, and racism. “It is time,” she concludes, “to find new ways to organize our common world.”

The author does not explain what, if any, “new ways” she has in mind. Could civilizational thinking be eradicated even if we tried? Human beings are sovereign individuals, of course; they are also members of groups, who have always divided themselves into categories according to culture, geography, race, or religion, placing their own group not coincidentally at the apex of achievement. Quinn herself notes the frequency of collectivism and exceptionalism within societies from at least the first millennium B.C. up to the modern world’s multiculturalist dogma, which similarly assumes the existence of cohesive cultural entities.

As one would expect, the book is lucid, wide-ranging, and usually interesting. Much of the history is already well-known, but it is useful to have it set out sequentially and in such detail. Modern carbon and isotope analyses are providing ever more precise information about the odysseys of concepts, goods, and people across the ancient world, and she brings us helpfully up to date.

Ideas about agriculture, architecture, art, food, language, learning, manufacturing, navigation, philosophy, religion, and social organization always spread outwards, albeit unevenly, from their originating areas. She reminds us, for example, of parallels between Babylonian and Hittite legends and the Homeric epics, although she is careful not to exaggerate the connection. “Such borrowings contribute only a fraction of the content and meaning of these poems,” she writes, “which are in many ways dramatically different from the literature of Egypt and western Asia.”

There have always been such borrowings, echoes, and parallels, as seen, for example, in the interpenetration of Greek and Arabic learning, especially within astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. Yet there were always important local variations, and sometimes even radical reactions against what were seen as domineering and unsympathetic external forces—what we now call “glocalization.”

Cornish tin made it to Carthage, Welsh gold to Rome, Afghan gems to Germany, Baltic amber to Anatolia, and Grecian pottery to India. Even animals and plants roamed far from home: the black rat and domestic cat originated in Asia, camels and elephants trekked to the Balkans and Spain, and the vine took root in Italy around the eighth century B.C.

Many people also covered epic distances, as government representatives, merchants, sailors, or soldiers. The garrison shiveringly watching Hadrian’s Wall included legionaries from modern Romania and Syria. Tombstones from Roman London commemorate residents who started life in Antioch and Athens. A few Chinese merchants somehow materialized in Augustus’s Rome, even though, as the author is at pains to point out, the lionized “Eternal City” was not necessarily the epicenter of the ancient world.

Military tactics traveled too, in more dramatic ways. Alexander was just the most celebrated of many ancient warriors—first expelling the Persians from Greece, then driving relentlessly east and south into India and Egypt, in quest of the “ends of the world and the Great Outer Sea,” before dying in Babylon, aged just 32. The glamorous Alexander, Quinn writes, “collapsed the distinction between Asia and Europe completely.”This is overstated because Alexander was acutely conscious of his Macedonian identity and on a mission to destroy the Persians. His first action when he landed at Troy in 334 B.C. was to make a sacrifice to Athena and pour a libation to the Greek heroes. Although he achieved near-iconic status across the Near East, Asia and Europe were no closer after his death than before. Alexander’s exploits, in fact, fed growing Greek ethnic consciousness; even now, he is an icon of Hellenicity.

The Persians were probably the first civilizational collectivists, seeing themselves as a united cultural entity, ineffably superior to other peoples, with a destiny to expand and impose their will. The Greeks responded enthusiastically, portraying the Persians as cruel, duplicitous, effete, and tyrannical, and themselves as courageous, free, and honorable, stalwart defenders of their shared homeland—stereotypes which, Quinn argues, still find echoes today. The names Marathon and Thermopylae still stir Western hearts, to the author’s chagrin. She is right that there is little logic in this link, but then logic amounts to little in human affairs—and what is so wrong, anyway, about being inspired by heroic tales?

The chief problem with civilizational thinking, in Quinn’s eyes, is that it can justify racial prejudice. She hopes her examples of ancient mobility will allow Westerners to come to terms with the mass migration of today. “People die at the hands of zealots for a White West,” she declares with feeling, and certainly any killing is tragic. Yet such crimes are mercifully rare, notwithstanding the lurid imaginations of thriller writers and politicians. When they do happen, unassimilated migrants do the killing as or more often than racist whites.

She says that the Greeks would not have considered themselves “white.” There is, however, evidence that both Greeks and Romans held fair coloration in high esteem—even though fair coloration was more associated with sun-starved northern “barbarians.” Homer’s Hymns describe Demeter and Persephone as fair-haired. Heliodorus of Emesa’s novel Aethiopica (A.D. 3^rd or 4^th century)centers around a blonde heroine born to the decidedly un-blonde Ethiopian queen (blonde, because she was conceived beneath a painting of pallid Andromeda). Attention-seeking Roman women wore light-colored wigs, often made from the hair of slaughtered Gauls. A compendious 2004 work, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity by Benjamin Isaacs, offers many other examples of prejudice against “barbarians” of all complexions.

Western civilization, even as traditionally understood, has always been more absorbent than any other civilizational bloc. Indigenous European folkways and pantheism melded somehow with Middle Eastern monotheism, then almost equally exotic Greco-Roman culture. This uneasy ideational alliance was then overlaid with Reformed Christianity, and ultimately Enlightenment enquiry and individualism. There were always other influences too, whom at least some Westerners acknowledged, from Quinn’s own “Phoenicians” to the Egyptians, and the Indians and Iranians embraced by 18^th– and 19^th-century Orientalists and philologists. 

Quinn mentions one British Army officer who, in 1836, risked his life scaling a rock face in Iran solely to record a huge relief sculpture showing the Persian king Darius towering over enemy prisoners, with lengthy explanatory inscriptions he spent the next 11 years deciphering. No other civilization has been so interested in whatever was new and strange—or, more recently, so open to incomers that it is now risking its own stability. Incidentally, it seems unlikely that the Chinese, Islamic, or Russian civilizations would allow their equivalents of Josephine Quinn to attain such prestigious positions.

This is an erudite work by a well-intentioned writer. What a pity it is addressed to one civilization only—one, furthermore, that is already unravelling, without the expert “assistance” she offers here. For all her great intelligence, she cannot see that the freedom and tolerance that have allowed her (and us) to prosper will stand or fall with the West. What might happen to the first global civilization to uniliterally “disarm”? Perhaps we are already finding out.