How the World Made the West, Josephine Quinn
How the World Made the West, Josephine Quinn
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How the World Made the West
A 4,000 Year History

Author: Josephine Quinn

Narrator: Alix Dunmore

Unabridged: 15 hr 47 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/03/2024

Synopsis

An award-winning Oxford history professor overturns the way the West thinks about itself, tracing its innovations and traditions to societies from all over the world and making the case that the West is, and always has been, truly global.

“Superb, refreshing, and full of delights, this is world history at its best.”—Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The World: A Family History of Humanity

In How the World Made the West, Josephine Quinn poses perhaps the most significant challenge ever to the “civilizational thinking” regarding the origins of Western culture—that is, the idea that civilizations arose separately and distinctly from one another. Rather, she locates the roots of the modern West in everything from the law codes of Babylon, Assyrian irrigation, and the Phoenician art of sail to Indian literature, Arabic scholarship, and the metalworking riders of the Steppe, to name just a few examples.

According to Quinn, reducing the backstory of the modern West to a narrative that focuses on Greece and Rome impoverishes our view of the past. This understanding of history would have made no sense to the ancient Greeks and Romans themselves, who understood and discussed their own connections to and borrowings from others. They consistently presented their own culture as the result of contact and exchange. Quinn builds on the writings they left behind with rich analyses of other ancient literary sources like the epic of Gilgamesh, holy texts, and newly discovered records revealing details of everyday life. A work of breathtaking scholarship, How the World Made the West also draws on the material culture of the times in art and artifacts as well as findings from the latest scientific advances in carbon dating and human genetics to thoroughly debunk the myth of the modern West as a self-made miracle.

In lively prose and with bracing clarity, How the World Made the West challenges the stories the West continues to tell about itself. It redefines our understanding of the Western self and civilization in the cosmopolitan world of today.

About The Author

Josephine Quinn is Professor of Ancient History at Oxford University, and Martin Frederiksen Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Worcester College, Oxford. She has degrees from Oxford and UC Berkeley, has taught in America, Italy and the UK, and co-directed the Tunisian-British archaeological excavations at Utica. She is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, as well as to radio and television programmes. She is the author of one previous book, the award-winning In Search of the Phoenicians. She lives in Oxford.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Malcolm

I think the following quote from the book sums it up perfectly: "Many people in ancient times spent their whole lives in small worlds revolving around farm and family, travelling no further than a local festival, shrine or market. Others, though, lived on the road - or more often on the sea learning......more

Goodreads review by Kumar

Good history lesson. Learnt a lot.......more

Goodreads review by Wing

This is a sweeping celebration of ‘glocalisation’: ‘the way that as more places become involved in broader economic and cultural networks, they tend to emphasise, rediscover, or even invent their own local customs and identities’ (p.86). The term ‘the West’ is a nineteenth-century invention, a civil......more

Goodreads review by Logan

How the World Made the West is a book with a number of layers to it. The first is as an a history of Europe from 2000 BCE to 1500 CE. Many people reading this will be limited to an exposure to that in the form of a class titled 'Western Civ' some time in secondary school. But History Marches On, as n......more

Goodreads review by Olga

A new perspective on history and how many of the assumptions Western-centred history is based on ignoring many of the facts and the interconnectedness of cultures well before Greek and Roman "civilisation" came into being. There was far more interconnectedness than we've been led to believe between......more

Quotes

“Compelling . . . The book makes a forceful argument and tells a story with great verve: Classical Greece and Rome owed an enormous cultural debt to the societies that preceded them and surrounded them. Therefore, notions that these cultures are the sole and direct ancient progenitors of the modern West are blinkered. We need a new kind of ancient history. . . Ms. Quinn’s book points to a possible path forward, toward a more expansive version of ancient history.”—The Wall Street Journal
 
“Those archaic ‘Western Civ’ classes so many of us took in college should be updated, argues Quinn, an Oxford professor of ancient history. She invites us to widen our scope and see the influence of Phoenicia, Assyria, and India, and to revel in a richer, more polyglot inheritance.”—The Boston Globe
 
“Josephine Quinn ranges wide with [her] broad survey of world history. The Oxford history professor shows how the West has always been remarkably global, detailing examples from the past 4000 years if you doubt it. Your high school teacher may have said it all began with Greece and Rome. But Greece and Rome knew how much they learned by interacting with the rest of the world. From Arabic scholarship (surely we all know their primacy in maths) to Assyrian irrigation, the countless examples of ideas beginning in one place and soon darting all over the world are fascinating.”—Parade

“As our leaders and pundits glorify ‘Western Civilization’ and excoriate migration and wokeness, Josephine Quinn offers a momentous correction: the Greeks and Romans were hodgepodge people, and if we are their heirs it is only because of globe-spanning connections that always produce multifarious ways of life. . . . Brilliant and essential.”—Samuel Moyn, author of Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times

“Bold, beautifully written, and filled with insights, How the World Made the West demands that we challenge traditional views of the past. An extraordinary achievement.”—Peter Frankopan, bestselling author of The Earth Transformed

“One of the most fascinating works of global history to appear for many years . . . incredibly ambitious and wide-ranging . . . allowing us to understand just how globalized and interconnected mankind has always been.”—William Dalrymple, bestselling author of The Anarchy

“Engaging, aspirational, and inspirational, How the World Made the West will be devoured by history buffs and should be required reading for those arguing for the supremacy of ‘Western Civilization’ as well as those arguing for its demise and dismantling, and everyone in between.”—Eric Cline, author of 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“The book traces the stories of an imposing array of different early cultures, always focusing on their relations with others and how each of them drew on their predecessors and contemporaries. Quinn makes a point of reexamining many of the familiar landmarks of ancient history. . . . Even readers with a fairly good knowledge of history are likely to learn something new. . . . A fascinating look at world history from the broadest possible perspective.”—Kirkus Review, starred review

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