An award-winning Cambridge history professor “makes a forceful argument and tells a story with great verve” (The Wall Street Journal)—that the West is, and always has been, truly global.

“Those archaic ‘Western Civ’ classes so many of us took in college should be updated, argues Quinn, [who] invites us to . . . revel in a richer, more polyglot inheritance.”—The Boston Globe

AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

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, as well as through vivid maps and color illustrations, 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.

Story Locale:The ancient world

Publication History:HC Fall '24
 
Contributor Bio(s)
 
Josephine Quinn taught Ancient History at Oxford from 2003 to 2024. In January 2025 she became the first woman to hold the Chair in Ancient History at Cambridge. 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.

Author Residence: Oxford, UK