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How the World Made the West

'World history at its best' Simon Sebag Montefiore

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How the World Made the West

By: Josephine Quinn
Narrated by: Alix Dunmore
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Bloomsbury presents How the World Made the West by Josephine Quinn, read by Alix Dunmore.

A Guardian, Financial Times, New Statesman, The Rest is Politics and Waterstones Highlight for 2024

'Quinn has done a lot more than reinvent the wheel. What we have here is a truly encyclopaedic and monumental account of the ancient world' THE TIMES
'A work of great confidence, empathy, learning and imagination' RORY STEWART
'Bold, beautifully written and filled with insights . . . Extraordinary' PETER FRANKOPAN
'One of the most fascinating and important works of global history to appear for many years' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

The West, the story goes, was built on the ideas and values of Ancient Greece and Rome, which disappeared from Europe during the Dark Ages and were then rediscovered by the Renaissance. But what if that isn’t true?

In a bold and magisterial work of immense scope, Josephine Quinn argues that the real story of the West is much bigger than this established paradigm leads us to believe. So much of our shared history has been lost, drowned out by the concept – developed in the Victorian era – of separate ‘civilisations’.

Moving from the Bronze Age to the Age of Exploration, How the World Made the West reveals a new narrative: one that traces the millennia of global encounters and exchange that built what is now called the West, as societies met, tangled and sometimes grew apart. From the creation of the alphabet by Levantine workers in Egypt, who in a foreign land were prompted to write things down in their own language for the first time, to the arrival of Indian numbers in Europe via the Arab world, Quinn makes the case that understanding societies in isolation is both out-of-date and wrong. It is contact and connections, rather than solitary civilisations, that drive historical change. It is not peoples that make history – people do. Ancient Europe Greece Rome Western Europe Middle East Thought-Provoking Africa Middle Ages Italy Ancient Greece Ancient History
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Critic reviews

Quinn keeps the revelations coming at a fair lick . . . Quinn has done a lot more than reinvent the wheel. What we have here is a truly encyclopaedic and monumental account of the ancient world. In 400 crisp pages, 30 societies are paraded before us with comparative reflection and world-weary wit. Better still, Quinn’s book is polemical. These days, far too many academic historians worship at the altar of nuance rather than argument, with the result that the reader closes the book not with a spirit of contentment, but rather with a question: so what? Not here (Pratinav Anil)
The book is rich in marvellous detail, and succeeds in making the pre-classical world come to life . . . Full of little gem-like shifts of perspective . . . Most of all, the book triumphs as a brilliant and learned challenge to modern western chauvinism (Steven Poole)
Quinn demolishes the underlying concept of what she calls “civilisational thinking”. Her argument is simple, persuasive and deserving of attention . . . A brisk, scholarly romp across the arc of European history . . . This retelling of the West’s story scintillates with its focus on the unexpected and on the interstices between realms and eras rather than on history’s big, solid bits. But it is also an admirable work of scholarship . . . Even seasoned history buffs will find much that is new and fascinating. How the World Made the West joins a growing sub-canon of works that explores the broad sweep of history using new intellectual framings, such as Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (2011), Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads (2015) and Fall of Civilisations . . . Whoever thought history was passé could not be more wrong
The evidence Quinn has accumulated is rich in arresting detail and she delivers it with engaging gusto . . . Quinn is acutely alive to the ways in which the remote past can serve modern political uses . . . An immense achievement (Lucy Hughes-Hallett)
Quinn’s purpose is to dethrone the “privileged connection” between the ancient Greeks and Romans and the modern west, and focus instead on the millennia of interaction with other cultures . . . Quinn pursues this claim with an impressive display of rigorous scholarship lightly worn, successfully covering a huge amount of material (Tristram Hunt)
How the World Made the West has plenty of myths about the ancient world to dispel . . . Show[s] that progress in the ancient world and beyond was driven by connections between peoples and places rather than by discrete cultural centres (namely Greece and Rome) . . . The vicissitudes in each centre’s fortunes make for a dynamic narrative, as cities that were once great are swept away, and new ones spring up in their wake . . . It is one of the strengths of How the World Made the West that it forces us to think outside the usual parameters of antiquity (Daisy Dunn)
All stars
Most relevant
A great perspective on history which recasts our understanding of the past. A well produced audio book which is enjoyable to listen to.

A brilliant world history

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Thanks to a classical education, I grew up with this false historical notion of distinct, separate civilizations, of which Greece and Rome were the greatest, and we in the west their fortunate descendents. How wrong! Quinn convincingly shows that history has always been a potpourri of rising or falling polities, on a scale from villages to empires, which exchanged ideas, goods, people, diseases etc to a greater or lesser extent, and Greece and Rome were just two moments of cultural and intellectual ascendance. There's so much here to absorb, but one striking fact is that much of what we know about Greece and Rome actually came through translations of Arabic texts compiled during our so-called 'dark' ages. Having listened to it once through, I feel the need now to buy the text and keep it as a reference work.

Necessary change of mindset

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A highly enjoyable, thought-provoking challenge to long-established assumptions about the origins and rise of Western civilisation.

The core argument is that the dividing lines between cultures are fuzzy and porous, even over long distances, and going back far further than one might assume - and that the idea of Europe or "the West" as distinct from "the East", "Asia" or "Africa" is a far more recent concept than many might think.

Is this argument new? No. But it is superbly laid out here, drawing on a vast array of up-to-date evidence from archaeology, tree ring analysis, carbon dating, DNA testing, and much more - as well as an impressive range of primary documentary sources.

Despite the vast scope and timeline - the Persian invasions of Greece in the late 5th century BCE only arrives in chapter 15 of 30 - Quinn does a superb job of keeping the argument coherent and the pace brisk. This is rare for books covering this most ancient of histories, where the evidence is often scant - with the bigger picture connecting thread providing a coherence and focus that more traditional linear histories of these early civilisations often struggle to provide.

This means that for non-specialists this is extremely accessible and highly readable - probably the best introduction to ancient history I've encountered. For the more academically-inclined, copious endnotes point the way to much, much more detail.

Are there things to quibble with? Of course. Religion plays surprisingly little role. I'd also personally have preferred a bit more about travellers' tales and myths in shaping understandings of the world. I'd have been interested too to have more on the rise of intra-European national identities as a contrast to the macro-scale emergence of a sense of West versus East (or Christendom versus Islam), and how this played out during the Crusades in particular.

But that's what makes this such good fun - it's designed to provoke thought and discussion, and succeeds admirably. Having started out listening to the audiobook, halfway through I picked up a hard copy (the maps for each chapter really help, and the notes and index are invaluable), and I'll be re-reading and returning to this again and again to take it all in, and to find more areas to disagree with and explore.

A new favourite.

A superb challenge to civilisational assumptions

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The scope of learning and detailed references was sometimes a challenge but the dates, names and events were often balanced with amusing and surprising elements such as references to cats, chickens and the introduction of zero

comprehensive sweep through time

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I thought this book was excellent.

Great statistics backed up with references.

Quinn knows her stuff. A

Great book

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