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

(Hardback)

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'A work of great confidence, empathy, learning and imagination' RORY STEWART 'Eye-popping, mind-blowing, ground-breaking' LUCY WORSLEY 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 isnt 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of Indian numbers in Europe via the Arab world, Quinn makes the case that understanding societies in isolation is both out-of-date and wrong.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.

Reviews

Erudite, inventive, playful a work of great confidence, empathy, learning and imagination -- RORY STEWART
An eye-popping, mind-blowing, ground-breaking juggernaut of an argument, from a writer ready to roar. This is the book the ancient world needs now -- LUCY WORSLEY
No one but Josephine Quinn could have written a book like this - a book of enormous erudition and curiosity; a book that teaches you something new on almost every page. With a sense of growing political urgency, How the World Made the West reveals the folly of civilisational thinking. In its place, Quinn traces the many entangled paths of art, commerce, religion, and language, forging a deeper and truer understanding of our common world -- MERVE EMRE
A masterpiece that gives us a new lens to understand 4,000 years of history -- OLIVETTE OTELE
This book full of memorable stories is nothing less than a reorientation of the history of the West. Josephine Quinn persuasively shows that the mingling of cultures through trade and migration is as old as civilisation itself, breaking down the hackneyed idea of the uniqueness of the Greco-Roman world . . . This is a book to unite us in divided times -- SIR JONATHAN BATE
Josephine Quinn is one of the few scholars writing today who could possibly present such a masterful sweeping overview as an accessible and compelling story . . . A marvelous, majestic book. This will be an instant classic -- ERIC CLINE
Jo Quinn gives us a fascinating insight into the entanglements that have driven change in our collective past: the journeys, meetings, relationships and exchanges that, more than anything else, have helped shape our world today. It is a brilliant reminder that our human story is and always will be empty if we dont acknowledge the ways in which we have constantly interacted with, and depended on, one another -- MICHAEL SCOTT

Author Bio

Josephine Quinn is Professor of Ancient History at Oxford University, and Martin Frederiksen Fellow and Tutor of 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, as well as to radio and television programmes. She lives in Oxford.