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How Was the West Shaped? It’s Complicated.
Big history is fashionable again. Authors, publishers, and readers agree that large-scale, sweeping world histories, as ambitious and unwieldy as they might seem, can be engaging and serious, stimulating and fun to read. Pitfalls abound; the sheer amount of material is a daunting challenge for any researcher or writer, let alone editor. But if you get it right, you can win prizes, tour the television and podcast studios, and maybe even sell 25 million copies.
With How the World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History, Josephine Quinn offers a new entry into the catalog of world histories, arguing we have to go beyond our study of the Greeks and Romans to understand the rise of the West. Moreover, she argues the way we usually approach the study of big history is unhelpful because it focuses on civilizations rather than on the connections between people groups.
To be successful, world histories generally need to pass two tests. One is to find a way of making the topic smaller. You cannot possibly narrate the history of everything (unless you’re J. M. Roberts or Odd Arne Westad), so you need an angle: a history of the world in 100 objects, a history of the way humans have interacted with the environment, or a history of the oceans. Your local bookshop is probably full of examples, telling the story of the world through anything from cities and Christianity to wood and the horse, from the silk roads and salt to fear and the family.
The other test such books must pass is to creatively drive the plot. History is always at risk of turning into a list, with dates, facts, battles, and inventions tumbling out of the cupboard in an unsorted mess. (There has never been a better summary of this problem than the opening line of The History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours: “A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad.”) So any world history needs a way of maintaining interest in the narrative. Will our curiosity be piqued by a good question to which we instantly want an answer? A new way of looking at a familiar story? An issue of great contemporary significance? A counterintuitive thesis, a defense of the apparently indefensible, a confident piece of debunking? A desire to know what happens next? Will it be a thriller or a detective story, a drama or even a comedy?
Tracing Connections
How the World Made the West passes the first of these two tests with flying colors. Despite ranging from China to West Africa in a tale that covers four millennia, Quinn narrows her scope by focusing on how the “West” was shaped by its connections to, and entanglement with, the rest of the world.
Some examples Quinn provides will be familiar to the average reader (ancient Egypt, Carthage, Islam, the Mongols); some will be familiar to those who know their Bibles and less to those who don’t (Tyre, Assyria, Babylon, Persia); and some will be unfamiliar to nearly everybody outside academia (Uruk, Byblos, Ugarit, Parthia). But by and large, she finds ways of orienting the reader in these unknown worlds through a combination of maps, discoveries, celebrity shout-outs (Tutankhamen, Pythagoras, the Minotaur), and amusing vignettes. For example, the pettiness of the correspondence between the Egyptian pharaohs and their diplomatic neighbors feels comically contemporary. I was also delighted to learn that the North African geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi taught that Norwegians didn’t have necks and lived inside trees.
As you’d expect from a professor of ancient history at Oxford University, Quinn’s breadth of learning is genuinely impressive. With such a vast range of sources at her command, she highlights all kinds of ways in which the “West” didn’t develop in isolation but was shaped by the “world,” from relatively trivial goods that quickly became embedded in European societies (food, wine, clothing, animals) to utterly transformative innovations like the Phoenician alphabet, Indian numbers, Chinese technology, and Arabic math. She describes cities like ancient Rome and Islamic Córdoba vividly and evocatively, and writes with a nice turn of phrase: “They live happily ever after,” she says of Scheherazade and the sultan in One Thousand and One Nights, “though he was probably happier than her” (388).
As you’d expect from a professor of ancient history at Oxford University, Quinn’s breadth of learning is genuinely impressive.
Quinn peppers her story with interesting facts, several of which shed light on biblical stories. For example, I had no idea that Pharaoh Necho II, whom we meet in 2 Kings 23, was the man “who established that Africa was surrounded by sea by sending Phoenician sailors to circumnavigate the continent from the Red Sea to the Pillars of Hercules” (209). Nor did I know that Babylonian mathematicians were aware of what we now call Pythagorean theorem more than a thousand years before Pythagoras was born, nor that all modern alphabetic scripts are descended from the alphabet used in Tyre, with the exception of Korean Hangul. It was also news to me that the city of Uruk “developed the first known system of standard weights and measures, based on the load an average man could carry (a talent) and on the length of his forearm (a cubit)” (16).
We could quibble with some of Quinn’s claims about biblical narratives—she dismisses the Queen of Sheba on the grounds that “there is no evidence outside the Bible for a powerful Sabean queen” (114), despite acknowledging on the previous page that extrabiblical evidence for the house of David in Judah was only discovered in 1993. But on balance, she takes the biblical material seriously and often confirms it. Her section on Phoenician child sacrifice, and the difference between the way Greco-Romans and Israelites reacted to it, is a striking example.
Tilting at Windmills
The book is less compelling, however, when it comes to the overall narrative or plot. As we’ve seen, Quinn has no difficulty in showing that we cannot understand the West without understanding its neighbors, and that “a narrative focused solely on Greece and Rome impoverishes our view of the past, and impoverishes our understanding of our own world” (1–2). I doubt anyone today will finish the book disagreeing with her central claim that “understanding societies in terms of lonely trees and isolated islands is 200 years out of date and . . . demonstrably, historically wrong” (415). The problem is that few people today would even start the book disagreeing with it. As such, it feels like the book’s overarching purpose is to debunk an argument that no longer needs debunking.
The thesis was probably more necessary a hundred years ago. In her introduction, Quinn cites a Cambridge lecturer in 1912 who began his book by announcing that “Athens and Rome stand side by side as the parents of Western civilization” (7), and John Stuart Mill’s even more bizarre claim “that the Athenian defeat of the Persians at the Battle of Marathon was one of the most important events in English history” (5). Later, she quotes an Australian in 1925 who proclaimed that “the Minoan spirit was thoroughly European and in no sense oriental” (28). She returns to the 19th-century myth, whereby civilizations developed geographically and in isolation, in the book’s final chapter.
But does anyone talk like this now? Granted, the Enlightenment attempt to ground Western identity without reference to Christianity produced some fanciful back-projection in the 18th and 19th centuries; if the West was to be successfully post-Christian, it needed a new intellectual and cultural genealogy, and classical antiquity was the obvious alternative. And it isn’t surprising that prospective Oxford students, like the ones with whom the book opens, explain their desire “to study the ancient world because Greece and Rome are the roots of Western Civilisation” (1). That’s exactly the sort of thing 18-year-olds write on application forms for academic degrees they haven’t started.
Sleight of Hand
But how many people seriously think the Greco-Roman world is the exclusive fountainhead of the modern West, without reference to Christianity or Judaism? How many people who’ve read the Bible would object to the inclusion of Babylon, Persia, Nineveh, and Tyre as formative influences on God’s people in the ancient world? How many of the “zealots for a White West” who believe in “enduring and meaningful difference between human societies” would tell the Western story without reference to the Middle Eastern religion we now call Christianity (9)?
The thesis was probably more necessary a hundred years ago.
Quinn’s response to this objection has a motte-and-bailey feel to it. Maybe nobody today (besides eager classics undergraduates) sees the Greco-Roman world as an isolated, independent, and exclusive source of Western identity—but she’s concerned that people do still think in terms of civilizations that are distinguishable from each other, that preserve characteristics across several centuries, and that often “clash” with each other, as Samuel Huntington put it (7–9). Indeed they (and we) do. But not only is this claim different from one of a “narrative solely focused on Greece and Rome”; it’s also entirely compatible with the argument she mounts in the rest of the book.
It’s perfectly possible to believe both that societies trade with, learn from, adapt to, and become entangled with other societies and that they retain an inner coherence that remains meaningfully distinct from (and in competition with) that of their neighbors over many centuries. The relationship between Christendom and the house of Islam from the Umayyads to the Reconquista is an obvious example. Joseph Henrich makes this point brilliantly about the eastern and western parts of Christian Europe, though he does it from a different perspective. (Read my review of his book.)
Entertaining but Imperfect
At times, it’s unclear which book we’re reading. If it’s a debunking of the idea that the West’s roots are entirely found in Greece and Rome, with minimal exchange of ideas and practices from anywhere else, then it’s convincing but not particularly necessary. At one point, I wrote in the margin, “Didn’t we already know that?”
If, on the other hand, it’s an argument for the position that civilizations don’t really exist, cannot be meaningfully distinguished from each other, and/or should be jettisoned from our vocabulary, then it’s intriguing and potentially explosive but not very persuasive or even substantiated by the rest of the book. It’s also curiously similar in intention, if not approach, to Naoíse Mac Sweeney’s The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives, released in 2023.
In the end, How the World Made the West represents something between these two poles: a tale of many interactions between the “West” and the “world” from the beginning of writing to the Columbian exchange, the conclusion of which is neither as dramatic as the latter summary nor as mundane as the former. The book has lots going for it—including Quinn’s range, scholarship, and prose, which aren’t insignificant strengths—but its overall narrative is less satisfying than recent equivalents like William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road or David Abulafia’s magnificent The Boundless Sea. Lovers of big history, and pastors interested in why the West is the way it is, may want to look elsewhere first.
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