How the World Made the West

Author Josephine Quinn
Narrator Alix Dunmore
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
Run Time 15 hours and 45 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Ancient history, Biography and non-fiction prose, History, Maritime history, Philosophical traditions and schools of thought, Social and political philosophy, Western philosophy: Enlightenment.

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What to expect

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of Indian numbers in Europe via the Arab world, Quinn makes the case that understanding societies in isolation is both out-of-date and wrong.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.

Critics Review

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
The Times
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
Guardian
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
Telegraph
A revelatory account of how the ancient world was much wider and more interconnected than traditionally thought – and the lessons that holds for today
Financial Times
Astounding . . . Both erudite and witty, sweeping and granular, this book is revisionist history at its best
i-news
Incredibly ambitious and wide-ranging, it connects disparate parts of the ancient world with dazzling shafts of insight and intuition, held together by vast scholarship, elegant prose and an enviable lightness of touch. It is not just revelatory, it is also hugely important, completely reframing our conception of the Western classical world as something whose influences and inspirations stretch far beyond ‘Mare Nostrum’, allowing us to understand just how globalised and interconnected mankind has always been
WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
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
An eye-popping, mind-blowing, ground-breaking juggernaut of an argument, from a writer ready to roar
LUCY WORSLEY
Erudite, inventive, playful – a work of great confidence, empathy, learning and imagination
RORY STEWART
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 don’t acknowledge the ways in which we have constantly interacted with, and depended on, one another
MICHAEL SCOTT

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