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of Indian numbers in Europe via the Arab world, Quinn makes the case that understanding societies in isolation is both out-of-date and wrong.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