The main idea in How the World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History by Josephine Quinn is that our commonly held ideas about the history of civilization, especially Western Civilization, are not just wrong, they’re harmful.

Josephine Crawley Quinn is Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge University. In 2025 she became the first woman to hold that chair. (Nice to see venerable Cambridge taking a bold leap forward into the 20^th century.) Prior to Cambridge, Quinn taught and researched ancient history at Oxford for 20 years. She holds degrees from Oxford and UC Berkeley.

In How the World Made the West, Quinn challenges the conventional wisdom that civilizations are like trees, each with its own roots and branches that develop largely independent from any other civilization. So Western Civilization developed from roots in Ancient Greece and Rome with branches extending across Europe and the Americas. In this view, history is often seen as a “clash of civilizations.”

Quinn thinks this view of history is “impoverished.” In her telling, history is driven by connections rather than civilizations. How the World Made the West tells the story of surprisingly complex relationships of contact, trade and competition among small city states around the Mediterranean and Middle East starting around 4,000 years ago. It’s based on extensive research, including newly available genetic evidence. All this trade and contact led to exchanges of goods, technology, culture and DNA that created deep links between what we usually think of as distinct civilizations. The world making the West and vice versa.

How the World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History
By Josaphine Quinn
Random House, New York, 2024

OK, so what makes the idea of isolated civilizations harmful?

The first problem, as Quinn explains early in the book, is that civilizational thinking often leads to civilizational ranking. She notes that there are two definitions of the word “civilization.” In the singular, civilization means a state of advanced development, evolved from an earlier, more “savage” one. In the plural, civilization refers to competing systems arising in different places around the world, largely in isolation. Both meanings lead to ranking. We’re a civilized society; they’re barbarians. Our civilization is more developed, more advanced, more sophisticated, more whatever, than theirs. Like “race,” civilization is just another way of stack-ranking people in value hierarchies.

“Civilizational thinking embeds an assumption of enduring and meaningful difference between societies that does real damage. People die at the hands of zealots for a White West, while the different attitudes expressed in some European countries to refugees fleeing war in Syria and Ukraine demonstrate the power of civilizational exceptionalism to erase human suffering.” [p. 12]

Equally important, the whole idea is just wrong.

“Civilizational thinking fundamentally misrepresents our story. It is not peoples that make history, but people, and the connections that they create with one another.” [p. 12-13]

How the World Made the West explores in detail the development of those connections in and around the Mediterranean over the last 4,000 years. There’s no doubting Quinn’s expertise. The book is impressively researched – there are over a hundred pages of notes at the end – and it’s illustrated with terrific maps and photographs. Some of Quinn’s ideas echoed other books I’ve read in recent years, like The Book of Roads and Kingdoms by Richard Fidler and The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

Unfortunately, I just couldn’t finish it. It’s quite long — 437 pages — but divided into 30 relatively short chapters. So it’s easy to read in short bursts. That’s what I did over the course of five or six weeks. But I found the detail overwhelming. A little past the halfway point I lost interest and started skimming, first paragraphs and then chapters. After a while there wasn’t much point continuing.

Quinn periodically drops insights like this one into the narrative:

“Religion has become a boundary in the modern world, but in antiquity religious sites, rituals and institutions brought people closer together. Ancient gods were rarely jealous: they had their areas of special competence and their own particular constituencies, but they welcomed donations from anyone, and were happy to serve up favors, prophesies and protection in return.” [p. 110]

I wish there was more of this, it would have made the book more rewarding.

If you’re keenly interested in ancient history or archaeology, you might find this book more to your liking than I did.

Thanks for reading.

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