Josephine Quinn has produced a great single volume world history which avoids crass simplification – an incredibly difficult task – while deftly avoiding the Eurocentric biases of much traditional historiography.

All of which is to be commended. But Quinn has a bone to pick which she describes as ‘civilisational thinking’. Quinn sees the whole concept of ‘western civilization’ as suspect – ‘I will argue that there has never been single, pure Western or European culture.’

But this is a straw man – no reputable historian I am aware of thinks that European Culture is ‘single’ or ‘pure’ even if it was appropriate to use the term (which by the 19th century for example it may be). The problem becomes semantic. Who are these other influences if not other ‘cultures’ or civilisations? Indeed, when discussing cultural influence one cannot escape – and Quinn herself uses – terms such as ‘Phoenician’, ‘Persian’ and ‘Egyptian’ as shorthand for their respective cultures.

Indeed, in recent years there have been numerous works of historical scholarship aimed at a general readership and focused precisely on the interaction between ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ cultures. To name a few – The Eagle and the Lion by Adrian Goldsworthy, Tom Holland’s Persian Fire, William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road. There is nothing surprising about this – after all Herodotus’s The Persian Wars started the genre about 2500 years ago.

That said How the World Made the West is an excellent account of how other civilizations contributed to and influenced the development of ‘the West’. Beginning with the very differently centred world of the bronze age – the world of the Amarna letters – where the Achaeans were bit players on the western periphery – Quinn takes us on a highly enjoyable voyage through the literary and archaeological evidence for cultural exchange in the Mediterranean and Middle east over 4000 years.

Quinn’s basic premiss is sound – ‘the West’, closely considered,’aint all that western and different groups always interacted and exchanged ideas and technologies. This is a fascinating and refreshing take on how other ‘civilizations’ influenced and interacted with ‘us’.

Reviewed by Grant Hansen

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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