Josephine Quinn

Josephine Quinn on How the World Made the West

Oxford University Professor of Ancient History, Josephine Quinn, joins us to discuss How The World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History. Josephine deftly and thoroughly challenges established perspectives of Western exceptionalism.

What would history look like without civilisations?

Josephine Quinn calls for a major reassessment of the West and the entangled world that made it. We are told that the roots of Western Civilisation are in ancient Greece and Rome. A distinctive Western culture, the story goes, was built on the ideas and values of Greece and Rome, lost to Europe during the Dark Ages and then rediscovered by the Renaissance.

Drawing on three decades of teaching and research, Josephine Quinn argues that this narrative impoverishes our view of the past, as well as our understanding of today’s world. The backstory behind what is now called the West is much bigger, and even more interesting. How the World Made the West shows that there has never been a single, pure, European or Western culture.

What are called Western values – freedom, rationality, justice, democracy and tolerance – are not only or originally western, and the West itself is a product of long-standing links between a much larger group of cultures, from the Gobi Desert to the Atlantic Ocean, Scandinavia to the Sahara. Millennia of interaction with other people and places have now largely been forgotten, drowned out by ideas developed in the Victorian period that organised the world into distinct ‘civilisations’.

Josephine Quinn is Professor of Ancient History at Oxford University, and Martin Frederiksen Fellow and Tutor of Ancient History at Worcester College, Oxford.