‘It’s a war that is intended, really, truly, to save Western civilization,’ Israel’s President Isaac Herzog said recently. Between genocide in Palestine and the growth of essentialist thinking across the Western political spectrum, the arrival of Josephine Quinn’s massive ancient history is timely.
An ancient historian and archeologist at Oxford University, Quinn argues across 400 pages that the very idea of ‘Western civilization’ is a 19th century anachronism, alien to the ancient world upon which it has been foisted. In How the World Made the West, Quinn reconstructs the pre-modern world on a grand canvas, through the lens of connectedness and ‘cultural entanglement’. In snippets, she provides a (recent) intellectual history of the concept of discrete civilizations, before deftly demolishing its right to exist.
