Published today, ‘How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History’, is a bold new take on the history we think we know from Professor Josephine Quinn, Martin Frederiksen Fellow & Tutor in Ancient History.

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? Professor Quinn argues that the real story of the West is much bigger than this established paradigm of separate ‘civilizations’ leads us to believe. 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of Indian numbers in Europe via the Arab world, Quinn makes the case that understanding societies in isolation is both out-of-date and wrong.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, Quinn argues, meaning that it is not peoples that make history but people.

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