How the World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History

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Publisher
Varies, see individual formats and editions
Publication Date
2024
Language
English

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An award-winning Oxford history professor “makes a forceful argument and tells a story with great verve” (The Wall Street Journal)—that the West is, and always has been, truly global.“Those archaic ‘Western Civ’ classes so many of us took in college should be updated, argues Quinn, [who] invites us to . . . revel in a richer, more polyglot inheritance.”—The Boston GlobeAN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEARIn How the World Made the West, Josephine Quinn poses perhaps the most significant challenge ever to the “civilizational thinking” regarding the origins of Western culture—that is, the idea that civilizations arose separately and distinctly from one another. Rather, she locates the roots of the modern West in everything from the law codes of Babylon, Assyrian irrigation, and the Phoenician art of sail to Indian literature, Arabic scholarship, and the metalworking riders of the Steppe, to name just a few examples.According to Quinn, reducing the backstory of the modern West to a narrative that focuses on Greece and Rome impoverishes our view of the past. This understanding of history would have made no sense to the ancient Greeks and Romans themselves, who understood and discussed their own connections to and borrowings from others. They consistently presented their own culture as the result of contact and exchange. Quinn builds on the writings they left behind with rich analyses of other ancient literary sources like the epic of Gilgamesh, holy texts, and newly discovered records revealing details of everyday life. A work of breathtaking scholarship, How the World Made the West also draws on the material culture of the times in art and artifacts as well as findings from the latest scientific advances in carbon dating and human genetics to thoroughly debunk the myth of the modern West as a self-made miracle.In lively prose and with bracing clarity, as well as through vivid maps and color illustrations, How the World Made the West challenges the stories the West continues to tell about itself. It redefines our understanding of the Western self and civilization in the cosmopolitan world of today.

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ISBN
9780593729816
9780593913369

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Published Reviews

Kirkus Book Review

A world history, from ancient times to the discovery of America, emphasizing the contacts between disparate regions. Quinn, a classics professor at Oxford University, begins by noting the conventional wisdom that "Greece and Rome are the roots of Western Civilization." Arguing that this formula "impoverishes our view of the past," she shows how many of the ideas and technologies we associate with Greece and Rome were borrowed from Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Phoenician, African, and East Asian sources. Even in the earliest times, she points out, hunter-gatherers traveled widely in pursuit of game, inevitably meeting others from different parts and trading useful objects and ideas. The pioneering cities of Egypt and Mesopotamia relied on imported building materials and new means of transportation such as donkeys and wheeled vehicles. Ships were important from the outset, as revealed by artifacts from all over the ancient world found in the ruins of port cities on the Levantine coast. The book traces the stories of an imposing array of different early cultures, always focusing on their relations with others and how each of them drew on their predecessors and contemporaries. Quinn makes a point of reexamining many of the familiar landmarks of ancient history--notably the wars between Greece and Persia and between Rome and Carthage, with an emphasis on the "other" side. Even readers with a fairly good knowledge of history are likely to learn something new about, for example, the Etruscans or Phoenician colonies on the Iberian peninsula. This is probably not the first world history one should read, but to those already familiar with the conventional narrative, it adds an important new dimension. A fascinating look at world history from the broadest possible perspective. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
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