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How the World Made the West

'World history at its best' Simon Sebag Montefiore

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How the World Made the West

By: Josephine Quinn
Narrated by: Alix Dunmore
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Bloomsbury presents How the World Made the West by Josephine Quinn, read by Alix Dunmore.

A Guardian, Financial Times, New Statesman, The Rest is Politics and Waterstones Highlight for 2024

'Quinn has done a lot more than reinvent the wheel. What we have here is a truly encyclopaedic and monumental account of the ancient world' THE TIMES
'A work of great confidence, empathy, learning and imagination' RORY STEWART
'Bold, beautifully written and filled with insights . . . Extraordinary' PETER FRANKOPAN
'One of the most fascinating and important works of global history to appear for many years' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

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?

In a bold and magisterial work of immense scope, Josephine Quinn argues that the real story of the West is much bigger than this established paradigm leads us to believe. So much of our shared history has been lost, drowned out by the concept – developed in the Victorian era – of separate ‘civilisations’.

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of Indian numbers in Europe via the Arab world, Quinn makes the case that understanding societies in isolation is both out-of-date and wrong.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. It is not peoples that make history – people do. Ancient Europe Greece Rome Western Europe Middle East Thought-Provoking Africa Middle Ages Italy Ancient Greece Ancient History
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Critic reviews

Quinn keeps the revelations coming at a fair lick . . . Quinn has done a lot more than reinvent the wheel. What we have here is a truly encyclopaedic and monumental account of the ancient world. In 400 crisp pages, 30 societies are paraded before us with comparative reflection and world-weary wit. Better still, Quinn’s book is polemical. These days, far too many academic historians worship at the altar of nuance rather than argument, with the result that the reader closes the book not with a spirit of contentment, but rather with a question: so what? Not here (Pratinav Anil)
The book is rich in marvellous detail, and succeeds in making the pre-classical world come to life . . . Full of little gem-like shifts of perspective . . . Most of all, the book triumphs as a brilliant and learned challenge to modern western chauvinism (Steven Poole)
Quinn demolishes the underlying concept of what she calls “civilisational thinking”. Her argument is simple, persuasive and deserving of attention . . . A brisk, scholarly romp across the arc of European history . . . This retelling of the West’s story scintillates with its focus on the unexpected and on the interstices between realms and eras rather than on history’s big, solid bits. But it is also an admirable work of scholarship . . . Even seasoned history buffs will find much that is new and fascinating. How the World Made the West joins a growing sub-canon of works that explores the broad sweep of history using new intellectual framings, such as Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (2011), Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads (2015) and Fall of Civilisations . . . Whoever thought history was passé could not be more wrong
The evidence Quinn has accumulated is rich in arresting detail and she delivers it with engaging gusto . . . Quinn is acutely alive to the ways in which the remote past can serve modern political uses . . . An immense achievement (Lucy Hughes-Hallett)
Quinn’s purpose is to dethrone the “privileged connection” between the ancient Greeks and Romans and the modern west, and focus instead on the millennia of interaction with other cultures . . . Quinn pursues this claim with an impressive display of rigorous scholarship lightly worn, successfully covering a huge amount of material (Tristram Hunt)
How the World Made the West has plenty of myths about the ancient world to dispel . . . Show[s] that progress in the ancient world and beyond was driven by connections between peoples and places rather than by discrete cultural centres (namely Greece and Rome) . . . The vicissitudes in each centre’s fortunes make for a dynamic narrative, as cities that were once great are swept away, and new ones spring up in their wake . . . It is one of the strengths of How the World Made the West that it forces us to think outside the usual parameters of antiquity (Daisy Dunn)
All stars
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A great perspective on history which recasts our understanding of the past. A well produced audio book which is enjoyable to listen to.

A brilliant world history

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Thanks to a classical education, I grew up with this false historical notion of distinct, separate civilizations, of which Greece and Rome were the greatest, and we in the west their fortunate descendents. How wrong! Quinn convincingly shows that history has always been a potpourri of rising or falling polities, on a scale from villages to empires, which exchanged ideas, goods, people, diseases etc to a greater or lesser extent, and Greece and Rome were just two moments of cultural and intellectual ascendance. There's so much here to absorb, but one striking fact is that much of what we know about Greece and Rome actually came through translations of Arabic texts compiled during our so-called 'dark' ages. Having listened to it once through, I feel the need now to buy the text and keep it as a reference work.

Necessary change of mindset

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it's very informative, well argued and fascinating really. You could have a book that last for days if you wanted to get into every aspect covered here. From the ancient Egyptians to the Mongals its five thousand years of human history, mostly around the Mediterranean, to be honest, thinking about it all I'm getting lost in my thoughts about it and this will turn into a massive ramble. It is definitely worth the credit and your time.
However there is an annoyance, the mid sentence bibliography quote. Your listening to it, imagining the scene and then get distracted by someone from Cambridge page such and such etc al!! maybe they could've been saved till the end. (This is not a reflection on the narrator)

Worth listening too

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Great book, very well research and present and I have been educated on alot of area I haven't even heard of let alone have knowledge of.

My niggling issue with the books are that I feel the author has some personal bias against Europe and Christianity. When describing the the use of slaves throughout the book, there always seemed to put extra emphasis when the 'west' used slavery than when the 'east' used slavery. I noticed the same when with Christian and Muslim empires, maybe it was just me but it really stuck out to me.

Even with that in mind and very educational book that I would 100% recommend.

really enjoyed the book but have some nigglings issues

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Probably better off with the physical book for this as there’s so much to go over.

Very interesting but a lot to unpack

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