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

Table of Contents:
Notes to the Reader Introduction           1.       A Single Sail           2.       The Palace of Minos           3.       The Amber Routes           4.       The Erupting Sea           5.       Band of Brothers           6.       Alphabet City           7.       Regime Change           8.       I Am Not Your Servant           9.       Through the Pillars           10.     The Invention of Greece           11.     The Assyrian Mediterranean           12.     He Who Saw the Deep           13.     The Bitter River           14.     The King of Kings           15.     The Persian Version           16.     Continental Thinking           17.     Of Elephants and Kings           18.     Clouds in the West           19.     Fighting for Freedom           20.     Rome, Open City           21.     Trade Winds           22.     Salt Roads           23.     The Rise of the Barbarians           24.     Kings of the World           25.     The Father of Europe           26.     The Translation Movement           27.     The Sign of the Cross           28.     Kalila wa-Dimna           29.     The Land of Darkness           30.     A New World Acknowledgements Notes Index

About the Author :
Josephine Quinn is Professor of Ancient History at Oxford University and Martin Frederiksen Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Worcester College, Oxford. She has degrees from Oxford and University of California, Berkeley; has taught in America, Italy, and the UK; and co-directed the Tunisian-British archaeological excavations at Utica. She is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, as well as to radio and television programs. She is the author of one previous book, the award-winning In Search of the Phoenicians, and lives in Oxford.

Review :
“Compelling . . . The book makes a forceful argument and tells a story with great verve: Classical Greece and Rome owed an enormous cultural debt to the societies that preceded them and surrounded them. Therefore, notions that these cultures are the sole and direct ancient progenitors of the modern West are blinkered. We need a new kind of ancient history. . . . Ms. Quinn’s book points to a possible path forward, toward a more expansive version of ancient history.”—The Wall Street Journal   “Those archaic ‘Western Civ’ classes so many of us took in college should be updated, argues Quinn, an Oxford professor of ancient history. She invites us to widen our scope and see the influence of Phoenicia, Assyria, and India, and to revel in a richer, more polyglot inheritance.”—The Boston Globe   “Josephine Quinn ranges wide with [her] broad survey of world history. The Oxford history professor shows how the West has always been remarkably global, detailing examples from the past 4000 years if you doubt it. Your high school teacher may have said it all began with Greece and Rome. But Greece and Rome knew how much they learned by interacting with the rest of the world. From Arabic scholarship (surely we all know their primacy in maths) to Assyrian irrigation, the countless examples of ideas beginning in one place and soon darting all over the world are fascinating.”—Parade “As our leaders and pundits glorify ‘Western Civilization’ and excoriate migration and wokeness, Josephine Quinn offers a momentous correction: the Greeks and Romans were hodgepodge people, and if we are their heirs it is only because of globe-spanning connections that always produce multifarious ways of life. . . . Brilliant and essential.”—Samuel Moyn, author of Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times “Bold, beautifully written, and filled with insights, How the World Made the West demands that we challenge traditional views of the past. An extraordinary achievement.”—Peter Frankopan, bestselling author of The Earth Transformed “One of the most fascinating works of global history to appear for many years . . . incredibly ambitious and wide-ranging . . . allowing us to understand just how globalized and interconnected mankind has always been.”—William Dalrymple, bestselling author of The Anarchy “Engaging, aspirational, and inspirational, How the World Made the West will be devoured by history buffs and should be required reading for those arguing for the supremacy of ‘Western Civilization’ as well as those arguing for its demise and dismantling, and everyone in between.”—Eric Cline, author of 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed “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. . . . Even readers with a fairly good knowledge of history are likely to learn something new. . . . A fascinating look at world history from the broadest possible perspective.”—Kirkus Review, starred review