The scourge of civilisations
JERRY BROTTON is won over by a book arguing that migration, mobility and mixing, not the exclusive brilliance of the west, drove centuries of progress
Historians have been pronouncing the end of ‘western civilisation’ ever since the concept was first proposed by English-speaking historians and thinkers in the 19th century. Part of the problem is what anyone actually means by ‘the west’. Most of us assume it emerged from classical Greece and Rome, and that Christendom rediscovered their civilised values of freedom, tolerance, progress and science in the Renaissance – another 19th-century term, from the French meaning ‘rebirth’ – that in turn gave rise to the Enlightenment and modernity.
Like so many grand narratives of historical change, they were driven almost exclusively by white, male, imperial beliefs at the height of Europe’s colonisation of much of the known world. Such beliefs also came with deeply racist and religious assumptions about the opposite of western civilisation – a barbaric, despotic and oriental ‘east’ that needed, well, civilising. Now, as historians begin to unpick and revise these stories, the Oxford classicist Josephine Quinn questions the very idea of ‘western civilisation’ in this absolutely scintillating book.
Beginning in the Bronze Age, and ending with Columbus’s first landfall in the Americas in 1492, Quinn shows how what she calls ‘civilisational thinking’ was an invention of 19th-century British imperialist and Greek nationalist archaeologists. These men misread or simply ignored deeper and longer global connections across a classical world centred on Asia Minor and the eastern Mediterranean, but which ranged from east
Africa and the Baltic to China. “Migration, mobility and mixing are,” as Quinn shows, “hard-wired into human history,” creating “entangled histories” driven by people making connection as they travelled for trade, diplomacy, prosperity, adventure and plunder, regardless of religious or ethnic distinctions. It is these messy and contradictory connections, not clashes of civilisations, that drive historical change.
There is also, as Quinn points out, a contemporary dimension to these historical reassessments. Zealous civilisational thinking “fundamentally misrepresents our story” and still drives many of the political conflicts of our times.
Thrilling tapestry
If this all sounds terribly serious, it is belied by the pace of Quinn’s story. She weaves deftly between the latest genomic sequencing, archaeological excavations and tales of Victorian adventurers to create a thrilling tapestry of our entangled past – with glimpses of its remains in ancient palaces, temples, ceramics and papyrus.
Quinn starts 4,000 years ago in Byblos, a Lebanese town where some of the newest single-masted merchant sailing vessels plied their trade east to west, shipping lapis lazuli gems from Afghanistan, turquoise from Uzbekistan and gold from the horn of Africa. Such global connectedness became cultural entanglement as the wheel and the horse joined the sail to drive the need for the earliest scripts, such as Ugaritic in 13th-century BC Syria.
In all this cultural entanglement, Quinn revises some of the most iconic texts and stories of the period, explaining how the likes of the Odyssey, One Thousand and One Nights and the Bible represent an “account for change in terms of journeys and encounters”. Homer is shown as drawing on a patchwork of Egyptian and Anatolian echoes that themselves stretch back even further. He wrote through the darkest generations of
Iron Age withdrawal from long-distance trade and exchange, but where Greeks “still chose to sing of international kingdoms, intercontinental war and voyages across broad seas”.
Each chapter offers striking insights and parallels. The idea that Minoan civilisation was a precursor of the west turns out to be a myth promulgated by 19th-century archaeologists. The same is true of Mycenae, where Quinn unearths amber from the Baltic turned into jewellery made by British craftsmen and later labelled ‘Mycenaen’.
Rejecting the myth of eastern Persia versus western Greece, Quinn links Spartan slogans and clothing with “neo-fascist activism” of the kind seen on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021; meanwhile the Roman empire needs to be seen “not as a collection of lands but as a series of coasts”. Even as the crusades raged, Muslim scholars like Muhammad al-Idrisi worked at the Norman court of Roger II in Sicily, writing geographical textbooks in Arabic with titles like The Entertainment for He Who Longs to Travel the World (1154), which described an interconnected world stretching from the Canaries to Korea.
Quinn is too sophisticated a historian to blame the closing of this world on the rise of Christianity, but she does explain how it created a monoculture out of the imperial conquests and ethnic cleansing that swept Iberia on the eve of Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas in 1492, when both Jews and Muslims were expelled from the region.
In some respects, the opening of the Atlantic trade only intensified the connections forged across the global commercial networks over the preceding 3,000 years that Quinn describes. Yet in other ways it signalled the end of one way of doing business: European kingdoms such as Portugal, Spain and England, and their settler colonies, forged new worlds that did not include the people they displaced and exterminated.
It is a satisfying if sobering end to a marvellous book that concludes by arguing that the question we should ask is not whether western civilisation is good or bad, but whether ‘civilisational thinking’ helps explain anything at all.
How the World Made the West should be one of the most discussed books of the year. While it doesn’t pronounce the end of the west, it will certainly make many of us ask why we still use either that term or ‘civilisation’ to describe both our past and our present.
Jerry Brotton is the author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps (Penguin, 2012)
The idea that Minoan civilisation was a precursor of the west turns out to be a myth spread by 19th-century archaeologists.