World history without limits

Josephine Quinn opens up nothing less than a new global perspective on our western civilization in her captivating history. In doing so, she focuses on the fact that ultimately not cultural circles, but their relationships with each other drive the change.

Whenever the topic comes up, where the roots of western culture and civilization are now, history -loving with raised index fingers: in Greece and in Rome. Where else? Whether philosophy, whether democracy, architecture, technology or theater, in ancient Greece and Rome – and only here – the widely shining foundations of Western civilization were laid. Then, however, the “dark Middle Ages” swallowed this treasure before the revival of ancient education and traditions in Italy of the Renaissance raised the Greek-Roman knowledge and made it fruitful for the Western culture. The British old historian follows her work “The West. An invention of the global world. 4000 years of history” but another interesting trace, which is far less linear and much less on Greece and Rome: “The true story behind what the West is today is much larger and fascinating.”

Quinn consistently directs the gaze to the yield of the millennia -old exchange of various companies from the Bronze Age to the age of discoveries. In addition, the author fans as well as entertaining examples, such as the rise of Crete in the early 2nd millennium BC. BC, on the periphery of huge networks that extended far to the east. Mixing and interweaving, trade and exchange, innovation and assimilation as the driver of change. Wasn’t it Levantine workers in Egypt who created the alphabet? Didn’t Indian numbers find their way to Europe about the Arab world? What resulted from this, the writer James Joyce once described: “Our culture is a huge tissue in which a wide variety of elements have mixed … It is pointless to look for a tissue to look for a thread that has remained pure and originally and did not color a neighboring thread.”

In her book, Quinn represents the thesis that “the West” is largely a product of long -term connections to a much larger network of societies around it. The era of the interlinking from the Bronze Age to the age of the discoveries, the author has come to the following: There has never been a unique, purely Western or European culture. The idea of imagining companies as a certain extent isolated individual trees is misleading. Quinn draws a fascinatingly different picture on 688 pages: “Human society is not a forest full of trees, with subcultures that branch out of individual tribes. It is more like a flower bed that has to be fertilized regularly in order to sow and grow again.” So what could be more obvious than to follow Quinn into the flower bed of history?

Josephine Quinn

After studying in Oxford and Berkeley, the professor of old history at the University of Cambridge is the first woman to hold this chair. The old historian and archaeologist taught in the USA, Italy and Oxford and took part in Tunisian-British excavations in Utica.
Photo: Sukant Deepak

Josephine Quinn
The West