Book Review: How the World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History
by Josephine Quinn
The historical evidence presented in this book provides cause for rethinking fundamental assumptions about our contemporary geopolitical and societal structures worldwide. Through long term and thorough analysis of archaeological and written artifacts, Josephine Quinn examines the interrelated actions of different peoples and nations over multiple millennia—and from that our assumptions about international relations will require reconsideration. The terms West and East to denote separate civilizations is fairly common practice today. In its dominant usage, the term East refers to an Asian-centric culture and the term West refers to a European-centric culture. These assumptions pertain especially to the large cities and empires that rose and fell in the most recent millennia. This view conveniently ignores other cultures that are neither East nor West, such as Native American, Inuit, and Aboriginal Australian—and it also excludes the great pre-Columbian empires in South America. Quinn demonstrates that the problem with the idea of a Western civilization is that it’s an artificial concept.
From the best archaeological and forensic data currently available, Quinn traces the vast interconnections that were active in the period preceding the great empires of the Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans. This included trade with tribes as distant as present day Scandinavia, central and western Africa, and India. The introduction of the faith in Jesus held by the Messianic Jews and later the faith of Islam moved world religious perspectives closer to monotheism—and the official adoption of Christianity by the Roman Emperor Constantine evolved into an expression of Christendom that was more about military and cultural influence than the Christian faith itself. The centers of civilization were not necessarily Athens or Rome, and instead the world of humans was much more mixed, fluid, and integrated—people sought and valued material and ideas from distant lands. Military hegemony, economic exploitation, and slaving were all parts of that world—just as they still are today in our contemporary global existence. The scientists of that earlier time developed advanced math that was lost until later, and they also knew the Earth was a globe and not a flat object—notably, they were not burned at the steak for their objective observations.
Quinn chronicles how the change to the current civilizational perspective arose in the most recent few centuries, as Europe increasingly adopted a self conscious exclusionist posture—primarily in response to its economic, academic, and military decline vis-à-vis the rest of the world. For the first time, a culture defined its most salient feature as being whom it excluded. As Europe became more culturally ingrown, the concurrent colonization push took off—instead of accommodating cultures of conquered peoples as had been done in past millennia, this tolerance became less common and cultural assimilation to the exclusion of the original cultures became the norm in European colonized areas. It is only in this era that the concept of race arose as a delineator between the imagined able and not able, intelligent and not intelligent, and the cultured and not cultured.
The author suggests no obvious lessons from these observations—this book (properly) does not present any moral assertions. However, it does provide some context in addressing our own contemporary geopolitical and societal challenges. Although many current events are destructive to humanity, the erroneous perspective of all Europeans bad, everyone else good, is not a proper conclusion and such misguided dogma is damaging to all humanity on several levels without alleviating the problems they claim to address. This book does demonstrate that humans have been horribly imperfect for as long as there have been humans—no surprise there, and they (and we) are without excuse. Among the lessons to be gained from this study are these: trade, tolerance, humility, cultural interchange, and science are all good for all of humanity—and anything that diminishes those things is to be avoided. Although armies and police will always be needed wherever there are errant humans, they must be utilized in support of those features just described above. As we humans also (occasionally) display a spiritual dimension, it should be considered (also in light of the above) bad form to appeal to the gods/or God to harm our enemies for us—that would be a selfish manipulative intention toward a deity. Although it would be difficult to predict how successful we could be in living better than all of the horrors committed throughout the millennia of human existence, we humans do need to keep trying to do right—until we get it right.