Elephants, Alphabets, and Ice Ages: Josephine Quinn’s How the World Made the West

How the World Made the West follows a broad sweep of history focused on the world around the Mediterranean. The book examines the wars, trading relationships, spreading religions and technologies, and migrations that make it impossible to understand a single “civilization” in isolation. The book aims to expand the story of “the West” from Greek and Roman inheritance, by breaking the narrative of competing, self-contained “civilizations” with consistent long-term characteristics. Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire interacted with less popularly well-known cultures and thought of themselves in very different ways than we’re usually taught. The idea of “Europe” or “the West” as a cohesive Christian world distinguished from an extremely different “East” is relatively modern.

• How the World Made the West follows a broad sweep of history focused on the world around the Mediterranean with excursions south, north, and east, between about 2000 BCE and 1500 CE.
• Quinn’s goal is to expand the story of “the West” from Greek and Roman inheritance, by breaking the narrative of competing, self-contained “civilizations” with consistent long-term characteristics.
• Bronze and Iron Age empires tended to work by moving entire populations around, a form of colonialism intended to disconnect people from their original lands and connect them to the empire in question

Source: Tor.com  | 
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