Josephine Quinn can laugh about it now, but it wasn’t fun. On tour in America to promote her book, she turned down some invitations after all. “I canceled a few festivals in the middle of the country because I didn’t feel comfortable with them.” Before her book How The World Made The West (2024) was in bookstores, far-right media and sites had already launched an attack on it. Quinn: “One reported that as an Oxford professor I advocated ‘genocide in the West’. Oh? What page is that on?” Once the book was published, the criticism died down. “But I wasn’t sure I wanted to meet people who thought that way about the book or had written something like that.”
Her book, now translated into Dutch, received rave reviews, also in NRCwhere philosopher Michiel Leezenberg praised it as “a refreshing look at an interesting subject.” That subject is: the idea of a ‘Western civilization’ that completely invented itself while the rest of the world was still in hibernation. With a more or less straight line from Athens and Rome to present-day London and Paris, and from Homer and Plato to Harry Mulisch and Andreas Kinneging.
Quinn (52), classicist and now professor at Cambridge, consigns that idea to the realm of fables on the basis of a rich tableau of modern archaeological and historical research. In lively, detailed chapters, she shows how ‘the West’ over a period of 4,000 years (from roughly 2500 BC to 1500 AD) was in contact with – and shaped by – cultures from the Levant to the Persian Empire and India. She discusses in detail shipping, trade and the spread of writing, the alphabet and forms of political organization.
“My target is thinking in terms of separate civilizations,” Quinn said at a lecture in Amsterdam for about three hundred interested parties. “I deconstruct the idea of the West as a self-made entity.” It seems a hardly offensive relativization – and certainly not a cultural genocide – of the nineteenth-century idea of an evolution of civilizations with the unique Western one at the top. But still, what was unique about the Greeks and Romans? In a conversation in her hotel, Quinn explains her work cheerfully and with a smile.
Academics are like cats, they feel safest in a box
You write that thinking in ‘civilizations’ is still the norm. As in Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations (1996), with its division into demarcated civilization areas. But isn’t that the case in science anymore? There is a whole field worldhistorywhich emphasizes exchange.
“Oh, there are definitely historians who look at things with more nuance and an eye for complexity. Outside the profession there were authors such as the anthropologist David Graeber (1961-2020), although he was a bit of an outsider, who in The Dawn of Everything shook up the Eurocentric idea of history. But generally speaking, thinking in terms of ‘civilizations’ and ‘cultures’ is still very persistent. Such umbrella concepts are simply useful tools in the academic world. Researchers often know a lot about one subject and a division into ‘civilizations’ keeps things clear. You can then say that you study ‘Chinese painting’ or ‘Greek literature’.” Laughing: “Academics are like cats, they feel safest in a cubicle.”
In your own field, established views about the Greeks and Romans have been under challenge for decades. The classics were much stranger to us than we like to think, is often the lesson.
“Some classicists are now trying to understand the classical world a little more from within, for example as Homer spoke about it. The idea is that you work ‘hodologically’, from the Greek hodos (away). As if you are on your way and still have to find the route. And therefore not cartographically, with an omniscient overview of the entire site with a helicopter view. The funny thing is that you also see this changed approach happening in our daily lives. We travel with Google Maps instead of a paper map and then you no longer have an idea of the bigger picture. That’s a huge change. It’s actually a very ancient way of engaging in the world.”
Outside the academy, praising one’s own superior civilization is on the rise. Trump, Putin and Xi are all doing it.
“Yes, and that is very disturbing. When I wrote this book I still thought that we were dealing with two toxic ways of thinking about culture and civilization. On the one hand, there is the nationalist idea that there are all kinds of rounded civilizations that belong to homogeneous nation states. A Muslim in India or a Uyghur in China then has a problem.
“On the other hand, you have the populist movements that believe that the West is ‘better than the rest’. With the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, you see an even more dangerous idea emerging, namely that there is, after all, only one civilization and the rest of the world is populated by barbarians. You see it among the radical right in the US and Europe. Putin thinks the opposite: there are civilizations, only the West is left out because it is decadent.”
Josephine Quinn: “Before the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europe as a civilization concept was rarely mentioned.”
Photo Merlijn Doomernik
Does thinking in terms of civilizations still make sense or do you think we should abolish it? Are you an abolitionist?
Laughing: “I think we would be better off without that concept, both in historiography and in politics. You can make connections between countries, cities, intellectual developments, communities without relying on that overarching concept of civilization. You then have to think more in terms of networks, with sometimes unexpected connections and cross-pollination, also outside Europe. Look at India and England, there are so many historical, commercial and technological connections. While it is now becoming increasingly difficult for Indians to to get a visa for England.”
In your book, ‘the West’ seems mainly a negative concept, a concept with which Europeans reacted against the threat of Islam or later against the Ottoman Turks.
“Before the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was rarely any talk of Europe as a civilization concept. People experienced Christianity as something rather than connecting them, or ‘Christendom’. By the way, that also often had a defensive function. After all, Christianity had been chased from its cradle in West Asia and had to survive in Europe against ‘false religions’. You also see this with the classical Greeks, who talk very little about themselves as ‘the Greeks’. ‘the Persians’, the enemy. They were well aware that there were all kinds of Greeks who had no problem being under Persian rule. Civilizational notions are very often defensive.”
You dispute that there is a straight line from the classics to us. But we have a Roman and Greek cultural heritage, right?
“Oh, certainly. Of course. When you walk through London and Paris, you come face to face with it, those cities are full of architecture that is inspired by Greek temples, or at least by what we thought they looked like. My point is, those Greek temples were in turn enormously indebted to others, to Egyptian examples. The oldest Greek temples, by the way, looked very different from what we imagine them now, they were more like long huts.”
A civilization, I want to say, is not a tree that grows in isolation
Roman law, Greek philosophy?
“Absolutely. Although philosophy among the Greeks was something completely different from the specialist subject it is today. That classical heritage is so strong that other influences and ways of thinking are pushed aside. While so much comes from other traditions: mathematics from India, writing and alphabets from the Levant. Arab scholars kept Aristotle’s philosophy alive. A civilization, I want to say, is not a tree that grows in isolation.”
You make a sobering comment about the preservation of Greek knowledge through Arabic translations. You call it a myth.
“The myth is the idea that they saved Greek knowledge that would otherwise have been lost. These texts were simply available in the monasteries and archives of Byzantium, the Eastern Roman Empire that only fell in 1453. Manuscripts found their way to Western Europe and the first printing houses in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries via the major port cities. There are only a few classical texts that have survived only in Arabic, there is a very interesting guide for the household with comments on the role of women. And a work on physiognomy, about what a person’s appearance says about his character.”
So the importance of that translation tradition is overestimated?
“Its value was not so much the preservation of Greek texts, but particularly the Arabic commentaries and intellectual reflections on them. These were extremely exciting for readers in the West and stimulated the scientific revival of the twelfth century. It is also the reason that European scholars moved or moved to cities like Toledo or Palermo, where ‘it happened’. These must have been incredibly vibrant intellectual cities at the time.”
Now name one thing that is truly ‘Western’.
“Let me think for a moment… There must be something…” she says, laughing. “Democracy as a real distinguishing feature, there is a lot to be said for it. You can find precursors of most elements of classical Athenian democracy in Babylonia or Syria, but nowhere will you find them all at the same time. It is a real shame that we have not been able to maintain that Athenian model. What we now call democracy is just a poor version of it. In Athens, everything was decided by citizens, often through graduated forms of drawing lots. Much more inclusive than our simple majority system of half plus one that decides for everyone. We can still learn from that. Experiments with citizen councils like in Ireland are a good step in the right direction.”
You also write that Athenian democracy was based on exclusion.
“That is also true, that is the downside. Women, foreigners and slaves did not count. As an outsider you could not green card or become a ‘Greek citizen’. With the Romans you almost see the opposite. Being Roman meant you had civil rights wherever you were born. They developed an idea of citizenship that is not ethnic or territorial, but political. That gave great social mobility. It is one of the reasons the Roman Empire was so successful and survived for so long.”
Could you also write a mirror-image book about your period: ‘how the classical West made the world’?
“Hmm, I think so. After all, my model is based on connections and exchange, there is reciprocity in that. Take the Gandhara art in India, which is Buddhist with Greek influences. We have long thought that that art was a product of Alexander the Great’s campaign to India. We now think that it is of a later date and dates from the Roman period. There is a beautiful Buddha statue, the ‘Berenike Buddha‘, from about 100 AD. It has a Greek facial expression and is made of Turkish marble. Found in an Egyptian temple built by an Italian. Look, that’s a wonderful example of how everything comes together.”
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