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To that point, The Economist reviews Josephine Quinn’s new book, How the World Made the West, a re-examination of what we think we know about civilizations…

Asked what he thought of Western civilisation, Mahatma Gandhi is said to have quipped that such a thing “would be a good idea”. (The West, he suggested, was not so enlightened.) But as Josephine Quinn makes clear in her new book, Western civilisation has always been a bad idea, or at any rate a wrong-headed one. To compartmentalise history into a set of distinct and essentially self-contained civilisations is a misguided quest that has dangerously distorted our understanding of the world, Ms Quinn asserts: “It is not peoples that make history, but people, and the connections that they create with one another.”

Ms Quinn, a historian and archaeologist who teaches at Oxford, does not spend 500-odd pages trashing what generations of schoolchildren have been taught to take pride in as European achievements. Instead, she demolishes the underlying concept of what she calls “civilisational thinking”. Her argument is simple, persuasive and deserving of attention.

The idea of civilisation, Ms Quinn points out, is relatively recent. The word was first used only in the mid-18th century and did not take hold of Western imaginations until the late 19th century. In that imperialist age, historians found that Greek, Roman and Christian civilisations made nice building blocks that could be stacked into a grand-looking construct, which they labelled “Western” or “European” civilisation. To this they attributed a host of inherited “classical” virtues: vigour, rationality, justice, democracy and courage to experiment and explore. Other civilisations, by contrast, were regarded as inferior.

It does not take much unpacking by Ms Quinn to expose the folly of this approach. Behold, for instance, John Stuart Mill, a philosopher in the 19th century, claiming that the Battle of Marathon, Persia’s first invasion of Greece in 490BC, was more important to English history than William the Conqueror’s triumph at Hastings in 1066. (Without an Athenian victory, the logic goes, the magical seed of Greek civilisation might never have grown into Western civilisation.) Or consider “The Clash of Civilisations” (1996) by Samuel Huntington, an American historian, who declared it impossible to understand history without classifying humanity into mutually hostile civilisations between which, “during most of human existence”, contact has been “intermittent or non-existent”.

What is non-existent is any truth to that notion. Ms. Quinn’s brisk, scholarly romp across the arc of European history shows that, far from being rare, contact across and between cultures, often over surprisingly long distances, has been the main motor of human advancement in every age. Rather than being prickly and inward-looking, most societies have proved receptive to ideas, fashions and technologies from their neighbours…

As The Economist observes, “anyone who thought history was passé could not be more wrong”: “The history of the West is not quite what you learned in school” (gift link)– @TheEconomist on @josephinequinn.

* Henry Glassie

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As we ponder the past’s presence in our present, we might send civilized birthday greetings to a man who contributed mightily to the paradigms that Quinn questions, Bernard Ashmole; he was born on this date in 1894. A historian, archaeologist, and art historian, he taught at both the University of London and Oxford and served as Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum from 1939 to 1956.

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