How The World Made The West
Josephine Quinn, Bloomsbury, £30 

WHEN Mahatma Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilisation, he replied he thought it might be a good idea. Josephine Quinn, in her survey of 4,000 years of history, implies Gandhi might have been being quite generous. 

Western civilisation doesn’t have much definitively Western in it, and it’s wrong to think in terms of a civilisation. There aren’t really “peoples,” there are people who travelled, learned, borrowed, and adapted. And often “civilisation” doesn’t quite stand up its reputation. 

“Western civilisation” sees itself as the direct inheritance of ancient Greece and Rome. Democracy, liberty, philosophy, theatre and concrete are bequeathed to the West, from the ancients, via the Renaissance. 

Except the ancient world borrowed liberally from from its neighbours whether it was the laws of Mesopotamia or the mythology and artisanship of Egypt. 

Even the modern alphabet was a Levantine innovation, with the letters depicting the first sound of certain words: “The sign for ‘a’ was the head of a bull, alep, in Levantine dialects, ‘b’ was a schematic house (bayit), ‘d’ was door (dalet).” This you can still see, by rotating Roman capitals 90 degrees left to see the pictograms.

Equally, what are now seen as culture-defining battles which demonstrate the Greek virtues of freedom, democracy and courage are quite different from the Persian point of view. 

Most Greek speakers allied with the Persians; the battle at Thermopylae was an easy win. Greek victories at Salamis and Platea are celebrated, but in the end Persia sacked Athens twice. Rather than tyrannical conquest and the desire to put down nascent democracy and haughty women, the Persians were completing “punishment expeditions against a few rogue states in their western borderlands.”

In the meantime, Athens itself was a latecomer to democracy, which itself took a particular form. Most official posts were determined by lottery rather than vote and, in any case, most groups were excluded from participation. 

Enslaved labour provided the Athenian surplus without representation, and Athenian women were unable to work, travel or do financial transactions without permission from their male guardian. They were unable to inherit property in their own right and had to cover their heads outside the home, conditions which would have shocked Xerxes as draconian. 

“Western civilisation” as an ideology appears to gain traction from the 15th century onwards. Key technological changes included the range of sailing ships, the advent of colonialism and a change in scope as the Americas were colonised and looted. 

Christianity spread as a religion which excluded Muslims and Jews. Clearly the advent of capitalism brought new ideologies, and it would have been interesting for Quinn to have examined the relationship between these ideologies and the economics of the emerging Western world and its imperialist imperatives. 

But this is a work of classics, not economics. Its 400 pages of prose come with more than a hundred pages of notes and references, and covers a history from Byblos in 2,000 BC to about the mid-18th century “Europe” (itself a newish idea at the time). 

But there never have been isolated trees of civilisations with core immutable values, there was more of a trellis, with each part weaving through the other and coming out as an amalgam of everything before it and sometimes more. 

In discussing a popular collection of fables (the Kalila wa-Dimna) first translated into English in 1570, Quinn notes it was later described as “the English version of an Italian adaptation of a Spanish translation of a Latin version of a Hebrew translation of an Arabic adaptation of the Pehlevi version of the Indian original.” 

Quinn’s book is published in the midst of a genocidal spasm with its roots in ideas of Western civilisation. It’s difficult not to draw the conclusion that “Western civilisation” is propaganda puff for imperialism. 

While she might not have meant to, it seems appropriate to conclude that Gandhi's opinion was conservative. Perhaps Western civilisation is neither Western, nor civilised, but is instead a disruptive polarisation in what was historically a more diverse and interconnected world.