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How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History

by Josephine Quinn

A Guardian, Financial Times, New Statesman, The Rest is Politics and Waterstones Best Book for 2024
'A work of great confidence, empathy, learning and imagination' RORY STEWART
'Eye-popping, mind-blowing, ground-breaking' LUCY WORSLEY
'Bold, beautifully written and filled with insights . . . Extraordinary' PETER FRANKOPAN

The West, the story goes, was built on the ideas and values of Ancient Greece and Rome, which disappeared from Europe during the Dark Ages and were then rediscovered by the Renaissance. But what if that isn't true?

In a bold and magisterial work of immense scope, Josephine Quinn argues that the real story of the West is much bigger than this established paradigm leads us to believe. So much of our shared history has been lost, drowned out by the concept - developed in the Victorian era - of separate 'civilisations'.

Moving from the Bronze Age to the Age of Exploration, How the World Made the West reveals a new narrative: one that traces the millennia of global encounters and exchange that built what is now called the West, as societies met, tangled and sometimes grew apart. From the creation of the alphabet by Levantine workers in Egypt, who in a foreign land were prompted to write things down in their own language for the first time, to the arrival of Indian numbers in Europe via the Arab world, Quinn makes the case that understanding societies in isolation is both out-of-date and wrong. It is contact and connections, rather than solitary civilisations, that drive historical change. It is not peoples that make history - people do.

576 pages.

ISBN: 9781526605191

€ 21.25 

In Stock.

Usually despatched in 2-5 working days.

Date of Publication: 29/02/2024

  
Cover of How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History - Josephine Quinn - 9781526605191Trade Paperback

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Archaeology