On Quinn's How the World Made the West
For those people who would like to see and hear me in Dutch, there is a video of me talking on Adam Smith as a political theorist (here) a few months ago. It was my first return to Ghent since my last PhD students had defended there.
All week I was mulling a piece on the decision by The International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor, Karim Khan to apply for arrest warrants to be issued against Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, Ismail Haniyeh, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Yoav Gallant in respect of war crimes and crimes against humanity. But my reflections got overtaken by today’s ICJ ruling. And so I want to reflect a bit more on the situation.
This week I read Josephine Quinn’s excellent (2024) How the World Made the West: a 4,000 Year History. As regular readers know I very much enjoyed her (2018) In Search of the Phoenicians that I blogged about a few years ago (recall here). Since I have met Quinn in person to express my admiration, and at the time she told me about her plans for How the World Made the West. (The Wikipedia page is a bit out of date (see here)). What follows is not a book review, but (ahh) some digressions.
The polemical target of Quinn’s book is civilizational thinking in which civilizations are treated as social kinds, especially associated with the idea of superiority and homogeneity. She associates this idea with eighteenth century stadial thought, and especially nineteenth century Victorian (and French) imperialism. I want to say up front, that while I agree with her conclusion, I don’t think she does a very good job explaining how this idea originates and how it developed in the nineteenth century (including into the study of great, comparative civilizations). Below I say a bit on this, but I should probably return to it some other time with more detail.
For now, it is worth noting that the 30 chapters of her history kind of end around 1500. Yes, there are many references and allusions to events after — not the least the work of archeologists in the nineteenth and early twentieth century —, but this is a work centered on the Mediterranean and the circles of trade, invasion, and travel within it and wider circles around it. (That’s not a criticism.)
But cutting off in 1500, also means that the way civilizational thinking was developed during the Renaissance with Greek and Roman conceptual tools (and partially inscribed in a Christian view of history) goes missing. In addition, the impact of Roman history and jurisprudence on debates over what to do with natives in the Americas is unexplored, and so we miss the roots of later conceptions of civilization. (This is a criticism.)
Incidentally, each chapter is focused on a place at a given time, and explores (what one might call) the ‘dynamics of change’ visible then. The reader learns an enormous amount about (shifting) long term trade patterns, about the means of carriage involved, and about the cultural significance of what was being traded. Of course, war, religion, and culture/sciences, and emperors, are not ignored, but the focus is resolutely on what we may call ‘distant interactions.’ She has, for example, a terrific eye for how ‘exotic’ animals are markers of status and how they end up in different places. I love it.
Alongside this polemic, there is a far more subtle account of the development and many transformations of the idea of a ‘West’ and (in a more minor key) the idea of ‘Europe.’ In particular, she very cleverly links thinking about a/the ‘West’(s) to cartography (and its visual representations and iconography), geography, and what we may call, ‘thinking in Continents.’ I have myself researched and written a bit on the contrast between ‘Western’ and non-Western philosophy, and I found Quinn’s account very instructive—go read the book! I note two things.
First, strikingly, what the ‘West’ is and what function this terminology serves is really quite context dependent and fluid. This should not be a surprise, but Quinn’s multiplies examples, and demolishes the idea that this has an enduring meaning.
Second, on Quinn’s view, the let’s call it ‘spiritual’ ideal of ‘Europe’ is really tied to ideas associated with Christian homogeneity and the aftermath of Charlemagne’s empire. Charlemagne himself frequently looked back to Rome, but ‘Europe’ was a useful term to capture something broader than ‘Gaul’ (p. 339). Some version of this gets re-activated at various points, especially when from the twelfth century onward, Latin Christianity (as distinct from the Orthodox kind) becomes increasingly intolerant of heresy and ethnically cleanses Muslims, Pagans, and Jews from its territory (see chapter 27, especially). She notes, of course, the economic incentives involved (appropriation of property). And is very alert to the fact that “organised processes of inquisition and punishment provided work, status and authority for an army of educated bureaucrats – men who were increasingly the product of the new ‘universities’ that were beginning to appear in European cities.” (p. 374.) But somewhat surprisingly, she provides some evidence for the thought — popular among Catholic and reactionary intellectuals today — that Europe has, indeed, been a Christian project.
Okay, so much for set up.
The focus on trade is, in part, the effect of Quinn’s desire to show how choice is a significant driver of change throughout history. Let me quote a representative passage:
This brings out a key aspect of how cultural borrowings make change: they make things new again. Ancient Aegean culture would have been very different without the Tyrian alphabet, but the new adopters use alphabetic writing in ways that made most sense to them, to forge connections but also to underline their own differences: different versions of the Greek alphabet develop quickly even in neighbouring towns. What matters as ever is not ‘influence’ but choice. (pp. 138-139)
Crucially, people in the past have agency. This is also a commitment characteristic of works by James C. Scott and Graeber (also writing with Wengrow); and in her notes Quinn acknowledges their inspiration. As a (skeptical) liberal I admire and approve of this. She has little time for non-agential historical forces.
However, in many places I was left wondering whose choices we were really seeing expressed. In the quoted passage, we never learn do town councils decide on the version of the alphabet? The local priest/temple? A local merchant guild? We are never told. It may be there is no evidence one way or another, but it’s strange to ascribe differences to choice, without mentioning agents at all.
Quinn herself often recognizes that the trade patterns she is recounting to us are primarily trade in high value (and high status) goods (sometimes even exclusively organized by various courts), but even in such cases I would have liked to have seen more detail on the nature of agency involved. Something similar can be said about the many irrigation projects/systems/technology mentioned along the way. Who organizes these? How? There is implied choice, but again decoupled from particular agency. Sometimes she is acutely aware of the fact that there are winners and losers in a particular trade (most obviously slavery), but most of the time she is more interested in flows than agents.
The reason I am alert to this is that despite the emphasis on choice, Quinn’s favored explanation is often, perhaps even more often than not environmental in character. In fact, in the second half of the book, she privileges two features: (i) warming and cooling; (ii) and germs/disease. Not unlike Jared Diamond (whom she doesn’t mention) these trump any institutional factors as drivers of large scale history.
I don’t mean to say that Quinn has to choose between agency and environmental factors in the service of her polemics. One of the show case episodes of the book is telling the story of Thermopylae from the vantage of the Persians. And the change of perspective humanizes all sides, and debunks lots of myths at once. But I found explanations often underdeveloped.
I want to close with two observations. First, the book quietly rehabilitates Herodotus. He is frequently cited as a source and also as a guide to help us think about particular cultural differences and their significance. His infectious zest for human variety and interest in how others live also animates Quinn’s work. (Of course, she is very judicious in her use of Herodotus as she is in her use of the Bible as a historical source.) But also, in many ways the geography of her book echoes Herodotus's mental and physical geography, and when it became out of date she shows us how.
My second observation is closer to Quinn’s expertise in Levantine peoples. What the book makes abundantly clear is that even well before the Arabic-Islamic conquests, Semitic speakers had a massive impact on the Mediterranean world (and, thus, classical Athens and Rome). She makes this point without actually exploring the details and ways in which (western) Christianity itself shares in this debt. That is, in many ways her polemical case is much stronger than she explicitly argues. That’s a nice feature, not a bug.*
But somewhat oddly, the cumulative effect is to suggest that the very hybrid West she recovers is indeed very much indebted to a version of Jerusalem and Athens. Of course, this has little to do with Tertullian. ‘Jerusalem’ stands in for all Levantines and their diasporas/colonies (as well as the ways in which they assimilate Persian and Indian learning/sciences). And ‘Athens’ stands in for Greeks and Romans. That is, the peoples and cultures South of the Rhine and Danube (with exception of Vikings), and their encounters with war-elephants, play a disproportionate role in this narrative. To give an example, the Baltics (and their amber) and Carpathians are mentioned in the great trade routes of the second millennium before CE, but after their presence is little remarked upon. It is a testament to this marvelous book, that it felt too short.
*There is an oddity that we learn of quite a few individuals who went on pilgrimage to Mecca (including some West Africans), but of none of the intra-European Christian pilgrimages.