The enduring myth of the 'West'

How the World Made the West: A 4000 Year History

Author: Josephine Quinn

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Pages: 564

Price: Rs 699

Not a day passes without some reference to the “West”, Western “values” and Western “interests”, usually seen as under threat. This sense of a collective, monolithic identity has been a part of modern-day politics and culture for over two centuries. And yet, the terms themselves are amorphous and remarkably flexible, with transient applications to suit contemporary interests, usually with negligible historical support.
 

The idea of the “West” as a cohesive geographical, political and civilisational construct emerged in the early nineteenth century when certain nations of western Europe achieved military success and political and economic control over large parts of Asia and Africa, vanquishing earlier Islamic, Indian and Chinese political entities. European leaders and intellectuals saw in these victories the triumph of an inherently superior people —  superior in race, intellect and civilisation, reflecting the apogee of human achievement.
 

Hubris led their scholars and scientists to view these successes on a unique linear progression of European people from the singular achievements of Greece and Rome, moving on to the virtues of the Christian Church, and then being imbued with the values of the Enlightenment —­ constituting a uniquely European evolution that has given its modern-day descendants a civilisation characterised by “democracy and capitalism, freedom and tolerance, progress and science” that distinguishes them from Asian and African peoples.
 

In this 4,000-year story of multi-faceted and substantial connections between the Asian world and the peoples of Europe, Josephine Quinn of Oxford University challenges the notion of a unique and insular “Western” identity and achievement. Contrary to the idea of the West’s insular development, Dr Quinn notes that “migration, mobility and mixing are hard-wired into human history”, and that Greece and Rome “adapted most of their ideas and technologies from elsewhere”. These included: Irrigation from Assyria; stone sculpture from Egypt; the alphabet from the Levant; law codes and literature from Mesopotamia, and ideas of governance from Persia.
 

Early human life evolved through extensive exchanges of building materials, minerals and technologies pertaining to agriculture, manufacture and shipping across the vast territories of West Asia and North Africa, as also of ideas relating to law, social order and war and diplomacy. West Asia was way ahead of Europe during most of the four millennia discussed in this book. A millennium before Greece, Ur in Mesopotamia had developed entrepreneurship, rule of law, popular government, science and literature.
 

West Asia itself benefited from imports of goods, technologies and ideas from further east — Persia, India and China — due to highly advanced land-based and maritime connections. These included silk, paper and explosives from China; mathematics and astronomy from India, and experience of administration and war from Persia. Almost all the texts viewed today as national treasures —  Gilgamesh, The Iliad, the Odyssey, The Thousand and One Nights, the Arabic  Kalila wa Dimna,  and the more recent Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and several of Shakespeare’s plays— are products of extensive exchanges across diverse cultures over several centuries.
 

Dr Quinn pays particular attention to the “Translation Movement” during the Abbasid caliphate when Muslim scholars translated early Greek, Indian, Persian and Chinese works of philosophy, science and literature and also produced a huge body of original studies. Since these intellectual exchanges were two-way, there was no sense among givers or receivers of knowledge of hubris on one side or of inferiority on the other. These taken together constitute a rich legacy of human learning that made possible later advances in humanities, science and technology in Europe.
 

Again, despite the later consolidation of the Christian Church in Europe and European encounters with Islam in Spain and Southeast Europe, there were no widespread expressions of a hard religious divide. The more intense and violent divisions were, in fact, within Europe, mainly directed at Christian sects and Jews. As Dr Quinn notes, “preserving the cultural purity of Christendom became increasingly important in Europe even as it became increasingly irrelevant elsewhere”.
 

This began to change under two diverse influences. One, the plague epidemic, the “Black Death”, killed over 100 million people in Europe between 1346 and 1353, and continued to make itself felt through the next century. It restricted long-distance travel and trade, discouraged transnational intellectual engagements, and promoted religious faith and a return to local cultural traditions. The eclectic interest in knowledge beyond Europe reduced considerably, though it did not die away for another three centuries.
 

The other influence came from trans-oceanic exploration. Instead of fostering a broader cultural outlook, Dr Quinn explains that “the maritime kingdoms of Europe and their settler colonies forged a new world together that did not include the people they displaced”. The idea of a unique and superior Western civilisation emerged when exploration led to colonialism and imperial control over what were viewed as inferior subject races.
 

Dr Quinn has offered an important and timely corrective to “Western” hubris. It reminds us that the modern West is itself the product of exchanges with its neighbours in the East over four millennia and that all contemporary achievements have emerged from lively exchanges between our common ancestors.
 

But Western capitals, anxious to continue their political, economic and military hegemony in the face of emerging challenges from new players, are unlikely to pay much heed to this sobering intervention. They are already sharpening the weaponry for the “New Cold War”.

The reviewer is a former diplomat