Josephine Quinn, a professor of ancient history at Cambridge University, is on a mission to take down what she calls civilizational thinking, which “embeds an assumption of enduring and meaningful difference between human societies that does real damage.” Seeing the world in terms of distinct civilizations—Eastern and Western or Muslim and Christian—dooms people to misunderstanding because it “is not peoples that make history, but people.”

This kind of thinking has brought us “extremists dressed in Spartan helmets or tattooed with Roman slogans [who] appeal to the intrinsic value of a white, Western, and European heritage, under threat of a Great Replacement from without,” Quinn warns in her recent book, How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History.

How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History, Josephine Quinn, Random House, 592 pp., $38, September 2024.

Quinn’s opening attack on civilizational thinking might remind students of international relations of Samuel P. Huntington’s classic, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, which predicted that in the wake of the Soviet Union’s demise, the world would be shaped by conflicts between Western, Latin American, Islamic, Chinese, Hindu, Orthodox Christian, Japanese, African, and perhaps Buddhist civilizations. (Quinn mentions Huntington’s book in How the World Made the West but only once.)

Instead of retelling the rise of the Western world since Columbus sailed the seas, Quinn’s witty and well-researched book focuses on antiquity—ending rather than beginning the story in 1492.

On the face of it, How the World Made the West is a surprising title for a book that says less about how the concept of the West—which Quinn never really defines—came to be than about how regions around the Mediterranean made ancient Greece and Rome; how the Greco-Roman legacy helped remake a wider band of Eurasia; and how, just at the point in the 15th century that Europeans claimed to be rediscovering Greece and Rome, they in fact rejected this heritage in favor of a closed, Christian identity.

Thinking about history in terms of competing civilizations (and associated races) peaked around the start of the 20th century, Quinn writes. J.C. Stobart opened his 1912 bestseller, The Grandeur That Was Rome, with the words “Athens and Rome stand side by side as the parents of Western civilization.” No other civilization mattered.

Even if Quinn’s title is perhaps overambitious, her core claims are largely convincing, and her engaging book might prompt political scientists and international relations theorists to think a bit more about ancient history. Well into the 20th century, European and U.S. political figures and diplomats saw their own times at least partly through the lens of antiquity; think of Winston Churchill in his speeches urging Britain to rearm in the 1930s, casting himself as Demosthenes and Hitler as Philip of Macedon. Their 21st-century successors sometimes seem unaware of much before 1989.

How the World Made the West brings to a wider audience the consensus that has emerged among historians in the last 30 years that the premodern world was one of mobility, interaction, and the sharing of ideas—a world surprisingly like ours. “I want to make the case that it is connections, not civilizations, that drive historical change,” Quinn writes. Traders, missionaries, and migrants carried ideas, luxuries, food, and microbes across vast distances. A Persian king dug a Suez Canal 2,400 years before Ferdinand de Lesseps. Arabs in central Asian oases corrected the observations of Greek astronomers. Roman soldiers on Hadrian’s Wall spiced up food with black pepper from Southeast Asia. There is nothing new about globalization—it goes all the way down.

It is hard to disagree with any of this, and How the World Made the West is grounded in evidence from Persian poetry to ancient DNA. In fact, many archaeologists—me among them—would go further and argue that globalization is as old as humanity itself. But so too are its discontents. Quinn reminds readers that the “interactions” that she focuses on “are by no means always positive or peaceful.” Still, the version of ancient history in her book and in much other recent scholarship is a strangely happy one, in which inclusive people effortlessly share art and ideas—with Europeans in the last half-millennium (and especially the Victorians) cast as a narrow-minded aberration.

In this view, episodes that historians used to see as disasters, such as the destruction of palaces across the eastern Mediterranean around 1200 B.C., are recast. “What happened … was not so much disintegration as simplification,” Quinn writes, because below “the level of the palaces, some things carried on as before, others somewhat better.” Yet excavations show that ordinary people’s houses were one-third smaller after 1200 B.C. compared with before, skeletal studies confirm that their lives were typically several years shorter, and archaeological surveys suggest that the population fell by around half. This was not somewhat better.

Furthermore, civilizational thinking is not a peculiarly Victorian or even Western European neurosis. Anthropologists report that the people they encounter, whether in the American Southwest or the Australian Outback, regularly engage in us-versus-them discourse. This shouldn’t be surprising: Biologists have long identified a genetic basis to ethnocentrism, which they call “kin altruism.” Helping one’s own and hurting outsiders promotes the success of one’s genes in a competitive world.

Openness to outsiders is always controversial, largely because the costs and benefits tend to fall unevenly. Those with the connections, capital, and education to take advantage of such connections prosper, while many others might be left behind. And so in seventh-century B.C. Assyria, pro- and anti-Babylonian factions argued over which gods to follow; in second-century B.C. Rome, Cato the Elder furiously resisted those who would import Greek culture; and in China there was a harsh Confucian backlash against Indian Buddhism.

If premodern people paralleled today’s world in their mobility, interaction, and sharing of ideas, they also did so in their readiness to resist these things, even to the extent of using force. There is nothing new about nativist versus globalist rhetoric and violence. And at least in part, this is because civilizational thinking often does capture something real about the world.

Since 1981, a European consortium called the World Values Survey (WVS) has interviewed around half a million people in 100 countries about their attitudes toward religion, family, authority, trust, tolerance, and physical and economic security. Analyzing WVS data, political scientists Ron Inglehart (who co-founded WVS) and Christian Welzel (who serves on its executive board) write, “socioeconomic development tends to transform people’s basic beliefs and values—and it does so in a roughly predictable fashion.” As incomes rise, people worry less about gods, kin, starvation, and violence, and become more trusting, tolerant, and ready to stand up to authority.

However, Inglehart and Welzel continue, “although socioeconomic development tends to bring predictable changes in people’s worldviews, cultural traditions—such as whether a society has been historically shaped by Protestantism, Confucianism, or communism—continue to show a lasting imprint on a society’s worldview. History matters.”

Civilizational thinking is at the center of this history. Some years ago, I was invited to teach a module on intercultural management in an executive MBA program. Colleagues at my local business school told me that students like to joke that the only thing such courses teach is that different places are different, but in reality these classes teach why different places are different and what to do about it—in effect, civilizational thinking. There are reasons why you want to tell Swiss businesspeople that you’re offering them a win-win proposition but never want to say that to Chinese partners. If you’re going to make a deal, you had better understand these reasons.

As useful as civilizational thinking is in business, it is even more so in foreign policy. Economics and geography seem to conspire to encourage countries from Australia to Japan to reach what terms they can with China and for Ukraine to do the same with Russia, but civilizational thinking tells them not to. In these countries, people are willing to fight (and in some cases die) to be part of Western civilization, not because they have been duped by Victorians—but because civilizational differences matter to them.

Quinn is quite right that the rise of global perspectives has been one of the best developments in the study of premodern history in recent years. This new kind of ancient history provides valuable context for anyone who is usually interested in more recent international relations, and Quinn’s fascinating book is an excellent place to start. However, some of these gains will be lost if premodern history becomes a foundational myth for internationalism and multiculturalism.

Civilizational thinking is not a 19th-century sleight of hand. In fact, it’s difficult to think of more virulent examples of it than the fifth-century B.C. Athenians who defined their own virtue in opposition to Persian vices, the 16th-century B.C. Egyptians who defined themselves against the so-called Asiatic Hyksos, or how China’s 14th-century Ming dynasty defined itself against Mongol invaders. Huntington didn’t pull the clash of civilizations out of thin air.

How the World Made the West is a timely reminder that globalization has been a driving force in history for at least 4,000 years. But parochialism is every bit as old as globalism, and policymakers forget that at their peril.