A Guardian Financial Times New Statesman The Rest is Politics and Waterstones Highlight for
2024 'Quinn has done a lot more than reinvent the wheel. What we have here is a truly
encyclopaedic and monumental account of the ancient world' THE TIMES 'A work of great
confidence empathy learning and imagination' RORY STEWART 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Made the West makes the case that understanding societies in isolation is both out-of-date and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.
