Interview: Josephine Quinn author, How the World Made the West

Well, I think there were two different things. I’ve been thinking about this book for about 20 years, because every time I read the applications for students applying to Oxford to do Classics, always a number of them will say, I want to do Classics because Greece and Rome are the roots of Western civilization.

And every year I turn to the guy I interview with and I say, I just wish that people would understand that there’s a bigger world out there, and that Greece and Rome is so interesting, but as part of a bigger world and so on. So, for a long time I’ve been thinking I wanted to write a book that was — not so much decentring Greece and Rome as contextualising them — putting them into the bigger context of ancient and medieval history and showing what a huge world of connections and contacts and meetings and so on, wars, explorations, pilgrimages, all these things, contributed to people exchanging ideas that made up new societies, in particular Western society, because that’s the one that my own students tended to be interested in. That’s something I’ve been thinking about for years.

But the thing that actually made me sit down and write the book is realising only about five or six years ago that the way of splitting the world up into civilisations is actually an incredibly recent one. And the word civilisation itself was only invented in the 18th century. It was only in the 19th century that people started to talk about multiple civilisations.

I also realised that ancient history, my own profession, was much more interesting before that. In the 18th century, there are incredible works of ancient history selling huge numbers of copies, immensely popular, being translated into many languages. Some of the absolute bestsellers of the Enlightenment are in ancient history, but they are ancient history of the Carthaginians, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Greeks…

One of the biggest-selling books of the 18th century in England was a thing called the Universal History, which was an attempt to tell the whole history of the world, including the early Americas. A huge thing; 60 different authors, the first editor was an Arabic specialist, and it starts off with Creation of the World by God, of course, because it’s an 18th century kind of book, but it then covers the whole world, assumes that people want to know about the whole world. And suddenly, how did it happen that we went from a situation where if I wanted to pick up a book on ancient history, I would find out about the whole world, to a book where I would just find out about two small Mediterranean societies in them? That was what made me think, OK, I’m going to do this.

So, it’s not, in the end, a book about the whole world, but it is a book about how, even from a Western perspective, you can see a much bigger world in your own history.

You also spoke about now as well there’s a certain civilizational thinking which has led to this problematic, linear narrativization of history. Please elaborate on the idea of ‘the civilisation’, how it came about, how it’s been ossified in the ways in which we look at history as a discipline?

Yes, so civilisation first appears in the 18th century, and it first appears in French, and it’s a term. It’s related to the old term “civility”, it’s an idea of politeness and refinement, but it’s a kind of development of that concept, and it becomes something that people, philosophers, intellectuals, and so on in Europe, believe that everyone should aspire to, even if it means helping people to do that. So, it’s a great favourite of early European imperialists in places like India. James Mill thinks it’s wonderful.

The idea is that all humans are potentially equal; it’s just that we’re helping other people recognise their potential, mostly by stealing all their stuff, but a little bit by helping them with civilisation. So that’s stage one (laughs), which isn’t great, but then stage two is where it gets really dodgy. Stage two is where people start using this plural idea of civilisation. It also starts among French scholars in the 1820s, but it catches on pretty quickly in the 19th century in Europe.

There the idea is that everyone has their own culture, and what that means is that you no longer have to believe that everyone can progress to the same extent. People are very interested in progress in this period. That’s what we’re all supposed to be doing, progressing, improving ourselves, and so on. I don’t know if they’d look back from today and see where that got them, if they would still think that, but that’s the idea.

But once you’ve got multiple civilisations, you can say, well, of course, some of them just don’t have the capacity to progress in the same way. You know, not their fault, of course, it’s just an unfortunate fact about the world that Europeans appear to be best at this civilisation thing, and so European civilisation is really the most impressive one. And that justifies this really kind of brutal turn in European colonialism, not that it wasn’t pretty violent to start off with, but the kinds of things that are happening in the Belgian Congo and so on in the late 19th, early 20th century are really helped along by this kind of thinking.

And it comes along at exactly the same time as scientists are also dividing the world into different races at the same time, who also are seen as having some natural limits of their progress and so on, also put in a hierarchy. And then in the 20th century, the hierarchy disappears. It has come back quite a lot now, but for most of the second half of the 20th century, it wasn’t fashionable to rank civilisations. But there was still a very firm idea that these were separate, they developed relatively separately, and they kind of were a good thing. It wasn’t just a neutral categorisation of history.

It was also a sense that this is the way the world is and the way it should be. And that ends up, I think, in the end of the 20th century with things like Samuel P Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations theory, where you imagine that the world is going to become about these clashing cultures. I think in some parts, at least, that theory is responsible for the fact that that kind of is what’s happened in the 21st century.

Now the world is so much about civilisations. We hear so much about individual civilisations, appeals to Western civilisation, in connection with Israel-Palestine at the moment, that sort of thing. And all of this comes out of an invention.

There’s an interdisciplinary approach to how you go about this scholarly investigation. The Intimacies of Four Continents by Lisa Lowe also delved into how the histories of trade connect to the making of Western liberalism. Are there any other works or authors who, in your opinion, are undertaking similar projects?

I think the book I’ve just been talking about, Brian Catlos’s new book, The Sea in the Middle, is almost a kind of continuation of what I’ve been doing; looking at Mediterranean history as a product of all the societies around it in the kind of medieval into sort of early modern period. That would be the immediate example that I give. But I think it is becoming more common to think about the world in these terms.

Now we understand that if you learn a few more languages, look at a few different archaeologies and so on, bring in the science, you’ll be able to get a fuller picture of the past. What I’d really like is for people to actually think about the future in those terms as well.

We can think about a world without civilisations.

Will such projects help in decentring the West from the discourse around knowledge production and dissemination?

I think it really should because there’s no reason to centre the West in those discussions. There isn’t any reason in the modern world and there isn’t any reason in the past either.

One of the first scripts in the world was invented, disseminated in India. And that’s not something people talk about nearly as much as they talk about the alphabet or the Egyptian hieroglyphs and so on that are much closer to the West. I think it would have looked really different if we were sitting here 1,000 years ago, because then we could have talked about the way that storytelling across the world, certainly from India to the British Isles, if not even further east, it’s really a joint project at that point, that, you know, stories that start off in India, like the Panchatantra, they get to Persia and they have a slight… You know, everything is recontextualised, slightly different lessons, different messages.

But the Persians take up this idea of advice given to a monarch by a wise man through animal fables. And so the Persians use these stories, these original Indian stories, these animal fables, to talk about political theory and so on. Then the Arabic scholars pick it up from the Persians and they write this wonderful book, Kalīla wa-Dimna, about two jackals called Kalila and Dimna, but who originally come from the Indian stories.

It becomes a huge story in the Arabic traditional set of interlocking stories. And then it comes to Europe and it gets translated into Latin and into Catalan and into Spanish and into Italian. And at the same time, it’s being translated into Armenian and Hebrew and so on. So, it’s going off in different directions. You get different versions. Every time someone tells you these stories, it’s going to be a slightly different story.

Some of them end up in Chaucer. So it’s these stories kind of just making their way around the world. It’s not even that they’re really travelling. In this particular case, you could tell a story about how it’s travelling from east to west, but then it’s also travelling back again and around and so on. There’s this whole interlocking world where people are producing these stories together, essentially. I think that’s something that we’ve lost in the modern world and I would love it if we could get it back.

Do you also think the ways in which literary studies curricula is ossified in its categorisation of ancient Greek literature, with the epics and the myths entailed within them belonging to the Mycenaean cycle or the Minoan cycle, gives rise to this historical conception of the West?

Yes, I mean, it’s funny. I think that’s absolutely right. I think, in fact, you know, classics was the first degree, the first humanities degree in Western universities.

A lot of it’s to do with Latin stopping being a living language and kind of finally getting categorised with Greek.

It was just at the time when universities were reorganising themselves and so it became an obvious set of knowledges. It was not really at the time seen as being particularly even about necessarily the Romans and the Greeks, but being more about things that are discussed in these languages that are now no longer living languages. Over time, it really has ossified into an idea that the only classics that really matter are Greek and Roman classics.

There’s sometimes a nod to Gilgamesh. But very rarely are there discussions of any other Asian tradition or African storytelling traditions. So, in the modern world, that has been an unfortunate consequence of the way that university studies developed.

The thing that is really important to me is that the Greeks and Romans themselves did not see the world this way. If people do actually study the Greeks and Romans, one thing they’ll find out very quickly is how interested they are in other people and how they see themselves as enormously interconnected. I mean, you know, you just sort of touch a Greek myth and suddenly all these other… The Phrygians turn up, the Amazons, the Phoenicians.

You know the stories of Europa and the bull? The name of Europe itself is a Phoenician princess who kind of jumps on the back of Zeus appearing as a bull and gets brought to Crete. But then she goes back to Turkey at a certain point with her son.

And so these stories that we’re getting from the Greek and Latin tradition, particularly the Greek tradition, are all about connections and exchange and the importance of entangled pasts and so on. This is a world of immense movement and travel, whether people are travelling as traders or as pilgrims or as imperial bureaucrats, or as soldiers. Soldiers go all around the Mediterranean and well into Europe, well into Asia, well into North Africa with the Roman army.

And those people are often themselves from nowhere near Rome or even necessarily Europe. There are people up on Hadrian’s Wall in the far north of England. Some of them are coming from Europe, some of them are coming from Syria. They’re coming from all over the world.

They’re going such a long way and they’re meeting all these other soldiers from all over the world. So they’re not only kind of engaging with the local populations where they go, they’re also engaging with each other. And then they retire. Soldiers retire early. They have the rest of their lives. Even in antiquity, people could have reasonably long lives.

And then what they’re bringing to the rest of their lives is this knowledge of a very big and entangled world, many languages, many stories. And I think that’s something that… I don’t want to kind of blame the study of classics for the sort of bad situation that we get in because I think you can get so much from the study of classics to make it better.

When you say let’s look towards the future and see how such projects can help us embody that, do you feel that the categories such as the ‘Global South’ or the ‘Global North’, or non-inclusive terms such as ‘globalisation’ also perpetuate then the ‘West and the others’ binary in global political and economic thought?

Yes. The thing is, nobody thought in terms of Western East until the 5th century CE. And St Augustine is really one of the first, certainly the first person to kind of disseminate the idea that you could divide the world into West and East. But he’s not remotely interested in this as a political or ideological or cultural thing.

It’s about categories of knowledge. He’s like, well, there’s the continents, which of course themselves are entirely made up as categories. And Africa is a continent now, since the Suez Canal, but until then it wasn’t a continent.

Europe has never been a continent in real terms. But, you know, people had invented, back in the first millennium BC, this idea of continents. OK, you’ve got that, says Augustine.

But partly he’s trying to show how really coincidental these ideas are. He said, well, you could think of things in terms of continents or you could divide the world into spheres of East and West. And that would be interesting because then you’d have Africa and Europe together and then Asia would be separate and so on. He’s not saying this would help us understand anything about Africa or Europe or Asia. One of the points that comes out of his work is that all of this is arbitrary. So, in a way, East and West were invented precisely to illustrate the kind of arbitrary nature of the sort of boundary that it’s become.

Your upcoming book is on anarchic politics. Can you share a bit more about that project?

Yes. Well, this is really a project that I’m just starting. And what I’m interested in is the ancient Mediterranean. This is not yet quite such a big-scale project in terms of world history.

Going back to the centre of my own studies in the ancient Mediterranean, how many phenomena would look different if you took seriously the idea that anarchy might not just be a modern idea? It’s sort of the opposite of what I’m doing in How the World Made the West, where I’m talking about how we should really understand that civilization is a 19th-century idea. What I want to do with this project is say, what if anarchy isn’t a 19th-century idea? What if people actually are trying to resist power in the ancient Mediterranean by resisting the states? And not just states particularly, but the state itself.

I’m still at a very exploratory stage. But I’m interested in the way that Athenian democracy, for instance, has been seen as being the democracy nonpareil, so all democracies go back to it. This is something you can read a lot about in Greece as well. But if you look at Athenian democracy, it’s very odd.

An awful lot of it works by lottery. So, anyone has a chance of becoming a magistrate. The only people that were elected were the generals, which is such a strange idea in our world.

I think we could imagine electing almost everyone except the generals. But otherwise, almost every position, it’s filled by a lottery system. And so that in itself adds a kind of level of randomness and luck into things, which means that you can’t rely on the kind of coercive power of democracy, where 51% of people want this, so that’s what we’re going to do.

Or as we found out in Britain with Brexit, 52% of people want something, then that’s what we’re going to do. That’s not necessarily pretty good for the 49% or 48% who are left over. What’s really interesting about a system that introduces luck into the equation is that it requires more consensus, more discussion. Everyone has to know a bit about politics, everyone has to have some ideas, because you might be president of the council next week. But it also means that people have to work together. People don’t grow up in political parties or systems that are going to then give them a framework.

When people become involved in politics, perhaps rather to their surprise, they have to work out with other people what they want to do. And I think there are some crazy things about the Athenian system, like the way that people chose which play won the annual dramatic competition. Sometimes, my students will say to me, “Oh, well, this particular play, by Aeschylus or Sophocles, was very popular.” I say, how do you know that? They say, well, it won the competition. I say, do you know how they decided who won the competition? It wasn’t like everyone in the audience was pressing a buzzer or raising their hands and so on. They had an extraordinarily complicated system of choosing representatives of representatives of representatives, and then drawing opinions out of a hat. It wasn’t actually a hat, it was a jar. But in a way that meant that, OK, you couldn’t win if literally nobody thought your play was any good at all. But you could win on a very, very few people happening to like your play and having their votes count in that thing.

And I think that’s so obvious that that’s about luck, not about democratic thinking, that it has to be deliberate. You don’t do that by mistake. I think it’s not just that this happens in Athens, but that it’s a very knowing system.

That’s one example. I could tell you about piracy and just how much of what is now talked about as very proper ancient colonisation, ancient Phoenician colonisation, ancient Greek colonisation, for good, state-sponsored, expanding like a good civilisation should. But, actually, a lot of it is that people decided that it was more fun to be pirates than to be farmers back where they lived.

If you do a map of the Mediterranean and where the first colonies are placed from Phoenicia and from Greece, from the Aegean, you then map it on to where we know historically in later periods the pirates hang out. There’s pretty much a direct corollary. These people are moving to places often on very narrow straits where it is easy to control. Where you, with quite small boats and so on, can control the major trade that’s coming through by harassing it, essentially. So I’m kind of rethinking these early Greek, early Phoenician colonies as sort of pirates, pirate nests (laughs). We’ll see how it goes, but I’m excited about it at the moment.

Simar Bhasin is an independent journalist.