Josephine Quinn: Exploring the Origins of the West

Historian Josephine Quinn is the first woman to lead the Ancient History department at the University of Cambridge. She is also an honorary member of Wadham College and an emeritus fellow at Worcester College, both at the University of Oxford. Quinn is a well-known expert on the ancient Mediterranean, and her work questions many traditional ideas about identity, culture, and civilization.

With a global and thoughtful approach, Quinn shows that ancient societies were much more connected than we usually think. In her book In Search of the Phoenicians (2018), she challenges the idea that the Phoenicians were one united group of sailors and traders. Instead, she explains that this identity was created much later for political or cultural reasons. Her latest book, How the World Made the West (2024), looks again at where the idea of “the West” comes from. She argues that it was not created by just Greece and Rome, but by many different cultures through trade, migration, and mixing of ideas.

 

“The real problem is the idea of ‘civilizations,’” Quinn says. “That’s what we should stop teaching. The word ‘civilizations,’ as we use it today, only started in 19th-century Europe, around the same time people started talking about ‘the West.’ It’s easier to treat people badly if you believe they are totally different from you, if you can put them in a separate category. But humans have always wanted to connect with each other. If we stop thinking in terms of separate civilizations, we can see history more clearly.”

Quinn encourages us to look at history as a conversation between people and cultures, not just a series of isolated empires or nations. In the end, her work reminds us that both the past and the present are built on human connections.