How the World Made the West: A 4,000-year History (2024) debunks the myth of the modern West as a self-made miracle with local roots, an idea that erases a much bigger story of the emergence of modern European culture through contact and exchange, journeys and relationships, trade, sex and war. This entangled world, I argued, was largely lost to the nineteenth-century notion of ‘civilizations’, the idea of distinct cultures associated with particular places that emerge, flourish, and then decline largely alone. This lecture traces the gradual emergence of what I call ‘civilizational thinking’ in the West in the maps of the world people make there.

Josephine Quinn is Professor of Ancient History at Oxford University. She trained at Oxford (BA) and UC Berkeley (MA, PhD), and has taught in the US, Italy, and the UK. She has held fellowships at the Getty Villa and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Her books include In Search of the Phoenicians (2018) and How the World Made the West (2024), and she is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. In January 2025 she will take up the Chair in Ancient History at Cambridge University.