Cambridge professor wants to break down cultural blocs

According to University of Cambridge ancient history professor Josephine Quinn, the idea of a world divided into cultural blocs is an untenable one that is best consigned to the ash heap of history.

- Clement Yong

For her, civilisational thinking— resorting to shorthand like Western, Eastern or even Russian culture—makes little sense. To borrow the title of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's 2022 hit comedy, everything is actually everywhere all at once.

Over Zoom, she muses on civilisational thinking's recent provenance: "At the same time as scholars were inventing this idea of discrete civilisations in the 19th century, they were also inventing the idea of races and these two concepts really support each other—biological distinctiveness and cultural distinctiveness.

"They really help each other to build, by the end of the 19th century, some quite horrific ideas about hierarchies of human and soul."

Her book, How The World Made The West, traverses 3,000 years from 2,000BC Byblos in the Levant to AD1,349 Aleppo in present-day Syria.

It stretches developments so far back to distil culture into the fundamental building blocks of human development—the wheel from the Eurasian Steppe, bronze-making requiring tin from southwest Iran and participatory forms of governments from Assyria.

Her cosmopolitanism is a rebuke to 21st-century far-right movements that claim the purity of a superior ancient Greek or Roman civilisation. These had no exclusive claim to the advancements that these supremacist movements are so proud of. Prof Quinn says there is also no direct link between ancient Greece and Rome and the modern "West".