The west, p.1
The West, page 1
Academic Titles by Naoíse Mac Sweeney
Community Identity and Archaeology
Foundation Myths and Politics in Ancient Ionia
Troy: Myth, City, Icon
Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War: Dialogues on Tradition (with Jan Haywood)
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For Gianni and Valentino
Contents
Author’s Note
Introduction
The Importance of Origins
Chapter One
The Rejection of Purity: Herodotus
Chapter Two
The Asian Europeans: Livilla
Chapter Three
The Global Heirs of Antiquity: Al‑Kindī
Chapter Four
The Asian Europeans Again: Godfrey of Viterbo
Chapter Five
The Illusion of Christendom: Theodore Laskaris
Chapter Six
The Reimagining of Antiquity: Tullia D’Aragona
Chapter Seven
The Path Not Trodden: Safiye Sultan
Chapter Eight
The West and Knowledge: Francis Bacon
Chapter Nine
The West and Empire: Njinga of Angola
Chapter Ten
The West and Politics: Joseph Warren
Chapter Eleven
The West and Race: Phillis Wheatley
Chapter Twelve
The West and Modernity: William Ewart Gladstone
Chapter Thirteen
The West and Its Critics: Edward Said
Chapter Fourteen
The West and Its Rivals: Carrie Lam
Conclusion
The Shape of History
Acknowledgements
Notes
References
Recommended Reading
List of Images
Index
_143644386_
Author’s Note
I have chosen to capitalise the term “Western Civilisation” throughout this book, to emphasise that it is an invented abstract construct, rather than a neutral descriptive term. Similarly, I have also chosen to capitalise “the West” and “Western” when these words relate to abstract politico-cultural concepts which carry connotations of culture and civilisation rather than serving as purely geographical descriptions. Following the same logic, when I use purely geographical descriptions, I have used lowercase to do so. For example, when referring to the central part of the continent of Europe I have used “central Europe” rather than “Central Europe.” I have, however, retained the customary capitalisation for the names of continents.
I have followed a similar principle for racial terminology. Terms such as “Black” or “Yellow” are capitalised, to highlight that these categorisations are invented abstract constructs rather than neutral descriptive terms. Lowercase is used when colour terms are deployed in a purely descriptive manner.
With the spellings of names and places, I have tended to use the commonest Latinate versions for consistency and with the aim of simplifying things for the reader. There are, however, names included in this book which can be rendered in several different ways in the Latin script. In these cases, I have tried to choose the spellings and accentuation that seemed to me to be the most common in the existing Anglophone literature. Unless explicitly attributed, translations are my own.
This book engages with subjects from a range of periods in human history, and from many different cultures and societies. In writing parts of it, I have therefore relied heavily on secondary literature for my research. I have done my best to seek guidance from subject, regional, and period specialists when dealing with areas beyond my own particular expertise. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that all sections of this book will be as accurate, detailed, or nuanced as if they had been written by specialists in each area, and I anticipate that they may contain some errors of fact and interpretation. I do believe, however, that there is value in work such as this book, which aims to offer a broad synthetic overview of a topic. By zooming out to see the bigger picture it is inevitable that sometimes we lose some of the detail and resolution, but there are times when the bigger picture is nonetheless important.
Introduction
The Importance of Origins
Origins matter. When we pose the question “Where do you come from?” what we are really asking is often, “Who are you?” This is true for individuals, families, and entire countries. It is also true of an entity as large and as complex as the West.
This intersection between origins and identity lies at the heart of the culture wars that are currently rocking the West. The last decade has seen the toppling of statues, heated debates over culture and history, and the toxic polarisation of public discourse. The identity crisis within the West is largely a response to wider global patterns. The world is changing, and the foundations of Western dominance are being shaken. In this historical moment we have the opportunity to radically rethink the West and to remake it anew for the future. But we can do this only if we are willing to confront its past. Only by answering the question of where the West comes from can we answer the question of what the West could and should be.
The term “the West” can refer to a geopolitical alignment or a cultural community, usually designating a set of modern nation-states sharing both cultural features and political and economic principles. Amongst these are ideals of representative democracy and market capitalism, a secular state overlying a Judeo-Christian moral substratum, and a psychological tendency towards individualism.[1] Nothing on this list is exclusive to the West or universal across it, yet the regular occurrence of all or most of these attributes together is nonetheless characteristic. The same can be said of many of the more clichéd symbols of westernisation—champagne and Coca-Cola, opera houses and shopping malls. But one particular defining feature of the West is the notion of a common origin resulting in a shared history, a shared heritage, and a shared identity.
The origin myth of the West imagines Western history as unfurling unbroken back in time through Atlantic modernity and the European Enlightenment; back through the brightness of the Renaissance and the darkness of the Middle Ages; back, ultimately, to its origin in the classical worlds of Rome and Greece. This has become the standard version of Western history, both canonical and clichéd. But it is wrong. It is a version of Western history that is both factually incorrect and ideologically driven—a grand narrative that constructs Western history as a thread running singular and unbroken from Plato to NATO,[2] and that is usually referred to by the handy shorthand term “Western Civilisation.”
Just to avoid any confusion, this is not a book about the rise of the West as a cultural or political entity. There are a great many books on that subject already, offering a variety of explanations for how the West achieved global dominance.[3] Instead, this book charts the rise of one particular version of Western history, a version that is now so widely perpetuated and deeply ingrained that it is often accepted unthinkingly, and yet which is both morally problematic and factually wrong. This book unpicks and unpacks the grand narrative known as “Western Civilisation.”
This version of Western history—the grand narrative of Western Civilisation—is all around us. I remember when I became truly conscious of quite how deeply entrenched it was. I was in the reading room of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Looking up by chance at the ceiling I realised uncomfortably that I was being watched, not by the ever-vigilant librarians, but by sixteen life-size bronze statues standing on the gallery beneath the gilded dome. From antiquity there were Moses, Homer, Solon, Herodotus, Plato, and St. Paul. From the Old World of Europe there were Columbus, Michelangelo, Bacon, Shakespeare, Newton, Beethoven, and the historian Edward Gibbon. And from the New World of North America there were the jurist James Kent, the engineer Robert Fulton, and the scientist Joseph Henry. I realised in that instant that the entire setup of the room (not j ust the statues but also the murals that decorated the walls and even the organisation of the bookshelves) was designed to emphasise one thing—that we at the desks were part of an intellectual and cultural tradition that stretched back though the millennia. And our forebears in that tradition were literally watching over us, perhaps in encouragement, perhaps in judgement, as we worked.[4]
Two troubling thoughts hit me. The first instinctive thought was that I was out of place. I felt that someone like me (female, mixed-race) did not belong in a tradition usually imagined in terms of elite white men. I rapidly dismissed this notion as ridiculous (after all, I was at that very moment sitting in a seat of privilege at a reader’s desk), but I was then struck by a much weightier concern. Did these sixteen figures truly represent the past of the West? Was the narrative that linked them an accurate portrayal of Western history?
The standard narrative of Western Civilisation is so omnipresent that most of us rarely stop to think about it, and even less often to question it. Indeed, despite the fact it is being increasingly (and successfully) challenged, this narrative is still all around us. We read about it in school textbooks and works of popular history that, when they set out to explain the history of the West, usually begin it “with the Greeks and the Romans, carry it through the European Middle Ages, focus it on the age of European exploration and conquest, and analyse it closely in the modern world.”[5] The language used of Western Civilisation in such works is usually peppered with genealogical metaphors, describing it in terms of “legacy,” “evolution,” and “ancestry.”[6] We hear time and again that “western civilisation is something we have inherited from the ancient Greeks, the Romans and the Christian Church via the Renaissance, the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment.”[7] This idea of Western Civilisation as a linear cultural inheritance is drummed into us from an early age. One influential series of children’s books prefaces its magical adventures by describing Western Civilisation as “a living force . . . a fire” that first started in Greece; passed from there to Rome; alighted in Germany, France, and Spain before pausing for several centuries in England; finally coming to rest in the United States of America.[8] Origins matter, and where we claim the West came from is one way of characterising what the West fundamentally is.
The West’s imagined cultural genealogy is invoked explicitly in the speeches of populist politicians, the rhetoric of journalists, and the analysis of pundits. It underlies the symbols and vocabulary deployed by people from across the political spectrum. Amongst these, there is often particular emphasis placed on Greco-Roman antiquity as the birthplace of the West, and allusions to ancient Greece and Rome are frequent in contemporary political rhetoric. When a mob stormed the US Capitol building in January 2021 claiming to defend Western values, they carried flags emblazoned with ancient Greek phrases and placards depicting former president Donald Trump as Julius Caesar, while some wore replicas of ancient Greek helmets, and others dressed in full Roman military costume.[9] When the European Union launched an initiative to tackle irregular immigration and refugee flows in 2014, it settled on the name “Operation Mos Maiorum” as a reference to the traditions of ancient Rome.[10] And when Osama bin Laden proclaimed a holy war against the West in 2004, he called on Muslims to “resist the new Rome.”[11] But this narrative of Western Civilisation is not just recounted in historical works and invoked in political contexts. It is also all around us, part of the fabric of our everyday lives. We watch it played out in movies and on television, coded into the choices of casting directors, costume designers, and screen composers. We encounter it enshrined in stone not only at the Library of Congress, but also in the neoclassical architecture of both imperial capitals and colonial buildings around the world.[12] It is so pervasive that most of us simply take it for granted. But is it true?
These were the thoughts that raced through my head that rainy afternoon in Washington, DC. By that point, I had spent the best part of two decades studying precisely these imagined origins of the West, in which is invested so much of Western identity. My particular research focus was on how people in the ancient Greek world understood their own origins, investigating the mythical genealogies they constructed, the ancestor cults where they worshipped, and the stories they told of migrations and foundations. While I felt (and indeed still do feel) privileged to be in my profession, in that moment I was deeply uncomfortable. I realised that I was complicit in upholding an intellectual artifice that was both ideologically and factually dubious—the grand narrative of Western Civilisation. From that point on, I began to repurpose the methods of analysis that I had employed for exploring identities and origins in antiquity, and applying them to the modern world around me. This book is the result.
It argues two things. The first is that the grand narrative of Western Civilisation is factually wrong. The modern West does not have a clear and simple origin in classical antiquity and did not develop through an unbroken and singular lineage from there through medieval Christendom, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment to modernity. As the academic and philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has pointed out, Western identity and culture were not passed down, like a “golden nugget,” along this line.[13] Problems with this grand narrative were first identified more than a century ago, and the evidence against it is now overwhelming. Today, all serious historians and archaeologists acknowledge that the cross-fertilisation of “Western” and “non-Western” cultures happened throughout human history, and that the modern West owes much of its cultural DNA to a wide range of non-European and non-white forebears.[14] Yet the nature and nuances of these cultural interactions remain to be fully untangled, and the shape of a new grand narrative to replace that of Western Civilisation is yet to emerge. Contributing to this work was part of my motivation for writing this book. The rest of my motivation came from reflecting on the troubling fact that all the historical evidence amassed and all the scholarly consensus against the grand narrative of Western Civilisation have had relatively little impact on the wider public consciousness. The narrative remains ubiquitous in contemporary Western culture. Why do we (that is, Western societies, broadly speaking) still cling so doggedly to a vision of history that has been so thoroughly discredited?
The second main argument of this book is that the invention, popularisation, and longevity of the grand narrative of Western Civilisation all stem from its ideological utility. The narrative exists—and continues to exist today long after its factual basis has been thoroughly disproved—because it serves a purpose. As a conceptual framework, it has provided a justification for Western expansion, imperialism, and ongoing systems of white racial dominance. This does not mean that the grand narrative of Western Civilisation is the brainchild of some evil mastermind, cynically scheming to engineer a false view of history to further their cause. Quite the opposite. Rather, the weaving of this story was piecemeal and haphazard, owing as much to serendipity as to calculation. It is a grand narrative comprised of many micronarratives, interlinked and interleaved, all of which have been separately deployed in the service of specific political ends. They include the idea of classical Athens as a beacon of democracy, used as a foundation charter for modern Western democracy;[15] the notion of the fundamental Europeanness of ancient Romans as a basis for shared European heritage;[16] and the myth of the Crusades as a simple clash of civilisations between Christendom and Islam, justifying anti-Western jihad on one side and the “War on Terror” on the other.[17] The ideological utility of these individual micronarratives, and others like them, is well documented; each has been told because it fits the expectations and ideals of the particular teller. Individually, these stories are various and fascinating, and I hope that readers will enjoy exploring some of their dazzling diversity in the pages of this book. Collectively, however, they make up the grand narrative of Western Civilisation and serve as the origin myth of the West.[18]
The West is not, of course, the only sociopolitical entity that has retrospectively constructed a narrative of its past that fits its needs and self-image in the present. The politicised reimagining of history is in fact pretty standard practice and has been going on as long as history itself has been written (and probably even long before this, through oral histories and community storytelling). It was said that in Athens in the sixth century BCE, lines were added to the Homeric Iliad to imply that Athens had controlled the island of Aegina in the age of heroes. Unsurprisingly, these lines were inserted at precisely the time that Athens was trying to control Aegina.[19] More recently, after the modern nation-state of Turkey was proclaimed in 1923, a complex historical and archaeological programme, known as the “Turkish History Thesis,” was put into place to strengthen the identification between Turkishness and the landmass of Anatolia.[20] More recently still, under the leadership of Xi Jinping, a new official narrative about China’s role in the Second World War has been aggressively promoted, in ways that may be worrying or encouraging depending on your point of view.[21] And in July 2021, as the Russian army massed at the Ukrainian border in advance of a military invasion, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, published a treatise arguing the historical unity of the Russian and the Ukrainian peoples.
