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The West: A New History of an Old Idea
Does Western civilization really stretch back from modernity through the Enlightenment to the classical glories of Greece and Rome? We learn this story of Western history at school and take it for granted, but is it true?
In this bold, story-driven retelling of global history, prize-winning historian Naoise Mac Sweeny debunks the myths and origin stories that underpin the history we thought we knew. Told through nine fascinating figures who each played a role in the creation of the Western idea -- from Herodotus a mixed-race refugee, to Mary Fisher, the Yorkshire housemaid who charmed an Ottoman sultan, and from Gladstone, with his private passion for epic poetry, to the medieval Arab scholar Al-Kindi - the subjects are a mind-expanding blend of unsung heroes and familiar faces viewed afresh. Each life tells us something unexpected about the age in which it was lived and offers us a piece of the puzzle of how the modern idea of the West developed - and why we've misunderstood it for too long.
As a new world order emerges from the shocks of pandemics and populism, to chart a future for the West we must properly understand its past.
In this bold, story-driven retelling of global history, prize-winning historian Naoise Mac Sweeny debunks the myths and origin stories that underpin the history we thought we knew. Told through nine fascinating figures who each played a role in the creation of the Western idea -- from Herodotus a mixed-race refugee, to Mary Fisher, the Yorkshire housemaid who charmed an Ottoman sultan, and from Gladstone, with his private passion for epic poetry, to the medieval Arab scholar Al-Kindi - the subjects are a mind-expanding blend of unsung heroes and familiar faces viewed afresh. Each life tells us something unexpected about the age in which it was lived and offers us a piece of the puzzle of how the modern idea of the West developed - and why we've misunderstood it for too long.
As a new world order emerges from the shocks of pandemics and populism, to chart a future for the West we must properly understand its past.
448 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 2, 2023
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4827 people want to read
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August 29, 2025
Mac Sweeney's argument is, to oversimplify, that the history of the term "West," and of the "West" itself, is grossly misrepresented in the common narrative: origins in Greece and Rome, followed by Judeo-Christianity, Europe, Enlightenment, etc. She makes her case by focusing each chapter on a historical figure whose life and views demonstrate how the idea of "the West" arose, which parts of the world understood themselves to be part of that West, and how those parts of the world thought of their own history.
Some of the persons Mac Sweeney instantiates are well known even to non-historians: Herodotus, Francis Bacon, Phillis Wheatley, Edward Said. Others will be less familiar to general readers: Tullia d'Aragona, al-Kindi, Njinga of Angola (aspects of whose story will ring a bell for anyone who's seen The Woman King, although Njinga was much less appealing as a person than the movie's protagonists are). Chapter by chapter, historical figure by historical figure, year by year, century by century, the common understanding of the "West"'s origins and what regions were included under that rubric shifts and shifts again.
The short answer to whether Mac Sweeney makes her case is yes. The West certainly undid my conception of this intellectual and political history; most people in "the West," probably, need the corrective supplied by works like this, along with the books, essays, and podcasts produced by historians like those associated with Medievalists.net (undermining, among other idiocies, the white-nationalist narrative of the European Middle Ages as all white and uninfluenced by Africa and Asia) (yes, that was a plug!).
I dinged a star for two reasons. The first is that although each chapter builds on the previous one, and there is of course an intellectual throughline, the overall effect is hard going for a general reader like me. With each chapter we face a whole new set of historical names and events, and since most of those are unfamiliar, it's difficult to keep them straight in one's mind. This may have been unavoidable given the nature of Mac Sweeney's argument.
The second reason is the occasional points where Mac Sweeney goes beyond facts. Her case is a strong one, so there's no need for "likely" to do as much work as it sometimes has to, nor for speculations about anyone's inner life. To take just examples from the first chapter: Herodotus no longer "felt at home" in a particular place; he "was evoking the world of his own youth"; he "would have shuddered" at a specific misconception. This kind of thing produces a weird pop-history effect that jars against the careful, serious argument being made, an argument that doesn't need dressing up.
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of this valuable book.
ETA: My response to an obviously r@c15t comment was deleted by GR.
So I've deleted that comment. Suffice it to say that the narrative in which Europe used to be all white and uninfluenced by any other quarter of the world has only been debunked 500 gazillion times and that no serious historian accepts it.
Some of the persons Mac Sweeney instantiates are well known even to non-historians: Herodotus, Francis Bacon, Phillis Wheatley, Edward Said. Others will be less familiar to general readers: Tullia d'Aragona, al-Kindi, Njinga of Angola (aspects of whose story will ring a bell for anyone who's seen The Woman King, although Njinga was much less appealing as a person than the movie's protagonists are). Chapter by chapter, historical figure by historical figure, year by year, century by century, the common understanding of the "West"'s origins and what regions were included under that rubric shifts and shifts again.
The short answer to whether Mac Sweeney makes her case is yes. The West certainly undid my conception of this intellectual and political history; most people in "the West," probably, need the corrective supplied by works like this, along with the books, essays, and podcasts produced by historians like those associated with Medievalists.net (undermining, among other idiocies, the white-nationalist narrative of the European Middle Ages as all white and uninfluenced by Africa and Asia) (yes, that was a plug!).
I dinged a star for two reasons. The first is that although each chapter builds on the previous one, and there is of course an intellectual throughline, the overall effect is hard going for a general reader like me. With each chapter we face a whole new set of historical names and events, and since most of those are unfamiliar, it's difficult to keep them straight in one's mind. This may have been unavoidable given the nature of Mac Sweeney's argument.
The second reason is the occasional points where Mac Sweeney goes beyond facts. Her case is a strong one, so there's no need for "likely" to do as much work as it sometimes has to, nor for speculations about anyone's inner life. To take just examples from the first chapter: Herodotus no longer "felt at home" in a particular place; he "was evoking the world of his own youth"; he "would have shuddered" at a specific misconception. This kind of thing produces a weird pop-history effect that jars against the careful, serious argument being made, an argument that doesn't need dressing up.
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of this valuable book.
ETA: My response to an obviously r@c15t comment was deleted by GR.
So I've deleted that comment. Suffice it to say that the narrative in which Europe used to be all white and uninfluenced by any other quarter of the world has only been debunked 500 gazillion times and that no serious historian accepts it.
July 20, 2023
My problem is not with the subject matter of the book, namely that the concept of western civilization as a coherent and unbroken civilization stretching from Homer to the present day geopolitical west is not historically supported. Not many people would argue with that as an academic matter. At times it even begins to be a bit strawmanned. This is my first minor issue. This is important because she attempts to debunk the view of western civilization as a bundled whole without pointing out if this is a position ACTUALLY held by anyone academically.
This brings me to my second minor problem. Like I said earlier, her thesis is academically sound (if you manage to extract it from the piles of minor profiles), but she does not do a good enough job of differentiating the academic claims of western civilization from the polemical/political claims. In other words, she treats every claim (ranging from the claims of a medieval Greek to the signs carried by the Jan 6th Trump supporters) as though they should all be scrutinized studiously for historical accuracy. When I hear a politician say that the western civilization is under attack by migrants and refugees, for example, I do not attempt to debunk it by asking them to explain western civilization historically. I understand it to be a polemical concept which must be countered polemically. I understand it the same way I understand anything modified by the adjective ‘Judeo-Christian’. They are not historically coherent by the standards of strict history; they are polemical concepts. They may be benign or dangerous depending on who wields them, but they are only polemical. They are porous and malleable depending on the use for which it is to be deployed.
My MAIN problem is that the book is unnecessarily inflated by the very way she chose to structure the book. Rather than structure it topically by arguments, she chose to arrange it under various historical persons. This caused much of the book to be devoted to mini-profiles of people who should have no place in a book like this. This is not because historical figures such as Livilla or Tullia D’Aragona or Theodore Laskaris or Godfrey of Viterbo are not important. If they interest me, I may choose to purchase biographies of their lives. The issue is that in a book that attempts to survey a concept which stretches back at least 2400 years, structuring the book by relatively obscure persons, and burying the topic of each chapter under piles of irrelevant and prolonged profiles made the book a chore. Theodore Laskaris might be an interesting person as the subject of a biography, but in a book about the grand narrative of western civilization, why do I need to know that his mother suffered a hunting accident that prevented her from having any more children and that this must have made him precious in the eyes of his parents? Tullia D’Aragona’s works might also be interesting but what do I care how she is described in “The Pricelist of the Whores of Babylon?”
At the end of the book she notes that “the biographies I have presented to you in this book are ones I have selected, based on my own personal experiences and interests. I imagine that you might select differently should you undertake a similar exercise.” Fair enough. She then goes on to say that, “this book is therefore necessarily my own subjective interpretation of Western history, focused not on great men like those of Spofford and Bacon, but rather on individuals whose lives I feel encapsulated something of the Zeitgeist of their age.” Here then is the problem; by consciously avoiding “great men”, and choosing individuals who encapsulated their zeitgeist, she includes people who demonstrably did not encapsulate the topic of the chapters. In the chapter on Livilla, for instance, the focus was on how the Romans (who are wielded as weapons in the polemics of western civilization) are really from the east, being (according to Virgil) descendants of refugees from Troy. As important as Livilla might be to her zeitgeist, her profile was irrelevant to the crucial point of the chapter. I may wish to know about Tullia as an example of someone who captured the zeitgeist of her time, but in a chapter that attempts to discuss whether the Renaissance was really a rebirth of classical Greco-Roman art and culture or an unconnected “birth”, Tullia’s profile was irrelevant.
Sometimes she begins a chapter by hinting at a topic she wishes to cover through the particular person profiled, but most times she gets so lost in the thickets of these unnecessary profiles that she only returns to the proposed topic in the last few pages of the chapter. The chapters on Livilia, Godfrey of Viterbo, Tullia D’Aragona, Joseph Warren, Francis Bacon, and Njinga of Angola were the most baffling in this regard.
I recommend it very hesitantly. I just wish an abridged version, stripped of irrelevance, and reduced to the essentials, would be issued.
This brings me to my second minor problem. Like I said earlier, her thesis is academically sound (if you manage to extract it from the piles of minor profiles), but she does not do a good enough job of differentiating the academic claims of western civilization from the polemical/political claims. In other words, she treats every claim (ranging from the claims of a medieval Greek to the signs carried by the Jan 6th Trump supporters) as though they should all be scrutinized studiously for historical accuracy. When I hear a politician say that the western civilization is under attack by migrants and refugees, for example, I do not attempt to debunk it by asking them to explain western civilization historically. I understand it to be a polemical concept which must be countered polemically. I understand it the same way I understand anything modified by the adjective ‘Judeo-Christian’. They are not historically coherent by the standards of strict history; they are polemical concepts. They may be benign or dangerous depending on who wields them, but they are only polemical. They are porous and malleable depending on the use for which it is to be deployed.
My MAIN problem is that the book is unnecessarily inflated by the very way she chose to structure the book. Rather than structure it topically by arguments, she chose to arrange it under various historical persons. This caused much of the book to be devoted to mini-profiles of people who should have no place in a book like this. This is not because historical figures such as Livilla or Tullia D’Aragona or Theodore Laskaris or Godfrey of Viterbo are not important. If they interest me, I may choose to purchase biographies of their lives. The issue is that in a book that attempts to survey a concept which stretches back at least 2400 years, structuring the book by relatively obscure persons, and burying the topic of each chapter under piles of irrelevant and prolonged profiles made the book a chore. Theodore Laskaris might be an interesting person as the subject of a biography, but in a book about the grand narrative of western civilization, why do I need to know that his mother suffered a hunting accident that prevented her from having any more children and that this must have made him precious in the eyes of his parents? Tullia D’Aragona’s works might also be interesting but what do I care how she is described in “The Pricelist of the Whores of Babylon?”
At the end of the book she notes that “the biographies I have presented to you in this book are ones I have selected, based on my own personal experiences and interests. I imagine that you might select differently should you undertake a similar exercise.” Fair enough. She then goes on to say that, “this book is therefore necessarily my own subjective interpretation of Western history, focused not on great men like those of Spofford and Bacon, but rather on individuals whose lives I feel encapsulated something of the Zeitgeist of their age.” Here then is the problem; by consciously avoiding “great men”, and choosing individuals who encapsulated their zeitgeist, she includes people who demonstrably did not encapsulate the topic of the chapters. In the chapter on Livilla, for instance, the focus was on how the Romans (who are wielded as weapons in the polemics of western civilization) are really from the east, being (according to Virgil) descendants of refugees from Troy. As important as Livilla might be to her zeitgeist, her profile was irrelevant to the crucial point of the chapter. I may wish to know about Tullia as an example of someone who captured the zeitgeist of her time, but in a chapter that attempts to discuss whether the Renaissance was really a rebirth of classical Greco-Roman art and culture or an unconnected “birth”, Tullia’s profile was irrelevant.
Sometimes she begins a chapter by hinting at a topic she wishes to cover through the particular person profiled, but most times she gets so lost in the thickets of these unnecessary profiles that she only returns to the proposed topic in the last few pages of the chapter. The chapters on Livilia, Godfrey of Viterbo, Tullia D’Aragona, Joseph Warren, Francis Bacon, and Njinga of Angola were the most baffling in this regard.
I recommend it very hesitantly. I just wish an abridged version, stripped of irrelevance, and reduced to the essentials, would be issued.
April 25, 2023
The discourse of The West is something I've had to reckon with a lot recently during the course of my undergrad and post-grad dissertations. It's a subject fraught with contradictions and, critically, is an invented construct.
Typically the go to critique of the discourse is Said's Orientalism - which features in this book - but this provides a chronological journey through the development of the idea of the west through fourteen different people. This is about the development of the idea throughout all of history rather than just the 18th-20th century view of it as Said covers.
This is a really interesting introduction to thinking about The West and to begin to introduce some nuance into our understanding of society and civilization.
Typically the go to critique of the discourse is Said's Orientalism - which features in this book - but this provides a chronological journey through the development of the idea of the west through fourteen different people. This is about the development of the idea throughout all of history rather than just the 18th-20th century view of it as Said covers.
This is a really interesting introduction to thinking about The West and to begin to introduce some nuance into our understanding of society and civilization.
November 25, 2023
“The West” (2023) é um livro da arqueóloga Naoíse Mac Sweeney que pretende atacar a ideia de que existe uma civilização europeia nascida dos escombros da Antiga Grécia e Antiga Roma e que se espalhou depois pelo continente americano. O ataque começa pelo facto da Grécia não ter sido um estado uno, e ter defendido ideias completamente incompatíveis com as de uma Roma Imperial. Fala-se na ideia de que a Grécia e Roma não surgiram sozinhas, estiveram conectadas à Ásia e África, sem o que não se teriam afirmado.
Nada disto é contradito por qualquer académico na definição de uma cultura europeia...
Comentário completo: https://experiencianarrativa.wordpres...
Nada disto é contradito por qualquer académico na definição de uma cultura europeia...
Comentário completo: https://experiencianarrativa.wordpres...
March 25, 2023
Despite all the arguments over the last three decades over what is excluded from “Western culture” and what “the West” can gain from greater interaction and appreciation of other cultures, very little has changed in the way most in the West view history. As I was taught in school, most students are still taught that Ancient Greece and Rome represent the beginnings of Western civilization, the “dark ages” represent a temporary lose of that heritage and the Renaissance and Enlightenment represented Western cultures renewed appreciation for its roots. Mac Sweeney, however, sets out to demonstrate that our view of “Western” origins as separate from the rest of the world is simply a convenient myth. Fascinating and clear writing. Highly recommended.
February 23, 2023
Super cool cover! Unfortunately, reads more like a textbook, I prefer novels. Had plenty of textbooks while working on doctorate. Anyways, someone else might appreciate this more than I. Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.
August 10, 2023
A bad read. Mac Sweeney doesn't have the light touch of a true master. Instead, this feels like a plodding effort by a dogged scholar with the bit between her teeth. Revisionist history at its least impressive.
September 19, 2024
It was an interesting premise, and I did like the character biographies, but I think it's really hard to do something that's both nonfiction and historical. She does okay at it, but honestly I do think the last chapter had all the information that she wanted to present in a much more concise point than reading her make the same point 14 times over.
July 8, 2023
كتاب يقوم على نقض السردية الكبرى للغرب وكأنه كيان منفصل عن العالم، السردية التي تقول أن الحضارة انتقلت من الاغريق إلى الرومان ثم النهظة وعصر التنوير قبل أن تحط اخيرا في أوروبا الغربية وامريكا لاحقا، لذلك العرب متحضر بينما الآخر همجي ولا بد أن يتم قمعه
الكتاب يعتمد على ١٤ شخصية ليسوا بالضرورة معروفين حاليا ولكن كان لهم أثر في وقت ما لتحكي كيف تغيرت السردية من عهد الاغريق إلى الحين
كتاب مهم
"إن إعادة تخيل التاريخ هو عمل سياسي وهو في الواقع ممارسة معيارية إلى حدٍ ما ، والعملية مستمرة منذ بدأ كتابة التاريخ نفسه (وربما حتى قبل ذلك بوقت طويل ، من خلال الروايات الشفوية ورواية القصص المجتمعية).
قيل أنه في أثينا في القرن السادس قبل الميلاد ، تمت إضافة نصوص إلى الإلياذه للإشارة إلى أن أثينا سيطرت على جزيرة ايجينا في عصر الأبطال. مما لا يثير الدهشة ، تم إدخال هذه النصوص في الوقت الذي كانت فيه أثينا تحاول السيطرة على إيجينا.
بعد إعلان الدولة القومية الحديثة لتركيا في عام 1923 ، تم وضع برنامج تاريخي وأثري معقد ، يُعرف باسم "أطروحة التاريخ التركي" ، لتعزيز التماثل بين التركية وأرض الأناضول.
في الآونة الأخيرة ، تحت قيادة شي جين بينغ ، تم الترويج لرواية رسمية جديدة حول دور الصين في الحرب العالمية الثانية بقوة ، بطرق قد تكون مقلقة أو مشجعة اعتمادًا على وجهة نظرك.
وفي يوليو 2021 ، عندما احتشد الجيش الروسي على الحدود الأوكرانية قبل الغزو العسكري ، نشر الرئيس الروسي ، فلاديمير بوتين ، مقالاً يطرح فيه الوحدة التاريخية للشعبين الروسي والأوكراني.
ليس عليك بالضرورة أن تكون خبيثًا أو كاذبًا حتى ترغب في إعادة كتابة التاريخ وفقًا لأجندتك السياسية ، ولا يجب عليك بالضرورة تزوير التاريخ للقيام بذلك.
يمكن أن تأخذ إعادة كتابة الماضي أيضًا شكل اختيار تضمين الحقائق التي تمت كتابتها مسبقًا من رواية تقليدية"
الكتاب يعتمد على ١٤ شخصية ليسوا بالضرورة معروفين حاليا ولكن كان لهم أثر في وقت ما لتحكي كيف تغيرت السردية من عهد الاغريق إلى الحين
كتاب مهم
"إن إعادة تخيل التاريخ هو عمل سياسي وهو في الواقع ممارسة معيارية إلى حدٍ ما ، والعملية مستمرة منذ بدأ كتابة التاريخ نفسه (وربما حتى قبل ذلك بوقت طويل ، من خلال الروايات الشفوية ورواية القصص المجتمعية).
قيل أنه في أثينا في القرن السادس قبل الميلاد ، تمت إضافة نصوص إلى الإلياذه للإشارة إلى أن أثينا سيطرت على جزيرة ايجينا في عصر الأبطال. مما لا يثير الدهشة ، تم إدخال هذه النصوص في الوقت الذي كانت فيه أثينا تحاول السيطرة على إيجينا.
بعد إعلان الدولة القومية الحديثة لتركيا في عام 1923 ، تم وضع برنامج تاريخي وأثري معقد ، يُعرف باسم "أطروحة التاريخ التركي" ، لتعزيز التماثل بين التركية وأرض الأناضول.
في الآونة الأخيرة ، تحت قيادة شي جين بينغ ، تم الترويج لرواية رسمية جديدة حول دور الصين في الحرب العالمية الثانية بقوة ، بطرق قد تكون مقلقة أو مشجعة اعتمادًا على وجهة نظرك.
وفي يوليو 2021 ، عندما احتشد الجيش الروسي على الحدود الأوكرانية قبل الغزو العسكري ، نشر الرئيس الروسي ، فلاديمير بوتين ، مقالاً يطرح فيه الوحدة التاريخية للشعبين الروسي والأوكراني.
ليس عليك بالضرورة أن تكون خبيثًا أو كاذبًا حتى ترغب في إعادة كتابة التاريخ وفقًا لأجندتك السياسية ، ولا يجب عليك بالضرورة تزوير التاريخ للقيام بذلك.
يمكن أن تأخذ إعادة كتابة الماضي أيضًا شكل اختيار تضمين الحقائق التي تمت كتابتها مسبقًا من رواية تقليدية"
May 25, 2023
I suspect most of us in the West have bought into the idea that we are the heirs to Greece and Rome before realising it doesn't really fit reality. Mac Sweeney explores what constitutes The West using an eclectic range of historical figures. I'll put my hands up and admit a few were unknown to me, probably as many being female they didn't exist in most history books until recently. The book is most timely as the liberal integrationist model is under sustained attack from within by the far right and internationally by Putin and Xi, both straightforward racists. Xi's ideas of racial purity are the most worrying as the multicultural world is doomed if his China succeeds. Thought provoking throughout, I hope this doesn't get lost.
July 18, 2023
If you get beyond the Author's Note (which I couldn't) let me know how it went ...
Read
August 31, 2023Bravo!
I absolutely loved her analyses and critiques – she methodically examined the origins of thought and concepts surrounding Western Civilization and its evolution throughout history, including its omnipresent indoctrination upon its citizens via the educational system, political agenda, and the varied forms of media. Granted, not all will agree with her; but I loved reading her viewpoints.
This novel looks at the ideologies and principles of today’s Western stance as it attempts to move away from white racial superiority and imperialism to one that values democracy and liberalism. The author chooses 14 individuals from varying eras to dispel inaccuracies – starting with the classical world (with Herodotus, a reintor of history and Livilla, granddaughter of Emperor Augustus) and moves through the Dark Ages, Renaissance, etc (including Francis Bacon, Njinga of Angola, and my namesake Phillis Wheatley) to land at today’s views and perceptions. Basically - how it starts with narratives to explain how it started and how we got here (today).
Recommended for historians, political scientists, sociologists, etc. - there is a lot to be gained and pondered in this offering.
Thanks to the publisher, Penguin Group, Dutton, and NetGalley for an opportunity to review.
I absolutely loved her analyses and critiques – she methodically examined the origins of thought and concepts surrounding Western Civilization and its evolution throughout history, including its omnipresent indoctrination upon its citizens via the educational system, political agenda, and the varied forms of media. Granted, not all will agree with her; but I loved reading her viewpoints.
This novel looks at the ideologies and principles of today’s Western stance as it attempts to move away from white racial superiority and imperialism to one that values democracy and liberalism. The author chooses 14 individuals from varying eras to dispel inaccuracies – starting with the classical world (with Herodotus, a reintor of history and Livilla, granddaughter of Emperor Augustus) and moves through the Dark Ages, Renaissance, etc (including Francis Bacon, Njinga of Angola, and my namesake Phillis Wheatley) to land at today’s views and perceptions. Basically - how it starts with narratives to explain how it started and how we got here (today).
Recommended for historians, political scientists, sociologists, etc. - there is a lot to be gained and pondered in this offering.
Thanks to the publisher, Penguin Group, Dutton, and NetGalley for an opportunity to review.
April 19, 2023
The publisher's blurb says that this is a "radical new account", but this is actually a fairly measured critique of the idea of a Western Tradition from "Plato to NATO" that doesn't overreach, except perhaps in thinking its critique is more radical than it is. The idea that the historical and religious stories we tell are fictions designed to bind us to greater causes, whether they are nefarious (e.g. imperialism and racial hierarchy) or benevolent (e.g. human rights and free inquiry) doesn't strike me as particularly shocking. But while the arguments may not be shocking, they are always interesting and this book captivated me.
The book particularly shines in the way it uses 14 lives to back up its central arguments: that the "West's" claim to being the inheritors of the Greek and Roman civilizations of antiquity is a relatively new idea; that both "Western" and "Eastern" cultures had laid claim to Greek or Roman legacies (but rarely both); and that the Greek and Roman civilizations weren't all that "Western" to begin with, but were very multicultural societies. I hadn't heard of most of the people profiled, and even when I had (e.g. Francis Bacon, Edward Said) there was plenty to learn.
I read this almost immediately after reading Humanly Possible by Sarah Bakewell - a history of 700 years of mostly "Western" humanism - and I couldn't imagine a better pairing. At first I thought The West would be a useful corrective to Humanly Possible which largely embraces the "Western" tradition, but it turns out these two books are complementary in that both honor the processes of self-criticism and disputation of received wisdom that are among the best aspects of that tradition.
Many thanks to Net Galley for providing an egalley.
The book particularly shines in the way it uses 14 lives to back up its central arguments: that the "West's" claim to being the inheritors of the Greek and Roman civilizations of antiquity is a relatively new idea; that both "Western" and "Eastern" cultures had laid claim to Greek or Roman legacies (but rarely both); and that the Greek and Roman civilizations weren't all that "Western" to begin with, but were very multicultural societies. I hadn't heard of most of the people profiled, and even when I had (e.g. Francis Bacon, Edward Said) there was plenty to learn.
I read this almost immediately after reading Humanly Possible by Sarah Bakewell - a history of 700 years of mostly "Western" humanism - and I couldn't imagine a better pairing. At first I thought The West would be a useful corrective to Humanly Possible which largely embraces the "Western" tradition, but it turns out these two books are complementary in that both honor the processes of self-criticism and disputation of received wisdom that are among the best aspects of that tradition.
Many thanks to Net Galley for providing an egalley.
June 6, 2023
Definitely struggled with this one. I'll caveat this review with saying that the subject matter isn't something that I am extremely interested in, but I received an advance copy of this and I'm willing to give anything a try - especially if I can learn something from it. I had a hard time really following where the author was going with the book. Maybe just too complex for me or too much of a subject I don't know enough about.
April 23, 2023
Some excellent points are well made in the book but her writing gets a bit convoluted at times which can detract from the narrative.
While interesting I found her “factionalized” introductions to most chapters out of place in a history book.
While interesting I found her “factionalized” introductions to most chapters out of place in a history book.
July 26, 2023
Extremely readable history, and full of good stuff about significant figures who represent "civilization" but are not traditional Greco-Roman heroes of the Enlightenment. Sweeney's extensive research and passionate arguments in favor of figures such as Herodotus, Njinga of Angola and Phillis Wheatley make for entertaining reading, though her insistence on changing aspects of Big History can reach too far occasionally. I know a few medievalists who might quarrel with her separating that era from any links to traditional classical philosophy - I'm not sure Godrey of Viturbo was such a rebel as to reject the whole structure of religious Eurocentrism of his -or that Livilla of Rome was quite the trailblazer her whole chapter struggles to make her out to be. But it is particularly enlightening to read how past thinkers like Al-Kindi used "Western" theories to compare and contrast with fundamental Islamic principles. A good start for those who want to revisit the roots of their thinking about Western Civ and widen their viewpoint, even a little.
January 11, 2025
This book struggled to tell a coherent story with how they structured the story. The author really wanted to break down and dissect what “western culture” means. She does this by choosing 14 historic figures, who at times seem very randomly chosen. Almost every chapter would be a pickle ball match back and forth between the academic discussion of western identity and the characters, but often struggled to make her chosen subjects interesting or impactful enough and also struggled to thread the story all the way through. At times the writing felt like a college essay, where she was given a topic and a list of sources she could use. Language was very simple and lacked real insight. This was an academic discussion that is quite important, but the author struggled to be translate into an interesting popular history book.
June 3, 2023
Fascinating read but slightly incoherent, at least for me. I felt like I followed it when I read it but that’s as much as I can say. Well, the Greco-Roman thing is wrong as is the grand narrative of Western Civilization. That was the book, basically, disproving the grand narrative of Western Civilization and maybe for extra credit, exposing it as a “morally bankrupt fiction,” (p 351). I got that much. And the teenaged, enslaved Revolutionary war poet was really cool. I liked her. Genius is genius, yeah? You know how words work or you don’t. Joseph Warren was an interesting character. And Herodotus was actually critiquing the “Greeks.” Huh. It’s like there was all this stuff you had to memorize, and now there’s a new administration, so there’s a whole bunch of new stuff you have to memorize. I hope the test is multiple choice.
July 9, 2024
Another book I wanted to like more than I did. The author deploys portraits of 14 lesser known intellectual figures in the West to argue that Western Civilization is not what it thinks it is--or maybe that there is no such thing as Western Civ at all? Not all sketches were equally compelling, the best in my view being the first, of a Herodotus who looked more to the East than to Europe, and the chapter on Gladstone as the poster child of carrying the white man's burden. I wish that the argument in the last chapter, which was good, about the shortcomings of the West's conception of itself had informed more trenchantly the vignettes that preceded it. Instead, the book has the vibe of a historical travelogue.
What is the West, or Western Civilization? Is there such a thing? Does the possibility that it is a modern hermeneutical device imposed on the past deprive it of its coherence or explanatory value? Is the West "Judeo-Christian civilization"? Is it, as I might like to think, the historical and intellectual unfolding and discovery of "enlightenment," that is, the process leading to what Kant termed "man's release from his self-incurred tutelage?" Or it it something else? Or all of these things, in search of a coherent, unifying explanation?
Makes me want to go back to college to explore this . . . and to explore, in a way that was not as easy in the 80s, non-"Western" civilizations.
What is the West, or Western Civilization? Is there such a thing? Does the possibility that it is a modern hermeneutical device imposed on the past deprive it of its coherence or explanatory value? Is the West "Judeo-Christian civilization"? Is it, as I might like to think, the historical and intellectual unfolding and discovery of "enlightenment," that is, the process leading to what Kant termed "man's release from his self-incurred tutelage?" Or it it something else? Or all of these things, in search of a coherent, unifying explanation?
Makes me want to go back to college to explore this . . . and to explore, in a way that was not as easy in the 80s, non-"Western" civilizations.
July 1, 2024
This book is a purely ecstatic read of intellect and contrarian ideas. Naoise Mac Sweeney puts forward the West, rather than being a pure, unchanging idea had been gradually created over time and reflected ideological and cultural beliefs of the time. Her book is structured by focusing on individuals in a particular period of history to gradually identify how the pure contradictory ideas of the West were created. The people Mac Sweeney looks at vary dramatically, from Herodotus and the Roman Levilla to the Arab Al-Kindi, Byzantine-Greek (Eastern Roman) Theodore Laskaris, Italian prostitute Tullia D'Aragon, mother of Sultan Safiye, Francis Bacon, African Queen Njinga of Angola, Americans Joseph Warren and Phillis Wheatley, Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone, Orientalist critic Edward Said and Chinese sympathising Carrie Lam. By focusing on these people, Mac Sweeney crafts an argument that the West never existed in its pure self and was a social construct created over time.
The first chapters focusing on the Classic and Medieval worlds put burst the bubble that the West has any particular foundations. After all, it was a myth that the West preserved Greek culture. As pointed out by Mac Sweeney, the Arabs were far better at preserving Greek philosophy than their Latin speaking counterparts. Of course, as Dairmaid MacCulloch pointed out in The History of Christianity, had Boethius survived his trials and completed translating Plato and Aristotle into Latin, history would have been altered beyond comprehension. Still, the Arabs on the whole were better at preservation of the Greek texts. On Greek civilization, Mac Sweeney argues that there is no comparison to Western civilisation as it was a rejection of Western ideas such as race. On the contrary, race for Greeks was less clear and more of an idea of unified features of language and culture than genetics. The Greek civilization contrasted itself from Persia and became the West Vs East narrative so found in the West. Herodotus subverts the idea of Greek civilization, by arguing that Phonecians and Egyptians brought the alphabet and religion respectively. It must be said Plato, the man philosophy was but a footnote to, spent years in Egypt before writing his works. Herodotus disagreed with the idea that Greek civilization was unique and purely European. The section of Livilla also shows the Romans as being multi-ethnic as Mac Sweeney recalls various Roman emperors were of African and Asian origin.
I think my first criticism of the book is that the book jumps to Arabic civilisation without ignoring the elephant in the room. What about Christianity? Now, chapter 4 and 5 partially address this that Christianity did shape the creation of the West. However, the West versus other was heavily influenced by the Great Schism and by earlier breakages in the church into smaller groups. What I am getting at is that Western Christianity, which emphasises Rome was heavily influenced by non-European sources namely Africans including Anthony of Egypt, Augustine of Hippo and Tertullian who were all North African theologians. How North African theology shaped Roman Catholicism and the Western church and by Western civilization by extension, would have been a very interesting chapter but one that was ignored or missed out for whatever reason.
Still, we get the gradual separation of West in Chapters 4 and 5 where the Godfrey of Viterbo and Theodore Laskaris come on the scene. Godfrey is the first one to use the term Europe in this book but it refers to a culture rather than idea. Chapter 5 is where Byzantine Greece confuses everything. They are a contradiction of a civilisation; they considered themselves Roman but spoke Greek. This contradiction is not lost on Mac Sweeney that both argues that they were at times highly educated in classics but also rejected their pagan Greek cultural roots because of their religion. Their difference in religion made a seperation of Western and Eastern culture. But they were the inheritors of Rome and gradually saw themselves as Greek or Hellas as Laskaris argues.
The Renaissance was the time period in which European countries regained knowledge of the classical world and one which Mac Sweeney scrutinises. Italy was pointed out as being the birth place of the Renaissance and where the new ideas developed. Indeed, the book points out that a Platonic Academy was founded in Florence, as the Italian elite gained interest in the Greek world. There was the point about Byzantine educated elites escaping Constantinople after it fell as the cause of knowledge but as Mac Sweeney points out, the fall of Grenada and with it 250,000 books as another source of knowledge. Out of this scene comes D'Aragona, an Italian prostitute who wrote books using the philosophy of Aristotle and Plato in works such as Dialogue. Titterlating stuff.
The Path Not Trodden is perhaps one of the most interesting chapters as it looks into the relationships between Protestant England and the Islamic Ottoman Empire in the potential of an alliance between the two powers. This bizarre arrangement, not least because Protestants had mixed feelings to Islamic Ottoman-Turks shows how flexible Western civilzation is in allying those who were convenient.
The West and Knowledge looks at the developments of Francis Bacon who famously said "knowledge is itself power", in that the Enlightenment started with him and that he added ideas to Western civilization. The West and Empire shows the weird example of an African empire aligning with Western interests and for its leaders to be then undermined. I seem to remember The New Age of Empire to have nothing to say about the African tributary states to Western imperialists, but Mac Sweeney offers a different position to Kehinde Andrews. Where Kehinde Andrews argues in an almost absolute existence of demarcated ethnic and cultural identity of race, Mac Sweeney cleverly argues that race is a construct demonstrated with Njinga of Angola, who adopted Christianity and was therefore seen as akin to Western civilisation at the time, only for to be maligned later for her skin colour. Afterall, skin colour she argues on page 202 was subjective prior to the 18th century. And it was in the adoption of Christianity that turned Njinga into a civilised person. It was the 1735 work Systema Natura that classified humans by race. I think it is worth pointing out though that the first nation to heavily characterise people by ethnicity into a hierarchy was the Spanish in Latin American colonies as way to segregate society. This was later copied by other nations.
The West and Politics and The West and Race look over the complex contradictions of the founding of the US. On the one hand, US was supposed to be free and democratic but on the other, it subjected people to slavery. This contradiction looks to be centred at the heart of American views of the West. It was its views on race that marked it as completely contradictory from the offset. This leads onto The West and Modernity, where the contrast between William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli is made. William Gladstone, who was an ardent classist and liberal but also a racist and Anti-Semite who even saw the Europeans as descendants of the Aryans which has the dark shadows of Nazi ideology written over it.
I think the level of research that has gone into the book is exceptional. I do think there are some errors. However, the level of writing is exquisite. The argument put forward is sharp. The West isn't a continuous culture that has existed for millennia but a myth created to serve a cultural and political purpose in defending certain ideals. Upon inspection and research, it follows that the West's basis for existence relies on the existence of other civilizations and these civilizations were cosmopolitan and diverse. This book is a phenomenal work.
The first chapters focusing on the Classic and Medieval worlds put burst the bubble that the West has any particular foundations. After all, it was a myth that the West preserved Greek culture. As pointed out by Mac Sweeney, the Arabs were far better at preserving Greek philosophy than their Latin speaking counterparts. Of course, as Dairmaid MacCulloch pointed out in The History of Christianity, had Boethius survived his trials and completed translating Plato and Aristotle into Latin, history would have been altered beyond comprehension. Still, the Arabs on the whole were better at preservation of the Greek texts. On Greek civilization, Mac Sweeney argues that there is no comparison to Western civilisation as it was a rejection of Western ideas such as race. On the contrary, race for Greeks was less clear and more of an idea of unified features of language and culture than genetics. The Greek civilization contrasted itself from Persia and became the West Vs East narrative so found in the West. Herodotus subverts the idea of Greek civilization, by arguing that Phonecians and Egyptians brought the alphabet and religion respectively. It must be said Plato, the man philosophy was but a footnote to, spent years in Egypt before writing his works. Herodotus disagreed with the idea that Greek civilization was unique and purely European. The section of Livilla also shows the Romans as being multi-ethnic as Mac Sweeney recalls various Roman emperors were of African and Asian origin.
I think my first criticism of the book is that the book jumps to Arabic civilisation without ignoring the elephant in the room. What about Christianity? Now, chapter 4 and 5 partially address this that Christianity did shape the creation of the West. However, the West versus other was heavily influenced by the Great Schism and by earlier breakages in the church into smaller groups. What I am getting at is that Western Christianity, which emphasises Rome was heavily influenced by non-European sources namely Africans including Anthony of Egypt, Augustine of Hippo and Tertullian who were all North African theologians. How North African theology shaped Roman Catholicism and the Western church and by Western civilization by extension, would have been a very interesting chapter but one that was ignored or missed out for whatever reason.
Still, we get the gradual separation of West in Chapters 4 and 5 where the Godfrey of Viterbo and Theodore Laskaris come on the scene. Godfrey is the first one to use the term Europe in this book but it refers to a culture rather than idea. Chapter 5 is where Byzantine Greece confuses everything. They are a contradiction of a civilisation; they considered themselves Roman but spoke Greek. This contradiction is not lost on Mac Sweeney that both argues that they were at times highly educated in classics but also rejected their pagan Greek cultural roots because of their religion. Their difference in religion made a seperation of Western and Eastern culture. But they were the inheritors of Rome and gradually saw themselves as Greek or Hellas as Laskaris argues.
The Renaissance was the time period in which European countries regained knowledge of the classical world and one which Mac Sweeney scrutinises. Italy was pointed out as being the birth place of the Renaissance and where the new ideas developed. Indeed, the book points out that a Platonic Academy was founded in Florence, as the Italian elite gained interest in the Greek world. There was the point about Byzantine educated elites escaping Constantinople after it fell as the cause of knowledge but as Mac Sweeney points out, the fall of Grenada and with it 250,000 books as another source of knowledge. Out of this scene comes D'Aragona, an Italian prostitute who wrote books using the philosophy of Aristotle and Plato in works such as Dialogue. Titterlating stuff.
The Path Not Trodden is perhaps one of the most interesting chapters as it looks into the relationships between Protestant England and the Islamic Ottoman Empire in the potential of an alliance between the two powers. This bizarre arrangement, not least because Protestants had mixed feelings to Islamic Ottoman-Turks shows how flexible Western civilzation is in allying those who were convenient.
The West and Knowledge looks at the developments of Francis Bacon who famously said "knowledge is itself power", in that the Enlightenment started with him and that he added ideas to Western civilization. The West and Empire shows the weird example of an African empire aligning with Western interests and for its leaders to be then undermined. I seem to remember The New Age of Empire to have nothing to say about the African tributary states to Western imperialists, but Mac Sweeney offers a different position to Kehinde Andrews. Where Kehinde Andrews argues in an almost absolute existence of demarcated ethnic and cultural identity of race, Mac Sweeney cleverly argues that race is a construct demonstrated with Njinga of Angola, who adopted Christianity and was therefore seen as akin to Western civilisation at the time, only for to be maligned later for her skin colour. Afterall, skin colour she argues on page 202 was subjective prior to the 18th century. And it was in the adoption of Christianity that turned Njinga into a civilised person. It was the 1735 work Systema Natura that classified humans by race. I think it is worth pointing out though that the first nation to heavily characterise people by ethnicity into a hierarchy was the Spanish in Latin American colonies as way to segregate society. This was later copied by other nations.
The West and Politics and The West and Race look over the complex contradictions of the founding of the US. On the one hand, US was supposed to be free and democratic but on the other, it subjected people to slavery. This contradiction looks to be centred at the heart of American views of the West. It was its views on race that marked it as completely contradictory from the offset. This leads onto The West and Modernity, where the contrast between William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli is made. William Gladstone, who was an ardent classist and liberal but also a racist and Anti-Semite who even saw the Europeans as descendants of the Aryans which has the dark shadows of Nazi ideology written over it.
I think the level of research that has gone into the book is exceptional. I do think there are some errors. However, the level of writing is exquisite. The argument put forward is sharp. The West isn't a continuous culture that has existed for millennia but a myth created to serve a cultural and political purpose in defending certain ideals. Upon inspection and research, it follows that the West's basis for existence relies on the existence of other civilizations and these civilizations were cosmopolitan and diverse. This book is a phenomenal work.
June 7, 2023
Odds are strong that you first became fully aware of the term “Western Civilization” through an introductory survey course in college or AP history in high school. And you’ve lived your life since then believing that “the West” boasts “a common origin resulting in a shared history, a shared heritage, and a shared identity” grounded in the classical era of Greece and Rome. But younger historians are now rethinking Western Civilization. Writing with great clarity, history professor Naoise Mac Sweeney challenges the origin myth in her brilliant new book, The West.
We imagine “Western history as unfurling unbroken back in time through Atlantic modernity and the European Enlightenment,” she writes, “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.” With a sure hand, Mac Sweeney “unpicks and unpacks the grand narrative” known as “Western Civilization” in the four hundred pages of this endlessly fascinating survey.
THE PRINCIPAL ELEMENTS OF THE CASE AGAINST “WESTERN CIVILIZATION”
To sum up Mac Sweeney’s argument isn’t easy. She traces the evolution of the concept of “Western Civilization” through the shifting sands of intellectual history. But here, greatly simplified, is the gist of it . . .
GREEKS AND ROMANS WEREN’T “WESTERN” OR “EUROPEAN”
Neither the Greeks nor the Romans considered themselves “Western” or “European.” And the inhabitants of what we now call Europe didn’t, either. Those concepts didn’t arise until more than a thousand years after the two empires had faded into history. In fact, both empires straddled the three continents circling the Mediterranean Sea—including Asia and Africa as well as today’s Europe. And both Greece and Rome looked to Troy—in Asia—for their origins. (The city-state of Troy lay in western Anatolia, in present-day Turkey.)
THE PAST WAS NEVER “GRECO-ROMAN”
The people who called themselves Greek or Roman were at odds for centuries and never identified with each other. “The concept of the Greco-Roman world as a single entity—the basis for classical antiquity— was born, not reborn,” Mac Sweeney writes. It emerged gradually in Renaissance Italy beginning in the fourteenth century.
However, even then “Europe was not necessarily seen as being the sole heir to the Greco-Roman legacy. Nor was the Greco-Roman past assumed to be the only fount of European culture.” The Italians knew better. Their lives, and those of their ancestors, had been profoundly shaped by developments throughout the Mediterranean, on all three continents. Islamic culture was especially influential.
IDEAS NEEDED TO JUSTIFY EMPIRE-BUILDING
Later, in the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “improvements in maritime transport, armaments, and military technology” gradually emerged, enabling Europe to establish dominion over the planet. “All that was needed was the ideological novelty of a civilisational grand narrative to make Western imperialism morally and socially acceptable,” Mac Sweeney asserts. The answer lay partly in the concept of “Western Civilization.” But defining Europe in opposition to “the Rest” was only part of the solution.
SETTING OFF THE WEST FROM THE REST
The other elements that underpinned imperialism were Christianity and racism based on skin color, which defined the people of “the Rest” as inferior to their colonizers. “Western ideas about racial distinction and hierarchy began first to emerge and then to crystallize in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although it was not until the eighteenth century that these ideas became more systematic and assumed a ‘scientific’ veneer.”
ONLY IN AMERICA DID THE CONCEPT EMERGE FULLY FLESHED
By the latter years of the eighteenth century, American colonists began to ground their case against the British monarchy in the language of the Enlightenment. But they went further. Among the most convincing arguments they put in play was the notion that the torch of “Western Civilization” lit by Greco-Roman values had passed from Europe to the Americas.
Only here, in the newly emerging United States, was that heritage in full flower. “North America remained unblemished by the decadence of the Old World, and was therefore the rightful heir to millennia of European culture,” Mac Sweeney writes of the revolutionaries’ thinking. And, using tortured reasoning, they enshrined the concept of “freedom” as its central aspiration—despite the fact that so many of the Founding Fathers were slaveholders. Racism allowed them to slither out from the contradiction.
DOUBTS EMERGED IN THE 20TH CENTURY
That contradiction, and other flaws in the case for “Western Civilization,” began coming under fire in the twentieth century, most prominently in the work of the Palestinian American scholar Edward Said. “By highlighting [the] interplay between politics and culture,” Mac Sweeney explains, “Said laid the foundations for a reassessment of Western Civilisation, allowing us to see it for what it really is—an invented social construct, one that is extremely powerful and has far-reaching consequences in the real world, but a construct nonetheless.”
RETHINKING WESTERN CIVILIZATION THROUGH BIOGRAPHY
Mac Sweeney artfully tells this tale through the lives and work of fourteen individuals. Some are familiar. Herodotus (484-425 BCE?), the “Father of History.” Francis Bacon (1561-1626), credited with originating the scientific method. Liberal British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone (1809-98). American academic Edward Said (1935-2003), who championed the Palestinian cause. And now-retired Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (1957-).
But most are likely to be unknown to the majority of readers, even though among them were emperors, eminent scholars, and powerful nobles who were the celebrities of their day and sometimes famous for decades to come. By placing them in the context of their times, Mac Sweeney demonstrates how their thinking reveals the evolving concept of “Western Civilization” as we have come to know it through college courses of that name and the news media. It’s a truly fresh approach to the past, and profoundly thought-provoking.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Naoise Mac Sweeney is a Professor of Classical Archaeology in the Institute of Classical Archaeology at the University of Vienna. Born to a Chinese mother and an Irish father in London in 1982, she obtained an undergraduate degree in Classics at the University of Cambridge, a Master’s in History at University College London, and a PhD at Cambridge in 2007. She is the author of six books.
We imagine “Western history as unfurling unbroken back in time through Atlantic modernity and the European Enlightenment,” she writes, “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.” With a sure hand, Mac Sweeney “unpicks and unpacks the grand narrative” known as “Western Civilization” in the four hundred pages of this endlessly fascinating survey.
THE PRINCIPAL ELEMENTS OF THE CASE AGAINST “WESTERN CIVILIZATION”
To sum up Mac Sweeney’s argument isn’t easy. She traces the evolution of the concept of “Western Civilization” through the shifting sands of intellectual history. But here, greatly simplified, is the gist of it . . .
GREEKS AND ROMANS WEREN’T “WESTERN” OR “EUROPEAN”
Neither the Greeks nor the Romans considered themselves “Western” or “European.” And the inhabitants of what we now call Europe didn’t, either. Those concepts didn’t arise until more than a thousand years after the two empires had faded into history. In fact, both empires straddled the three continents circling the Mediterranean Sea—including Asia and Africa as well as today’s Europe. And both Greece and Rome looked to Troy—in Asia—for their origins. (The city-state of Troy lay in western Anatolia, in present-day Turkey.)
THE PAST WAS NEVER “GRECO-ROMAN”
The people who called themselves Greek or Roman were at odds for centuries and never identified with each other. “The concept of the Greco-Roman world as a single entity—the basis for classical antiquity— was born, not reborn,” Mac Sweeney writes. It emerged gradually in Renaissance Italy beginning in the fourteenth century.
However, even then “Europe was not necessarily seen as being the sole heir to the Greco-Roman legacy. Nor was the Greco-Roman past assumed to be the only fount of European culture.” The Italians knew better. Their lives, and those of their ancestors, had been profoundly shaped by developments throughout the Mediterranean, on all three continents. Islamic culture was especially influential.
IDEAS NEEDED TO JUSTIFY EMPIRE-BUILDING
Later, in the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “improvements in maritime transport, armaments, and military technology” gradually emerged, enabling Europe to establish dominion over the planet. “All that was needed was the ideological novelty of a civilisational grand narrative to make Western imperialism morally and socially acceptable,” Mac Sweeney asserts. The answer lay partly in the concept of “Western Civilization.” But defining Europe in opposition to “the Rest” was only part of the solution.
SETTING OFF THE WEST FROM THE REST
The other elements that underpinned imperialism were Christianity and racism based on skin color, which defined the people of “the Rest” as inferior to their colonizers. “Western ideas about racial distinction and hierarchy began first to emerge and then to crystallize in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although it was not until the eighteenth century that these ideas became more systematic and assumed a ‘scientific’ veneer.”
ONLY IN AMERICA DID THE CONCEPT EMERGE FULLY FLESHED
By the latter years of the eighteenth century, American colonists began to ground their case against the British monarchy in the language of the Enlightenment. But they went further. Among the most convincing arguments they put in play was the notion that the torch of “Western Civilization” lit by Greco-Roman values had passed from Europe to the Americas.
Only here, in the newly emerging United States, was that heritage in full flower. “North America remained unblemished by the decadence of the Old World, and was therefore the rightful heir to millennia of European culture,” Mac Sweeney writes of the revolutionaries’ thinking. And, using tortured reasoning, they enshrined the concept of “freedom” as its central aspiration—despite the fact that so many of the Founding Fathers were slaveholders. Racism allowed them to slither out from the contradiction.
DOUBTS EMERGED IN THE 20TH CENTURY
That contradiction, and other flaws in the case for “Western Civilization,” began coming under fire in the twentieth century, most prominently in the work of the Palestinian American scholar Edward Said. “By highlighting [the] interplay between politics and culture,” Mac Sweeney explains, “Said laid the foundations for a reassessment of Western Civilisation, allowing us to see it for what it really is—an invented social construct, one that is extremely powerful and has far-reaching consequences in the real world, but a construct nonetheless.”
RETHINKING WESTERN CIVILIZATION THROUGH BIOGRAPHY
Mac Sweeney artfully tells this tale through the lives and work of fourteen individuals. Some are familiar. Herodotus (484-425 BCE?), the “Father of History.” Francis Bacon (1561-1626), credited with originating the scientific method. Liberal British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone (1809-98). American academic Edward Said (1935-2003), who championed the Palestinian cause. And now-retired Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (1957-).
But most are likely to be unknown to the majority of readers, even though among them were emperors, eminent scholars, and powerful nobles who were the celebrities of their day and sometimes famous for decades to come. By placing them in the context of their times, Mac Sweeney demonstrates how their thinking reveals the evolving concept of “Western Civilization” as we have come to know it through college courses of that name and the news media. It’s a truly fresh approach to the past, and profoundly thought-provoking.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Naoise Mac Sweeney is a Professor of Classical Archaeology in the Institute of Classical Archaeology at the University of Vienna. Born to a Chinese mother and an Irish father in London in 1982, she obtained an undergraduate degree in Classics at the University of Cambridge, a Master’s in History at University College London, and a PhD at Cambridge in 2007. She is the author of six books.
July 8, 2023
كتاب يقوم على نقض السردية الكبرى للغرب وكأنه كيان منفصل عن العالم، السردية التي تقول أن الحضارة انتقلت من الاغريق إلى الرومان ثم النهظة وعصر التنوير قبل أن تحط اخيرا في أوروبا الغربية وامريكا لاحقا، لذلك العرب متحضر بينما الآخر همجي ولا بد أن يتم قمعه
الكتاب يعتمد على ١٤ شخصية ليسوا بالضرورة معروفين حاليا ولكن كان لهم أثر في وقت ما لتحكي كيف تغيرت السردية من عهد الاغريق إلى الحين
كتاب مهم
"إن إعادة تخيل التاريخ هو عمل سياسي وهو في الواقع ممارسة معيارية إلى حدٍ ما ، والعملية مستمرة منذ بدأ كتابة التاريخ نفسه (وربما حتى قبل ذلك بوقت طويل ، من خلال الروايات الشفوية ورواية القصص المجتمعية).
قيل أنه في أثينا في القرن السادس قبل الميلاد ، تمت إضافة نصوص إلى الإلياذه للإشارة إلى أن أثينا سيطرت على جزيرة ايجينا في عصر الأبطال. مما لا يثير الدهشة ، تم إدخال هذه النصوص في الوقت الذي كانت فيه أثينا تحاول السيطرة على إيجينا.
بعد إعلان الدولة القومية الحديثة لتركيا في عام 1923 ، تم وضع برنامج تاريخي وأثري معقد ، يُعرف باسم "أطروحة التاريخ التركي" ، لتعزيز التماثل بين التركية وأرض الأناضول.
في الآونة الأخيرة ، تحت قيادة شي جين بينغ ، تم الترويج لرواية رسمية جديدة حول دور الصين في الحرب العالمية الثانية بقوة ، بطرق قد تكون مقلقة أو مشجعة اعتمادًا على وجهة نظرك.
وفي يوليو 2021 ، عندما احتشد الجيش الروسي على الحدود الأوكرانية قبل الغزو العسكري ، نشر الرئيس الروسي ، فلاديمير بوتين ، مقالاً يطرح فيه الوحدة التاريخية للشعبين الروسي والأوكراني.
ليس عليك بالضرورة أن تكون خبيثًا أو كاذبًا حتى ترغب في إعادة كتابة التاريخ وفقًا لأجندتك السياسية ، ولا يجب عليك بالضرورة تزوير التاريخ للقيام بذلك.
يمكن أن تأخذ إعادة كتابة الماضي أيضًا شكل اختيار تضمين الحقائق التي تمت كتابتها مسبقًا من رواية تقليدية"
الكتاب يعتمد على ١٤ شخصية ليسوا بالضرورة معروفين حاليا ولكن كان لهم أثر في وقت ما لتحكي كيف تغيرت السردية من عهد الاغريق إلى الحين
كتاب مهم
"إن إعادة تخيل التاريخ هو عمل سياسي وهو في الواقع ممارسة معيارية إلى حدٍ ما ، والعملية مستمرة منذ بدأ كتابة التاريخ نفسه (وربما حتى قبل ذلك بوقت طويل ، من خلال الروايات الشفوية ورواية القصص المجتمعية).
قيل أنه في أثينا في القرن السادس قبل الميلاد ، تمت إضافة نصوص إلى الإلياذه للإشارة إلى أن أثينا سيطرت على جزيرة ايجينا في عصر الأبطال. مما لا يثير الدهشة ، تم إدخال هذه النصوص في الوقت الذي كانت فيه أثينا تحاول السيطرة على إيجينا.
بعد إعلان الدولة القومية الحديثة لتركيا في عام 1923 ، تم وضع برنامج تاريخي وأثري معقد ، يُعرف باسم "أطروحة التاريخ التركي" ، لتعزيز التماثل بين التركية وأرض الأناضول.
في الآونة الأخيرة ، تحت قيادة شي جين بينغ ، تم الترويج لرواية رسمية جديدة حول دور الصين في الحرب العالمية الثانية بقوة ، بطرق قد تكون مقلقة أو مشجعة اعتمادًا على وجهة نظرك.
وفي يوليو 2021 ، عندما احتشد الجيش الروسي على الحدود الأوكرانية قبل الغزو العسكري ، نشر الرئيس الروسي ، فلاديمير بوتين ، مقالاً يطرح فيه الوحدة التاريخية للشعبين الروسي والأوكراني.
ليس عليك بالضرورة أن تكون خبيثًا أو كاذبًا حتى ترغب في إعادة كتابة التاريخ وفقًا لأجندتك السياسية ، ولا يجب عليك بالضرورة تزوير التاريخ للقيام بذلك.
يمكن أن تأخذ إعادة كتابة الماضي أيضًا شكل اختيار تضمين الحقائق التي تمت كتابتها مسبقًا من رواية تقليدية"
December 26, 2023
The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives is terribly disappointing. The point the author makes – that the Western Civ concept of the world is off base – is entirely valid imho. But I can’t stop thinking that this is a book that might have been interesting 50 years ago but is not really at all noteworthy today. It is as though we still lived in the time of Will and Ariel Durant, and the author needed to open our eyes to a different reality. But that reality is already well known and pretty well absorbed. Mac Sweeney sets up a series of obvious straw men and then knocks them down with great satisfaction and a lot of contemporary jargon. This is a book that is not before its time, but way after.
But it’s worse than just that. The vehicle for telling this story – or rather making this case, since Mac Sweeney seems to muster evidence in more of a polemical than an analytical manner – is also pretty unsatisfactory. I know the author deliberately tried to include a range of important and not-so-important persons among her Fourteen, but this still smacks, on the one hand, of a kind of “great man” approach to history, and on the other of something almost entirely random – driven by the author’s limited time to muster more substantial evidence.
There is so little meaningful analysis I am left wondering whether the author has really mastered the subject matter. Are these individuals representative of something larger, or just selected to support the argument – or because the author focused her research on them and didn’t have a lot of time? Proving a negative - that the recent (19th-20th C) notion of the West did not exist in earlier periods - would always be difficult even if the point is a valid one. But after reading 200 or more pages devoted to this endeavor, it also seems a great waste of time. I am not at all convinced by Mac Sweeney's presentation; one might think she just wanted to make money by publishing something commercial rather than academic.
This work suffers from the same ills as so much popular history over the past, say, 30 years. The genre has declined dramatically. Popular history now eschews the classical form (I use the term advisedly!) of narrative history – allegedly because that is too hackneyed and simplistic, but I generally believe it’s because the authors are too lazy and rushed. After all, there is so much wonderful, nuanced narrative popular history that was written in the middle of the last century that I honestly believe that academics like Mac Sweeney who dabble in popular history lack the patience and curiosity to do a proper job at what is in fact a difficult and demanding discipline.
That’s one shortcoming of The West: A New History. The other, to my mind, is the essentially polemical nature of this history, like so many others. Mac Sweeney dabbles in revisionism that is itself hackneyed, without taking the time to do it right. Like Frankopan in The Silk Roads, another classic example, she picks and chooses data points to build an alternative world that, I must confess, I don’t quite believe. Both Mac Sweeney and Frankopan are clearly on to something, don’t get me wrong. They just dramatize the obvious and then rush to publication, evidently with their eyes on a best-seller paycheck.
For example, Mac Sweeney, by choosing Livilla (that is a strange chapter) as the biography for Rome, fails utterly to address one of the key shortcomings in the early argumentation – the very conscious Roman imitation of Greek models in literature, art, and religion. Are we supposed to be ignorant of this or just ignore it? After all, the Aeneid, which is so central to the argument, is an epic poem modeled on Greek epic poetry, which takes as its starting point a Greek epic – the Iliad. How does that fit into the author’s polemic?
This broad, polemic approach also leads the author to engage in some seriously flawed broad-brush history. Here is a typical passage, from page 132, regarding the Renaissance: “The grand narrative of Western Civilization had yet to emerge. This was to come later, as we shall see in Chapter 9. Yet by the height of the Renaissance in the sixteenth century, all the pieces were in place: a Christianity slightly less riven than in previous centuries; an area of political and cultural coherence focused in central and western Europe; and an historical orientation to antiquity that encompassed both Greece and Rome.” This is just nonsense, apart from the last part. The Reformation and all the resultant wars took off in the 16th C and lasted well into the 17th. The dominant states in the 15th C were Portugal and Spain, and later on a resurgent France. Not Germany, and not central Europe more generally. The “focus on central and western Europe” had been clearer before the Reconquista. Why does Mac Sweeney make such tendentious general assertions? It seems performative rather than serious.
The last few chapters of the book were more worthwhile, at least compared to what went before. The chapters on William Gladstone and Edward Said were to me more interesting and more coherent, and also suggest that Mac Sweeney would have done well to focus on the period when the concept of the West acquired those characteristics – racialization, colonialism, and pseudo-scientific potency – that prompted her interest and concern, rather than rushing through a bunch of thumbnail sketch biographies collecting small bits of evidence of dubious antecedents – or trying to prove a negative.
Bottom line: history, even popular history, should either convey an understandable narrative or engage in balanced analysis of all the available data, with caveats and, as needed, footnotes that are explanatory, not just citations. Even for general readers, authors need to engage in serious scholarship and draw on the available literature. Mac Sweeney's The West fell far short in this regard. I am not saying Mac Sweeney is a hack. I believe she is a serious scholar. But this is not a serious book.
But it’s worse than just that. The vehicle for telling this story – or rather making this case, since Mac Sweeney seems to muster evidence in more of a polemical than an analytical manner – is also pretty unsatisfactory. I know the author deliberately tried to include a range of important and not-so-important persons among her Fourteen, but this still smacks, on the one hand, of a kind of “great man” approach to history, and on the other of something almost entirely random – driven by the author’s limited time to muster more substantial evidence.
There is so little meaningful analysis I am left wondering whether the author has really mastered the subject matter. Are these individuals representative of something larger, or just selected to support the argument – or because the author focused her research on them and didn’t have a lot of time? Proving a negative - that the recent (19th-20th C) notion of the West did not exist in earlier periods - would always be difficult even if the point is a valid one. But after reading 200 or more pages devoted to this endeavor, it also seems a great waste of time. I am not at all convinced by Mac Sweeney's presentation; one might think she just wanted to make money by publishing something commercial rather than academic.
This work suffers from the same ills as so much popular history over the past, say, 30 years. The genre has declined dramatically. Popular history now eschews the classical form (I use the term advisedly!) of narrative history – allegedly because that is too hackneyed and simplistic, but I generally believe it’s because the authors are too lazy and rushed. After all, there is so much wonderful, nuanced narrative popular history that was written in the middle of the last century that I honestly believe that academics like Mac Sweeney who dabble in popular history lack the patience and curiosity to do a proper job at what is in fact a difficult and demanding discipline.
That’s one shortcoming of The West: A New History. The other, to my mind, is the essentially polemical nature of this history, like so many others. Mac Sweeney dabbles in revisionism that is itself hackneyed, without taking the time to do it right. Like Frankopan in The Silk Roads, another classic example, she picks and chooses data points to build an alternative world that, I must confess, I don’t quite believe. Both Mac Sweeney and Frankopan are clearly on to something, don’t get me wrong. They just dramatize the obvious and then rush to publication, evidently with their eyes on a best-seller paycheck.
For example, Mac Sweeney, by choosing Livilla (that is a strange chapter) as the biography for Rome, fails utterly to address one of the key shortcomings in the early argumentation – the very conscious Roman imitation of Greek models in literature, art, and religion. Are we supposed to be ignorant of this or just ignore it? After all, the Aeneid, which is so central to the argument, is an epic poem modeled on Greek epic poetry, which takes as its starting point a Greek epic – the Iliad. How does that fit into the author’s polemic?
This broad, polemic approach also leads the author to engage in some seriously flawed broad-brush history. Here is a typical passage, from page 132, regarding the Renaissance: “The grand narrative of Western Civilization had yet to emerge. This was to come later, as we shall see in Chapter 9. Yet by the height of the Renaissance in the sixteenth century, all the pieces were in place: a Christianity slightly less riven than in previous centuries; an area of political and cultural coherence focused in central and western Europe; and an historical orientation to antiquity that encompassed both Greece and Rome.” This is just nonsense, apart from the last part. The Reformation and all the resultant wars took off in the 16th C and lasted well into the 17th. The dominant states in the 15th C were Portugal and Spain, and later on a resurgent France. Not Germany, and not central Europe more generally. The “focus on central and western Europe” had been clearer before the Reconquista. Why does Mac Sweeney make such tendentious general assertions? It seems performative rather than serious.
The last few chapters of the book were more worthwhile, at least compared to what went before. The chapters on William Gladstone and Edward Said were to me more interesting and more coherent, and also suggest that Mac Sweeney would have done well to focus on the period when the concept of the West acquired those characteristics – racialization, colonialism, and pseudo-scientific potency – that prompted her interest and concern, rather than rushing through a bunch of thumbnail sketch biographies collecting small bits of evidence of dubious antecedents – or trying to prove a negative.
Bottom line: history, even popular history, should either convey an understandable narrative or engage in balanced analysis of all the available data, with caveats and, as needed, footnotes that are explanatory, not just citations. Even for general readers, authors need to engage in serious scholarship and draw on the available literature. Mac Sweeney's The West fell far short in this regard. I am not saying Mac Sweeney is a hack. I believe she is a serious scholar. But this is not a serious book.
September 24, 2023
Uneven in concept, rough in writing and error-laden.
I get the conceit, that the average Jane/Joe, and more from her point of view, the “ruling class” in many modern “Western” nations, has these ideas about “the West” that aren’t totally true. The execution? Uneven.
Essentially, whether true or not, the book comes off as derived from 14 separate essays either written for political magazines or history journalism, then stitched together without working more on the overarching thesis.
Torn between 2 and 3 stars, and, even though I learned bits about a few people, I went two stars because it’s rated too high on Goodreads and because there’s outright historical errors in multiple chapters. And so it goes on my “meh” shelf as well as “history.”
Herodotus chapter? A good start.
Livilla chapter? No idea why it’s there and why you need a whole chapter to talk about Romans’ belief they came from Aeneas, esp. since most of the chapter is not about that at all.
Al-Kindi chapter? Pushes back too hard on the issue of the “Dark Ages,” IMO, as does some other recent revisionist history. In Europe, part of the Middle Ages were “dark,” in many ways. Let’s not forget that. Concluding analysis in chapter kind of weak.
Godfrey of Viterbo? First, see my Livilla chapter. Second, no, Charlemagne did not invent the Holy Roman Empire, since he empire dissolved less than 50 years after his death and more than before the founding of the actual Holy Roman Empire. Second, the set of seven electors wasn’t fixed until the Golden Bull of 1356. At this point, we’re entering “grokking” territory for sure on my reading of this book, with “did not finish” already a background possibility.
Theodore Laskaris chapter? Much of the Greek peninsula was NOT controlled by “a colonial Latin ruling class” for “more than three centuries” after the Fourth Crusade. Before the end of the 1400s, the Ottomans controlled not only all of today’s Greece but everything south of the Danube. By 1450, the Ottomans controlled the northern half of peninsular Greece and all of northern Bulgaria, while the Byzantines had the Peloponnese. Latins had but littie bits. And, at the time of the “reunification” in 1261, the Byzantines controlled most the northern half of today’s Greece. It controlled all of it by 1340. So again, no, “We usually don’t think of Greece as being under the colonial rule of western Europeans, but for more than three hundred years it was,” isn’t true. The idea of “Hellenes” being created vs the old “Romanoi” is good, but exactly how major of relevance for the book’s big theme?
Tullia D’Aragona chapter? Seems to strawman a bit. Yes, Burckhardt (and Michelet) popularized the word Renaissance itself, but the idea was held during the time of the Renaissance by the humanists of the era, whether their ideas about classical antiquity were right or not. She even mentions Vasari etc. I will confess to never having heard of Tullia D’Aragona before. That said, the idea that her final, posthumous Il Meschino has support for Mac Sweeney’s main thesis, especially when based on a totally non-historical prose romance of the 1300s?
Safiye Sultun chapter? While noting the Ottomans’ claim to have inherited the Byzantine claim to world empire and the battle with the HRE Hapsburgs and their similar claims, the “Third Rome” of Moscow is ignored. In fact, none of the chapters in the book is Russia-oriented, despite Mac Sweeney’s repeated notes in earlier chapters that for Europeans of this time and earlier, “Russia” often fell out of their definition of “Europe,” meaning that a chapter with Russian ties should surely support her thesis. We’re grokking more lightly.
Francis Bacon chapter? Why is Bacon being used as an intro to the Enlightenment? If one wanted to talk about ideas from China influencing Enlightenment Europe then use an Enlightenment figure. (Wiki’s article on The Enlightenment notes Bacon and Descartes as FORERUNNERS, not part of.) And, why does Mac Sweeney try to align the New Atlantis with an existing continent?
Njinga of Angola chapter? Her story is interesting, even more than that of Tullia D’Aragona’s. Would be great as a part of an “Overlooked Women of History” book. She, or rather western biographies of her in the 1600s, from two Capuchins who worked in her kingdom of Ndongo, are used to illustrate Mac Sweeney’s thesis of the gradual development of the idea of “classical antiquity” = “the west.”
Joseph Warren chapter? Stand-in for all US Founding Fathers, in part. Also a claim by Mac Sweeney of US phil-Romanism vs European philhellenism. I think she pushes this too much; also, philhellenism is not phil-Athenianism, and that didn’t develop in Europe until Romantic times. Skimmed this totally.
Phillis Wheatley chapter? Chosen as upsetting the “modern” Western applecart’s racism.
William Gladstone chapter? Used as exemplar of “the West” being extended back from North America to encompass non-Romanov and non-Ottoman Europe, and a whiff of anti-semitism as part of that.
Edward Said chapter? Modern wars within academia; she referenced Huntington and his clash of civilizations ideas in the intro. Said is a representative type of reimagining the West. She notes his feeling out of place in both Orient and Occident, though she spoils the literary parallel by contracting Orient and West.
Carrie Lam chapter? Perhaps Mac Sweeney chose her because of her own partially Chinese ancestry. She does, picking up a plaint I had earlier, note Putin in 2016 contrasting Russia to the West. And, given the amount of time she spends on Putin, why he’s not the namesake figure of the chapter, I have no idea. If you felt you had to do the rise of China as well as the resistance of Russia, and the Hong Kong angle to the west on China? Do two chapters.
I get the conceit, that the average Jane/Joe, and more from her point of view, the “ruling class” in many modern “Western” nations, has these ideas about “the West” that aren’t totally true. The execution? Uneven.
Essentially, whether true or not, the book comes off as derived from 14 separate essays either written for political magazines or history journalism, then stitched together without working more on the overarching thesis.
Torn between 2 and 3 stars, and, even though I learned bits about a few people, I went two stars because it’s rated too high on Goodreads and because there’s outright historical errors in multiple chapters. And so it goes on my “meh” shelf as well as “history.”
Herodotus chapter? A good start.
Livilla chapter? No idea why it’s there and why you need a whole chapter to talk about Romans’ belief they came from Aeneas, esp. since most of the chapter is not about that at all.
Al-Kindi chapter? Pushes back too hard on the issue of the “Dark Ages,” IMO, as does some other recent revisionist history. In Europe, part of the Middle Ages were “dark,” in many ways. Let’s not forget that. Concluding analysis in chapter kind of weak.
Godfrey of Viterbo? First, see my Livilla chapter. Second, no, Charlemagne did not invent the Holy Roman Empire, since he empire dissolved less than 50 years after his death and more than before the founding of the actual Holy Roman Empire. Second, the set of seven electors wasn’t fixed until the Golden Bull of 1356. At this point, we’re entering “grokking” territory for sure on my reading of this book, with “did not finish” already a background possibility.
Theodore Laskaris chapter? Much of the Greek peninsula was NOT controlled by “a colonial Latin ruling class” for “more than three centuries” after the Fourth Crusade. Before the end of the 1400s, the Ottomans controlled not only all of today’s Greece but everything south of the Danube. By 1450, the Ottomans controlled the northern half of peninsular Greece and all of northern Bulgaria, while the Byzantines had the Peloponnese. Latins had but littie bits. And, at the time of the “reunification” in 1261, the Byzantines controlled most the northern half of today’s Greece. It controlled all of it by 1340. So again, no, “We usually don’t think of Greece as being under the colonial rule of western Europeans, but for more than three hundred years it was,” isn’t true. The idea of “Hellenes” being created vs the old “Romanoi” is good, but exactly how major of relevance for the book’s big theme?
Tullia D’Aragona chapter? Seems to strawman a bit. Yes, Burckhardt (and Michelet) popularized the word Renaissance itself, but the idea was held during the time of the Renaissance by the humanists of the era, whether their ideas about classical antiquity were right or not. She even mentions Vasari etc. I will confess to never having heard of Tullia D’Aragona before. That said, the idea that her final, posthumous Il Meschino has support for Mac Sweeney’s main thesis, especially when based on a totally non-historical prose romance of the 1300s?
Safiye Sultun chapter? While noting the Ottomans’ claim to have inherited the Byzantine claim to world empire and the battle with the HRE Hapsburgs and their similar claims, the “Third Rome” of Moscow is ignored. In fact, none of the chapters in the book is Russia-oriented, despite Mac Sweeney’s repeated notes in earlier chapters that for Europeans of this time and earlier, “Russia” often fell out of their definition of “Europe,” meaning that a chapter with Russian ties should surely support her thesis. We’re grokking more lightly.
Francis Bacon chapter? Why is Bacon being used as an intro to the Enlightenment? If one wanted to talk about ideas from China influencing Enlightenment Europe then use an Enlightenment figure. (Wiki’s article on The Enlightenment notes Bacon and Descartes as FORERUNNERS, not part of.) And, why does Mac Sweeney try to align the New Atlantis with an existing continent?
Njinga of Angola chapter? Her story is interesting, even more than that of Tullia D’Aragona’s. Would be great as a part of an “Overlooked Women of History” book. She, or rather western biographies of her in the 1600s, from two Capuchins who worked in her kingdom of Ndongo, are used to illustrate Mac Sweeney’s thesis of the gradual development of the idea of “classical antiquity” = “the west.”
Joseph Warren chapter? Stand-in for all US Founding Fathers, in part. Also a claim by Mac Sweeney of US phil-Romanism vs European philhellenism. I think she pushes this too much; also, philhellenism is not phil-Athenianism, and that didn’t develop in Europe until Romantic times. Skimmed this totally.
Phillis Wheatley chapter? Chosen as upsetting the “modern” Western applecart’s racism.
William Gladstone chapter? Used as exemplar of “the West” being extended back from North America to encompass non-Romanov and non-Ottoman Europe, and a whiff of anti-semitism as part of that.
Edward Said chapter? Modern wars within academia; she referenced Huntington and his clash of civilizations ideas in the intro. Said is a representative type of reimagining the West. She notes his feeling out of place in both Orient and Occident, though she spoils the literary parallel by contracting Orient and West.
Carrie Lam chapter? Perhaps Mac Sweeney chose her because of her own partially Chinese ancestry. She does, picking up a plaint I had earlier, note Putin in 2016 contrasting Russia to the West. And, given the amount of time she spends on Putin, why he’s not the namesake figure of the chapter, I have no idea. If you felt you had to do the rise of China as well as the resistance of Russia, and the Hong Kong angle to the west on China? Do two chapters.
April 28, 2024
We are committed to uncovering and communicating how diverse, exciting, and colourful antiquity really was—much more so than acknowledged by the grand narrative of Western Civilisation. Our appreciation of Homeric epic is enriched when we realise that it re-imagined themes and motifs from Mesopotamian and Hittite poetry. Our knowledge of Roman religion is deepened when we examine the complex syncretisms that emerged between Roman cults and those of Iron Age Europe. And we gain a much more sophisticated understanding of fifth-century Athens if we consider how engaging in anti-Persian rhetoric went hand in hand with adopting Persian material culture and artistic styles. Like Herodotus, we argue that the most historically accurate (as well as the most interesting) way of studying the ancient world is by embracing it in all of its dizzying diversity.
Brilliant and well-written, with the kind of history that is alive and interesting, this is a must-read to help understand how we got to where we are as a culture and country, and how there can be a path forward. It is not guaranteed, however, and the myth needs to be confronted and acknowledged, and this book is a very accessible beginning of that conversation.
The first argument 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.
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.
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.
Before the US Capitol building was stormed in January 2021, supporters of the then president Donald Trump used social media to call for him to “save our Republic,” using the hashtag #CrossTheRubicon to spread their message—a reference to Julius Caesar using his army to seize power at Rome. The fact that Caesar used force to overturn a more representative government and establish himself as a dictator seems to have been lost on pro-Trump campaigners, who erroneously claim that they were upholding democracy by protesting against a rigged election.
Traditional narratives of Western Civilisation cast this period as a dark age of backwardness and barbarism. But the medieval period only looks like a dark age if your view is fixed on northern and western Europe. In the eastern Mediterranean, the Byzantine Empire dazzled with splendour and sophistication. The Islamic world, as we shall see in this chapter, stretched from Seville to Samarkand and from Mosul to Mali and enjoyed a period of unrivalled prosperity as well as artistic and scientific advancement. In east Asia, the Tang Dynasty transformed China, and the Buddhist empire of Srivijaya ushered in a golden age for the southeast Asian archipelago. But back in Europe, people hung on to Western Civilisation “by the skin of our teeth,” in the words of one popular historian. The traditional narrative claims that the precious classical inheritance was preserved thanks to the efforts of monks and nuns (although mostly monks) labouring in obscure libraries and scriptoria across Europe, squirrelling away the cultural legacy of antiquity for future generations. Yet this view of the medieval period is, to put it bluntly, wrong.
By the late twelfth century, the Holy Roman Empire was increasingly being characterised as “Western” and “European” when compared to its Byzantine rival. As we have learned, the identification with Europe had begun as early as the ninth century, with an anonymous poet describing Charlemagne as the “Father of Europe” following the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire. But this trend had intensified over the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, given the ongoing confessional disputes between Rome and Constantinople. Against this background, the idea of Asian origins (Troy was, after all, located in what is modern-day Turkey) might seem like a strange choice for an empire that was firmly rooted in central Europe.
The old racialised way of defining the West has become obsolete in part because it simply no longer works, but also because it runs counter to the principles that most Westerners consider to be central to Western identity today—principles of fundamental human equality and rights, social liberalism, and toleration. (There are people within the West who do not subscribe to these principles, preferring instead illiberalism and intolerance, of course.)
This is therefore a vision of history which, like that of Western Civilisation, is inconsistent with the facts as we currently understand them. Yet the very existence of these radically divergent models tells us something. It should prompt all of us, both within and without the West, to question the narratives that we usually take for granted, and to think more openly about the types of narratives that we might possibly build for the future.
Brilliant and well-written, with the kind of history that is alive and interesting, this is a must-read to help understand how we got to where we are as a culture and country, and how there can be a path forward. It is not guaranteed, however, and the myth needs to be confronted and acknowledged, and this book is a very accessible beginning of that conversation.
The first argument 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.
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.
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.
Before the US Capitol building was stormed in January 2021, supporters of the then president Donald Trump used social media to call for him to “save our Republic,” using the hashtag #CrossTheRubicon to spread their message—a reference to Julius Caesar using his army to seize power at Rome. The fact that Caesar used force to overturn a more representative government and establish himself as a dictator seems to have been lost on pro-Trump campaigners, who erroneously claim that they were upholding democracy by protesting against a rigged election.
Traditional narratives of Western Civilisation cast this period as a dark age of backwardness and barbarism. But the medieval period only looks like a dark age if your view is fixed on northern and western Europe. In the eastern Mediterranean, the Byzantine Empire dazzled with splendour and sophistication. The Islamic world, as we shall see in this chapter, stretched from Seville to Samarkand and from Mosul to Mali and enjoyed a period of unrivalled prosperity as well as artistic and scientific advancement. In east Asia, the Tang Dynasty transformed China, and the Buddhist empire of Srivijaya ushered in a golden age for the southeast Asian archipelago. But back in Europe, people hung on to Western Civilisation “by the skin of our teeth,” in the words of one popular historian. The traditional narrative claims that the precious classical inheritance was preserved thanks to the efforts of monks and nuns (although mostly monks) labouring in obscure libraries and scriptoria across Europe, squirrelling away the cultural legacy of antiquity for future generations. Yet this view of the medieval period is, to put it bluntly, wrong.
By the late twelfth century, the Holy Roman Empire was increasingly being characterised as “Western” and “European” when compared to its Byzantine rival. As we have learned, the identification with Europe had begun as early as the ninth century, with an anonymous poet describing Charlemagne as the “Father of Europe” following the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire. But this trend had intensified over the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, given the ongoing confessional disputes between Rome and Constantinople. Against this background, the idea of Asian origins (Troy was, after all, located in what is modern-day Turkey) might seem like a strange choice for an empire that was firmly rooted in central Europe.
The old racialised way of defining the West has become obsolete in part because it simply no longer works, but also because it runs counter to the principles that most Westerners consider to be central to Western identity today—principles of fundamental human equality and rights, social liberalism, and toleration. (There are people within the West who do not subscribe to these principles, preferring instead illiberalism and intolerance, of course.)
This is therefore a vision of history which, like that of Western Civilisation, is inconsistent with the facts as we currently understand them. Yet the very existence of these radically divergent models tells us something. It should prompt all of us, both within and without the West, to question the narratives that we usually take for granted, and to think more openly about the types of narratives that we might possibly build for the future.
December 11, 2023
I spend an unhealthy amount of time picking what book I should read going through all my shelves of unread books on Goodreads, but ran into this one by chance in a local library and it was an excellent read.
The author, Naoise Mac Sweeney, makes a case for how the grand narrative of the Western civilization is misleading. The grand narrative is a view of the West as an unbroken, linear, and growing achievement of culture and civilization starting with the Greeks, carried on through the Romans, and continued mostly in Europe through the Renaissance and further and lately extended into America. It is not a denunciation of the Western civilization, but rather the narrative of it. To make her case, the author chooses to speak of the lives and times of 14 men and women, all well-accomplished but only some are well-known today. The author contends that the grand narrative is false and developed over time by various people to suit their ideological purposes. She instead suggests that the West’s progress was not and the boundaries between the West did not exist, were unclear, and porous even when formed. This enriched the West, rather than firmed it. Besides, she speaks to how the modern vision of what the West is will be unrecognizable to those whom we consider heroes in its construction.
Her choice of people spans time and geography, starting with Herodotus (the Greek historian from the fifth century BC) to Carrie Lam (the retired leader of Hong Kong). She starts with how the Greeks themselves fought among each other and did not consider themselves as belonging to a common pool. The Romans on the other hand freely borrowed, mixed, and received aspects of other cultures. She continues through the medieval times, the Renaissance, and till present day, including the claims of the US, Russia, and China.
The curiosity about the origins of what we consider Western civilization is not uncommon, and it has forever lurked in me - someone who has embraced and enjoyed many fruits of the Western civilization, but cannot see himself in it. Feeling like a stranger in both your adopted and native lands may be one of the causes that drive it. Like me, the author seems to be prone to it and it was eloquently captured in the chapter on Edward Said, both by Edward and the author herself.
I believe that the value of books may not be purely in satisfying their objective, but can be through other ways. In this case, the author does make a convincing case and there is value in it, but the view of the past through various new lenses is illuminating.
The author enriches the view of how the West evolved and its circumstances. For example, how the competing Byzantines and the Roman Empire claimed the West and how their fortunes impacted what we consider the West. Another example is how the leading figures during the American independence claimed a link for America from the Greek and Roman civilizations.
The book’s style and arguments complement well. While the rewards are rich, they are not perfect. The author’s argument that the grand narrative is a myth is acceptable, but some things bother me, I am not a historian and offer my objections humbly and accept that I can be quite guilty of big ignorance. First, I am afraid that the grand narrative that she portrays is not as strident and lofty as it claims. I thought many do assume that the West did borrow or steal from others and that history is never a straight line. Second, proving that the grand narrative is not perfect doesn’t mean that it is wholly wrong. There are places where the author seems to read too much into something to support her arguments.
But, overall, this book is well worth the time and I relished reading it.
The author, Naoise Mac Sweeney, makes a case for how the grand narrative of the Western civilization is misleading. The grand narrative is a view of the West as an unbroken, linear, and growing achievement of culture and civilization starting with the Greeks, carried on through the Romans, and continued mostly in Europe through the Renaissance and further and lately extended into America. It is not a denunciation of the Western civilization, but rather the narrative of it. To make her case, the author chooses to speak of the lives and times of 14 men and women, all well-accomplished but only some are well-known today. The author contends that the grand narrative is false and developed over time by various people to suit their ideological purposes. She instead suggests that the West’s progress was not and the boundaries between the West did not exist, were unclear, and porous even when formed. This enriched the West, rather than firmed it. Besides, she speaks to how the modern vision of what the West is will be unrecognizable to those whom we consider heroes in its construction.
Her choice of people spans time and geography, starting with Herodotus (the Greek historian from the fifth century BC) to Carrie Lam (the retired leader of Hong Kong). She starts with how the Greeks themselves fought among each other and did not consider themselves as belonging to a common pool. The Romans on the other hand freely borrowed, mixed, and received aspects of other cultures. She continues through the medieval times, the Renaissance, and till present day, including the claims of the US, Russia, and China.
The curiosity about the origins of what we consider Western civilization is not uncommon, and it has forever lurked in me - someone who has embraced and enjoyed many fruits of the Western civilization, but cannot see himself in it. Feeling like a stranger in both your adopted and native lands may be one of the causes that drive it. Like me, the author seems to be prone to it and it was eloquently captured in the chapter on Edward Said, both by Edward and the author herself.
I believe that the value of books may not be purely in satisfying their objective, but can be through other ways. In this case, the author does make a convincing case and there is value in it, but the view of the past through various new lenses is illuminating.
The author enriches the view of how the West evolved and its circumstances. For example, how the competing Byzantines and the Roman Empire claimed the West and how their fortunes impacted what we consider the West. Another example is how the leading figures during the American independence claimed a link for America from the Greek and Roman civilizations.
The book’s style and arguments complement well. While the rewards are rich, they are not perfect. The author’s argument that the grand narrative is a myth is acceptable, but some things bother me, I am not a historian and offer my objections humbly and accept that I can be quite guilty of big ignorance. First, I am afraid that the grand narrative that she portrays is not as strident and lofty as it claims. I thought many do assume that the West did borrow or steal from others and that history is never a straight line. Second, proving that the grand narrative is not perfect doesn’t mean that it is wholly wrong. There are places where the author seems to read too much into something to support her arguments.
But, overall, this book is well worth the time and I relished reading it.
June 12, 2024
Mac Sweeney tells her story - then uses her rendition of the lives of 14 people to buttress her arguments concerning Grand Narratives - how they were created; what they mean and implications for the current time period.
Bottom Line - It is indeed a "slippery concept" - the Term - "The West". It could be a short-hand blurb to describe countries that believe in free-markets (currently Neo-Liberalism), countries that are (representative) democracies - and countries that are usually based in Europe, North America and some parts of Asia.
These countries support "International" institutions such as European Union, EU, NATO and OECD some of which created after the end of WW II.
There is or may be a hidden link between "Western Civilization" and "White Civilization".
Mac Sweeney's thesis is that the grand narrative of a 'straight line' between Plato and NATO centered in and through Europe is demonstrably false - but remains a powerful grand narrative in 2024.
Mac Sweeney proposes that this grand narrative was developed over centuries and stood to rationalize White supremacy, along with economics and humanism [Take up the White Man's Burden] (?) as the rationale for Colonial Powers which were European based at the time.
Even to the casual observer - mathematicians' use of zero - is derived from either/both the Indians and the Arab Mathematicians which lends credence to Mac Sweeney's thesis that "The East" made significant contributions to "Western Civilization". Mathematics is but one example of the types of data points Mac Sweeney cites. Additionally, 'lineage' - the Romans cite their heritage back to Troy (Aeneid?). Troy is/was considered an "Eastern" entity.
Additionally Mac Sweeney states that the ideas and values we tend to associate with "Classical Antiquity" - such as "Christianity" and the "Scientific Method" evolved as much from contributions from those in "The East" as from those in Europe.
Of interest is Mac Sweeney's list of Grand Narratives:
* From Plato to NATO - Europe is a direct descendant from Greece/Rome.
* Russia is 'the third Rome' - Rome (1st); Constantinople (2nd); and Russia (3rd) - upholding traditional "Christian" values.
* China Grand Narrative that Civilization is place-centric and cannot be transmitted - or mutated. The China Grand Narrative is in direct conflict with a Western thought-model about Civilizations - that they can be transmitted and that they can be mutated. Discussion relates to the North American colonies - wanting independence from Great Britain - didn't want to be slaves; although they kept the practice of slavery alive in the newly created republic even thought Great Britain banned it earlier. This line of argument is used as a data point to observe that Civilizations' can be transmitted across time, place and geography and therefore can be mutated as appropriate.
Finally an important point made by Mac Sweeney....."The West no longer dominates how the world sees itself...." in reference to the From Plato to NATO grand narrative. Sometime spoken about as "The decline of the West"; "The Rise of the Rest".
An important Book - best when speaks to the purposes for the creation of these Grand Narratives and the purposes to which they have been put.
Should be of interest to those who read history and current events.
Carl Gallozzi
Cgallozzi@Comcast.net
Bottom Line - It is indeed a "slippery concept" - the Term - "The West". It could be a short-hand blurb to describe countries that believe in free-markets (currently Neo-Liberalism), countries that are (representative) democracies - and countries that are usually based in Europe, North America and some parts of Asia.
These countries support "International" institutions such as European Union, EU, NATO and OECD some of which created after the end of WW II.
There is or may be a hidden link between "Western Civilization" and "White Civilization".
Mac Sweeney's thesis is that the grand narrative of a 'straight line' between Plato and NATO centered in and through Europe is demonstrably false - but remains a powerful grand narrative in 2024.
Mac Sweeney proposes that this grand narrative was developed over centuries and stood to rationalize White supremacy, along with economics and humanism [Take up the White Man's Burden] (?) as the rationale for Colonial Powers which were European based at the time.
Even to the casual observer - mathematicians' use of zero - is derived from either/both the Indians and the Arab Mathematicians which lends credence to Mac Sweeney's thesis that "The East" made significant contributions to "Western Civilization". Mathematics is but one example of the types of data points Mac Sweeney cites. Additionally, 'lineage' - the Romans cite their heritage back to Troy (Aeneid?). Troy is/was considered an "Eastern" entity.
Additionally Mac Sweeney states that the ideas and values we tend to associate with "Classical Antiquity" - such as "Christianity" and the "Scientific Method" evolved as much from contributions from those in "The East" as from those in Europe.
Of interest is Mac Sweeney's list of Grand Narratives:
* From Plato to NATO - Europe is a direct descendant from Greece/Rome.
* Russia is 'the third Rome' - Rome (1st); Constantinople (2nd); and Russia (3rd) - upholding traditional "Christian" values.
* China Grand Narrative that Civilization is place-centric and cannot be transmitted - or mutated. The China Grand Narrative is in direct conflict with a Western thought-model about Civilizations - that they can be transmitted and that they can be mutated. Discussion relates to the North American colonies - wanting independence from Great Britain - didn't want to be slaves; although they kept the practice of slavery alive in the newly created republic even thought Great Britain banned it earlier. This line of argument is used as a data point to observe that Civilizations' can be transmitted across time, place and geography and therefore can be mutated as appropriate.
Finally an important point made by Mac Sweeney....."The West no longer dominates how the world sees itself...." in reference to the From Plato to NATO grand narrative. Sometime spoken about as "The decline of the West"; "The Rise of the Rest".
An important Book - best when speaks to the purposes for the creation of these Grand Narratives and the purposes to which they have been put.
Should be of interest to those who read history and current events.
Carl Gallozzi
Cgallozzi@Comcast.net
June 16, 2023
"The West: A New History of an Old Idea" by Naoíse Mac Sweeney offers a comprehensive examination of the concept of "the West" throughout history. While the book presents a wealth of information and covers a broad range of topics, it falls short in certain aspects, leaving it deserving of an average rating.
One commendable aspect of Mac Sweeney's work is the extensive research that went into its creation. The author delves into the historical, cultural, and philosophical dimensions of the West, providing readers with a deep understanding of its origins and evolution. Mac Sweeney's meticulous attention to detail is evident throughout the book, as she includes a multitude of primary and secondary sources, enabling readers to explore the subject matter more extensively if desired.
However, the book's greatest drawback is its lack of cohesion and a clear narrative structure. Mac Sweeney's writing style often feels disjointed, with a tendency to jump abruptly between different time periods and regions. This fragmented approach makes it challenging to follow the author's arguments or grasp the overarching thesis of the book. A more coherent structure would have helped readers to navigate the complexities of the subject matter more effectively.
Moreover, despite the book's title suggesting a "new history," it falls short in delivering a truly fresh perspective. While Mac Sweeney does introduce some novel interpretations and challenges certain long-held assumptions about the West, much of the content remains firmly rooted in well-established historical narratives. As a result, readers hoping for a truly groundbreaking analysis of the subject may be left disappointed.
Furthermore, the book lacks a strong sense of engagement with contemporary debates and issues surrounding the idea of the West. In an era of globalization, cultural exchange, and shifting power dynamics, it is crucial to consider how the concept of the West is evolving and being challenged. Unfortunately, Mac Sweeney's work largely focuses on historical developments, neglecting to explore the implications of the West in today's world.
In terms of readability, "The West" can be quite dense and academic, which may deter some casual readers. The author's extensive use of specialized terminology and academic jargon can make certain sections feel inaccessible to those without prior knowledge of the subject matter. While the book undoubtedly appeals to scholars and experts in the field, it may struggle to engage a broader audience.
In conclusion, "The West: A New History of an Old Idea" by Naoíse Mac Sweeney offers an average exploration of its subject matter. While the book showcases rigorous research and offers valuable insights into the history of the West, its disjointed structure, lack of a truly fresh perspective, and limited engagement with contemporary debates prevent it from achieving greatness. It may appeal to dedicated scholars and enthusiasts interested in delving deep into the topic, but it falls short of being an essential read for a wider audience.
One commendable aspect of Mac Sweeney's work is the extensive research that went into its creation. The author delves into the historical, cultural, and philosophical dimensions of the West, providing readers with a deep understanding of its origins and evolution. Mac Sweeney's meticulous attention to detail is evident throughout the book, as she includes a multitude of primary and secondary sources, enabling readers to explore the subject matter more extensively if desired.
However, the book's greatest drawback is its lack of cohesion and a clear narrative structure. Mac Sweeney's writing style often feels disjointed, with a tendency to jump abruptly between different time periods and regions. This fragmented approach makes it challenging to follow the author's arguments or grasp the overarching thesis of the book. A more coherent structure would have helped readers to navigate the complexities of the subject matter more effectively.
Moreover, despite the book's title suggesting a "new history," it falls short in delivering a truly fresh perspective. While Mac Sweeney does introduce some novel interpretations and challenges certain long-held assumptions about the West, much of the content remains firmly rooted in well-established historical narratives. As a result, readers hoping for a truly groundbreaking analysis of the subject may be left disappointed.
Furthermore, the book lacks a strong sense of engagement with contemporary debates and issues surrounding the idea of the West. In an era of globalization, cultural exchange, and shifting power dynamics, it is crucial to consider how the concept of the West is evolving and being challenged. Unfortunately, Mac Sweeney's work largely focuses on historical developments, neglecting to explore the implications of the West in today's world.
In terms of readability, "The West" can be quite dense and academic, which may deter some casual readers. The author's extensive use of specialized terminology and academic jargon can make certain sections feel inaccessible to those without prior knowledge of the subject matter. While the book undoubtedly appeals to scholars and experts in the field, it may struggle to engage a broader audience.
In conclusion, "The West: A New History of an Old Idea" by Naoíse Mac Sweeney offers an average exploration of its subject matter. While the book showcases rigorous research and offers valuable insights into the history of the West, its disjointed structure, lack of a truly fresh perspective, and limited engagement with contemporary debates prevent it from achieving greatness. It may appeal to dedicated scholars and enthusiasts interested in delving deep into the topic, but it falls short of being an essential read for a wider audience.
January 23, 2024
A tragic consequence of simplifying history is that we see the past as not nearly as diverse and muddled as our present. This consequence encourages us to fetishize what came before and reduce our current times as the result of “mongrelisation.” The way history has been manipulated is the primary concern of this book. The principal argument being that what is usually defined as being from “the West,” has always been made up of many different beliefs from many different parts of the globe. The only reason a distinction was made was to assign supremacy over others. This can be extended to the entire modern concept of race, which was invented to decide who could be a slave and who could not.
MacSweeney cites a group of individuals throughout history who represent the comingling of cultures and peoples that have been paved over in order to paint a unified concept, starting with Herodotus. The “father of history” is seen as emblematic of the height in ancient culture (the Greeks), even though he himself wrote of how integrated the peoples of the Aegean Sea were and efforts to assign difference were misguided. Other subjects MacSweeney explored would explain the similarities between Western & Eastern thought, while others exploited these divisions for personal, political or economic gain. The division of race in particular “hierarchicalises differences in the service of power.”
The intersection of race and power is best exemplified by the story of Njinga of Angola, an African queen in the 17th century who fought off Portuguese colonizers by allying with the Dutch. To smooth over relations, she was baptized and allowed Christians in her court. Whether for sincere or political reasons, she appeared to integrate her culture so that her kingdom would remain sovereign.
Other fascinating biographies featured courtesans and women writers who, while artfully highlighting the inadequacies of their patriarchal societies, muddled MacSweeney’s point a bit.
The last subject is Edward Said, a product of a comingled upbringing, he nevertheless pointed out the harm in dividing the world among Western & Eastern lines: “The job facing the cultural intellectual is therefore not to accept the politics of identity as given, but to show how all representations are constructed, for what purpose, by whom and with what components.” This entire work is meant to exercise this effort to deconstruct, and while the biographies don’t quite coalesce as singularly as MacSweeney attempted, the richness of the subjects are undeniable. She concludes with a final judgment on the dangers of simplifying history and the insistence that “the West” is crumbling to the modern mongrel hordes: “And when they call in shrill tones for us to mount a defense of Western civilization, they are in reality calling for us to rally to the defense of a morally bankrupt fiction.”
MacSweeney cites a group of individuals throughout history who represent the comingling of cultures and peoples that have been paved over in order to paint a unified concept, starting with Herodotus. The “father of history” is seen as emblematic of the height in ancient culture (the Greeks), even though he himself wrote of how integrated the peoples of the Aegean Sea were and efforts to assign difference were misguided. Other subjects MacSweeney explored would explain the similarities between Western & Eastern thought, while others exploited these divisions for personal, political or economic gain. The division of race in particular “hierarchicalises differences in the service of power.”
The intersection of race and power is best exemplified by the story of Njinga of Angola, an African queen in the 17th century who fought off Portuguese colonizers by allying with the Dutch. To smooth over relations, she was baptized and allowed Christians in her court. Whether for sincere or political reasons, she appeared to integrate her culture so that her kingdom would remain sovereign.
Other fascinating biographies featured courtesans and women writers who, while artfully highlighting the inadequacies of their patriarchal societies, muddled MacSweeney’s point a bit.
The last subject is Edward Said, a product of a comingled upbringing, he nevertheless pointed out the harm in dividing the world among Western & Eastern lines: “The job facing the cultural intellectual is therefore not to accept the politics of identity as given, but to show how all representations are constructed, for what purpose, by whom and with what components.” This entire work is meant to exercise this effort to deconstruct, and while the biographies don’t quite coalesce as singularly as MacSweeney attempted, the richness of the subjects are undeniable. She concludes with a final judgment on the dangers of simplifying history and the insistence that “the West” is crumbling to the modern mongrel hordes: “And when they call in shrill tones for us to mount a defense of Western civilization, they are in reality calling for us to rally to the defense of a morally bankrupt fiction.”
January 18, 2025
My wife and I stopped by Barnes and Noble during our last week on break, and this ended up being the book that I picked up. The subtitle, indicating a broad sweep of history through fourteen biographical sketches, sounded very compelling. And it promised to be critical re-evaluation of the term "the West" which you will hear bandied about in political parlance all the time. The author starts her book in a library where 14 statues of key western figures -- Francis Bacon, Moses, Plato, Columbus among them -- were staring down at her. The key insight Sweeney makes to build her book is that this corpus is arbitrary and serves political purposes. So she writes a re-telling of the West from an alternative selection of 14 characters throughout history, each requiring us to re-think our perception of the West.
First on the list, Herodotus, the author of the famous "Histories" that I remember attempting to read at one point. From him, we learn that "Histories" was written in a specific political climate to counter a narrative of cultural purity. He himself was a political refugee, and a politics of Us versus Them had left him out of the picture.
From Safiye Sultan, the mother of the Sultan in Constantinople in 16th Century France, we learn that there wasn't a cultural clash of civilizations between East and West that spanned across millennia. Safiye had been writing to Queen Elizabeth over the course of decades, maintaining an alliance between Protestant Europe and Islam against the Habsburg Empire. Sweeney imagines an alternate timeline where the idea of the West had never solidified in the same shape.
And she recounts the story of Phyllis Wheatley, a young slave girl who wrote poetry and invoked themes from classical Greek literature. This was so upsetting to colonial America because it challenged the racial hierarchy that had been solidifying in the conception of the West. Sweeney suggests the idea of the West had been used in America to justify simultaneously calls for "liberty" and enslaving other humans.
The book is very thoughtfully written. It isn't "out to get the West" or paint villains where there are none. There are those books out that that seem to have a chip on their shoulder, and this is not one. It sticks close to the historical record. It shows the complexity of the cast of characters from the past. It gives credit where credit is due.
First on the list, Herodotus, the author of the famous "Histories" that I remember attempting to read at one point. From him, we learn that "Histories" was written in a specific political climate to counter a narrative of cultural purity. He himself was a political refugee, and a politics of Us versus Them had left him out of the picture.
From Safiye Sultan, the mother of the Sultan in Constantinople in 16th Century France, we learn that there wasn't a cultural clash of civilizations between East and West that spanned across millennia. Safiye had been writing to Queen Elizabeth over the course of decades, maintaining an alliance between Protestant Europe and Islam against the Habsburg Empire. Sweeney imagines an alternate timeline where the idea of the West had never solidified in the same shape.
And she recounts the story of Phyllis Wheatley, a young slave girl who wrote poetry and invoked themes from classical Greek literature. This was so upsetting to colonial America because it challenged the racial hierarchy that had been solidifying in the conception of the West. Sweeney suggests the idea of the West had been used in America to justify simultaneously calls for "liberty" and enslaving other humans.
The book is very thoughtfully written. It isn't "out to get the West" or paint villains where there are none. There are those books out that that seem to have a chip on their shoulder, and this is not one. It sticks close to the historical record. It shows the complexity of the cast of characters from the past. It gives credit where credit is due.
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