I love visiting the public library and discovering books I never knew existed. In a day and age when choose the next book to read through social media or some online retailer’s algorithm there’s something pleasantly old fashioned about discovering a book by simply spotting it on the shelf. This serendipitous approach has introduced me to countless books over the years, some of which ended up being personal favorites of mine.
I’d never heard of Naoíse Mac Sweeney’s 2023 book The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives until I came across a copy one afternoon at my small town public library. I’m always down for reading something about “the West” but it was the fourteen lives approach Mac Sweeney took that intrigued me. It sounded a lot like what Simon Sebag Montefiore’s did for his 1,300 plus page tome The World: A Family History of Humanity.(An intimidating book I recently purchased l’m hoping to reader later this year.) Encouraged by Peter Frankopan’s warm endorsement on the front cover calling The World a “fantastic achievement” I rolled the dice and gave Mac Sweeney’s book a shot.
The West is an intelligent response to those primarily on the political right in North America and Europe who champion a chauvinistic concept of the West. As they proudly see it, their concept of today’s West can be traced via an unbroken line of cultural transmission stretching back to Ancient Greece and Rome. Those same partisans also claim Christianity, despite its origins within a largely Jewish milieu in the Middle East is completely synonymous with their concept of West. Islam, on the other hand despite having a somewhat similar origin story and arguably being even more monotheistic is seen at best a foreign religion and at worst a civilizational threat. To counter these claims, Mac Sweeney has spotlighted 14 individuals stretching from Ancient Greece to our current age. Whether we’ve heard of them or not, their respective lives prove this above-mentioned construct of the West is, relatively speaking a recent one and above all, historically inaccurate.
While we revere the Ancient Greeks, both Herodotus and his contemporaries never considered themselves European, wanting little to do with those uncouth barbarians living to the north. (This from a man who hails from the Greek city of Halicarnassus, located in what’s now modern Turkey.) Later the upstart Romans, seeking a classy origin story of their own adopted the national myth Rome was founded by Aeneas from Troy, like Halicarnassus a city in Asiatic Turkey. Later throughout the ages, other European kingdoms would do the same, tracing their respective origins back to Aeneas and his fellow Trojans. Some of those same countries took the next step by modifying their origin story to encompass Ancient Rome. Eventually, after the Protestant tide swept across Western Europe this national myth making fell out of fashion as Europe’s new Protestant realms sought to cleanse themselves from any Roman influences.
During the early Early Middle Ages, when the Abbasid Caliphate ruled a huge portion of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia the capital Baghdad was a hive of intellectual activity. Ancient Greek works in the fields of philosophy and science weren’t just being translated into Arabic they being commenting upon, inspiring some of the Caliphate’s best minds to produce bold new works of their own. So enamored with the wisdom of the ancients Baghdad’s smart set saw themselves as the living inheritors of Classical Greece. (Even one passionate lover of Greek learning wrote a treatise making the case the Ancient Greeks were forerunners of the Muslim Arabs.) Ironically, even though they were quick to identify with Ancient Greece they wanted nothing to do with Ancient Rome, deeming it inferior.
While today’s far right espouses an uncompromising, exclusivist brand of Christianity, according to Mac Sweeney this wasn’t always the case. There’s ample correspondence between the Queen Elizabeth and the Ottoman royal mother/wife of the Sultan calling for an alliance between the two kingdoms to counter their mutual Catholic rivals like Spain. Typical of the flowery diplomatic language of the day the two declared themselves co-religionists, since theological similarities far outweighed their differences. Around the same time, thousands of miles away in what’s now Angola Queen Nzinga in a shrewd political move converted to the Catholic faith. By doing so she earned the respect of the encroaching Portuguese and went on to be treated like any other European crowned head of state. Only later, when the slave trade began to take off and with it the racist views needed to justify the enslavement of others did Europeans would such egalitarian practices end.
Those on the far right aren’t the only ones misapplying history to advance a political agenda. Mac Sweeney concludes The West by examining a growing global movement. Chiefly orchestrated by China a select group of countries prefer to see themselves as distinct civilizations, as opposed to modern nation states. For example, the Peoples Republic of China, established in 1949 with Beijing as its capital China now asserts itself as the Chinese civilization. (In her 2007 book Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance–and Why They Fall Amy Chua quipped China is a civilization in search of a country. )Thousands of years old, a venerable entity unto itself China by default would owe nothing to the rest of the world. Setting itself above any international criticism China could conduct its domestic and foreign affairs with complete impunity. Through its global Belt and Road Initiative China’s leadership has exported this imperial sentiment to countries around the world from Greece to Bolivia.
Should you go on to read The West, whether you liked the book or not I’d encourage you do some follow-up reading. Start with The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Mac Sweeney’s number one fan, the above-mentioned Peter Frankopan. For two opposing perspectives I’d explore both Ibn Warraq’s Why the West is Best: A Muslim Apostate’s Defense of Liberal Democracy and Victor Davis Hanson’s Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power. For an Islamic take on Western Civ, Tamim Ansary’s Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes makes for good reading, in addition to Jim Al-Khalili’s The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance (referenced extensively by Mac Sweeney). On antiquity’s profound influence on Europe follow-up Al-Khalili’s book with Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages and Lars Brownworth’s Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization. Lastly, conclude your supplementary reading with Thomas E. Ricks’s First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country.
Of course some will criticize Mac Sweeney of cherry picking from history. Not being a profession historian I’m not qualified to judge her scholarship. But I can say her book feels well-researched. Perhaps most of all for nonacademics like myself her book isn’t just accessible it’s also enjoyable to read. While it might not make my year-end list of favorite nonfiction, it’s almost certain to go down as one of 2024’s honorable mentions.
