6. HOW THE WORLD MADE THE WEST: A 4,000 YEAR HISTORY

The West, so the story goes, was built on the ideas and values of Ancient Greece and Rome, which disappeared from Europe during the Dark Ages and were then rediscovered during the Renaissance. But what if that isn't true? In conversation with Nicholas Spencer of the Reading Our Times podcast, Josephine Quinn, Professor of Ancient History at Oxford University, argues that the real story of the West is much bigger than this established paradigm and that so much of our shared history has been lost, drowned out by the concept - developed in the Victorian era - of separate 'civilisations'. Moving from the Bronze Age to the Age of Exploration, Professor Quinn traces the millennia of global encounters and exchange that built what is now called the West, as societies met and tangled. She makes the case that it is contact and connections, rather than solitary civilisations, that drive historical change.