The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives

The idea of a coherent Western tradition is “both morally repugnant and factually wrong,” according to this pugnacious and erudite historiography. University of Vienna archaeology professor Mac Sweeney (Troy) debunks the “grand narrative of Western Civilization”—a distinctive European culture evolving from Greco-Roman antiquity through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment to modernity, and tending toward democracy, capitalism, and individualism—through biographical sketches of historical figures. The multicultural worldview of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, she argues, shows that the Greeks had no notion of a Western civilization distinct from Asian and African cultures, while ninth-century Muslim scholar al-Kindī considered Greek philosophy the intellectual foundation of Islamic, not European, culture. The idea of Western civilization, Mac Sweeney contends, was a 17th-century innovation that served mainly to justify racism and colonialism, as demonstrated in her profiles of enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley, whose “erudite allusions to classical and biblical literature” clashed with assumptions that nonwhites could not master Western learning, and 19th-century British statesman William Gladstone, who imagined an exclusively white, Western tradition to rationalize British imperialism. Though Mac Sweeney sometimes overreaches in her eagerness to skewer the idea of the West, as when she suggests that medieval Europe recognized no continuity with ancient Greece, she skillfully synthesizes a wealth of scholarship and draws vibrant character sketches. It’s a case to be reckoned with. Illus. (May)