Mapping Civilizations: The World from the West

In October 2024 OCGH had our 3rd Annual Gwilliam Lecture. Speaking on her latest work, Professor Jo Quinn gave an insightful talk on:

How the World Made the West: A 4,000-year History (2024) debunks the myth of the modern West as a self-made miracle with local roots, an idea that erases a much bigger story of the emergence of modern European culture through contact and exchange, journeys and relationships, trade, sex and war. This entangled world, I argued, was largely lost to the nineteenth-century notion of ‘civilizations’, the idea of distinct cultures associated with particular places that emerge, flourish, and then decline largely alone. This lecture traces the gradual emergence of what I call ‘civilizational thinking’ in the West in the maps of the world people make there. 

This was followed by a Q&A session and a drinks reception.