Josephine Quinn interviewed Peter Frankopan

Historian Professor Josephine Quinn launches her new book at this festival event, How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History, in which she argues that Western civilisation was built on a set of values that stretch far wider than the classical world of Greece and Rome.

Quinn says there has never been a single, pure European or Western culture. Values of freedom, rationality, justice, democracy and tolerance are not only western. The West is a product of links between a much larger group of cultures from the Gobi Desert to the Atlantic Ocean and from Scandinavia to the Sahara. Quinn says it was the Victorian world that drowned out these interactions and organised the world into distinct civilisations. It is contact and cultural appropriation not civilisations that drive change.

Quinn is professor of ancient history at Oxford University and codirector of the Tunisian-British archaeological excavations at Utica. Here she talks to Professor Peter Frankopan, professor of global history at the University of Oxford and author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World.