THE WEST

A classical archaeologist examines the “grand narrative” of Western civilization and finds it wanting.

The Enlightenment may have had its good points, but as prizewinning British scholar Mac Sweeney notes, it was thoroughly racialized in its mania for classification, leaving little room in the rise of the West for “someone like me (female, mixed-race) [who] did not belong in a tradition personified by…elite white men.” The author argues convincingly that it was a departure from Greek and Roman senses of who they were and how they fit into the world. A modern portrait gallery of the products of those traditions would be the White European males whose images Mac Sweeney found enshrined in the Library of Congress, but the Greeks took it as a given that “a big part of being Greek was about doing Greek things in a Greek sort of way,” which did not involve being White, Black, or any other skin color so much as speaking and thinking Greek. As Mac Sweeney adds, Herodotus looked more to the East than to whatever might have qualified as the West in his day, when the second tradition, the Roman, was beginning to rise—and which was also not racialized nor particularly ethnocentric, its influences stretching to and from as far away as South Asia. Indeed, writes the author, despite the bleatings of latter-day Italian racists, the Romans, counterintuitively, “saw themselves as the descendants of refugees,” namely the Asian survivors of the siege of Troy. The clash-of-civilizations narrative—in part driven by a misreading of Herodotus, Mac Sweeney points out—is based on incorrect and harmful presumptions. Mac Sweeney paints on a broad canvas and introduces numerous little-known characters, from the Roman aristocrat Livilla to the African ruler Njinga of Angola. She builds on arguments by Edward Said and other contemporary critics of Western triumphalism, and she also examines the counternarratives offered by the likes of the Islamic State and China, which have their own intellectual problems.

A highly readable, vigorous repudiation of the Western-centric school of history.