Introduction

This book is a history of Western civilization. Western civilization is made up; there’s no such thing. This might seem to be a problem.

We can classify human societies as modern or ancient, western or eastern, civilizations or savages. These categories are made up. There is no boundary between west and east, no year when the ancient became modern. To call a culture ‘savage’ denigrates it, in an ethnocentric way that has often in the past been the precursor to violence or even genocide. Every historical generalization, it seems, has exceptions, and every historical category has outliers and problems.

The study of Western civilization has a history itself. These courses began as an American phenomenon after the first world war, conceived as of general interest to all undergraduates and devoted to instilling knowledge and attitudes that would make them good democratic citizens. Civilization was understood as a beneficial phenomenon that reached its height in Europe and America. Progress was the central theme of such courses and the textbooks they spawned: technological progress, scientific progress, moral progress, social progress. This approach had the advantage of a clear and optimistic narrative that ordered the endless swarm of historical minutiae into a comprehensible flow. See how new ideas emerged: farming, writing, roads, democracy, Christianity, flying buttresses, gunpowder, harpsichords! Each a new component in the growing cathedral of Civilization!

Telling history as a story of human progress is called ‘Whiggishness’, for boring historical reasons. Whig history has two main problems. One is that telling a story of social and moral progress across human history usually involves a lamentable ethnocentrism, celebrating the culture of a few European countries plus America as superior to everything else throughout space and time. The other is that it to some degree must dismiss the plethora of massacres, genocides, witch-crazes and wars as insignificant in the big picture. The forces of progress and enlightenment must win in the end, and the bad deeds work much better in the story if they can be ascribed to the ignorant, the superstitious, the barbarian. A history that takes seriously massacres and wars carried out by powerful, civilized Western nations cannot easily be Whiggish, because the technological and scientific progress that made those nations powerful is exactly what allowed them to carry out their wickedest deeds.

These difficulties have caused a decline in the prevalence of Western civilization courses, and the emergence of global history as a common framework. Global history is a valuable topic and the death of Whiggish Western Civ should not be bemoaned. But since this textbook is nevertheless a history of Western civilization, the reader may have guessed that we will not be condemning the study of Western civilization as pointless or unsalvageable.

Western history as this textbook understands it is not defined by a particular type of narrative. It is not delineated by geography either, at least not mainly, despite the ‘Western’ in the title. It is defined by a diverse but unified cultural and intellectual heritage that extends back to the origins of agriculture. A ‘civilization’, like any historical category, will have fuzzy boundaries and in a certain sense is made up. But all human categories are (in this sense) made up — states, languages, laws, ethnicities, wars, inventions. The reality is messy and we impose concepts on it to make sense of it. The idea of ‘Western Civilization’ is a useful one, which is why it was invented in the first place. It isolates a distinct stream of intellectual culture that can be effectively studied as a unit. It can be contrasted with several other ‘civilizations’ that operated in different languages and different geographical areas. While travel and translation meant that these different civilizations influenced each other in various ways, the contacts between them were attenuated, especially by the barrier of language.

By narrowing our scope from the entirety of human history to a particular civilization, we can cover that history in more depth. Our history also become more narratively unified, because inside the (fuzzy) geographical and linguistic boundaries of our civilization, events are closely interconnected and we can avoid skipping back and forth between multiple parallel, mostly disconnected lines of change.

Our history of Western civilization extends back to the origins of agriculture and beyond, but in a certain sense it begins with a battle on October 1, 323 BCE. On that day, Alexander of Macedon and his army defeated an army led by Darius, the ruler of the Persian Empire. The significance of that battle is that it made Alexander ruler of a huge empire, and Alexander and (more importantly) his generals and aides spoke Greek. After his death, his empire was divided up in civil wars among his successors, and they spoke Greek as well. Consequently, Greek became the language of government and of education throughout the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia. Later, the Roman empire became bilingual, speaking Latin in the west and Greek in the east, and the writing of Greek scientists, philosophers, and artists survived and continued under Roman rule. This heritage was adopted and added to by the Islamic Caliphates and passed on via translation and conquest into the universities that developed in Europe by the twelfth century CE. These universities founded their curriculum on this intellectual heritage, until eventually in the twentieth century they started teaching courses about the history of civilization. But of course, their origins meant that ‘civilization’ as these universities and their faculty understood it began with Greek thought.^[1]

In the year of Alexander’s victory over Darius, the two largest empires in the world were his and the Mauryan empire of Ashoka, which ruled much of the Indian subcontinent. In Ashoka’s domain Sanskrit was the language of the elite, learned by both scholars and administrators. Further east, China was in its warring states period, not to be unified under the Qin dynasty for another hundred years. Already, however, a corpus of Chinese writing had emerged, most famously that of Confucius, which would beget its own lineage of scientists, philosophers and artists. Both these written traditions — the Sanskrit and the Chinese — developed substantially independently. This is not to say there were not very important connections, but the connections between these three Eurasian written traditions were much, much less dense than the connections within them. Chinese authors mostly read and responded to Chinese authors, Sanskrit authors to other Sanskrit authors, and Western authors to other Western authors.

One notable difference between these distinct ‘civilizations’ is that the Western tradition seems to involve more languages — Greek, Latin, Arabic, and then European vernaculars such as French and German. Partly this is an artifact of oversimplification — the Indian tradition begins in Sanskrit, but the main language of Ashoka’s empire was Prakrit, and many other languages become important over time, eventually replacing Sanskrit entirely. The broad swell of the Chinese tradition washes into its neighbours such as Korea, Japan and Vietnam and mixes with local languages and authors. Every historical generalization has its exceptions; it is always an imposition of idealised order onto a messier reality. One could conceive of the Western tradition as really the Latin tradition, and make things a little cleaner and tidier thereby. I think that this loses something important from the story, namely how the works were translated from one language to the next, integrating into and shaping one culture after another, creating connections and shared worldviews between them.

The written corpus of this multilingual ‘western’ tradition is the basis of what this textbook calls Western civilization. It shaped and was shaped by the culture of innumerable individuals, communities and states. It formed that intellectual basis for the emergence of modernity, via the scientific revolution, the ‘enlightenment’, European colonization, and the industrial revolution. It has become a shared intellectual heritage of humanity: its political ideas are embedded in constitutions from Argentina to Zimbabwe; doctors around the world swear the Hippocratic oath; scientists publish their results in journals that trace their origins back to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and the Memoires de L’Academie des Sciences. The capitalist, technological, industrialized world we inhabit today was created by the explosion of Western civilization around the globe, carried by armies, fleets, settlers and colonists, but also by books, teachers, and trade.

We can study the history of Western civilization not as a story of progress, but of a particular lineage of culture and ideas. These were transmitted over time from one generation to the next, transforming and evolving, shaping and shaped by the culture of the cities and nations and peoples that inherited or adopted them.

Although intellectual history provides the unifying narrative that justifies and organizes our study of Western civilization, this textbook is not primarily about intellectual history. That is because understanding intellectual history requires a solid grounding in social, economic and political history, and it seems important to provide this necessary context. The contributions of Plato, Augustine, Machiavelli, or Newton cannot really be understood, either in their origins or their significance, without sufficient familiarity with the societies in which they lived. Indeed, the interest of the intellectual history of Western civilization lies (I think) mostly in its social impact: the fact that the world we live in is so much its creation, for better or for worse. By studying the history of Western thought, we come to understand ourselves — at least, any of ourselves that are being educated in the western tradition and living in a city such as Toronto. The legacy of Western civilization is not one of progress — at least, not of moral and social progress. Technological, scientific and economic progress we can still include in the story. But the story need not be an optimistic one. The legacy of Western civilization includes slavery, genocide, imperialism and ruthless exploitation. It still remains to be seen whether that legacy will culminate in nuclear war or mass extinction. One hopes that it will instead culminate in a world of freedom, equality, prosperity and justice for all. Either possibility seems like a plausible conclusion, for all that I would personally prefer the happy ending.

This textbook is the first of four, and is designed to be used for Seneca College’s Development of Western Thought courses. It integrates text and images from a variety of open access sources, together with original material. Each chapter has both a chronological, geographic and thematic focus. That is to say, the chapters proceed approximately chronologically, but each chapter will usually focus on one or more specific regions or states that were significant during that time period, and will often use that focus to explore a more general theme that is relevant to the history of Western civilisation. So, for example, the second chapter of this textbook covers the time period from about 4000 to 2000 BCE, focuses on the region of Mesopotamia and Sumer specifically, and explores the themes of the emergence of cities and what constitutes civilization.

In order to be as focused and readable as possible, this textbook omits much discussion of general political history — kings, conquests, the rise and fall of dynasties and empires. This is perhaps the main structural difference between it and other more traditional Western Civ textbooks: the emphasis is firmly on social and intellectual history, with history of technology and economic history included in a supplemental way.

Suggestions, compliments, rants, and factual corrections may be sent to eugene.earnshaw-whyte@senecapolytechnic.ca. This work is made available under the Creative Commons non-commercial attribution share-alike license, which means that it can be copied, altered and reused as long as it isn’t being sold for profit, authorship is attributed, and it is shared under the same terms be people who use it.