This kind of thinking has brought us “extremists dressed in Spartan helmets or tattooed with Roman slogans [who] appeal to the intrinsic value of a white, Western, and European heritage, under threat of a Great Replacement from without,” Quinn warns in her recent book, How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History.

Josephine Quinn, a professor of ancient history at Cambridge University, is on a mission to take down what she calls civilizational thinking, which “embeds an assumption of enduring and meaningful difference between human societies that does real damage.” Seeing the world in terms of distinct civilizations—Eastern and Western or Muslim and Christian—dooms people to misunderstanding because it “is not peoples that make history, but people.”

Josephine Quinn, a professor of ancient history at Cambridge University, is on a mission to take down what she calls civilizational thinking, which “embeds an assumption of enduring and meaningful difference between human societies that does real damage.” Seeing the world in terms of distinct civilizations—Eastern and Western or Muslim and Christian—dooms people to misunderstanding because it “is not peoples that make history, but people.”

This kind of thinking has brought us “extremists dressed in Spartan helmets or tattooed with Roman slogans [who] appeal to the intrinsic value of a white, Western, and European heritage, under threat of a Great Replacement from without,” Quinn warns in her recent book, How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History.

Quinn’s opening attack on civilizational thin