Origins matter. When we pose the question, “Where do you come from?” what we are really asking is often, “Who are you?” This is true for individuals, families, even countries. It’s also true of an entity as large and complex as the West.
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The term “the West” can mean different things at different times to different people. Today, it usually refers to a set of modern nation-states that are geopolitically aligned and share cultural features and political and economic principles, including representative democracy, market capitalism and a secular state overlying a Judeo-Christian moral tradition.
Of course, nothing on this list is exclusive to the West or universal across it. The same can be said of many symbols of Westernization—Coca‐Cola, opera houses, shopping malls. But one defining feature of the West is the notion of a common origin resulting in a shared history, a shared heritage and a shared identity.
This story imagines Western history as unfurling backward in time through the Enlightenment, the brightness of the Renaissance and the darkness of the Middle Ages, all the way to its origin in the classical worlds of Greece and Rome—“from Plato to NATO,” as a popular 1998 history book put it.
This has become the standard version of Western history, both canonical and clichéd. But it is wrong. Today, all serious historians and archaeologists acknowledge that the cross-fertilization of “Western” and “non-Western” cultures happened throughout human history, and that the modern West owes much of its cultural DNA to a wide range of non-European and non -white forebears. Yet the nuances of these cultural interactions have yet to be fully untangled, and traditional narratives about Western history remain stubbornly ubiquitous.
What would Western history look like if we abandoned the myth of “Western civilization” and dug deeper to uncover the historical realities beneath it? We could start at the supposed birthplace of the West, in the classical worlds of Greece and Rome. Recent research shows that the ancient Greeks didn’t think of themselves as predominantly European.
Indeed, the famous historian Herodotus derided the very concept of separate continents, arguing instead that they all belonged to the same connected world. Similarly, the Romans ruled an empire that spanned three continents and claimed they were descended from the Trojans of Asia. Celebrating their heritage mixed, they would not have considered themselves to be white, and certainly not Western.
The misunderstandings accumulate after that. After the Roman Empire split in the late century—the western half eventually splintering into independent kingdoms, the eastern third half developing into the Byzantine Empire—some elements of classical culture were lost, some preserved and others transformed for a radical new world: the early Middle Ages.