In the 1990s, an entire generation was robbed of its historical consciousness by a powerful and seemingly unprecedented tale. This story, crafted as the Cold War came to an end, declared that real or imagined boundaries had stopped working as they once had. Humans were no longer contained within their old geographies or identities. They now inhabited a new world that appeared to be unhinged from the normal evolution of human society.
The concept chosen to capture this transformational moment in human history was ‘globalisation’. It described how new technologies and networks of connectivity had suddenly brought human communities closer together and made them permeable to an uncontrollable flow of people, ideas, goods and cultural practices, which all moved freely across the integrated markets of the world economy. In the wake of this transformation, new jargon emerged, expressing new anxieties: the world had truly become the ‘global village’ that Marshall McLuhan anticipated in the 1960s, but it was a world shaped by multinational corporations and ‘elite globalisers’, who spoke a common, hegemonic ‘global English’, and were spearheading a destructive ‘homogenisation’ (or ‘McDonaldisation’) of human cultures that national borders were too fragile to withstand.
During the past three decades, more people have begun viewing our ‘global’ world as a cursed fate. With its suffocating time-space compression, globalisation seems to have uncoupled us from the logic and flow of history. Our suspicious, bastard identities – patched together from a mishmash of cultures – appear incompatible with our ancestors’ ‘authentic’ traditions and ways of life. We have become strangers to the places they called home, to the ways they dressed, ate or communicated with one another. And, with no template for how to live and no experience to learn from, the deafening siren songs of anti-globalisation movements are now luring us back into the safer identities and boundaries of a lost, golden past.
This tale of globalisation is the most successful scare story of our times. And like all scare stories, it stimulates our fear of an overwhelming unknown.
But it’s all an illusion. There is no new global world.
Our present appears that way only because we have forgotten our common past. Globalisation didn’t begin in the 1990s, or even in the past millennia. Remembering this older shared history is a path to a different tale, which begins much, much earlier – long before the arrival of international supply chains, ocean-going sailing ships, and continent-spanning silk roads. The tale of globalisation is written across human history. So why do we keep getting the story so wrong?
You are strolling around a street market, the Grote Markt, in the Dutch city of Groningen, sometime in the 2020s. A lady operating a stall asks a customer if he wants his hummus ‘naturel’, by which she means ‘plain’. He looks baffled as she gestures to the orange, green and purple varieties of hummus on offer. It had taken him some time to try the original stuff – that pale paste that had him eating more chickpeas, sesame seeds and olive oil than all his ancestors combined – so purple hummus will have to wait for another day. He mutters: ‘The authentic one, please,’ and hurries to the opposite stall for the last item on his shopping list: potatoes, the most elementary ingredient of Dutch cuisine. Elsewhere in the market, other customers are searching for their favourite ingredients. Some are seeking whole wheat for a French-style sourdough loaf or Basmati rice for an Iraqi recipe; others are shopping for maize (corn) flour for a Nigerian pudding, tomatoes for a fresh Italian pasta sauce, or olives for a Greek salad.
Marketplaces like this one are perfect sites to observe the flux and mixing of peoples, goods, ideas and mores that we now call globalisation. They are also places where we can begin imagining the longer history of this process.
Many historical markets were established well before our global age. When the Grote Markt started operating in the late medieval era, little of the produce now available to Groningen’s current international community would have been on display. Back then, the people visiting the market would also have hailed from fewer and closer territories, most of them still speaking their regional dialects. In 1493, however, the imaginative horizons of everyday life at this and other European marketplaces suddenly expanded as news of an extraordinary discovery began to circulate: a previously unknown human world existed beyond Europe’s shores. It was a world so unexpected and seemingly so different that it shook Europeans’ consciousness to the core.
Our philosophical notions of ‘the self’ were born from the shock of Europeans discovering ‘otherness’
After Christopher Columbus arrived at the later-named ‘Americas’ in 1492, humankind experienced a four-century-long process of intensive world integration driven by imperialism, trade, religion, a new culture of mobility and an intellectual curiosity unleashed from the chains of tradition. As secure networks of maritime and land connectivity were established, the peoples of the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Worlds were brought together in the most violent and transformative way. This process inaugurated what the historian Alfred W Crosby Jr in 1972 called the ‘Columbian exchange’: a vast, human-driven intercontinental movement of animals, plants and disease-carrying microorganisms that forever changed Earth’s biological profile and the socioeconomic, cultural and political life of its inhabitants.
For many historians, this ‘early modern era’, spanning from around 1500 to 1800, marks the first stage of globalisation. According to them, this period birthed the first global capitalist economy and integrated world market, began an unprecedented mixing of local cultures and ethnicities, and crystallised the first global consciousness of a shared world. It was so powerful that its effects still endure to this day in diets, languages, economies, social and legal regimes, international balances of political and military power, and scientific frameworks and institutions. The early modern era even shaped our philosophical notions of ‘the self’, born from the shock of Europeans discovering ‘otherness’.
But even this era was not the first global age in human history. It, too, was the product of earlier global movements, encounters and exchanges. In fact, early modern globalisation was merely one accelerated episode of a general process that has been ongoing for tens of thousands of years.
Collective human memory is a partial and imperfect repository of our encounters with one another through time. We are not good at remembering, let alone acknowledging, the ways that these encounters have shaped our present societies, cultures and economies. So, how did we forget?
Globalisation theorists following the sociologist Roland Robertson use the term ‘glocalisation’ to describe how local cultures digest the products of the global market and turn them into something seemingly new. Through this process, incoming goods – technologies, ideas, symbols, artistic styles, social practices or institutions – are assimilated, becoming hybrid recreations that take on new meanings. These recreations are then redeployed as new markers of cultural or class distinction, sedimenting borrowed cultural products in the collective consciousness to the point of misrecognition. And so the global becomes local, the foreign becomes familiar, and the other becomes us. Glocalisation is how and why we collectively forget. Such is the silent trick of every single globalisation in our history: our forgetfulness of it is the method and mark of its success.
Every generation appropriates the inheritances of global exchanges and refashions them as its own. Excavating the sediments our predecessors left in our collective consciousness is not a task that we are naturally disposed to perform. It is an act of remembrance and self-understanding that can destabilise our identities because it counters the processes that endow them with authenticity.
Cultural products travelled around the planet through increasingly elaborate connective technologies
Excavating the sources of our identities is made more difficult by our tendency to focus on the uniqueness of the present. By limiting ourselves to the minutia of the current global moment, we overlook the most obvious manifestations of globalisation’s deeper past. Consider these broad, defining characteristics of human civilisation: our few world religions, our dominant paradigm of written communication, and our widely shared ethical norms of societal conduct. Consider our (quasi-)universal agrarian mode of subsistence, and our single nutritional and psychotropic order, which is based on an incredibly small number of starchy crops (including wheat, maize, rice), domesticated animals (cows, chickens) and stimulants (coffee, sugar) uniformly consumed across the planet. These characteristics predate our current ‘global age’ by millennia. And they are arguably more fundamental features of human culture, and more representative illustrations of globalisation, than either K-pop or the Birkenstock sandal – itself a recent reappropriation of identical or similar products that have been circulating for at least 10,000 years.
Sandals, c1479-1458 BCE, Egypt. Courtesy the Met Museum, New York
Such global phenomena follow a repeated pattern we can easily recognise throughout our history, in which cultural products travelled around the planet through increasingly elaborate connective technologies. Before the internet came aeroplanes and containerships. Before those, came the electric telegraph, railways, steamships, the printing press, newspapers, caravels, writing systems, chariots, and horses and camels. Before all of that came the earliest ideographic signs and the first sea-faring ships of the Palaeolithic Age.
Each new connective technology has opened or expanded pathways of mobility and exchange, creating eras of globalisation that have left lasting imprints in human consciousness. Along these pathways, social intercourse turned local languages into global languages and lingua francas – French, Arabic, classical Chinese, Nahuatl, Maya, Greek or Akkadian – which facilitated and intensified cross-cultural relations. As a result, material culture, ideas and innovations were able to circulate more easily during each historical period of exchange. This is how both ‘prehistoric’ jewellery and T-shirts spread across the globe. It is why monotheism and the story of the flood have appeared in so many different places. And it explains why certain ideas, like the theory of humours or quantum mechanics, have become shared ways of understanding the world.
No cultural system of any significance to our existence escapes this pattern of global becoming. Consider the food systems that sustain our existence and culinary practices. When we associate the potato with ‘traditional’ European cuisines or the Irish famine, we forget its Andean origin and the global journeys that eventually made it ubiquitous in family kitchens and fast-food restaurants all around the world. Similar forgotten stories can be told of other globalised staple foods, including the tomatoes and maize that originated from America, rice from East-Asia and Africa, and the wheat, barley and olives of Southwest-Asia. This forgetting is why many local culinary emblems, such as French wine or American hamburgers, are easily turned into totems and mythologies of national identity. The ‘local’ wine grapes and cattle that flood the world market today are the end-products of global migrations that began as early as the Neolithic Age.
The cultural markers of identity we cherish most jealously – our cuisines, religions, languages and social mores – are products of past globalisations. When we celebrate such cultural markers as ‘authentic’ elements of our identities, we are effectively celebrating our shared human culture, born of a long chain of encounters and exchanges.
Globalisation is observable across all human history. It displays such a degree of constancy that it must be fundamental to the evolution of human society. Far from being a mere lifestyle or worldview – or an invention of the elite – globalisation can be understood as the mass process through which human culture evolves and perpetuates itself.
Culture is how we have adapted to our changing environment to sustain ourselves and flourish. Cultures, plural, are the specific manifestations of human culture in different times and places. These two categories – human culture and cultures – are roughly equivalent to the biological idea of the ‘genotype’ (our core code) and the ‘phenotype’ (its variable expressions). The history of our globalisations is the history of how phenotypical variations in human culture have circulated and cumulatively transformed our cultural genotype.
Exclusionist and anti-globalist sentiments come from a confusion of these categories. National or regional cuisines, for example, which anchor feelings of pride in one’s identity and mediate feelings of disgust or contempt for the cuisines of others, are merely variations on a universal human behavioural trait, cooking, that distinguishes us from all other species. Cooking is an extraordinary trait of true significance for our ‘identity’ as a species. Less significant is how different cultures use this or that ingredient.
The invention matters, but equally important is the circulation of those discoveries
The distinctiveness of local cultures is an illusion of scale. When viewed in the long term, their boundaries blur and melt into each other. But the consciousness of an individual or a generation is not capacious enough to span the deep temporality that human culture inhabits. And so, we forget.
The national histories we are taught also erase this long story of cultural movement. They tend to focus on tales of innovation that emphasise moments of creation. In reality, there are few stories of origin and genuine invention.
Stories of circulation and adoption abound and offer a much more interesting and accurate account of our shared history. Consider the wheel, which was invented just a few times in different shapes, materials and sizes. Only one or very few of these instances spread globally with extraordinary and enduring effects. Consider the alphabet: it was invented just once, possibly around 1700 BCE (or even earlier), but was appropriated via different scripts hundreds of times, and now provides a basis for our global communication systems. The invention matters in these stories, but equally important is the circulation of those discoveries.
Our culture is cosmopolitan because we are a cosmopolitan species. We are citizens of the world, not nations, to paraphrase both Socrates and Thomas Paine. What has allowed us to thrive, physically and culturally, is not our rootedness but our mobility. Without it, we would already be extinct.
Mobility requires freedom of movement. This is a fundamental right we often overlook as we focus our attention on the valuable freedoms that we gained more recently – freedom of thought, belief and expression. Free movement secured our survival and allowed us to flourish on a planet we were not originally adapted to inhabit so widely. Forgetting this precious right makes it easier to succumb to the dominant ideology of rooted difference.
To have ‘roots’, we are taught, is to have a home. It means belonging to a distinctive place and people, which is something elevated as inherently good. City-states, nation-states and other polities based on territoriality often sacralise ‘roots’ and sedentariness while devaluing, controlling or even outlawing mobility. The profound hatred that is often aimed at nomads, immigrants and migrants, stateless people, displaced refugees and ‘travelling’ communities is a mark of this disciplining territorial ideology, which is constantly reproduced by the paradigm of the homeland. A similar antagonism manifests towards so-called globalists or ‘cosmopolitan elites’ who invest their time, assets and interests elsewhere and end up sharing values and modes of being that are unrecognisable at the places where they came from. In the words of the former British prime minister Theresa May: ‘If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.’
In response to May, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah noted that ‘cosmopolitanism’, as originally conceived in ancient Greece, was not incompatible with the notion and practice of citizenship. Appiah found it ironic that cosmopolitans had become ‘objects of suspicion’ at a time when their humanist ethos of extended citizenship and collective action is precisely what is needed to face the global challenges of our times. This is an ethos of responsibility for others’ wellbeing that transcends national and cultural differences.
Our history is one of constant flux as people moved across the planet, mixing populations and cultures
But the irony runs deeper. Ecologists use the term ‘cosmopolitan’ to describe species distributed across the planet. The black rhinoceros is endemic to Africa, and so were we. But the peregrine falcon is cosmopolitan, and so we became. This ecological cosmopolitanism, like its humanist counterpart, is not incompatible with its apparent opposite: our distinctive sedentism. We are, simultaneously, the first species of our lineage that learned to settle down and create lasting homes and the first that learned to inhabit the whole planet. We did so by repeatedly moving ourselves and our homes – and hundreds of millions of us still do.
According to the International Organization for Migration, one in 30 people alive in 2020 were migrants. This number is expected to rise as populations continue to flee poverty, environmental degradation and local armed conflicts, or simply seek better livelihoods in an asymmetrically prosperous global economy. This movement isn’t new: earlier globalisations sometimes involved even larger migrations. Our history is one of constant flux as people moved across the planet, mixing populations and cultures over the millennia. This forgotten global story is still legible in the archaeological and genomic records that our ancestors left behind.
The genealogy of free human movement is deep and so is its meaning. Our first cosmopolitan ‘odyssey’ during the Palaeolithic Age lasted from 200,000 to around 15,000 years ago and its map tells the extraordinary story of our cosmopolitan transformation. The routes we took as we moved around the world reveal how an endemic Afrotropical species with little chances of surviving the radical climatic fluctuations of its original home successfully settled a planet of diverse habitats. Our regional cultures are the ingenious products of this wondrous journey, created as we adapted our shared human culture to diverse ecologies and responded to the innovations of other travellers we met along the way.
Ultimately, in the fullness of deep time and human history, we are all migrants, and we have always been. For movement is an adaptive response to existential risks arising from our ecological and social environments. It is how we preserve our individual and collective dignity when our life conditions become unsustainable, unbearable and cruel. Coerced rootedness and coerced mobility are both aberrations that equally contradict the very process of home-making – of how we come to belong.
Periodically, however, our natural tendency to move, mix and exchange generates profound anxieties. This is because globalisation is always experienced in the here-and-now by social actors who are amnesic to past movements and cultural mixing. To these periodic anxieties we owe such inventions as passports and travel restrictions, ethnically segregated urban designs, and the banning of mixed marriages as well as specific foods, books and fashions. These measures ultimately fail. Consider maize tortillas, which early modern Spaniards once believed posed an existential and spiritual threat to the Christian body and soul. Today, ‘un-Christian’ maize has become part of our everyday world culture – and Christianity itself is now a world religion despite earlier persecutions of its converts and the prohibition of its ideas.
Anti-globalism often expresses itself in multiple registers that can be compounded into powerful ideological narratives. In 1686, France banned Indian cottons because of their damaging economic impact on the national textile industry. But to counter their uncontrollable popularity, state propaganda claimed that these textiles had morally damaging effects on the soul of the French public. Current anti-globalist anxieties and calls to ‘de-globalise’ the world feature similar narratives, which have become more acute in the supposedly unprecedented ‘polycrisis’ of our age, whereby political, ideological, environmental, economic and military crises are said to be converging to undermine our security.
Anti-globalisation movements have recently shifted from the far Left to the far Right
However, our times are not inherently unique, and we are therefore not clueless about how to diagnose and respond to the generalised narrative of an impending global collapse. The so-called ‘General Crisis’ of the 17th century offers a strikingly similar conjecture to our own and invaluable lessons for our times. That century witnessed an unprecedented number of political revolutions and wars in almost all regions of the world. This social unrest unfolded in the unstable climate of the Little Ice Age, a period of global cooling that ran from at least the 16th to roughly the 19th century, which affected the world economy through a disruption of food production and the spread of epidemic diseases. The apparent ‘contagion’ of the General Crisis, attested to by observers across the Northern Hemisphere and conveyed by global information networks, generated a shared sense of melancholy and gloom that everywhere reinforced apocalyptic visions and predictions of the end of the world. What seemed to have brought about this chaos was the world’s unprecedented interconnectedness. As a result, voices eventually rose to demand a cultural retrenchment toward the orthodox belief systems of regional civilisations and greater protection from external influences. An early and extreme response to such anti-globalist ideas was Japan’s sakoku policy of quasi-total isolation, which began in 1633 and ended two centuries later with little success.
In our own contemporary era, anti-globalisation movements have recently shifted from the far Left to the far Right of national and global politics. Justified resentment against the locally experienced injustices of the global economy and the growing disruptive effect of global climate change are now couched in resentment for the social and cultural dimensions of globalisation. Identitarianism, a political ideology that stresses the preservation of narrowly conceived ‘Western’ ethnicities and cultures, has accordingly become the easiest and most efficient strategy to mobilise local grievances, and direct them at whatever is perceived as a threat to the wellbeing of those suffering within. The ugly age of nationalism is back.
Is nationalist identitarianism the ethos we will now deploy to confront the common existential threats that await us in the coming century? Why wouldn’t it be? Does anyone doubt that national borders will be turned, once again, into sacred physical boundaries and fiercely defended against those fleeing the environmental, economic or military devastation of their homes? Do we doubt that eloquent voices animated by the most (ig)noble intentions will rise to justify patriotic bullets being aimed at ‘alien migrants’ and climate refugees? And that leaders will say these displaced people cannot be accommodated because of their numbers and cultures, and the threat they pose to our secure lives – to our ‘identity’?
Such scenarios are far too likely given the rise of xenophobic worldviews, such as the conspiratorial idea of a ‘Great Replacement’, in which elites – imagined to be Jews and other minorities – have begun executing a plan to replace so-called indigenous white Europeans with other populations of apparently greater and threatening reproductive vitality. These racialist worldviews dangerously converge with a public misunderstanding of ‘race’ as reflected in the recent craze for DNA ‘ancestry tests’. DNA has little to do with ‘identity’, as social and political ideologies have constructed it, and much to do with physical and social geography. Our genes are a result of human adaptive mobility, and the journeys, rich encounters and kin-making that our freedom of movement made possible over tens of thousands of years. Our genome does not tell our whole story, but the story it does tell shows how past globalisations made us what we are today.
How can we perceive plurality as a threat to survival and not see the richness of our shared human culture?
As we search for ways of communing with one another beyond the stubborn ideology of difference, we should also prepare for vicious future distortions and manipulations of our current scientific and historical understanding of identity. Some humans today carry a few genes that their Pleistocene ancestors inherited from intercourse with our Eurasian Neanderthalian and Denisovan cousins, whom some communities of Homo sapiens encountered on their journeys of cosmopolitan expansion. How might such a genetic difference among us be interpreted and used in the future by those intent on pursuing identitarianism to its silliest or most murderous conclusions? Might they declare that some humans are not ‘pure’ enough to enjoy the full freedom, security and dignity we recognise as the natural rights of humankind? Or might they, on the contrary, elevate the Neanderthalian or Denisovan gene as a marker of Eurasian ‘distinction’ to recreate narratives of racial superiority, similar to those that once plagued archaeological thinking about the allegedly more ‘advanced’ nature of those human fossils laying the farthest away from the species’ original African homes?
Palaeontologists who insist on ascribing the label ‘humans’ to the entire Homo genus while reserving that of ‘modern humans’ to the surviving representatives of the lineage (ie, us) probably understand better than most the dangers of ideological manipulations of scientific taxonomies. But in the open marketplace where ideas freely flow in the name of freedom of thought and expression, how can we protect ourselves and one another from such dangers, if we still perceive plurality as a threat to survival, and cannot see the richness of our shared human culture?
The wars we wage against one another are all civil wars. Until we recognise them as such, they will remain tragedies we accept as natural – or horrors we cheer on in the name of grand notions sold to us by loud voices who know our fears too well (and know too little of the richness of our world and our history). We have always been global, and this is our shared identity. It is our unique way of being and remaining in the world as one family. Whatever we cherish in our humanity and culture has been crafted by our global journeys and encounters. Through them, we will continue to write the story of how we become us.
This essay draws on the author’s project ‘The Global as Artefact’ (2017-2023), funded by the European Research Council’s Horizon 2020 Programme for Research and Innovation (Consolidator Grant no. 724451), and on a four-volume deep history of the global condition currently in preparation.
