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... See more

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... See more

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... See more

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... See more

What has allowed us to thrive, physically and culturally, is not our rootedness but our mobility. Without it, we would already be extinct.

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... See more

Globalisation is observable across allhuman 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.

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.

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... See more