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... See more

Our philosophical notions of ‘the self’ were born from the shock of Europeans discovering ‘otherness’

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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,... See more