We should understand the nonsensical nationalism of cultural pride. It's all freaking intermingled.
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?
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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’
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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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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.
