ABSTRACT
‘Nothing is more fruitless, when dealing with long-term social processes’, remarked Norbert Elias (2006: 249), ‘than to attempt to locate an absolute beginning.’ Many years ago, I pointed out that even globalization, which is so often seen as something that began in the 1990s, or perhaps after the Second World War, in fact has no meaningful starting point (Mennell, 1990). At most, one can say that the survival groups on which most people depend for the basic requirements of their lives have, over many millennia, grown larger and fewer in number; and that the chains of interdependence that link survival units to each other have become more numerous and tighter. Such chains include bonds of rivalry, hostility, and violence as well as of collaboration, amity, and peaceful coexistence. Viewed in this long-term perspective, globalization has been driven as much by war as by the expansion of trade and contact between cultures.
