ABSTRACT
The idea of a single, unified culture encompassing the whole world has a long and, so far as I know, relatively undocumented history. An inventory of the various historical dreams, visions and speculations about a global culture would, I suppose, have to include at least those of: the imperial projects of the ancient 'world empires' such as China or Rome; the great proselytising 'world religions' and the communities of faith established around them - Christendom, the Ummah Islam etc.; the utopian global visions of early socialists such as Saint-Simon; the various movements dedicated to establishing world peace; the ideas, beginning in the nineteenth century, of enthusiasts for artificial 'international' languages such as Esperanto; and many more.l These ideas clearly differ from each other in all sorts of ways. For example, some (probably most) were simply naive, unproblematised, often dogmatic, projections of a particular cultural outlook onto a 'universal' screen, while others were driven by the desire to reconcile cultural differences and to usher in a new, pacified ideal home for humankind. But two things unite all these visions. First, that they all approached the idea of a single global culture with enthusiasm, and second that none of them came anywhere near to seeing it achieved.
