I'm John Bachel with Peter Frank Epstein. He's a professor of global history and his new book is exactly that. Global history over several, several tens of thousands of years. But right now we're after 2200 BC.

The rise of cities that leave records, law records, codes records, relationships then are suggestive. Professor, this is trade. This is globalization. Do I overdo I overread it?

No, I think some of my colleagues will get get get very over excited about the world globalization because it clearly means something in the modern world that is different to the past.

In the past connecting the Americas to each other and also to the other great continents of the world is obviously a different story. But one can talk about long range connections linking Europe, Africa and Asia going back thousands of years.

And I think that if one is willing to be relatively generous with the idea about what globalization means in terms of exchange. We can charge that through the exchange of goods.

We can change that through the exchange of ideas, which a little bit little bit more tricky to always pin how they're moving and how they're being spread. But we can also tell test through linguistics and genetics.

And those kinds of things tell us a wholly different picture of what is going on around about 4000 years ago. Those rise of those cities in competition with each other often in conjunction with each other.

But one of the things that's most interesting is the glue between these cities and the key driver for these cities. Is there a that they're connection often to nomadic peoples who are the conveyors in the vectors of long distance.

And so these ideas technologies and so on. So ideas about bronze, different kinds of cereals, different kinds of races are being transported not by city dwellers, but by by nomadic or mobile peoples.

And of course mobile people don't just don't just travel distances. They have access to protein sources through their livestock dairy, of course, textiles that could go from the wool and and the leather from sheep and horses, et cetera.

So this world that rises together one can talk about, I think in a in a globalized system. Obviously the distance is huge and the connections are never from one side of the other to the other.

There are a series of dots that are all buzzing together all the time and sometimes more more intensively than others.

volcanoes often playing a major role in climate adaptation. And let's go to a big one. We've all visited if we've been in the Mediterranean, Tyrass and Torini now.

The volcano that's that's blamed for the loss of creder. What happens to create does that have a worldwide effect on crops, the explosion.

Yeah, all these big volcanic eruptions inject large amounts of particles in the atmosphere. And a lot depends on the on the latitude of the volcano a lot depends on the timing of the eruption and a lot depends on the explosivity.

In fact, in the case of the theorem, although the drama of the destruction of creed, which is a kind of major focal point of intermeditarian trade and in fact trade across the Middle East and North Africa to one of the things that it does that's probably has a longer run impact is that it it triggers a change in the very old.

And virus, which is the virus that sits behind smallpox and smallpox probably over the course of the last three and a half thousand years.

I mean, it kills like 300 million people. So that to me is more measurable and more dramatic than a single point of failure because of the eruptions.

When these volcanoes do go big, they do the kinds of things that we understand because the last 12, 15 months, which is that there's sudden inflation repression, the governments find it hard to collect revenues, they borrow more, they become more fragile, they tend to become much more disruptive because of political opportunists.

For example, that comes with another volcanic eruption, a little bit of a little bit of a fear and an ockmock in Alaska.

That erupts in 43 BC and those of you who remember your classical educations will remember that Julius Caesar is murdered in 44 BC and to hunt down the assassins because vengeance is required under row in Rome because the state if someone important gets taking it out, it's not it's not okay to allow the assassin to roam around.

The hunt goes to bring Brutus and Cassius and the others to justice, ockmock erupts about 12 months later and has a dramatic impact on global crops as far as we can tell, but in particular, it affects the Nile floods.

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