I'm John Bachelor with Peter Francopan. 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 2,200 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 over

do I over read it?

No, I think some of my colleagues will get very over-excited about the word 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 chart that through the exchange of goods.

We can change that through the exchange of ideas, which a little bit more tricky to always

pin how they're moving and how they're being spread.

But we can also test through linguistics and genetics.

And those kinds of things tell us a wholly different picture of what is going on around

about 4,000 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 that their connection often to them are

that their connection often to nomadic peoples

who are the conveyors and the vectors of long distance,

...