I'm John Bachelor with Peter Frankapan.

He's a professor of global history, and his new book is exactly that.

Global history over 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 overread it? No, I think some of my colleagues will get very overexcited 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

globalisation 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, 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.

Are 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 that the glue between these cities

and the key driver for these cities is their connection often to nomadic peoples who are the

conveyors and the vectors of long distance, goods, ideas, technologies and so on. So ideas about

bronze, different kinds of cereals, different kinds of ricees,

are being transported not by city dwellers, but by nomadic or mobile peoples.

And of course, mobile people don't just travel distances.

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