When you study enough “horizontal” history cutting across regions and “vertical” mythologies behind modern nations, a weird sort of derealization starts kicking in where default modern political constructs start seeming very shaky.

For example, if you read about medieval Turkic-Mongol history and see the horizontal continuity from ottomans to Mughals, the “local” idea of north India starts to get very shaky. Medieval Delhi had a closer connection to Istanbul than to South India. Read about the spice route and south India starts to get similarly shaky,

The vertical continuity is real of course, but neither absolute, nor dominant, and over historical time it’s gotten steadily weaker. The world is a pile of congealed horizontal flows that were once firehoses. Spice route, Silk Road, crusades, renaissance, nomad invasions, spread of coffee and tea, cosmopolitan languages like English and Persian, produce from the Americas (tobacco, cocoa, potatoes, chilies…) the Bronze Age tin trade, Buddhist texts… there is a ton of such congealed flows. And more appear, flow for a while, and congeal in turn, creating increasing entanglement.

In a thousand years, abstractions like “America”, “Taiwan” and “Korea” may compete for narrative power with new horizontal historical abstractions like “oil trade,” “the silicon belt” or “Davos elites”

Vacuous over-large abstractions like “globalization” make us underestimate the horizontal historicity of the world.