No human community is of exceptional status relative to others. None are children of God, or chosen people, unless all are. And none of us live upon the centre of the earth any more than we live on its periphery, since we live on the surface of a globe. Nations as we understand them today are no older than a few centuries, and we are all interconnected – genetically, culturally and historically – far more than we imagine. And even ‘time immemorial’, it turns out, can increasingly be pinned down, dated, analysed and grasped.
