Power of travel

IT’s a pity that, post-Covid, travel has become so expensive. Travel is one of those human endeavours that has multiple benefits. Primarily it enables people to see a bigger world than the one they live in and allows them to appreciate the diversity of humanity as well as our many commonalities. Not being able to travel – or not even being interested in travelling – makes people insular and causes them to assume that what they know from their own environment is all there is.

The historian Yuval Noah Hariri, in his book Sapiens, noted that what fuelled European colonialism was essentially a belief that they were ignorant and needed to know more about the world they lived in. Hence the first people who set out on ships to other parts of the globes were explorers. They returned with stories of fantastic lands filled with precious minerals like gold, as well as spices and other goods that could be taken back to their own countries and sold. Traders immediately saw the potential in enriching themselves and sailed off to those “new” lands to exploit their economic potential. Those faraway lands however were inhabited by people they deemed even less ignorant than they. The only way to gain all those treasures at very profitable prices was to conquer those native peoples. No wonder that European colonialism began with the big trading companies such as the East India Company, rather than with governments, although governments soon followed.