A whistle-stop tour of the East

For many of us, life has become global. Areas which were previously tranquil backwaters are now hives of international activity. Leisure travel has given us the possibility of first-hand exposure to once very remote places. You don’t have to be particularly privileged or adventurous to go on holiday in January to south-east Asia: two weeks in a western chain hotel plus flights to Thailand may only cost £1,000. The increase in migration to western countries since the 1940s means that many lives are bound up with previously distant cultures — we have spouses, in-laws, lovers, friends and connections of all sorts whose origins lie in different countries and continents.

And, of course, there is the internet, making foreign media and cultural productions available to us in the West, unedited and uncurated. It is quite touching, in this book about different global locations, that Norman Davies takes the trouble to sit down in the High Commissioner’s residence in Delhi with the Times of India and tell us all about the newspaper. But it’s not necessary any more. This morning, at home in Switzerland, I called up its website and spent a pleasant half hour reading about horrid domestic crimes:

‘Some youths, who are yet to be identified, beat Ahmad, 30, Israr, 25, and Bakr, 22, after a tiff,’ said Baghpat superintendent of police Jaiprakash Singh.

The subject of migration, trade, the journey of ideas and the breaking down of the national barriers which seek to prevent these things is a very rich one. Davies is an excellent historian, who has worked in the past both on a local scale, in first-rate books about Poland, and on a larger scale, in a substantial history of the whole of Europe. Beneath Another Sky goes on a whistle-stop tour of half the world: no Africa or South America, and Europe can be taken as read, but otherwise Davies’s curiosity takes him to Azerbaijan, the Emirates, India, Malaysia and Singapore, Mauritius, Tasmania, New Zealand, Tahiti, Texas, and Manhattan.