In studying culture in time and space, scholars have typically started with the dichotomy between high culture, sometimes called the great tradition or civilization, and popular culture, also called the little tradition or folk culture. The latter is seen as local and limited, particular and stable. High culture, which is always superimposed over a number of popular cultures, is far more diffuse geographically but at the same time more coherent internally, more systematic or orthodox. And generally speaking, we tend to measure change in great traditions across time and change in little traditions across space. The difference in approaches to the two is revealed, partly, in the fact that historians usually study the great traditions and ethnographers the little. More recently, under the impact of globalization, an emergent international culture has been identified, some elements of which, mathematics, are totally denationalized and some, music, still bear the imprint of their ethnic or cultural origins. Thus, we now have a multilayer cultural cake composed of the local, the regional, the ethnic or national, the civilizational, and the international or global.

Chronologically, high and popular cultures can be found coexisting in deep antiquity, presumably from the very inception of complex urban-based societies in the Near East, India, China, and Central Mexico. But when did we begin to acquire the outer, international layer? For most historians, the answer, I suspect, is quite recently. Many would probably agree with Graham Wallas, an English social scientist writing on the eve of World War I, who saw incipient globalization, which he termed “a general change in the social scale,” as a phenomenon of the nineteenth century, produced by new technologies of transportation and communication. 1 Others might push back the date of globalization several centuries to the well-named “Columbian exchange,” which saw the rapid and planetary-wide dissemination of assorted technologies, ideologies, commodities, biologies, and pathologies. Obviously, if a strictly global criterion is imposed, then by definition this international layer must come after