Libealism is not 300 yers old, as commonly claimed; how about 10,000 years?: “Liberalism is not about how to live as a western capitalist Protestant. Its roots are to be found not in capitalism but in agriculture, in that remarkable 10,000-year-old revolution that led modern man, independently in many different parts of the world, to give up the hunting and gathering life and to found farms, villages and eventually cities. That change had a radical consequence: human beings had to learn to live and to trade with strangers for the first time. By an intriguing paradox, globalisation began when man became sedentary – for settled communities cannot hope to avoid all contact with outsiders by melting into the forest. Instead they must think systematically about defence, trade, immigration, and the division of labour on more than a local scale. This was a momentous departure: prehistoric man had lived in groups of kin or at least among familiar faces. The habits of mind and the forms of behaviour that farmers had to learn are the foundations of liberalism, and they are what we need to reaffirm today if we are to share the world with strangers without tearing ourselves apart. ” — Paul Seabright, an economist at the University of Toulouse, writing in Prospect Magazine