Ideas, trade, and empires – including the colonial armies that enforced their power – all drew apparently disparate places together. The flow of ideas had always occurred along trading routes, and intensified as transportation possibilities expanded. Arabic and Indian traders moved cargo around the Indian Ocean for centuries by ship, and after 700 ad their visits fostered the adoption of Islam in the seaports along trading routes. In Southeast Asia, this new religion encountered local ideas and the long influence of Hindu and Buddhist thought. Although Islam became the dominant religion in many places, it had syncretised with more local beliefs. Thus at the same time as it was becoming a global religion, Islam was also diversifying across many cultures and races. The awareness of the Umma, the community of believers, not only spread outwards from Mecca but also returned with the ritual of the Hajj, itself made easier with expanding trade routes and the later cheaper, more rapid steam transport between colonial holdings and the Middle East.

From the sixteenth century, European empires had fostered the expansion of Christianity, so new proselytisers of the Western variants of the Christian faith travelled along the old trading routes, where they met the earlier forms of the faith, established in Southern India by the third century ad. The European missionaries, however, brought new ideas and hierarchies. Their impact accelerated with the nineteenth century introduction of new technologies, such as steam power.

By the early twentieth century, as steam technologies continued to expand the transport of empire, the visions and hopes of socialism also began to spread along trade routes, circulating alongside and often both embedded within and in conflict with the ideas of organised religions. Like Islam, the ideologies of Western Christianity and socialism were carried by the mobile peoples of the trading routes themselves: the labourers, traders, and seamen.

Finally, the rapidity of new modes of transport ensured that where armies were used to enforce imperial control, it was far easier to move colonial troops from their place of origin to more distant colonial holdings, contributing to the mobility of subaltern (non-elite) groups between areas which had not previously been in contact.