Echoing one of Mark Twain's old sayings, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz argued that even though history might not repeat itself, it does rhyme (2005: 10). The easiest of these rhythms to notice are those that occur in our own lifetimes. Your children make many of the mistakes that you did as a kid, many “innovations” are just more of the same, and another freedom fighter turns into a dictator when he comes into power. There are, of course, other rhythms in history that are more difficult to grasp because they unfold beyond living memory. Geertz's comment, for example, was part of a personal reflection on his struggles to understand the roots of Indonesian culture as the region went through drastic changes in the 1950s and 1960s. The world would “not stand still” for his pen, and he found that the unrelenting chatter of daily life kept on engulfing the deeper rhythms of history that he sought to explore (2005: 10).

Despite these challenges, uncovering long-term patterns is important because these processes help to structure current events and ultimately have a significant impact on how history unfolds (e.g., Braudel 1979). One of the most important long-standing rhythms in world history may be the peaks and valleys in long-distance connectivity that have typified interactions in different parts of the world over the last few millennia (Chase-Dunn and Anderson 2005; Frank 1993; Marcus 1998).