Introduction

The title of this book – Why Travel? – is one of those questions that dates us, because modern human beings have been asking it in a succession of languages for about the last 11,500 years. Before that, back when travel was a given, not a choice, asking ‘Why travel?’ would have made no more sense than asking ‘Why sleep?’

Simplifying the back-story somewhat, modern humans left Africa about 60,000 years ago. But for fully four-fifths of that long time span, as they dispersed across the continents throughout almost 50,000 years, they were wanderers, people who hunted, fished and foraged, settling down at night, but moving on again and again, as the animals and plants they relied on were depleted or shifted seasonally or with changing climates.

Then as a species we came to a halt. Not everywhere, not all at once, but at some point over the past 400 generations of people, staying put became the norm, along with permanently growing a community's plants and animals on site. The technical term for this great shift is ‘sedentism’ – from the Latin word for ‘to sit’, which also led to sedentary, sediment, settlement.

Why travel? Set aside the profound and transformative economic, social and environmental changes sedentism has created, and look instead to the (in evolutionary terms) still only lately formed, inwardly focused, stay-at-home mindset that sedentism has brought with it. Innocently posed by the book's editors, the simple, two-word question is simmering with attitudes and expectations that immediately and usefully open up for close examination the psychology of travel and the effect it has on our minds.

‘Why travel?’ is actually a tightly knit collection of questions, and down at their heart lurks an entrenched sedentist scepticism, ambiguity and ambivalence about what travel can accomplish. There is a grudging quality here: is travel really necessary? If it has to happen, is it not likely to be more trouble than it is worth, and unpleasant and dangerous?

Such questions linger and smolder in 21st-century societies – where most people commute, where younger people who can afford to travel so far and so frequently they are called the ‘first globals’, and where involuntary dislocations of large groups of people from countryside to city and from country to country are increasingly commonplace. For all our restlessness, the underlying assumption remains that homes and communities are somehow unmoving and unshakeable.