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Introduction: How cross-cultural equality became thinkable -- Visions of a common humanity -- Religious and philosophical universalisms -- History, ethnography, and the anthropological turn -- Thinking across frontiers in medieval Islam -- The Atlantic frontier and the limits of Christian equality -- Global equality and inequality in Enlightenment thought -- Modern equality and scientific racism in the nineteenth century -- The globalization of equality -- The age of human rights -- Epilogue: The future of global equality

For much of history, strangers were seen as barbarians, seldom as fellow human beings. The notion of common humanity had to be invented. Drawing on global thinkers, Siep Stuurman traces ideas of equality and difference across continents and civilizations, from antiquity to present-day debates about human rights and the "clash of civilizations."

This article presents a comparative investigation of Herodotus and Sima Qian with a focus on their ethnographies of nomadic peoples. Both historians included geography
and ethnography in their works because their societies had reached a stage when it was
no longer possible to write their histories without taking the measure of their wider
environment. The author posits that frontiers are not just locations of "othering" but
also zones of creative interaction and regions in which it is possible to take the fi rst
steps toward an appraisal of the rationality of foreign cultures. Herodotus and Sima
Qian combined an incipient cultural relativism with notions of common humanity,
resulting in an anthropological turn, the representation of the cultures of "others" as
autonomous systems that must be judged on their own terms. Their anthropological
turn is connected to their conceptions of empire and the temporalities underpinning
their histories.