Goodreads asked Tamim Ansary:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Tamim Ansary Ten years ago, I published a book called Destiny Disrupted, A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. Basically, I was arguing that world history is the story of how we got to where we are today, but embedded in that narrative is always an assumption about who constitutes the “we.” I hoped to illustrate this point by showing how, if you assumed the center of the world to be the Islamic heartland rather than Europe and its offshoots, the history of the world looks completely different, even though it may contain many of the same events. The shape of the story depends on the teller of the tale. But after that book came out, it struck me that today, with pretty much everyone on the planet all up inside one another's business, it might be possible to construct a history of the world from the perspective of a global “we”. So that's what I set out to do. The Invention of Yesterday is what I came up with--a history of the world that looks at ever-increasing interconnectedness (with all its discontents) as the throughline of human history.

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