The new Grand Tour

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Friends in Los Angeles, California are moving to Accra, Ghana. They will forfeit some rare privileges: the feeling of being in the world capital of the screen age, the favours that the would-be 47th president might do for her home state, the tortellini in brodo at Alimento. On the other hand, imagine their front-row seat as the world changes.

Accra is the buckle in a belt of cities, from Abidjan to Lagos, that is becoming the largest contiguous urban zone on Earth. (Lagos had about 4mn people when I left it in 1987. It now has nearer 20mn.) How that growth is managed will determine the wellbeing of a sizeable share of humankind. The second-order implications — for European borders, for superpower interest in the region — aren’t trivial. If one wanted to observe the currents of the century, a stay on the Gulf of Guinea coast might be illuminating.

Where else, while we’re at it?

I ask because, in the bicentennial coverage of Lord Byron’s death, the Grand Tour comes up again and again. For a few centuries, Brits who could afford it, then Americans of the Henry James class, rounded off their education with a trip through continental and above all Mediterranean Europe. Before the jet age, with Qing China ailing and other places viewed as colonial chattel, this was “the world”, even aside from all the great art.

Well, it isn’t now. So what might a new Grand Tour look like? Where should a young westerner with a budget go to observe the forces that will skew their lives? If, as projected, one in four human beings by mid-century will be African, the case for somewhere like Accra makes itself.

If, as projected, one in four human beings by mid-century will be African, the case for somewhere like Accra makes itself

It is the case for Dubai that has to break through a wall of bien pensant distaste. Well, the question, remember, isn’t where is “good”. It is where is most revealing of our times. There can never be such a thing as the capital of the 21st century. Wealth and power are too scattered. But Dubai, more than Qatar, has a shout as the world’s hinge, or pivot, or frontline: the point at which the west encounters whatever it is now polite to call the non-west. (I see “global south” is losing purchase, not an hour too soon.)

Almost nowhere else puts a visitor among middle-class Indians and Anglo-French bankers and mobile Russians. As almost nowhere else could contemplate a 90 per cent foreign population, I don’t anticipate a rival either. Replacing the UAE as the Gulf’s expat base is among the Saudi Crown Prince’s bolder schemes.

The intellectual risk of travel, in the 18th century or ours, is that you over-index what you see. Repeated exposure to Dubai can make the world appear more post-American than it really is. Still, better a cartoon view of the future than none. It is worth the effort. You might see someone drink serious champagne out of a flute, but that happens in the grandest western capitals, and no odyssey is without its traumas.

A commonsensical Grand Tourist wouldn’t go home without taking in a Bric, or at least a visitable one. But I wonder. If the global story is one of fragmentation, of no state having a large enough share of world output to shape events, a trip to a great or would-be great power might miss the point. It is the rung below, the vied-for and courted countries, that reflects the times. (And which perhaps anticipate Britain’s own fate.)

And so the climax of a modern Tour, the Rome of it, must be south-east Asia. Perversely, it can be easier to grasp the magnitude of the continent from somewhere like Vietnam or the Philippines than from a billion-plus nation. Each is more populous than the largest EU state. Each belongs to an Asean that has around double the population of the US. And in the end, the visitor reflects, this is a subregion of Asia. The Grand Tour of old was meant to impress on men as high on themselves as Byron that there was a world out there. The modern version can’t fail to induce the same humility.

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